Enjoying the view from Limbo
We sing and dance. We tell easygoing jokes and eat delicious food. Our owners tighten the yoke sometimes to keep us humble. We watch our strongest boys play games and cheer for “our side,” just to imagine what it would be like if we were the owners, rather than the owned. The master jerks the chain, ever so judiciously, to remind us that...
We are living in an age of universal enslavement, a truism that will inevitably sound hyperbolic to men whose ears remain forever attuned only to the soporific music of soft despotism and relative material comfort. Those few, however, who are capable of blocking the hypnotic sounds of mindless pleasure well enough to see our global situation for what it truly is, and for...
What post-Soviet progressives have gradually learned, and what anti-totalitarian observers from Tocqueville to Huxley understood long before them, is that oppression maintained with hard walls will be short-lived. For hard walls, precisely because they are so overtly rigid, are vulnerable. Men locked within those walls naturally convulse at restraint so bluntly asserted. They will not produce, thus gradually rotting the oppressive power structure...
We all know the expression of Voltaire biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall, commonly misattributed to Voltaire himself, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Believers in modern liberty are wont to see this sensibility, elevated to the status of a principle, as a guarantor of the free speech so essential to classical liberalism....
A few hours ago, I concluded an e-mail reply to a reader about COVID-19, experts, “flattening the curve,” and the abuse of statistics, with this exhausted summary: “I’m getting tired of this story, since there is nothing left to save here, no one left to persuade, and no benefit to be had from muttering common sense into the ether. Slaves want to be...
A man claims ownership over you. He declares his authority to restrict your movement completely, and to limit your social interactions indefinitely as he sees fit. He browbeats you with belittling criticism and public shaming for your every breach of authority. He chains you to your post, sending his guards to discipline you severely if you should attempt to escape. All the while,...
A quick review of some major, extremely important, perhaps even life-altering headlines, along with the official Limbo response to these shocking developments: Donald Trump is angry about the weekend programming on Fox News, feeling that the network ought to be more consistent in serving the interests and attitudes of Trump and his fan club, which after all was their primary mission throughout 2016...
Essential liberty is slipping away from modern civilization, as the so-called free world succumbs by degrees to its homegrown form of tyranny, brilliantly forecast by Tocqueville in his speculation on a potential condition of contented self-enslavement which he called “soft despotism.” For everyone who sees this radical divesting of mankind’s birthright for what it is, however, there are a thousand others dismissing such views...
Death by Education / What is Progressivism?
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 9, 2018 · Last modified July 7, 2018
Because we live in our society, in our time, we cannot avoid exposure to the dominant moral atmosphere and the tenor of discourse around us. Growing up in a peculiar kind of social environment, the things that are considered “normal” in that environment inevitably come to feel normal to us too — and that includes the things about which we have reservations, or...
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