#so called liberal thinkers

[dracvlavra]

scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds

[communistkenobi]

I was looking for a book recently on an online storefront and was recommended a book written by a physicist about the history of humanity. this was a popular press book that was not intended to be read by other academics, but it reminded me of this niche genre of books, with experts from the physical sciences writing about human behaviour or history or what have you. Could you imagine coming across the inverse? A popular press book that purported to explain physics written by a historian?

There is some deep imbalance in how public perceptions of “general intelligence” seem to work - those in STEM are generally recognised for their competence, expertise, and intellectual acumen, and this recognition can be generalised, that at some level a demonstration of your expertise of eg astrophysics is a demonstration of your abilities of investigation writ large, that you have figured out some central underlying element of science that allows for basically limitless intellectual extension to any field or subject. A physicist can write a book about human history and be taken seriously by the general public on the assumption that physics is more difficult to understand than history, so any lower domain of investigation is open to them. The reverse is often not extended to a lot of the social sciences, particularly the theoretically-heavy social sciences; theory is just making bullshit up at the end of the day, it has no real practical application because any questions about the philosophy of thought or knowledge - how did we come to know what we know and under what conditions do we know these things - is just the indulgent wankery of people who can’t find a real job.

And of course it would be silly to insist that because you have read Hegel, an infamously difficult thinker, you know how to interpret the lab print-outs of electrochemists - I don’t want this goofy concept of general intelligence to be applied everywhere, I want it to go away entirely, but its current uneven applications across scientific fields indicates a broader problem with public conceptions of expertise and knowledge.

This probably has something to do with anti-communism on some level - social science is not generally regarded as “real science” (in no small part because social science is often the field of bureaucrats, and while animosity towards bureaucrats is deeply sympathetic, I suspect the reasons for this animosity are not themselves scientifically grounded), that while there is a public understanding of “objective facts” that exist prior and external to human interpretation, the politics of knowledge are hegemonically oriented around liberalism, to such an extent that any critique of the assumptions of knowledge are viewed as a dogmatic denial of reality done for the purposes of political infiltration and brainwashing. And I don’t feel totally unqualified to say this, given that this is basically the de facto response from students encountering Marxism for the first time in university. “Marx is too dogmatic” may as well be inscribed above the doors to lecture halls. Hell, Jordan Peterson made a nice little public career for himself railing against “post-modern neo-Marxism,” a phrase so nonsensical that the fact he was not immediately and permanently laughed out of the public arena for saying it is an indictment of how politically illiterate we are as a society!

And the infuriating thing is that a lot of social science scholarship (not just from the US but especially from the US) is complete horseshit, just pure evil garbage motivated solely by a desire to justify the fact that we do really need to keep killing tens of thousands of people a year to keep this whole party going. Every sociologist who calls themselves a “methodological individualist” is contributing to the long-standing tradition of eugenics scholarship but is too craven and vain to admit to this. If you had to describe the sum-total of the social scientific scholarly output of the west in a word, it would be ‘mysticism.’ Because it is the case that anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-capitalist investigations of the political-economic conditions of the world have produced social scientific knowledge on par with the discovery of the atom, but it is not treated as such. “It is right to rebel” is not just a moral claim about violence but a scientific summary of human history.

But I think it is precisely this reactionary state of affairs that makes people devalue the social sciences as an actual site of legitimate investigation, that understanding the historical trajectory of ideas or the political conditions of life are valuable pursuits for any just society. Because social science deals with the social world, the political conditions under which the social world is investigated and understood are themselves bound up in questions of political and economic power. But this equally extends to the physical sciences - I know at least in environmental sciences, there is an ever-growing reckoning with climate change as an imminent threat to all life on earth, and environmental scientists cannot avoid talking about the political conditions of our planet even if all they want to do is study a river. Genocide is measurable in soil samples taken in the American continent. The separation of the environmental from the social is itself a historically contingent arrangement of knowledge.

But this is infuriating to even complain about because I don’t want to sound like an entitled academic or ego-bruised professional. I have no desire to start a faculty war with the STEM fields. I feel secure in my own expertise. I do not want anyone to “recognise my greatness” I am just profoundly lonely in this whole affair. and it just so happens that we exist in terribly anti-intellectual conditions for the most cruel and ugly reasons possible, and so we (me, I) have to suffer seeing books on sale claiming to give a general account of human history written by a physicist

[onyxedenfox]

If you want to be part of the Community and call yourself Queer, even more so, be a Queer youth and connect with Queer elders, then you have to exist and act in a way that is worthy of the name. Because being LGBTQIA+ does mean there is a Community for you to fall back on, to be part of, to depend on, to come home to. But you don't get to pick and chose which parts of it you want to embrace and which you do not. If you want to be part of it, call yourself Queer, you either respect and care for all of it, or you get none of it.

The LGBTQIA+ community is not a pick and mix candy stand at a summer fair. It's not just flags, and sequins, and music, and fashion, and make up, and parties. It's not just the month of June, little videos on tiktok, content to be bought, yuri or yaoi. Its not engaging in club and hook up culture, but disrespecting fellow queers outside of it. It's not inner community separation, misogyny, misandry and sexism. It's not only bears or twinks, butches or femmes, tdick or gcock. It's not calling yourself a fag, a dyke or a tranny and "reclaiming" those terms when you never knew their meaning and significance in the first place. And it certainly isn't, using those same terms derogatorily and against your siblings as soon as their back is turned or when it is simply of convenience to you. That's not how this works.

You don't get to call yourself Queer and an Active Member of the Community, without learning the history first. Because not everyone can be doing the fight. Not everyone can march, protest and organize. There are people who have not come out, who aren't even sure where they might fit. Who are part of religious, conservative or abusive households. Who exist under threat of injury, violence, homelessness or loss of life. Who are ill, injured or disabled. Who live in abject poverty or are struggling financially. Under threat of forced sex work, trafficking or unemployment. The list goes on. All of these people and many others simply cannot advocate for the community because their circumstances mandate they are unable in many cases to even advocate for themselves. They don't have the luxury of helping someone else because they fight for their own survival every single day.

Those of us who have that privilege however, have to do the work. And all of us together need to learn about what that work is, what our past looked like and what that means for our future. In this day and age, where our rights are being stripped away and our very existence criminalized, not educating ourselves and choosing wilful ignorance, is the real crime.

Do you know what was the meaning of "Us" in Mesopotamia and the Ancient World? Do you know about the Celts, the Greeks, the Romans? Homosexuality from the Middle Ages to the 20th century? The punishments for sodomy? The growth of sex work through the working class? The cultures of cross dressing and drag? The underground bar scene? The lack of or the directly penalising healthcare? Forced sterilisation? Genital mutilation? The creation and spread of slurs? The spread of lavender marriages? The lavender scare? Stonewall? The HIV crisis? Gay Liberation? The power of leather and kink? How much we owe to the Punks, Anarchists and Feminists fighting for equality, abolition and against the system? How much we owe to our Black, Latinx and Asian trans brothers and sisters? To our non-binary siblings of colour? The names of those who have stood by and up for us? Back then and now?

"Nah. I'm not white. I'm not from the west. Idc bout that shit"

OK! Not okay, but OK! Can you answer any similar questions for yourself? About your own history? From the very beginning to the present day? About your own country, religious or ethnic communities? The different races and indigenous groups in your nation? Do you know your own past then? What issues your people have faced? How they have fought? Who were and are your poets, artists, musicians, thinkers, fighters? What did they do? How did they do it? What does that mean for your people? What does that mean for you?

"That doesn't concern me. I was born in the 21st century, why should I care what someone did over a hundred years ago?"

OK! Not okay, but OK! Then what about the country you live in, right now? Is it legal to be part of the community there? What are the governments' policies? On the recognition of different sexualities, gay marriage and trans rights? For those who are intersex or agender? What do the prominent religions there teach? What access is there to healthcare, welfare, disability assistance, adoption? What support networks are set in place? Helplines, shelters, care centres? What groups exist, that celebrate and fight for the rights of those in the community? For the rights of further marginalized individuals within the community? For you?

"Ugh. Not everything has to be political. I just want to live, not be an activist. Why should I care?"

OK! Not okay, but OK! Because most things in life do indeed take a village. Even more so when you're different. When you don't fit the status quo. The binary. The white straight sex specific conservative able bodied ideal. Because the people who perpetrate that ideal would like to see you gone as an obedient silent ignorant queer, just as much as they would as a loud educated fighting one. Because by caring for others, you care for yourself. Because if we are all sinners anyway, then we should all die for the sin of Empathy.

On a personal note, I grew up in a racist, homophobic, bigoted country. I have been beaten, assaulted, threatened and raped for being queer. I have friends who have been stabbed, shot at and set on fire. I had friends who took their own life. They have suffered and I have suffered, in a thousand and one ways, and although not one of us believed in God, all of us have prayed for the suffering to end, and all of us would pray to any God you may believe in, if it means you don't have to suffer at all. So don't go around pretending like you're not one of us or like all of this doesn't impact you whatsoever. Don't deny us. Don't deny yourself. Because if you do, then you're part of the problem too. Part of the march against freedom. In line right behind the neo nazis who want us all dead.

If you want to the be part of the Community. To call yourself an Active Member. To call yourself Queer. You have to know our history, know us, know yourself.

📣YOU 👏 HAVE 👏 TO 👏 DO 👏 THE 👏 WORK ✊

[mariacallous]

Revolutionaries throughout the ages have drawn strength from the story of Passover. As Michael Walzer brilliantly documents in his book “Exodus and Revolution,” the Israelites leaving Egypt inspired liberation movements and thinkers throughout history, from the French Revolution to the Puritans, and even Marx.

The African-American spiritual “Go Down Moses” and the inscription on the Liberty Bell — “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,” quoting Leviticus — are just two well-known invocations of the Exodus as a call to freedom.

Moses and the Israelites steadfastly stood up to their oppressors. Prevailing against the odds, they trudged through the desert for 40 years in order to get to the Promised Land. Determined humans that join together with vision and strategy can bend the arc of history towards justice and make redemption possible.

But with freedom comes tremendous responsibility. For this reason, the Torah could imagine that a slave, afraid of what freedom might entail, would choose to say, “I love my master … I do not wish to go free” (Exodus 21:5). The Torah understood that the weight, insecurity and uncertainty of self-determination could sometimes feel unbearable.

The responsibility that comes with freedom is terrifying and onerous, even if it makes life meaningful. Perhaps Erich Fromm said it best in his 1941 book, “Escape From Freedom”: “Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission? If there is not, how can we account for the attraction which submission to a leader has for so many today?”

Fromm’s warnings seem all too relevant today with the election of governments worldwide that seem ready and willing to trample on cherished civil protections. The celebration of freedom and human rights — which once seemed to be the norm in democratic regimes across the world — turns out to have been premature.

[uzumaki-rebellion]

Hi! I’ve seen you touch on this, but would love more of your insight into the Christian members of the Black community taking issue with Sinners and believing it’s “opening portals” due to the use of Hoodoo within the film (although they keep mistakenly calling it Voodooism and Witchcraft) 🙄 I guess it’s to be expected, but it’s certainly still upsetting and honestly triggering for me as someone who grew up Baptist, and has been having to have hard conversations about my beliefs and dealing with judgment from my own Christian family. Sinner’s depiction of how Christianity was something “forced upon on our enslaved ancestors” but Hoodooism stems from our ancestral practices back to the mainland really touched me in a way I wasn’t prepared for! Furthermore, I know many of our people hold Christianity dearly as a means to get through this tough life we deal with in our skin…just so many thoughts!

What I'm about to say is just me rambling, lol!

Religion is so extra personal to people, and for Black folks, it can become extra heated because Christianity has both been used to pacify us for a pie-in-the-sky tomorrow (to overlook/excuse the atrocities we deal with now with a promise of freedom after death), and also as a liberatory function when placed in the hands of people who believe in liberation theology. Think Martin Luther King Jr, El Hajj Malik Shabazz (Malcom X), Harriet Tubman etc.

With "Sinners", it's presenting some truthful facts. Christianity was beaten into us. We brought our own spiritual practices and gods with us from several different parts of West Africa and were forced to become Christians. Ain't no way around that. Colonizers stole us, beat us, stripped the overt parts of our culture away (language, clothing, hairstyles, foodways, etc) It was used to subjugate us for hundreds of years. Now we do it to ourselves willingly with some pretty terrible dogmatic beliefs in the Black church. White supremacy and Patriarchy has trained us to think like white people and embrace their disconnect from true godly behavior that is oppressive, fearful, homophobic, and xenophobic. I say all of this as someone who was raised by Baptists, attended Methodists churches, and a few Catholic churches too when I moved around. And every single one had discreet Hoodoo and Voodoo practitioners all up in them.

What messes people up is they often confuse spirituality with religion. You can be deeply spiritual and not religious at all. Just like you can be overly religious and not have a good spiritual bone in your body. (Think of all the predatory people in churches harming women and children). The film takes off the rose-colored glasses and asks us what is truly spiritual or even truly evil, and for me, not giving people a choice on how to live their own lives is the true evil under white supremacy. Not the devil. Not vampirism. Not drinking corn liquor or Blues music. Not dancing. Not skipping church on Sundays. Not fornicating with married people. The function of religion in this country is controlling the minds of people and making them think that if they don't follow the rules of a made-up book, then people are going to hell. But what happens if you're Black and you choose to worship a higher power in a different way?

You are considered a heretic. A heathen. A jezebel spirit. A lost soul. A fallen person. A sinner.

What a number of Black Christians are afraid of who have issues with the film (because a lot of Christians have no problem at all with it, and understand it's just a fictional movie using real-world elements and supernatural scares) is that people will become free thinkers and question the church. They'll possibly have some much-needed critiques or new insights into their own spiritual practices. Dassit. The last thing a holy roller wants is for people to challenge the word of their God. Pure fear-based thinking and programming. Guess what? They will always judge you no matter what you do if they are not open-minded.

All this "opening portals" and dabbling with demonic forces talk is coming from a frightened people who were confronted with the idea that it was Hoodoo and not Christianity that saved the day in the movie. The biggest devil in America is Trump and the MAGA cult, and they're worried about Hoodoo and fictional vampire demons. That mojo bag Annie made carried Smoke and Stack through war, gangland action in Chicago and more. The knowledge that Annie had provided protection and a chance to live in the movie. Until of course, people went against her out of fear (I'm looking at Grace). I've stated before on another post that "Sinners" refuses to demonize Hoodoo, and this is the heart of the issue for Black Christians in my humble opinion.

The irony is, even Jesus questioned his beliefs about himself and the good news he was supposed to be spreading to the masses. He critiqued the behavior of his fellow Jews, flipped tables (literally) and even doubted that he was divine. There's nothing wrong with looking at the film and taking stock of your belief systems and changing your mind about things you once believed in, or, even adjusting those beliefs with new information.

Personally I think "Sinners" is bringing out some healthy discomfort for Black Christians, especially since the number of people going to church nowadays is dwindling. Social media, celebrity, and capitalism are the new gods of America, and the Christian church can't compete anymore. The Satanic Panic energy of the 80s and 90s don't work on getting people scared back into church anymore. Threats of going to hell don't work either because too many of us are living hell on earth now, so how much worse can it really get?

"Sinners" is a love letter to the Blues, and the Blues came from our spirituals and work songs in the fields. We told stories with the blues and I think if Black Christians who have problems with the movie simply embraced the lesson of building community, gatekeeping our culture from exploiters, honoring our ancestors, and having faith in God and US as a people, then they could move past all the weird TikTok takes.

Club Juke was a type of church that had a different kind of fellowship. And the surreal montage alone should make Black Christians proud. If one is strong in their faith (like Annie was with hers) then no weapon formed shall prosper as they say in Isaiah 54:17. The weapon is always going to show up because this is America (where I'm from and the movie takes place), but faith and the work behind it make the difference.

Just my thoughts!

[shadowsofdarkness]

✧ The Play of Consciousness ✧:

 A Nondual Exploration Into the Drama of Life

“The forms are fleeting, ever-changing. The formless essence—consciousness—is untouched by the play.” - Eckhart Tolle

Life is a living stage where consciousness performs—an ever-shifting dance of its awareness manifesting in countless forms. Every moment, every thought, sensation, emotion, and event is like a scene in a dream-like theater. Not meaningless, but not as personal or solid as it appears either.

Consciousness, the formless witness and ground of all experience, expresses itself through the appearance of form—through bodies, identities, relationships, challenges, joy, loss, learning, forgetting, remembering.

It wears a convincing mask of disguise, calls itself “me,” and enters the stage as the seeker, the lover, the thinker, the dreamer, the doubter, the one who wants to awaken.

But here’s the liberating insight of Nonduality: you are not the character in the play—you are the entire space in which the whole play unfolds. The roles may change. The script may twist. The scenery shifts with time. But what you are remains untouched: the formless presence that knows the story without being caught in it.

This is not about escaping the story or dismissing life. It’s about seeing clearly:

✝ That no moment is truly separate from the whole.

✝ That no self is truly separate from the witness of consciousness.

✝ That what unfolds is yours to witness and observe with deep intimacy.

In this recognition, the drama of life becomes sacred.

Even sorrow becomes meaningful—not because it is enjoyable, but because it is seen through. Even confusion becomes bearable—not because it is solved, but because it is held in deeper clarity.

The play goes on. The waves rise and fall.

But you are the ocean.

—--------------------------------------------------------Part I: Drama of Life - Freedom Beyond the Character: 

“The person you think you are is just a role consciousness is performing—beautifully, temporarily, and without attachment.”

Many of us live as if under a gentle spell—not asleep, but subtly carried away.

We don’t realize it, but we’re constantly caught up in streams of thought, emotions rising and falling like tides, stories that whisper this is who I am. From the moment the day begins, there's a quiet momentum pulling us into the familiar drama of self.

We slip into the costume of identity without question. A name, a past, a personality—all stitched together by memory and expectation. We resume the identity we’ve long rehearsed, moving through the day guided by the quiet urge to be accepted, to achieve, to be validated, to feel like we’re enough.

It’s habit. Conditioning. It’s what we’ve learned it means to be a person in the world.

Life unfolds like a subtle dance, where we carefully craft our roles, mask our fears, and reach tirelessly toward some elusive sense of belonging or completion—always chasing a feeling that seems just out of reach.

What if the identity you hold so closely is not your true essence, but simply a role you play?

Beneath this ongoing performance lies something far quieter.

A presence that does not need to be anyone. A stillness that observes the unfolding story without becoming entangled in its plot.

The character you know—the “I” that thinks, chooses, doubts, longs, loves, and suffers—is just that: a character in a story.

A temporary form, rising and falling within a vast and boundless space.

Though this inner character feels deeply familiar and personal, here is the subtle yet profound shift: this character is not who you truly are.

“Freedom isn’t found in perfecting the character. It’s found in realizing you’re not the character at all.” - Adyashanti

An inner shift begins the moment you start to observe the character… rather than unconsciously being the character.

That moment of simple noticing—“Ah, this is just a pattern appearing in this character”—marks the beginning of a return to something deeper, something that quietly sets you free.

"When you no longer identify with the actor on the stage, you discover the vastness in which the entire play arises." - Adyashanti

As long as you take yourself to be the character, you are bound by its limitations. The invitation of Nonduality is not to eliminate or deny the character, but to see it with clarity—to recognize it as a transient expression arising within the vast field of consciousness.

This shift—this movement from identification to witnessing—is where liberation begins.

Why is this important? Because identification with the character is the root of psychological suffering. As long as we believe we are the character, we remain caught in its fear, its striving, its constant need to become something other than what is.

—--------------------------------------------------------------

✧ Part II: Observing the Character with Witness Presence ✧:

“The ego is a fiction. A character in the story of ‘me.’ But awareness is not in the story—it watches the story unfold.” - Eckhart Tolle

In the nondual perspective, the invitation to observe—not to identify with—the character you call “me” is more than just a step toward spiritual awakening. It is a profound gateway to true freedom.

When you begin to see that life isn’t happening to a separate self, but rather through the vast field of consciousness, a quieter, more natural attention arises within you. This attention doesn’t seek to fix or control. Instead, it simply observes.

It turns inward to watch the character you have known as “me” throughout your entire life.

This character has a name, a story, and a voice. It reacts, plans, desires, fears, and longs to be understood. It strives to live life ��correctly.” Its struggles arise not from being broken, but from believing itself to be the center of the story.

Carrying memories, beliefs, fears, and hopes, this character holds preferences and wounds, ambitions and doubts. It narrates your thoughts, guides your daily actions, and relentlessly searches for meaning within the unfolding drama of life.

We live through the character, mistaking it as our true identity. We speak as it. We suffer along with it. We say words such as:

“I’m lost.”

“I’m overwhelmed.”

“I need to find clarity.”

But slowly, a deeper inquiry begins to stir:

Who is this “I” that is speaking?

You are not the character. You are the vast space of consciousness in which the character moves. And that awareness doesn’t come and go. It doesn’t need anything. It simply witnesses.

This is the beginning of a quiet but powerful practice: the consistent recognition of the character, without identification.

This practice is not a one-time insight. It’s a living, ongoing invitation.

A return to deeper clarity, again and again, through the rhythms of your day and into the stillness of night.

You begin to witness the inner play without fusing with it. And in that witnessing, something softens.

You begin to notice, gently, throughout the day:

“This character is seeking validation.”

“This character is feeling afraid of being left out.”

“This character wants to be praised.”

“This character is comparing herself to others.”

“This character is searching for meaning.”

Each noticing loosens the trance of the identification with the story and its character.

You don’t have to stop the thoughts or fix the emotions. You just notice them and the character’s whole experience as the observer — the witness behind your eyes.

At any moment, the observing can return—noticing the patterns of the ego, the stories being told, the identity being worn. Simply observe it all without judgment.

It’s not dramatic, but it’s quietly revolutionary.

Because each time you remember to see the character, you remember what you truly are beyond the character - in your true nature:

✝ Not a separate self inside the story

✝ Not the thoughts about what’s next

✝ Not the emotions trying to find their ground

But the open, aware field in which it all arises and fades.

This is not detachment. This is deep intimacy—with life, with presence—seen clearly, held spaciously, and never mistaken for the whole.

—--------------------------------------------------------

✧ Part III: Stillness Beneath the Story ✧:

"“The ‘I’ you take yourself to be is just a passing character on the stage of consciousness. Recognize the one who watches the play.” --- Mooji

By the simple, sacred act of noticing—really noticing—the character moving through the scenes of your life, a quiet transformation begins. Not in fireworks or grand revelations, but in the silent spaces where truth gently ripens.

A new kind of compassion begins to emerge. Not just for your character, but for every being playing their part. You begin to see how each role is shaped by invisible tides—conditioning, memory, culture, inherited ache and unspoken hope. No one scripted their own beginning. No one chose their mask.

With this seeing, judgment loosens. The urge to fix, to become, to control gives way to understanding. Each character is but a wave, rising and falling within the vast ocean of consciousness.

And when you return, again and again, to this still witnessing, you discover something unexpected: liberation was never somewhere else. It has always been here—quiet, present, and untouched.

The character doesn’t vanish. It simply no longer claims center stage. It becomes what it always was: a costume worn in the dream. It walks and speaks, it loves and forgets—but behind it, beyond it, before it, remains the unchanging presence. Silent. Luminous. Free.

Awareness was never inside the character. The character appeared within awareness.

With this realization, life softens. It no longer feels like something to endure or manage, but something to behold. A sacred unfolding, held in gentle attention. Welcomed without defense.

The imagined line between “me” and “life” begins to blur… then dissolve.

You no longer feel like a fragment traveling through a world.

You rest in the clear knowing that you are the space in which the world arises.

You are the sky that holds every weather.

The stillness beneath every motion.

The silence that echoes through every word.

And so this path is not an escape from life—it is a falling fully into it, without clinging to the costume, without being lost in the script. Even when the story pulls you back in, even when the character cries or forgets, something remains untouched.

That still presence never leaves.

It was never elsewhere.

It is what you are.

And in the end, this path doesn't lead to more answers, but to a deeper, quieter knowing:

You are already home.

[microtheory]

This is part one on the philosopher Carl Schmitt and his critique of liberalism. I hope you love the show today.

So we’re three episodes into this new arc of the show and, as you know, we’re talking about the early 20th century here. Once again, it’s important to keep in mind all that’s going on during this time. Political philosophy is going through a serious transition phase because, in many ways, the world is going through a serious transition phase. Revolutions are taking place, world wars are on the horizon, the rise of fascism, authoritarianism. The entire legacy of the Enlightenment is being called into question. And what this means for the world of philosophy is that the thinkers doing their work during this time are very quickly coming face to face with the realization that, in this post-nuclear world, where for the first time the consequences of war could threaten the entire existence of the human race, they are the people that are going to have to figure all this out.

Think of the pressure these thinkers were faced with at the time. To be a thinker born into the early 20th century is to be born into a world where the strength of your ideas is going to be tested in real time while the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Being born into this time period is like the forces of history commandeering you for one of the most stressful jobs in the history of the world. I mean, imagine your first day at a new job, and the orientation is, here's the entire history of Western civilization; and day one at the new job is, “Well, time for you to fix it all. Now, get to work.”

Now, this job would be difficult enough if we were looking back at a history of total chaos in the West. But, keep in mind, the Western world at this time is the self-proclaimed center of political thought, the self-proclaimed most advanced collection of societies that have ever existed in history. So, if this really is such an advanced, developed environment that the rest of the world should draw inspiration from, why do we have such a rich history of things failing miserably? Think of the history this world is emerging out of. The Age of Reason and the political thought of the Enlightenment produced for us what we’ve long considered to be the greatest political strategy in existence, liberal, capitalist democracy. By this time, for over a hundred years liberal, capitalist democracy has been the gold standard in the West when it comes to how we should be structuring our societies.

The problem facing political philosophers at the beginning of the 20th century is this: What exactly is it about our longstanding strategy of liberal, capitalist democracy that seems to invariably lead society into an endgame of dictatorship, bloodshed, and political instability? When John Dewey and Antonio Gramsci show up with their lunchbox on the first day at the new job, this is the first order of business people like them are going to have to deal with. Now, it’s right here that we can understand why the two of them went in the respective directions they did. Because like we talked about, the beginning of the 20th century can be broadly understood in terms of three major branches of political discussion, three primary conversations that are going on. We’ve already talked about two of them. And understanding all three of them is going to be absolutely crucial, because the contents of these conversations is going to go on to dictate the direction of almost all subsequent political philosophy all the way up to the present day.

When a philosopher sets out to contribute something to the political discussion of the 20th century, they’re almost without exception doing so in consideration to one of these three major critiques of the way we’ve done things in the past. Once again, what we’ve done in the past is liberal, capitalist democracy. The three major critiques are going to be John Dewey and his critique of traditional democracy, Antonio Gramsci and his critique of capitalism, and the guy we’re going to be talking about today, the philosopher Carl Schmitt and his critique of liberalism.

But where’s the best place to begin explaining one of the most scathing critiques of liberalism in existence? Maybe the best thing to preface this with, just given the demographics of this show, is that when Carl Schmitt sets out to critique the doctrine of liberalism, he’s not setting out to critique liberalism in the context that some living in the modern United States may think of liberalism -- you know, that it’s one end of a political spectrum, diametrically opposed to conservatism, with these two poles being defined by the current state of the US political landscape -- that’s not the liberalism he’s talking about here. Carl Schmitt, believe it or not, is not setting out in his work to critique some modern political cliché, you know, some pro-choice Greenpeace platinum card member who roller blades to work and thinks healthcare should be a human right. That’s not the liberalism he’s talking about.

So let’s talk about what the word liberalism is actually referring to in the context of this broader philosophical discussion that’s going on. The term liberalism is referring to a political philosophy and method of determining political legitimacy that emerged out of the beginning of the Enlightenment. Modern historians, when looking back at history, often describe liberalism as the dominant political strategy of the Enlightenment era that should be contrasted with the methods of determining political legitimacy before the Enlightenment, which historians sometimes just group all together and refer to as pre-liberal thought. So we have the liberalism of the Enlightenment that is to be contrasted with the pre-liberal thought, which is the way we did things before the Enlightenment.

To put all this is in a very Philosophize This! way -- look, people form into societies. Those societies have problems that need to get solved. The people that make up those societies have to figure out the answer to several basic but very important questions. What kind of society do we want to produce? What sort of values do we want to uphold when engaging in our political process? What makes something a legitimate political problem at all? How do we solve these problems? Specifically, what is having a political disagreement even going to look like in our society? Because that’s a very important distinction that might not immediately seem like something our political process defines the parameters of. But, keep in mind, political disagreements of today look nothing like the political disagreements of a thousand years ago, and this is a big reason why liberalism is often contrasted with pre-liberalism.

Before liberalism burst onto the scene, societies determined levels of political legitimacy with very different methods than we do today. Pre-liberal societies often informed their political process through things like divine revelation, tradition, ritual, pure authoritarianism, theological scholarship; you know, the interpretation of scripture was an important part of the political process. Pre-liberal societies relied on these methods, and these methods reliably produced a certain type of society. People got fed up with this type of society and put their heads together in the Enlightenment to try to come up with some better criteria to try to base our political decisions on. These criteria and the positions they naturally arrive at have come to be known as liberalism.

Now, what this transition looks like, in keeping with the theme of the Enlightenment overall -- political strategy starts to move away from revelation and instead is beginning to rely a lot more on reason. Once again, from pre-liberal to liberal. When making political decisions, there’s a turn away from pre-liberal methods of theological scholarship and a turn towards a new liberal focus on secular scholarship. There’s a turn away from political decisions based on divine intervention towards a new confidence in decisions that are hashed out through rational debate. The pre-liberal standard of there being some single, anointed authoritarian leader that has ultimate say over the political process is quickly being replaced by things like parliamentary politics, separation of powers, democracy, civil and human rights. There’s a new focus on issues regarding equality. Capitalism starts to become the dominant economic approach. Liberal, capitalist democracies as opposed to feudal aristocracies.

Liberalism primarily aims to do away with the authoritarianism and divine revelation of the past and replace it instead with things like limited government, equality, freedom of expression, secular science, and rational debate. Now, somebody born into our modern world that’s largely grounded in liberal principles might be confused as to how anybody in their right mind could ever possibly disagree with this method of doing things politically. This episode is not talking about the merits of liberalism, but Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism. You might think, “Look, I know we’ve had our problems in the West over the years, but all this stuff just seems like common sense. I mean, back to the modern United States, liberalism seems to be the foundation of both political parties. How could anybody possibly think that it’s liberalism that’s the problem with liberal, capitalist democracy?”

Carl Schmitt would probably say to this person that the most dangerous political ideology is the ideology that’s currently popular, the kind of ideological assumptions you make about the political process that are so engrained, so steeped in tradition, that you don’t even think twice about them. Because if we should regard the thinking before the Enlightenment as pre-liberal and the thinking during the Enlightenment as liberal, then Carl Schmitt can be regarded as someone trying to bring about a new post-liberal way of thinking politically. Modern anti-liberal is how he’s often described.

So, for the sake of understanding where Carl Schmitt’s coming from, the important thing to keep in mind right here at the beginning is that, when there’s this shift towards liberal principles during the Enlightenment, what comes along with that is a promise from the thinkers of the time that this new strategy is going to bring about a better world for everyone. One of the dominant theories among the thinkers of the Enlightenment was that, if we let these liberal values play out and allow them to reach their natural conclusions, we will be the architects of a brand-new, cosmopolitan, peaceful world, the likes of which we’ve never seen. To understand Carl Schmitt, this is the perspective from which we need to view liberalism.

Liberalism was created as an alternative political philosophy that was supposed to be a solution to many of the political problems of the past. These thinkers are looking back at history, seeing the pattern of dictators, bloodshed, and political instability, and they’re trying to come up with some new way of conducting politics where these things aren’t going to happen anymore. This is actually a really good way to understand it. I mean, you can see why many of the hallmarks of liberalism are what they are, when you think about them in relation to some historical problem they were trying to solve. History of dictatorships and authoritarianism? Let’s introduce separation of powers, checks and balances on the executive branch. History of sprawling empires and rigid national and religious identities? Well, we’re all members of a global economy. Let’s have political and religious identities take a back seat for now and instead unite the world under a flag of mutually beneficial consumerism. History of political and religious wars? Well, let’s not fight on the actual battlefield anymore. Let’s instead hash out our political differences in the battlefield of rational debate, where people can still be at odds with each other, they can still go to war, but this way nobody has to die. This was the hope and ambition of liberalism as a political philosophy. Liberalism was supposed to be an alternative way of doing stuff that solved these problems of the past, but Carl Schmitt is going to say this is nowhere near what actually happened.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of Carl Schmitt. Try to see liberalism through the eyes of a philosopher living in the early 20th century. Similar to the early liberal thinkers, Carl Schmitt is looking back at history, and he too sees the pre-liberal world of dictatorships, bloodshed, and political instability. Oh, but then along comes liberalism to save the day. And then what he sees is really not much changing at all. What he sees is that, throughout the entire tenure of liberalism, things continue to descend into dictatorships, bloodshed, and political instability all the way up to the present day. And he thinks the only reasonable thing to conclude from this state of affairs is that there is a big difference between the hopes and ambitions of liberalism and how things actually play out in the world. Liberalism, to Carl Schmitt, doesn’t produce the world that it claims to produce.

Throughout several years of his career, Carl Schmitt attacked liberalism from so many different angles that there really isn’t a clear starting point here. So I want to just jump right in to some different examples of hallmarks of liberal thinking that Carl Schmitt takes issue with, use that as a skeleton, and then try to flush out the rest of his position from there.

So, just to get us started, one of the biggest delusions of liberal thought in the eyes of Carl Schmitt is the expectation that it is possible for us to produce a society where people can have extreme political differences and, by adhering to the tenants of liberalism, these people can coexist, live peacefully amongst each other, and just agree to disagree if things ever get heated. Put in the words of political philosophy, this is the toleration of difference. We see this kind of thinking in Western, liberal democracies every second of every day. I mean, you’ll often hear people talk about political discussion with the expectation that this sort of thing is possible. You know, we may be totally different people. We may disagree on almost every element of how a society should be structured. But, at the end of the day, we can shake hands, live and let live, and just go on about our lives.

Carl Schmitt would say that this is a liberal fantasy world, that if you pay attention to what’s actually going on in the real world of the political, this is not the way extreme political differences interact with each other in our societies. Liberalism just creates the illusion that they do. To Carl Schmitt, this expectation that we’re going to be able to coexist, tolerant of extreme political differences, comes from the more fundamental liberal belief that there is no political difference so extreme that there can’t be some sort of solution eventually arrived at in an open forum of rational debate, that there is no chasm between worldviews that is so unbridgeable that there can’t be some sort of reasonable compromise that’s arrived at by both parties. This is a hallmark of liberal thought and a cornerstone of the liberal political process.

Now, Carl Schmitt would say, this idea just in theory, no doubt, sounds really great. I mean, who doesn’t want a world where we can always just talk things through politically? Who wouldn’t want a world where we never have to implement political philosophy by force? The problem for Carl Schmitt is that this isn’t how the world works. Liberalism is marketed to people as an alternative, more peaceful way of engaging in the political. But Carl Schmitt believes all that liberalism really does is allow people to avoid engaging in the political.

Rational debate puts on a good show, but it’s mostly political theater. We have long periods of normalcy where a bunch of people get dressed up in suits and go to this building downtown and scream at each other for a few hours about issues that are almost entirely inconsequential. This all provides a nice soap opera for people to watch that’s supposed to be evidence of the liberal political process in action. “Hey! Look at how peaceful we’ve all learned to be. Hurray for liberalism!” is what we’re supposed to say.

But Carl Schmitt would say, look at history. What happens every single time there is a truly serious political issue where the differences between parties are irreconcilable? I mean, what happens when you try to have a rational debate with someone whose whole political belief is that I should be king of the world, and you should all be my slaves? Well, it doesn’t work. There’s no reasoning with that person. You wouldn’t try to solve that difference of opinion with rational debate. No, you’d tell that person to sit down and be quiet, or else they’re going to be thrown in jail.

So it’s at least possible to have a political situation that all the debating in the world isn’t going to solve. Okay. Now, think of all the political differences that can possibly present themselves that are far less of a cartoon. Carl Schmitt would start by saying, look, there are going to be groups that emerge in the political landscape whose entire existence is predicated on the destruction of another group. The reality of the world is that there are political differences that are irreconcilable. And these differences are not all that uncommon.

To Carl Schmitt, this is one of the failures of liberal political philosophy. No matter how good it feels to tell ourselves we’re going to be open to outsiders and just talk things out when we disagree, rational debate cannot solve political problems of this magnitude. No matter how much of a poster child you are for liberalism, faced with political beliefs sufficiently hostile to liberalism, faced with, for example, an authoritarian regime that wants to ascend to power, you are eventually going to have to do one of two things. Choice number one, be willing to accept the destruction of liberalism simply because something else was popular at the time. Or, choice number two, use the power of the state to silence opposition or, in other words, temporarily behave like what we would otherwise call a dictator by using the sovereign authority that, to Schmitt, is intrinsically embedded into the political process.

Choice number two of those two is something that liberals are absolutely terrified of, and for good reason. Remember, they’re looking to societies of the past that are structured around social contract theory. Society is an agreement between the citizenry and the sovereign. The citizen’s job is to serve the sovereign. The sovereign’s job is to ensure the security of the citizen. Sometimes in order to do this effectively, the sovereign needs to wield an authoritarian level of power. To political philosophers in the days of pre-liberalism, having a designated sovereign body, like a king, that has the ability to maintain certain elements of society unencumbered by the political process, was absolutely crucial. During the formation of liberalism, people looked back at our history of doing things this way and realized many of the downfalls of the great societies of the past occurred when in this volatile place of a sovereign body seizing control. Liberal philosophers, understandably, tried to do away with the concept of a sovereign. They saw it as an outdated and dangerous idea.

Carl Schmitt makes the case that this is why, once liberalism comes onto the scene, the thinkers at the time become absolutely obsessed with finding any possible way they can to make it so that we don’t have to have a sovereign anymore. The idea of a dictatorship, which at the time was historically one of the most common structures of a successful society -- dictatorships in this new liberal world become unthinkable. And Carl Schmitt wants to mark another distinction here between liberal theory and the reality of how the world is. The reality of the world is that societies sometimes need the ability to make swift and decisive decisions. And, in the post-Enlightenment world, this reality gets swept under the rug for the sake of pandering to the liberal fear of authoritarianism. He thinks this taboo towards the idea of a dictatorship certainly makes us feel good, but it simultaneously ignores the need for capabilities that healthy societies require.

To Carl Schmitt, this is yet another failure of the liberal political process. Not only does liberalism ignore society’s occasional need for a sovereign but, even if it wanted to get rid of the sovereign altogether, liberalism doesn’t actually remove the sovereign from the political process. Once again, it just creates the illusion that there isn’t a sovereign until we actually need one. Liberalism performs this illusion by engaging in various different types of what Carl Schmitt refers to as “normativism.” To put it bluntly, Carl Schmitt’s saying that liberalism’s terrified of the idea of a sovereign dictator holding power. So, to safeguard against that possibility, they’ve come up with all these different attempts to hold political power to a set of predefined norms and rules. Liberals are obsessed with this process of normativism. This is the rise of constitutional democracies in the West. Constitutions are designed to be safeguards against the swift and decisive action of authoritarianism. Normativism is sold as an incredible feature of liberalism that helps protect the will of the people.

Now, Carl Schmitt uses this term of normativism in a way that’s mostly intended to poke fun at the hopes of liberalism because, like I just alluded to, normativism is an illusion to Carl Schmitt. The hope and ambition of liberalism is that, by coming up with these norms that political leaders have to follow, whenever somebody comes along that starts to look like one of those sovereign dictators we’ve seen throughout history, well, we’ll just pull out the constitution. We’ll wave it in their face. They’ll burst into flames; and we’ll never have to hear from them again. But Carl Schmitt’s going to say this is yet another delusion of liberalism that doesn’t shore up with the reality of the world.

First of all, he would say, it doesn’t matter how long you sit down and talk about what the parameters should be for someone holding a position of power. You are never going to be able to come up with a set of rules that accounts for every contingency, given how many moving parts are involved when making decisions that affect this many people. To Carl Schmitt, trying to normativize these highly volatile moments that leaders are faced with is, at best, drastically oversimplifying how complex the world can be and, at worst, severely weakening your society and its ability to adapt and defend itself in a bad situation.

Here’s the good news though. To Carl Schmitt, this isn’t actually how things ever play out in liberal societies anyway, because even the most liberal society in existence eventually recognizes how necessary temporary extra-constitutional power is, given the right circumstances. Carl Schmitt is saying that even in liberal societies, whenever it really comes down to it and they’re faced with some sort of existential crisis, the constitution goes out the window anyway. Citizens of liberal, constitutional democracies often have this expectation of, “Oh, well, the government can’t just go rogue and do whatever they want. They’re held to the constitution. There are checks and balances. They got to get permission to do something, right?” But what happens every time there’s an emergency and something needs to get done? Oh, well, they just take action.

In other words, to Carl Schmitt, liberalism claims to have gotten rid of the sovereign from the political process. But what happens in these societies whenever something actually has to get done and we need a sovereign? Abracadabra! Poof! The sovereign was there the whole time. Who would have thought? I mean, this is a great magic trick. And to Carl Schmitt, the misdirection of this magic trick was performed by the liberal political process.

This is yet another liberal theory versus reality thing to him. The hope of liberalism was to get rid of the sovereign. The reality of the world is that we have these long periods of normalcy, where the government does almost nothing, punctuated by rare moments of extreme action whenever things actually need to get done. Liberalism hasn’t removed the sovereign from the political process, and the only time pieces of paper like the constitution prevent the sovereign from acting are during periods of normalcy, when the sovereign wouldn’t be exercising authoritarian power anyway. To Carl Schmitt, the biggest difference between our modern societies and the ones that existed in the pre-liberal world is that the pre-liberal societies were just a lot more honest about the authoritarianism that was going on. Nowadays, we got this grand illusion of liberalism that puts a bunch of window dressing on the whole process and pretends the world is something that it’s not. Liberalism is, in many ways, an impossible, utopian fantasy, in the eyes of Carl Schmitt.

Episode #132 - Transcript - Carl Schmitt On Liberalism pt 1 - Philosophize This! - Stephen West

[feygaleh]

The abridged life and times of Abraham Geiger, founding father of Reform Judaism, summed up in one tumblr ask

Abraham Geiger was born in 1810 in Frankfurt am Main, he grew up with siblings and from a very young age began to be educated in Rabbinic Texts by his older brother. From early on Geiger proved to be quite the good thinker, and at the age of 18 he enrolled at the University of Heidelberg and then at the University of Bonn where he came to meet a small number of other middle-class, well-educated Jewish boys like himself. At Heidelberg he began to study languages, and then at Bonn— in a most pivotal point in his lifetime— Arabic and the Quran.

Geiger was given the assignment by one of his professors to try and find similarities between Judaism and Islam by reading the Quran, and Geiger became completely invested as he ended up finding so many connections between Jewish and Muslim practices that he ended up writing his prize essay “Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen?” (“What did Mohammed take from Judaism?”) which became incredibly popular and was translated into multiple languages. Geiger would continue to write about Islam, and became particularly enamoured with the Prophet Mohammed, whom he viewed less as a prophet and more as a great philosopher. Abraham Geiger is now partially known as one of the founding academics of modern Quranic Studies.

After his time in University, Geiger later became a Rabbi partially due to the fact that Jews in this period of German history, though permitted to study at Universities, were still not allowed to become professors. However, Geiger made the most of his academic knowledge within his career as a rabbi, quite notably founding a journal of Jewish studies, as well as doing research and publishing. Later, Geiger was called to Breslau and became a rabbi there much to the ire of the more traditional rabbis there, he had become known to the more orthodox world as a radical reformer, which in many ways he was, though to the modern Reform Jews his observance would seem more akin to Modern Orthodox.

Still, though, Geiger was even by our modern standards quite radical and he earned the distaste of many other Jews, including quite notably one of his friends from University, Samson Raphael Hirsch, who would go onto become a very bitter opponent to Geiger’s Liberalization of Jewish life and tradition. Another group that Geiger found himself at the ire of were the early Zionists, who took particular issue with one of Geiger’s (And many early Reformer’s) most radical and notable changes to Jewish practice, that being anti-Messianism.

One of the early Reform movement’s most prominent aspects was of a kind of assimilationist approach to Jewish life, early participants of this perspective emerged in the 1700s when middle class lay-Jews decided to create their own version of synagogue that fit into more contemporary (Christian) aesthetics, installing organs in their homes and having private services complete with a service leader wearing black priestly robes and white collar, in many ways Reform began as a sort of Protestantization of Judaism. During the time of Geiger there were rabbis getting involved with this reformation and having more authoritative discussions around what this new Liberal Judaism should look like.

One of the core aspects of the new Liberal Judaism was a desire to integrate into larger Western European society, Geiger and his contemporaries were just as much Germans as they were Jews, and they wanted to show that. Unfortunately, due to what was viewed as “Progressivism” at the time, this resulted in a push more toward assimilation into Christian aesthetics than multiculturalism, this meant the removal of things like Tallit, Teffilin, davening, and even the wearing of kippahs. However, one of the most interesting changes made the Liberalization of Judaism was anti-Messianism e.g. the opposition to the belief that there is a Messiah coming and to the rebuilding of a third temple in Jerusalem, the logic went that if the Jewish people wanted to become emancipated into Western European society then it would be a bit of a bad look to have prayers calling for a rebuilding of Zion and a great migration of Jews there, they thought that their Christian neighbours would assume dual loyalty.

This resulted in some, Rabbis like Geiger himself, completely removing the prayers for a rebuilding of Zion from their liturgy. A fun fact about this is that some Reform Jews after Geiger adopted anti-Zionism as a direct evolution of anti-Messianism when Zionism became a more established aspect of Jewish life. This position would largely disappear after the Shoah.

During his time in Breslau, Geiger married and had four children— One of whom, Ludwig, would go on to continue his father’s work and publish many of his diaries and private letters of which would become invaluable for understanding who Geiger was as a person— unfortunately, though, his wife would fall ill and they would move to Berlin where she unfortunately passed away. During his time in Berlin, Geiger would write what would become his magnum opus “Urschift und Uebersetzungen der Bibel” a work which put fourth the position that the Pharisees and early rabbis of the Mishnah sought the Liberalization of Judaism themselves, in opposition to the more conservative Sadducees. The work has never been translated into English, though there is a Hebrew translation.

After the publication of his magnum opus, Geiger went on to do more writing and publishing, for example writing on the origins of Christianity, creating a new journal of Jewish studies and and writing on many, many more topics. Geiger was quite an accomplished man, he seemed to always be working something no matter what point of his life you look into. Geiger would also become a member of the Organization of Oriental Studies, where he published works in German and Hebrew. Some time later Geiger managed to found a Jewish Theological Seminary in Berlin, to which he faced much backlash from antisemites who did not want Jewish studies to become a part of the University curriculum.

Abraham Geiger would die in 1874, his grave remains in Berlin. He lived a most productive life and he will forever be remembered as a great academic of his time, may his memory be for a blessing.

A large amount of this rundown was lifted from an interview with Dr. Susannah Heschel on The Podcast of Jewish Ideas, which can be found here: https://youtu.be/6VOGw54FDXc?si=2E1VuQxBR9Rk4z36 I found it quite useful though I am not all too familiar with the podcast itself, I just happened to find this episode while looking for audio resources for learning about Geiger.

And finally, my sincerest apologies if I’ve gotten anything wrong here, I would highly recommend doing your own research and looking into these things yourself, as I am also still in the process of learning more about Geiger and the Reform Movement myself.

this was such an amazing read, thank you so much for the notes! i really do want to go read more into him now because of this

the history of reform-assimilation and anti-zionism is also very interesting! you’d think i’d know about that but we never went over that part in my shul!

you have such a kind spirit and i really deeply appreciate you for taking the time to share this information

[tmarshconnors]

The Illusion of Freedom

In today’s world, the illusion of democracy and free will is carefully maintained, but the truth is far from what we are led to believe. Power is not evenly distributed—it is hoarded by a select few who dictate the course of history while the majority remain unaware.

The 1%: The Masters of Control

At the very top of the pyramid sit the true rulers of the world—the 1%. These individuals are not merely wealthy; they are the architects of the global system. They own the central banks, control multinational corporations, manipulate governments, and influence the flow of information. Their wealth isn't just measured in money but in the power to shape ideologies, economies, and even conflicts.

They ensure their position remains unchallenged by controlling what people see, hear, and believe. Mainstream media, education systems, entertainment these are not neutral institutions but tools of control, designed to maintain a society that serves their interests.

The 4%: The Puppets of the Elite

Below the 1% are the 4%—the politicians, CEOs, media moguls, and so-called "leaders" who act as their enforcers. These individuals may seem powerful to the average person, but they are mere puppets, serving the agenda of their masters. They are rewarded with wealth and status in exchange for their loyalty, ensuring that the system remains intact.

These are the people who push narratives, sign treaties, start wars, and implement policies that benefit the elite while harming the general public. They give speeches about democracy and freedom while behind closed doors, they conspire to restrict liberties and consolidate power.

The 90%: The Asleep Majority

The vast majority—90%—live in a state of ignorance, not necessarily by choice, but by design. From birth, they are conditioned to accept the system as it is, to believe that they are free while unknowingly being part of a controlled society. Their energy is spent working for wages that barely cover the cost of living, consuming media that numbs critical thinking, and engaging in distractions that keep them too busy to question anything.

This group includes hardworking people who simply want to live their lives, but because they are unaware of the true structure of power, they unknowingly participate in maintaining it. The system depends on their compliance and indifference.

The 5%: The Awake and Aware

Then there are the 5%—those who see through the deception and understand the true nature of power. These individuals do not blindly trust the media, do not fall for political theatre, and refuse to be manipulated by fear. They are the thinkers, the dissenters, the whistleblowers, the independent journalists, and the free thinkers who challenge the status quo.

The 1% fear this group because if they succeed in waking up the 90%, the entire system collapses. This is why censorship is rampant, dissenting voices are silenced, and those who question too much are labeled as "conspiracy theorists" or extremists. The elite know that ideas are dangerous—once the illusion is broken, it cannot be restored.

The Battle for Truth

The struggle is not between political parties or nations—it is between control and freedom, between ignorance and awareness. Those in power do not care about left or right, liberal or conservative; they care only about maintaining their control. Divide and rule is their strategy, keeping the 90% fighting among themselves instead of uniting against their real oppressors.

The question is: Will the 5% succeed in waking up the masses before it's too late? Or will the 1% tighten their grip and usher in a future where true freedom is nothing more than a memory?

The choice is ours. Wake up. Speak out. Resist.

[whencyclopedia]

Roger Williams

Roger Williams (l. 1603-1683 CE) was a Puritan separatist minister best known for his conflict with both the Plymouth Colony and Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1633-1635 CE, resulting in his banishment and founding of the colony of Providence, Rhode Island. Williams believed that the clergy of both Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay were corrupt in continuing to adhere to the concept of one's deeds as an important aspect of spiritual salvation rather than acknowledging the biblical precept that only God's grace grants salvation (Romans 8:32, Ephesians 2:8). Further, he claimed, these churches were still aligned with the basic policies of the Anglican Church they had supposedly rejected.

Williams is also well-known as an advocate for the separation of church and state (claiming that politics poisoned religious practice and belief), complete religious freedom, the abolition of slavery in the colonies of North America, and respect for Native Americans. One of his criticisms of the colonies of New England was that they felt free to take land from the Native Americans without payment. When he founded Providence, he paid the Narragansett tribe a fair price for the land.

Providence became the first successful liberal colony in New England which was not informed by Puritan ideals and theology. Anyone of any religion or ethnicity was welcome to settle there as long as they recognized the fundamental human right of what Williams called the "liberty of conscience" – the freedom to express one's self - especially in religious matters, without fear of persecution or reprisal. Providence was scorned by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, especially, as populated by riffraff, lunatics, and heretics but became one of the fastest-growing settlements in the region under Williams' vision and guidance. In the modern day, parks, schools, and memorials around Rhode Island are named in his honor.

Early Life & Migration

Roger Williams was born, probably in London, England, in 1603 CE, the son of a merchant, James Williams, and wife Alice. Records of his early life were lost in the Great Fire of London in 1666 CE. As a young man, he was educated first at Charterhouse School and then Cambridge University's Pembroke College where he mastered a number of languages including Dutch, French, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. He was intensely interested in religious matters from a young age and studied to become an Anglican cleric. At Cambridge, however, he was drawn to Puritan theology and practice which would later set him at odds with the Anglican Church.

The Anglican Church, although founded in opposition to Catholicism, still retained a number of Catholic aspects in its organization, worship service, and beliefs. The Puritans were Anglicans who objected to any Catholic influences or observances in the Church and wished to 'purify' it, bringing it in line with the simple practices and beliefs of the first Christian community as depicted in the biblical Book of Acts. The more radical Puritans were known as separatists – those who felt the Anglican Church was wholly corrupted by Catholic influences and separated themselves from it completely – and, in time, Williams aligned himself with this theology and belief.

During his years at Cambridge, Williams was apprenticed to the famous jurist Sir Edward Coke (l. 1552-1634 CE), an independent and courageous thinker whose insistence on the concept of equality before the law brought him into conflict with the monarchy. Coke's unwavering stand for justice, as well as his practice of regularly speaking out against policies or even laws he considered unjust or inequitable, significantly influenced Williams' outlook and later actions.

The Anglican Church had replaced the pope with the English monarch as its head and so any criticism of the Church was considered treason against the crown. Throughout the reign of James I of England (1603-1625 CE), Puritans who voiced dissent were persecuted, fined, and jailed, some even executed, and under Charles I of England (r. 1625-1649 CE), these persecutions continued. Recognizing that England was no longer safe for an outspoken Puritan separatist, Williams left with his wife Mary in 1630 CE.

Continue reading...

[marshals-2]

The many slanders against fartshals dot blog

Picture a post about how certain groups of people that call themselves communist are in fact not so. This is nothing unusual online, one such post appeared on line on the 24 april 2025 by tumblr user irangp. This post said, simply, that communists cannot call themselves that if they are, in times of conflict, turned into nationalists, social chauvinists who become bourgeois nationalism’s strongest soldiers denying self determination for oppressed nationalities (which, we will note, is is different from the bourgeois nationalism of already developed political communities with nation-states). An important distinction is further drawn, which will be important, is that this does not apply to ethnostates. This is, thus far, perfectly fine. Nobody should really reject this statement, it is entirely agreeable. Unfortunately, there is an issue when the poster lists examples of such self proclaimed communists, among which serbians who are against the existence of Kosovo* are presented in the company of genocidal Israeli*, west Asian (presumably Iraqi, Turkish, azeri, and the like) leftists, Indians on Kashmir, et cetera.

Something is wrong here, one of these is not like the others. While israel*, the west Asian states, and india, received varying degrees of support from the United States and Europe, this is obviously not the case for serbs regarding Kosovo. The world is roughly split in two on the issue of Kosovo*, but western opinion is roughly universally in support of its “independence” and has, since the start of the more heated struggles from the breakup of Yugoslavia onwards provided political, economic, and military support to the ‘state’. I point out as much, taking some cheap shots about nato bombings and organ trafficking along the way to show that I’m very very serious about hating Kosovo* in my typical bitchy irony poisoned tone nobody likes.

Here’s the kicker, I got a response, a very long one in fact. Starting off with “why are you so attacked by me simply stating that serb nationalism isnt communist?”. Fantastic, if the post ended here I might have believed that this really was all this person believed on the matter, we will ignore the fact that what I actually said was that opposition to Kosovo* is itself not in any way anti-communist, nor should any serb be disqualified from being considered a communist for having such an opinion. I made no defense of Serbian nationalism nor do I have any intention to, my opinion on the modern state of Serbia is clear, though this guy doesn’t know me and I will not hold it against him that he doesn’t know what it may be. The post continues.

To quote irangp: “notice how i said nothing about kosovo having the right to be an ethnostate? i even mentioned that ethnostate=/= self determination, but for some reason this disturbed you so much you felt the need to show your whole ass on my post.”

This provides me with an interesting dilemma, do I call our friend immensely stupid for believing that saying “oh but it’s not ok to be an ethnostate” while supporting an ethnostate, or do I throw in the accusation of copying liberal Zionist rhetoric? Does this not parallel the wise words of such thinkers as owen jones? But this is a low blow, I will instead point out that you cannot eat your cake and have it, you either support Kosovar* self-determination and the ethnic cleansing it entails, or you do not. You cannot say that you want a Kosovo* that is independent and not ankle deep in blood. This is absurd.

In a similar note, he continues: “tell me is it communist to support the nationalist expansionist aspirations of a capitalist state just because it opposes NATO?”

I don’t know, is it? Is that remotely related to what is being discussed? Is Serbia an expansionist state for wanting to quell a secessionist movement in a non-colonized territory? It would be absurd for me to support expansionist sentiment within Serbia regardless, as Kosovo would be but step one of a revanchist campaign that would most certainly come to my home as well. I would sooner die than let that ape vucic anywhere near my country. Only the inheritor to Tito’s mantle can take back his magnum opus, Macedonia.

In any case, I did not make my response to argue about how communist it is or is not to support capitalist states that go against nato, though I will argue that, regardless, any defeat of nato as the military wing of the global core and its regime of bloody  exploitation and simple butchery is, if not communist, a moral imperative. Kosovo is, again, a tool of the American drug trade, not to mention their organ and human trafficking. Kosovo also serves to shelter Albanian criminals from the law in the countries they operate, much like how American sex pests will frequently move to israel lol. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say it would be preferable for none of that to have happened and for the Kosovars to instead have remained without “self” determination as subjects of Belgrade. Keen eyed readers (though I kid myself by using the plural form here, I don’t imagine anyone will read this, I’m just procrastinating actual work) might have noticed that I previously said I’d sooner die than live under the yoke of Belgrade myself. This is, however, because it would not change a damn thing in this country. If vucler somehow would have done anything to even slightly improve conditions here, I would become the SNS’ strongest patriot.

“if anything it made thing worse since it was seen as a halfway solution which they got into just because they wanted to keep the appearances of being the world's police. they didnt feel any different toward albanians than they felt towards bosniaks, no nato country wanted to send troops on the ground so they resorted to useless bombardment”

Ironic, of course, since Izetbegovic also received western support in much the same way as Kosovo*, I like the idea that the US only intervened, illegally as is often pointed out in discussions such as this, to show strength, as if Yugoslavia was somehow the only country experiencing armed conflicts and ethnic cleansing at the time or since. I like this idea since the west was rightly criticized for letting the Rwandan genocide happen around the same time, this being the only other such genocide that got its own UN ad-hoc criminal court alongside the three-way massacre spree that hit Yugoslavia. Why didn’t they start bombing there? Where is the US now in the face of ethnic cleansing in, say, the aforementioned Armenia? Myanmar? Do I even need to mention Sudan?

“and also point to me where i said that NATO occupation of Kosovo is good?”

I have to say I don’t believe he said that, nor did I say he said that. I will now say exactly that. The point stands about having and/or eating cakes. There simply is no self determination in Kosovo today, it is a tool of the US, anyone purporting to support this so-called state is supporting the NATO occupation, there is no way around this.

Please note that this is a response to exactly one of the like 10 paragraphs in this response, the rest of it is roughly as insane, accusing me of watering down politics by using the left-right divide (I will concede this, I myself hate the left-right divide and only used it because our friend used it when talking about, to quote: “serbian leftists about kosovo”. I can recognize now that this was in fact using leftist as a derogatory term in the stead of communist, this is the type of hair-splitting pedantism I can get behind (I mean that, this is not a sarcastic comment, I am a pedant myself.)

There’s further comparisons of the rhetoric between Milosevic and Zionists, though I’ve found that israel comparisons are ultimately useless since the Israelis do equip rhetoric that can be valid if applied to the right situation. It is simply vile when considering that they are crybullies who accuse their victims of what they do. As such, any and all rhetoric around any and every case of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the modern day is a dance of “you are doing this, I am innocent” by one party and the opposite claim by the other. It is entirely pointless as both an intellectual exercise and fact-finding endeavor to take this into consideration. I joke about Kosovo* being the israel* of the Balkans because of their attitude and behavior, but primarily for being fake states created and solely persisting due to American support.

Israel* supporting Serbia is hardly relevant either, Kosovo* today maintains a strong relationship with israel* alongside Serbia.  Fake recognizes fake I guess. It’s an interesting point though, since many Kosovars are frequently in shock when their government expresses undying support for israel*, I imagine narratives of ethnic cleansing and an ethnic/religious fueled butchery of muslim populations would make israelis hesitant to jump on the bandwagon. While our friend seems to be gladly taking the word of israel* at face value, I beg to differ.

The rest of it is more drivel about what is socialism or communism or leftism or what have you, some Marxist magazine I never mentioned that interviewed some fascist I didn’t mention with some unsourced screenshot of some book or essay I never mentioned to argue a point I never made. Truly I am dealing with a very productive, to the point, focused e-communist. I will not even touch on the issues of  who was bombed or how much, the goal of these bombings is clear and the disregard of the US for human life or its puppets and pawns is so blatant at this point that one should be deeply ashamed for arguing that them killing Kosovars is a sign they did not back the state. Icing on the cake was the hoxha plug though

In conclusion, and tl;dr, the age old observation that every e-commie has one issue they will simply inflexibly toe the state department line on stands true. But more entertainingly, our friend made so many insane claims in such a short paragraph that I wrote like 1500 words about what must have been no more than 2-300.

*not real states

[mariacallous]

“Don’t mention the word ‘liberalism,’ ” the talk-show host says to the guy who’s written a book on it. “Liberalism,” he explains, might mean Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to his suspicious audience, alienating more people than it invites. Talk instead about “liberal democracy,” a more expansive term that includes John McCain and Ronald Reagan. When you cross the border to Canada, you are allowed to say “liberalism” but are asked never to praise “liberals,” since that means implicitly endorsing the ruling Trudeau government and the long-dominant Liberal Party. In England, you are warned off both words, since “liberals” suggests the membership of a quaintly failed political party and “liberalism” its dated program. In France, of course, the vagaries of language have made “liberalism” mean free-market fervor, doomed from the start in that country, while what we call liberalism is more hygienically referred to as “republicanism.” Say that.

Liberalism is, truly, the love that dare not speak its name. Liberal thinkers hardly improve matters, since the first thing they will say is that the thing called “liberalism” is not actually a thing. This discouraging reflection is, to be sure, usually followed by an explanation: liberalism is a practice, a set of institutions, a tradition, a temperament, even. A clear contrast can be made with its ideological competitors: both Marxism and Catholicism, for instance, have more or less explicable rules—call them, nonpejoratively, dogmas. You can’t really be a Marxist without believing that a revolution against the existing capitalist order would be a good thing, and that parliamentary government is something of a bourgeois trick played on the working class. You can’t really be a Catholic without believing that a crisis point in cosmic history came two millennia ago in the Middle East, when a dissident rabbi was crucified and mysteriously revived. You can push either of these beliefs to the edge of metaphor—maybe the rabbi was only believed to be resurrected, and the inner experience of that epiphany is what counts; maybe the revolution will take place peacefully within a parliament and without Molotov cocktails—but you can’t really discard them. Liberalism, on the other hand, can include both faith in free markets and skepticism of free markets, an embrace of social democracy and a rejection of its statism. Its greatest figure, the nineteenth-century British philosopher and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill, was a socialist but also the author of “On Liberty,” which is (to the leftist imagination, at least) a suspiciously libertarian manifesto.

Whatever liberalism is, we’re regularly assured that it’s dying—in need of those shock paddles they regularly take out in TV medical dramas. (“C’mon! Breathe, damn it! Breathe! ”) As on television, this is not guaranteed to work. (“We’ve lost him, Holly. Damn it, we’ve lost him.”) Later this year, a certain demagogue who hates all these terms—liberals, liberalism, liberal democracy—might be lifted to power again. So what is to be done? New books on the liberal crisis tend to divide into three kinds: the professional, the professorial, and the polemical—books by those with practical experience; books by academics, outlining, sometimes in dreamily abstract form, a reformed liberal democracy; and then a few wishing the whole damn thing over, and well rid of it.

The professional books tend to come from people whose lives have been spent as pundits and as advisers to politicians. Robert Kagan, a Brookings fellow and a former State Department maven who has made the brave journey from neoconservatism to resolute anti-Trumpism, has a new book on the subject, “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again” (Knopf). Kagan’s is a particular type of book—I have written one myself—that makes the case for liberalism mostly to other liberals, by trying to remind readers of what they have and what they stand to lose. For Kagan, that “again” in the title is the crucial word; instead of seeing Trumpism as a new danger, he recapitulates the long history of anti-liberalism in the U.S., characterizing the current crisis as an especially foul wave rising from otherwise predictable currents. Since the founding of the secular-liberal Republic—secular at least in declining to pick one faith over another as official, liberal at least in its faith in individualism—anti-liberal elements have been at war with it. Kagan details, mordantly, the anti-liberalism that emerged during and after the Civil War, a strain that, just as much as today’s version, insisted on a “Christian commonwealth” founded essentially on wounded white working-class pride.

The relevance of such books may be manifest, but their contemplative depth is, of necessity, limited. Not to worry. Two welcomely ambitious and professorial books are joining them: “Liberalism as a Way of Life” (Princeton), by Alexandre Lefebvre, who teaches politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney, and “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society” (Knopf), by Daniel Chandler, an economist and a philosopher at the London School of Economics.

The two take slightly different tacks. Chandler emphasizes programs of reform, and toys with the many bells and whistles on the liberal busy box: he’s inclined to try more random advancements, like elevating ordinary people into temporary power, on an Athenian model that’s now restricted to jury service. But, on the whole, his is a sanely conventional vision of a state reformed in the direction of ever greater fairness and equity, one able to curb the excesses of capitalism and to accommodate the demands of diversity.

The program that Chandler recommends to save liberalism essentially represents the politics of the leftier edge of the British Labour Party—which historically has been unpopular with the very people he wants to appeal to, gaining power only after exhaustion with Tory governments. In the classic Fabian manner, though, Chandler tends to breeze past some formidable practical problems. While advocating for more aggressive government intervention in the market, he admits equably that there may be problems with state ownership of industry and infrastructure. Yet the problem with state ownership is not a theoretical one: Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister because of the widely felt failures of state ownership in the nineteen-seventies. The overreaction to those failures may have been destructive, but it was certainly democratic, and Tony Blair’s much criticized temporizing began in this recognition. Chandler is essentially arguing for an updated version of the social-democratic status quo—no bad place to be but not exactly a new place, either.

Lefebvre, on the other hand, wants to write about liberalism chiefly as a cultural phenomenon—as the water we swim in without knowing that it’s wet—and his book is packed, in the tradition of William James, with racy anecdotes and pop-culture references. He finds more truths about contemporary liberals in the earnest figures of the comedy series “Parks and Recreation” than in the words of any professional pundit. A lot of this is fun, and none of it is frivolous.

Yet, given that we may be months away from the greatest crisis the liberal state has known since the Civil War, both books seem curiously calm. Lefebvre suggests that liberalism may be passing away, but he doesn’t seem especially perturbed by the prospect, and at his book’s climax he recommends a permanent stance of “reflective equilibrium” as an antidote to all anxiety, a stance that seems not unlike Richard Rorty’s idea of irony—cultivating an ability both to hold to a position and to recognize its provisionality. “Reflective equilibrium trains us to see weakness and difference in ourselves,” Lefebvre writes, and to see “how singular each of us is in that any equilibrium we reach will be specific to us as individuals and our constellation of considered judgments.” However excellent as a spiritual exercise, a posture of reflective equilibrium seems scarcely more likely to get us through 2024 than smoking weed all day, though that, too, can certainly be calming in a crisis.

Both professors, significantly, are passionate evangelists for the great American philosopher John Rawls, and both books use Rawls as their fount of wisdom about the ideal liberal arrangement. Indeed, the dust-jacket sell line of Chandler’s book is a distillation of Rawls: “Imagine: You are designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it—rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like?” Lefebvre’s “reflective equilibrium” is borrowed from Rawls, too. Rawls’s classic “A Theory of Justice” (1971) was a theory about fairness, which revolved around the “liberty principle” (you’re entitled to the basic liberties you’d get from a scheme in which everyone got those same liberties) and the “difference principle” (any inequalities must benefit the worst off). The emphasis on “justice as fairness” presses both professors to stress equality; it’s not “A Theory of Liberty,” after all. “Free and equal” is not the same as “free and fair,” and the difference is where most of the arguing happens among people committed to a liberal society.

Indeed, readers may feel that the work of reconciling Rawls’s very abstract consideration of ideal justice and community with actual experience is more daunting than these books, written by professional philosophers who swim in this water, make it out to be. A confidence that our problems can be managed with the right adjustments to the right model helps explain why the tone of both books—richly erudite and thoughtful—is, for all their implication of crisis, so contemplative and even-humored. No doubt it is a good idea to tell people to keep cool in a fire, but that does not make the fire cooler.

Rawls devised one of the most powerful of all thought experiments: the idea of the “veil of ignorance,” behind which we must imagine the society we would want to live in without knowing which role in that society’s hierarchy we would occupy. Simple as it is, it has ever-arresting force, making it clear that, behind this veil, rational and self-interested people would never design a society like that of, say, the slave states of the American South, given that, dropped into it at random, they could very well be enslaved. It also suggests that Norway might be a fairly just place, because a person would almost certainly land in a comfortable and secure middle-class life, however boringly Norwegian.

Still, thought experiments may not translate well to the real world. Einstein’s similarly epoch-altering account of what it would be like to travel on a beam of light, and how it would affect the hands on one’s watch, is profound for what it reveals about the nature of time. Yet it isn’t much of a guide to setting the timer on the coffeemaker in the kitchen so that the pot will fill in time for breakfast. Actual politics is much more like setting the timer on the coffeemaker than like riding on a beam of light. Breakfast is part of the cosmos, but studying the cosmos won’t cook breakfast. It’s telling that in neither of these Rawlsian books is there any real study of the life and the working method of an actual, functioning liberal politician. No F.D.R. or Clement Attlee, Pierre Mendès France or François Mitterrand (a socialist who was such a master of coalition politics that he effectively killed off the French Communist Party). Not to mention Tony Blair or Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Biden’s name appears once in Chandler’s index; Obama’s, though he gets a passing mention, not at all.

The reason is that theirs are not ideal stories about the unimpeded pursuit of freedom and fairness but necessarily contingent tales of adjustments and amendments—compromised stories, in every sense. Both philosophers would, I think, accept this truth in principle, yet neither is drawn to it from the heart. Still, this is how the good work of governing gets done, by those who accept the weight of the world as they act to lighten it. Obama’s history—including the feints back and forth on national health insurance, which ended, amid all the compromises, with the closest thing America has had to a just health-care system—is uninspiring to the idealizing mind. But these compromises were not a result of neglecting to analyze the idea of justice adequately; they were the result of the pluralism of an open society marked by disagreement on fundamental values. The troubles of current American politics do not arise from a failure on the part of people in Ohio to have read Rawls; they are the consequence of the truth that, even if everybody in Ohio read Rawls, not everybody would agree with him.

Ideals can shape the real world. In some ultimate sense, Biden, like F.D.R. before him, has tried to build the sort of society we might design from behind the veil of ignorance—but, also like F.D.R., he has had to do so empirically, and often through tactics overloaded with contradictions. If your thought experiment is premised on a group of free and equal planners, it may not tell you what you need to know about a society marred by entrenched hierarchies. Ask Biden if he wants a free and fair society and he would say that he does. But Thatcher would have said so, too, and just as passionately. Oscillation of power and points of view within that common framework are what makes liberal democracies liberal. It has less to do with the ideally just plan than with the guarantee of the right to talk back to the planner. That is the great breakthrough in human affairs, as much as the far older search for social justice. Plato’s rulers wanted social justice, of a kind; what they didn’t want was back talk.

Both philosophers also seem to accept, at least by implication, the familiar idea that there is a natural tension between two aspects of the liberal project. One is the desire for social justice, the other the practice of individual freedom. Wanting to speak our minds is very different from wanting to feed our neighbors. An egalitarian society might seem inherently limited in liberty, while one that emphasizes individual rights might seem limited in its capacity for social fairness.

Yet the evidence suggests the opposite. Show me a society in which people are able to curse the king and I will show you a society more broadly equal than the one next door, if only because the ability to curse the king will make the king more likely to spread the royal wealth, for fear of the cursing. The rights of sexual minorities are uniquely protected in Western liberal democracies, but this gain in social equality is the result of a history of protected expression that allowed gay experience to be articulated and “normalized,” in high and popular culture. We want to live on common streets, not in fortified castles. It isn’t a paradox that John Stuart Mill and his partner, Harriet Taylor, threw themselves into both “On Liberty,” a testament to individual freedom, and “The Subjection of Women,” a program for social justice and mass emancipation through group action. The habit of seeking happiness for one through the fulfillment of many others was part of the habit of their liberalism. Mill wanted to be happy, and he couldn’t be if Taylor wasn’t.

Liberals are at a disadvantage when it comes to authoritarians, because liberals are committed to procedures and institutions, and persist in that commitment even when those things falter and let them down. The asymmetry between the Trumpite assault on the judiciary and Biden’s reluctance even to consider enlarging the Supreme Court is typical. Trumpites can and will say anything on earth about judges; liberals are far more reticent, since they don’t want to undermine the institutions that give reality to their ideals.

Where Kagan, Lefebvre, and Chandler are all more or less sympathetic to the liberal “project,” the British political philosopher John Gray deplores it, and his recent book, “The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is one long complaint. Gray is one of those leftists so repelled by the follies of the progressive party of the moment—to borrow a phrase of Orwell’s about Jonathan Swift—that, in a familiar horseshoe pattern, he has become hard to distinguish from a reactionary. He insists that liberalism is a product of Christianity (being in thrall to the notion of the world’s perfectibility) and that it has culminated in what he calls “hyper-liberalism,” which would emancipate individuals from history and historically shaped identities. Gray hates all things “woke”—a word that he seems to know secondhand from news reports about American universities. If “woke” points to anything except the rage of those who use it, however, it is a discourse directed against liberalism—Ibram X. Kendi is no ally of Bayard Rustin, nor Judith Butler of John Stuart Mill. So it is hard to see it as an expression of the same trends, any more than Trump is a product of Burke’s conservative philosophy, despite strenuous efforts on the progressive side to make it seem so.

Gray’s views are learned, and his targets are many and often deserved: he has sharp things to say about how certain left liberals have reclaimed the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his thesis that politics is a battle to the death between friends and foes. In the end, Gray turns to Dostoyevsky’s warning that (as Gray reads him) “the logic of limitless freedom is unlimited despotism.” Hyper-liberals, Gray tells us, think that we can compete with the authority of God, and what they leave behind is wild disorder and crazed egotism.

As for Dostoyevsky’s positive doctrines—authoritarian and mystical in nature—Gray waves them away as being “of no interest.” But they are of interest, exactly because they raise the central pragmatic issue: If you believe all this about liberal modernity, what do you propose to do about it? Given that the announced alternatives are obviously worse or just crazy (as is the idea of a Christian commonwealth, something that could be achieved only by a degree of social coercion that makes the worst of “woke” culture look benign), perhaps the evil might better be ameliorated than abolished.

Between authority and anarchy lies argument. The trick is not to have unified societies that “share values”—those societies have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headsman’s axe—but to have societies that can get along nonviolently without shared values, aside from the shared value of trying to settle disputes nonviolently. Certainly, Americans were far more polarized in the nineteen-sixties than they are today—many favored permanent apartheid (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”)—and what happened was not that values changed on their own but that a form of rights-based liberalism of protest and free speech convinced just enough people that the old order wouldn’t work and that it wasn’t worth fighting for a clearly lost cause.

What’s curious about anti-liberal critics such as Gray is their evident belief that, after the institutions and the practices on which their working lives and welfare depend are destroyed, the features of the liberal state they like will somehow survive. After liberalism is over, the neat bits will be easily reassembled, and the nasty bits will be gone. Gray can revile what he perceives to be a ruling élite and call to burn it all down, and nothing impedes the dissemination of his views. Without the institutions and the practices that he despises, fear would prevent oppositional books from being published. Try publishing an anti-Communist book in China or a critique of theocracy in Iran. Liberal institutions are the reason that he is allowed to publish his views and to have the career that he and all the other authors here rightly have. Liberal values and practices allow their most fervent critics a livelihood and a life—which they believe will somehow magically be reconstituted “after liberalism.” They won’t be.

The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg. After all, an iceberg is thrilling, and anyway the White Star Line has classes, and the music the band plays is second-rate, and why is the food French instead of honestly English? “Just as I told you, the age of the steamship is over!” they cry as the water slips over their shoes. They imagine that another boat will miraculously appear—where all will be in first class, the food will be authentic, and the band will perform only Mozart or Motown, depending on your wishes. Meanwhile, the ship goes down. At least the band will be playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which they will take as some vindication. The rest of us may drown.

One turns back to Helena Rosenblatt’s 2018 book, “The Lost History of Liberalism,” which makes the case that liberalism is not a recent ideology but an age-old series of intuitions about existence. When the book appeared, it may have seemed unduly overgeneralized—depicting liberalism as a humane generosity that flared up at moments and then died down again. But, as the world picture darkens, her dark picture illuminates. There surely are a set of identifiable values that connect men and women of different times along a single golden thread: an aversion to fanaticism, a will toward the coexistence of different kinds and creeds, a readiness for reform, a belief in the public criticism of power without penalty, and perhaps, above all, a knowledge that institutions of civic peace are much harder to build than to destroy, being immeasurably more fragile than their complacent inheritors imagine. These values will persist no matter how evil the moment may become, and by whatever name we choose to whisper in the dark.

[tanadrin]

the episode on Cold War Liberalism of Know Your Enemy is dense in a delightful way, and Samuel Moyn has a lot to say about the evolution of liberalism as an idea that I think is really interesting. His basic contention is that, essentially, the Cold War ruined liberalism, and the thing we think of when we think of liberalism nowadays is, in many ways, a shadow of its former self. Bullet points of bits I found interesting:

Earlier liberals engaged productively with thinkers like Marx; there was a strand of ambition and an idea of a gradual process of perfection that led to some of liberalism's greatest accomplishments, like the welfare state. Even out-and-out leftist figures like Marx could admire aspects of liberalism that were emancipatory (albeit within strict limits that had to be overcome).

During the Cold War, liberals became enamored of a theory of totalitarianism that didn't differentiate much between the right and the left, and shrank from its earlier ambitions, becoming--through vehicles like neoliberalism--less and less distinguishable from various flavors of conservatism. This eventually led liberals to turn away from liberalism's formerly successful achievements, including against the robust welfare states that had done so much in the middle of the century.

It's not like pre-Cold War liberalism wasn't bound up with ideas about laissez-faire economics (and even imperialism), long before neoliberalism arrived on the scene. Nevertheless, some of the earliest liberals still had promising ambitions: Moyn cites "perfectionism" ("perfection" here being understood more in the sense of "a process of improvement" rather than "a final unchanging state"), which he contrasts against (in more recent theory and practice) "tolerationism." Tolerationism sees liberalism as sort of merely the thing that lets people get along and which prevents bloodshed; figures like Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill weren't merely tolerationists in this sense; they weren't aiming for a world in which people merely muddled along, but had the ambition to achieve the highest life for humanity, and thought that you could create institutions that promoted this, via (or perhaps while also) promoting public and private freedom. In other words, perfectionism is a kind of positive (almost utopian) vision for liberalism to aspire to, but one which contemporary liberalism lacks. In this way liberalism was also both explicitly emancipatory and progressive, in a wauy which, again, Moyn contends present-day liberalism is not, having set its sights considerably lower.

Our instinctive sense of what liberalism consists of nowadays--something beleagered, timid, and not especially aspirational--is a product of the Cold War. The traumas of the world wars and the tensions of the Cold War seemed to produce what you might call a trauma response against ambitious and utopian ideas within liberal thought, albeit one that (like a lot of trauma responses) was reactive and self-limiting rather than a fully rational course-correction--call this allergy to real ideological commitment the "liberalism of fear," after Judith Shklar's work of that name. Although even Shklar was distasteful of neoliberals, who, she argued, abandoned the principles of the Enlightenment simply because the Soviets tried to claim them as well.

Cold War liberals seemed to take the Soviet Union at its word that they were the sole inheritors of the Enlightenment, the ideas of the French Revolution, and even of reason, science, and history; they contended themselves with something much more minimalist and timid, without the emancipatory element that was crucial to Enlightenment thought and abandoning useful lessons learned from writers like Marx.

European Catholics declare the Cold War long before liberals join in. Liberalism had helped to create socialism after all; there were once real points of ideological consonance between the two and many liberals were interested in the early days in seeing how the Soviet experiment would turn out. These writers coin the idea of totalitarianism as a thing uniting both the communists and Nazis. But they are perfectly fine with places like interwar Austria. They don't like the Nazis because of the pagan overtones, but these are not liberals!

Popper's contribution to this project is to decanonize and demonize historicism. He associates Hegel and Marx with his "very cramped understanding of what historicism is," i.e., a commitment to lawlike inevitable processes in history. But while attempting to cast that rather narrow idea into disrepute, he tars a much broader swathe of ideas with his brush--including (if I understand this part correctly) the thoughtful and deliberate engagement with the place of one's ideology and political aims in a larger historical context. Liberals sort of give up any claim on history because of Popper, which Moyn thinks has been particularly disastrous especially since the end of the Cold War. Liberals do not give people much to believe in anymore, either because history is over or because justice is sitting there at the end of the moral rainbow and we'll get there eventually if we just wait and vote Democrat without engaging in major criticism of structures of power.

There's an interesting point in this part about how nowadays nobody believes in positive teleologies anymore--"progress" on a grand scale--but only negative ones ("the slingshot to the atom bomb," to paraphrase Adorno).

The irony of course is that at the beginning of the Cold War, while liberals were as a group abandoning the whole idea of emancipatory politics, they were (for a short time) engaged in building some of the most triumphantly emancipatory institutions in the history of liberalism, in the form of strong welfare states. Rawls comes along and creates a robust theory of the welfare state in 1971, but only once the dismantling of these institutions has begun.

Only halfway through the episode so far, but it's a lot to chew on. It certainly resonates with my own frustrations with liberal politics, where liberals keep wringing their hands about the rise of far-right populism, and then going "I know what the answer is! It's a minor tweak to the tax code!" Like parties across the center-right/center-left spectrum are terrified of actually articulating any kind of coherent political vision, so of course the people who do that (even if their vision is a Hieronymous Bosch-style grotesque of the world) are going to have the advantage.

[givemearmstopraywith]

do you have any suggestions for material that approaches theology with marxist thought? i Have gone through liberation/womanist theology stuff but none that so explicitly called itself marxist

you might enjoy critical theory if you're not already familiar. none of these writers are theologians or even theists, but they are strongly influenced by marxism and i find they fill in the gaps of theology where i wish for more marxism. they radically reshaped my theology even as they are highly critical of institutional christianity and i strongly recommend them.

dialectic of enlightenment: critical theory and the messianic light by jacob klapwijick (good introductory primer)

negative dialectics by theodor adorno

"the dogma of christ" by erich fromm

max horkheimer's "theism and theism" and "religion and philosophy"

herbert marcuse's an essay on liberation

everyone i haven't directly linked can be found in this book.

you've mentioned you went through some womanist/liberation theology: the thing with both theologies is that, particularly for catholic theologians writing in the 1980s, there was a real danger to explicit marxism. marxism is atheistic: anyone utilizing marxist rhetoric or calling themselves marxist jeopardized their safety and inclusion, especially during the reagan administration, so liberation theologians like guiterrez were actively either shunned or discouraged from being "too marxist." i won't recommend their work again, but i strongly encourage you to reread them after engaging in some critical theory- my experience of liberation theology was radically changed by doing this, since liberation theology finds its origins in critical theory. additionally, you might be interested in:

the long loneliness by dorothy day

in the vale of tears: on marxism and theology by roland boer

class struggle in the new testament by robert j miles

christian socialism: an informal history by john cort

all things in common: the economic practices of the early christians by roman a. montero

prophetic encounters: religion and the american radical tradition by dan mckanan

speak truth to power a quaker search for an alternative to violence by bernard rustin

the life and work of camilo torres restrepo, dorothy day, benard rustin, and simone weil

i like this article a lot too

this is a bit all over the place, but it might be helpful for starting off- and again, i encourage you to reconsider liberation theologians, especially gustavo gutierrez, marcella althaus-reid, and james h cone. they are easily the most important thinkers for liberation theology and all of them are driven deeply and intrinsically by marxism even if they don't write explicitly about it. you might also like sallie mcfague: i recommend the body of god: an ecological theology and life abundant: rethinking theology and economy for a planet in peril.

[morlock-holmes]

the thing I don’t understand is why it’s so important to people that nietzsche be a nazi

his aesthetics are in many ways compatible with fascist politics, in some ways not (he seems so anti-egalitarian to where he criticizes nationalism for being a statement of collectivism?).

Arguably, he’s far more a proponent of an aristocratic RW ethos than the more mass-politics streetfighter types who drove early fascism. His disbelief in god complicates the association with the aristocratic or feudal systems, and so you can’t exactly call him a reactionary, but he’s certainly uninterested in any form of social equalization.

I’m by no means suggesting that leftists should see much of anything good in his work, but it seems trivially easy to make a leftist case against him on the grounds of his social elitism and shockingly boldfaced misogyny. The unwillingness to do that in favor of laser-focusing on his occasional crediting of Jewish thinkers with the birth of slave morality is very strange to me.

The focus on his opinions on Jews feels like lasering in on the “jaywalking” in “murder, arson, and jaywalking”. There are many people whose antisemitism is deep, major, and the definitional flaw of their morals, but for Nietzsche it seems like just a minor distaste for some Jewish people, compared to his dislike of just about everyone on earth, especially women, poor people, various types of religious people, darwinists, antisemites, most Germans, the English, Utilitarians, and so on.

he was not a happy camper. Strangely compelling thinker, although I doubt he would’ve seen much good in me

Anon, I was going to write almost exactly this post, up to and including the fact that when it comes to targets of Nietzsche's ire in Beyond Good and Evil Jews are at least third place behind Germans and liberated women, and they might well be in fourth place behind the English.

Beyond Good and Evil was the first time I'd read more than out of context snippets of Nietzsche, and reading it with the benefit of hindsight you can see Nazism waiting in the wings, particularly in Nietzsche's equation of weakness with sickness, and in his preoccupation with the damage that the weak can inflict on the strong.

At the same time I think an honest reading of that book reveals a viewpoint that is entirely incompatible with Nazism, from a thinker who in all likelihood would have found the Nazis utterly and totally repellent.

You might be able to construct a fascist ideology that was mostly compatible with Nietzchean thought, but Nazism certainly is not that ideology.

Now, why the Nazis wanted to claim Nietzsche is an easy question to answer, it's because he was becoming popular and Nazis are repulsive hypocritical liars so they didn't much care that any honest reading of Nietzsche reveals him to be totally incompatible with Nazi ideology.

Why a lot of left wing opponents want to make him a Nazi is less clear to me.

For the purposes of that video, it's only necessary to talk about whether he was "woke" and it is really easy to build the case for "No" in an intellectually honest way based on honest engagement with what Nietzsche actually wrote in Beyond Good and Evil and On The Genealogy of Morals.

So why instead try to prove he was more or less a Nazi, which requires a great deal of intellectual dishonesty about what he actually wrote in those books?

It's a fascinating mystery, isn't it?

One thing that actually pisses me off more and more the more I think about it is the assertion that Nietzsche merely disliked the anti-Semites because he hated his brother in law and had a shitty publisher.

Meanwhile, in On The Genealogy of Morals his criticism is heavily based on the fact that they essentially disguise a preoccupation with vengeance as a concern with justice "as though justice were merely an extension of the feeling of being aggrieved".

This strikes me as a genuinely valuable insight into the psychology of anti-semitism and I think it is genuinely disturbing for someone posing as an educator to bury and ignore that aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy.

PS - One other thought I had rereading passages from Beyond Good and Evil, On The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo is that I think Nietzsche is fully capable of drawing a distinction between

The religion of Judaism;

The Jews, as a people;

Specific individual Jews.

Such that his opinions about one of things on that list is not necessarily his opinion about the other two.

Anti-semitism is about effacing those distinctions, and honestly I am starting to think that maybe one of the most misleading things about Nietzsche's work is that most people who take his approach really aren't capable of drawing those distinctions.

PPS - In Ecce Homo Nietzsche says that part of why he is so great is that everybody who interacts with him comes away the better for it and that he "does not blame individuals for the calamities of millenia". Beyond Good and Evil and On The Genealogy of Morals are broadsides aimed at a certain value system, but in thinking of how Nietszsche would have reacted to you or I it is worth noticing that he praises a French nobleman who did not bear grudges because he literally forgot about sleights people had given him.

What the nuts and bolts of human relationships, the basics of, "Okay, how do I treat my spouse or a stranger" in Nietzsche's ideal society are really, genuinely unclear to me from those books. But it is important, and I think underdiscussed, that he spends a lot of time criticizing Slave Morality because it is so heavily focused on Vengeance.

Now, I'm an American and a believer in egalitarianism, so he certainly would have written badly about my opinions were he aware of them but beyond that the picture is rather hazier.

[hiiragi7]

hi whenever you see this-- just wanted to stop by and drop a note for you. you're extremely articulate and resilient and i appreciate your voice in this digital space so very much.

i'm a fully perisex afab individual. i identify as male and female bigender and do not claim transmasculinity as an effect of my identity. nonetheless i've always sought masculinizing bottom surgery and have called myself both a man and a woman to my peers, and moving through the world in this way is not an experience i can relate to common binary trans experiences. it was really isolating and it continues to be isolating, i felt like because there wasn't really an established discourse on multigender identities that i somehow had to find a way to fit my experiences into the transfeminine/transmasculine discussion and mostly cobbled together concepts from theorists under that umbrella to piece together the ways in which i was ostracized from my peers and queer spaces. the decision i made to seriously read into intersex issues and the ideas being put out by intersex thinkers was an incredibly liberating experience for me. intersex perspectives have completely overturned not just the way i understood gender, but my perception of my own self. everyday intersex people are thrown under the bus, ignored, dismissed, tokenized and objectified by the queer community at large in ways you absolutely do not deserve, and i want this ask to hopefully remind you that your work is not in vain, there are people who care, and the value of your experiences are not to be understated. ever. i stand forever in solidarity with my intersex siblings. you guys deserve to hit people with hammers 💖

Thank you ❤️ I really appreciate this. Here's a cat in a box on a skateboard.