I always am very uncomfortable with these sort of categories of … extreme optimism, extreme pessimism. I think those are somehow the wrong categories. … And I think they’re actually weirdly the same. Extreme optimism … says that you don’t need to do anything. The movie of the future will go on its own. It’s sort of automatic, accelerating progress and all you have to do is sit back and eat some popcorn and watch the movie of the future unfold. And then extreme pessimism is that … nothing you can do will make a difference. And the truth is always, I think, somewhere in between, or at least it’s best for us to believe that it’s somewhere in between and that … instead of being in emotive denial (that everything’s great) or acceptance (that everything is awful) and both denial and acceptance are code words for laziness, for not doing anything, because there’s nothing you can do — nothing you need to do. It’s best to be somewhere in between and to think: It actually matters. Things are always up for debate … and we should be fighting, and we should be figuring out … how to continue to have this healthy and free country in which we live.
In a democracy, what 51% of the population believes is probably better, and there’s a certain bias towards majoritarianism, and if you have 70% of the population [that] believes something it’s even more true. But if you go from 51% to 70% to 99.9%, you’ve gone from a democracy to North Korea. And it’s this very important question that one needs to always needs to come back to. Where do we sort of go from the wisdom of crowds to the madness of crowds, and where’s that dividing line between majoritarian democracy and where do you get to the sort of totalitarianism of North Korea. And it’s hard to define where that line is, but I want to suggest that in all kinds of contexts we’re far too far on the side that you can describe as collectivist, centralized, Borg-like, conformist, and also generally just simply incorrect.
We’ve had all these derangements of science, where … in the name of “science” we’ve done these rather unscientific things. And I often think that … when people use the word “science” it’s often a tell of the opposite … that the things that are actual science like physics and chemistry, you don’t need to call them “physical science” or “chemical science” because you don’t need to protest that much like, you know, Lady Macbeth. But when you call things “climate science” or “political science”, that’s sort of a tell that they’re not quite scientific.
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I’ve come to think that one way to think of a healthy “science” is that it has to fight a two-front war against excessive skepticism, and against excessive dogmatism. So excessive skepticism is if you can’t believe in anything: I don’t believe I’m here, I don’t believe the audience is here, nothing is real, everything is imaginary. That’s probably not an attitude that’s conducive to science. And of course, excessive dogmatism, at the other end of the spectrum, is … the 17th century church telling you that the Aristotelian view of the universe was correct and therefore the Earth couldn’t possibly be moving. And that’s excessive dogmatism, and that’s also very bad for science.
I haven’t been writing as much here as in past times, in part due to finding Twitter, GETTR, Parler, and Gab to be convenient outlets for concise, off-the-cuff thoughts. With the world gone as mad as it now has, I feel I have a great deal of catching up to do in this more enduring journal of observations, and much of it merits the deeper and more systematic exploration that writing longer pieces here facilitates. The task feels daunting at its outset, but I feel the need to tackle it with some persistent commitment, as there is so much gone awry in need of urgent remedy.
I haven’t yet written here, more than indirectly, about the now approximately two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, and our variously advisable and insane responses to it. There is much that needs to be captured for posterity, about the madness that we have allowed to descend on us and dominate our lives, and the darker-than-expected things I’ve learned about human nature in the process.
Simultaneous with the massive social experiment of addressing a global pandemic with radical measures decoupled from rational, salutary feedback loops, we in the USA were subjected to the determined resurgence of an unhinged social critic culture with which I have had all too much bitter experience. I can imagine that to well-intentioned younger generations this might have appeared to be something genuinely new and worthy of possible deference, but to me it is an old, familiar, and despicable foe in a very thinly veiled disguise. I have written here, since the beginning, of my heartfelt love for the American Idea and way of life. I have wanted for my life to stand as a celebration of this culture of ours and its possibilities — to express herein my feeling of gratitude for them, and to help others to see the beauty that I do and learn the means of thriving in it that I have acquired through a lifetime of observing, admiring, and learning from the achievements of others. I have wasted far too many moments of this precious journey in the company of smug, snide, bitter social critics — from academia in the late 90s and early ’00s, to the radical activist sub-culture of the art world, to eight years living in various parts of the the San Francisco Bay Area. I have watched so many of the things I love and value maligned, slandered, and disparaged by people whose fear, envy, narcissism, or other such mania have driven them to enthusiastically tear down and destroy rather than create. I have been, since my college years in the mid-90s, a witness to expressions of worldview and intent that I now regret having dismissed too lightly as fringe academic radicalism, which turned out to be the seeds of toxic ideology that means to “subvert” and dismantle everything I love, and which has seen its way, through persistent incrementalism, to the dubious and contrived claim of mainstream respectability it makes today. I assure you this is nothing new, but rather the down-the-road manifestation of decades of intellectual termites gnawing away at our cultural foundations — a phenomenon that I have witnessed. Yesterday’s uncontested absurdities have become today’s promoted ideology, leaving us in sad but not unrecoverable shape.
What we’ve come to now, as the culmination of decades of infiltration and radicalization of our education institutions (all the way from universities to K-12) is a broader cultural realization of how very far off course we’ve allowed ourselves to be blindly led. Those who mean to dismantle what they despise in this Liberty-loving culture have been acting with newly emboldened fervor, while simultaneously being umasked by parental oversight that they did not appear to anticipate. As a parent of two young boys who I love dearly, and whose futures must be as free, open, and optimistic as possible, it’s vitally important to me to support and be part of these parents’ and students’ rights movements. What the courage of past generations has purchased for our benefit at such high cost cannot be left casually on the table, sacrificed for no purpose and to no good end. It is worth the proverbial fight.
Watch for what I hope will be more frequent posts here in support of setting things right. I’ll endeavor to shed light on what I’ve seen, promote others’ good work, find and promote solutions, and maybe even lift my own spirits and yours a bit in the process.
I’m a “rah, rah America” guy. I can’t help it. Ever since I can remember, I’ve felt an appreciation and natural affection for this way of life of ours here in the USA, with its steadfast foundational devotion to Liberty. What I would call a deeper gratitude likely came later, as I’m sure I took this precious inheritance for granted growing up, and had little idea it would ever truly be in jeopardy. The ever-present threat of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union loomed large during the 70s and 80s, but I found reassurance in the cultural resolve I perceived all around me. We seemed sure of who we were and of the imperative to stand and defend this way of life. It was precious and worth every measure of devotion, so much so that even a fearsome and dangerous external enemy did not in the end seem more than a serious but likely manageable concern that we’d do everything we could to guard against. I had no idea, back then, that our foundations were under sustained internal attack, or that our undoing could ever possibly come from within rather than from an external adversary. The possibility just wasn’t even on my radar.
Growing up in this environment, I never anticipated, much less understood, the desire of some to live in a collectivist society, even as some abstract ideal. It seemed obvious to me where that road led — that it was a sure-fire recipe for subservience to an abusive, totalitarian state, and that there was no more certain way to extinguish creativity and the potential for thriving that make life worth living. Striving for independence and the life of a free individual was clearly worth it, even with the attendant uncertainty and risk. The only way I ever imagined that people would submit to collectivism was unwillingly, under the thumb of a totalitarian reign of terror like that which prevailed in the Soviet Union and its captive satellite nations, in China, or in North Korea. It interested me to learn the stories of people who had escaped collectivist societies, and also how those who chose to remain or were unable to escape found ways to cope, endure, maintain perspective, and push in whatever ways they could to move things back in the direction of freedom. Traveling to the Czechoslovakia of 1986 (where we had family who feared the peril they’d face when the state learned they’d met with Americans, including a cousin we never got to see who we later learned was sent to a forced-labor camp), and awareness of Soviet dissidents such as Sakharov, Sharansky, and Solzhenitsyn, reinforced my interest in understanding the way out from such things. Encountering Americans who expressed an affinity for or aversion to criticizing collectivism, later in life, was an experience for which I was wholly unprepared, and stands to this day as about the most chilling realization of my life. If, after every purge and totalitarian horror of the 20th century, there are people who still yearn to bring about a move to collectivism in some form, and if those people can gain the levers of power and cultural influence in so steadfastly, defiantly free and independent a place as the United States, then there seems to be no limiting factor on the horror that may await us in the future yet to come.
These worries bring me gloom sometimes, and the eager, enthusiastic embrace of appeals to authority we’ve seen in the COVID years has only deepened my concern. But I can’t allow myself to live in that gloom. Such is not the purpose of life in this world — one imperiled by our self-destructive will to subservience, to be sure, but also too full of hope for many to grasp. I can’t make choices for others, nor would I wish to, but I can choose my own actions and attitude, and the thoughts I populate my world with. Even as the slow creep of incrementalism seems to march inexorably on, I see glimmers of an inextinguishable desire to live free and thrive, and tremendous hope in the prospect of opening new frontiers and decentralizing ourselves away from the ossified institutions that are holding us back from the fullness of what we can achieve. I’m going into the future with this thought and the goal of realizing it in mind. I have faith, in the end, that we will find our way.
This captures beautifully what’s in my heart and mind every day on this Earth, and fills me with gratitude for the culture I feel so blessed to have been born into here in the USA. As we contemplate next places and head to new frontiers, I hope we’ll carry the spirit of this bold, hopeful declaration with us.
I do not choose to be a common man. It is my right to be uncommon. I seek opportunity to develop whatever talents God gave me — not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the state look after me. I want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed. I refuse to barter incentive for a dole. I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence; the thrill of fulfillment to the stale calm of utopia. I will not trade freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout. I will never cower before any earthly master nor bend to any threat. It is my heritage to stand erect, proud and unafraid; to think and act myself, enjoy the benefit of my creations and to face the world boldly and say — “This, with God’s help, I have done.”
I’m working on plans to start publishing on this site again, with a renewed focus on the development of new frontiers. This will include resuming the No Fear Pioneer podcast and adding to the post series I titled “The Way Out”.
Development of commercial space capability has accelerated rapidly in recent years, and the resultant advances have been thrilling to watch, thanks in no small part to SpaceX’s relentless achievements and bold, inspiring, and impatient vision for our off-Earth future. I’ve been following developments in this area with tremendous interest and enthusiasm, and will aim do so some useful thinking and writing about the implications here — focusing on the great and exciting potentials for space colonization, but also exploring novel opportunities to open new frontiers, physical or virtual, here on Earth.
We live in an amazing time full of immense possibilities — greater, I think, than most realize. I’m particularly energized by the potential that new places and the challenges that go with them hold to rekindle our resilience and our hunger for adventure. I foresee places where, out of great difficulty, our long-lost sense of fun and playfulness will get to emerge again. Places where those who are willing to embrace risk will have the chance to know what an easy-going, free-wheeling approach to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness feels like, and where humanity’s tremendous potentials can be set free to great benefit.
The month alone featured a successful second Crew Dragon launch to the ISS, and a couple of textbook satellite launches with beautiful first-stage landings, and it now looks like next week will hold possibly the most exciting development yet: the first 15km test flight and re-landing of a Starship prototype. Elon Musk Tweeted yesterday:
Good Starship SN8 static fire! Aiming for first 15km / ~50k ft altitude flight next week. Goals are to test 3 engine ascent, body flaps, transition from main to header tanks & landing flip.
I’ll be watching for sure, and cannot wait to see it.
Meanwhile, for your inspiration and enjoyment and a reminder of the amazing future that I believe lies ahead of us, I’ll just leave these here for now:
I’ve been revisiting past episodes of The No Fear Pioneer lately, finding much enduring value therein. The themes are as relevant now as ever, and I’m more pleased with this concise podcast series than with most any other work I’ve done.
If you have an interest in the role frontier life and adventure-seeking have played and will likely continue to play in human thriving, please do check it out. I look forward to getting back into it and producing new episodes in the near future.
Freedom is a tremendous and precious inheritance. To develop our potential, thrive in it, and pass it along to each successive generation is our highest calling. I write here to give my thanks, and to seek ways we can cultivate the resilience, independence, courage, and indomitable spirit necessary to sustain a culture that cherishes liberty.
