It seems to me that we in the United States — and, from what I can tell, the Western world more broadly — never did come to terms with the reality of Jihadist ideology and its clear intentions for us. Media malpractice and a general decline in cultural courage and self-confidence seem substantially to blame for that — themselves downstream of a “long march through the institutions” of toxic ideology that’s quite deliberately designed to weaken us. I don’t know how not to feel disgust for those responsible for it. In any case, this far down the road from the 9/11/2001 Al Qaeda attacks on the USA, I expect we’re pretty firmly settled into our respective conclusions and not much seems likely to change that. With Al Qaeda and ISIS/ISIL largely rendered inoperative, there hasn’t been as much reason to worry about Jihadist violence in recent years, and we’ve moved on as a culture to fearing, doubting, distrusting, and punishing ourselves over other issues. My focus has shifted to understanding the deeper roots underlying the general weakness that afflicts us, and seeking ways to re-energize a culture and civilization that I see as well worth saving. I’ve grown weary of trying to warn people about things they don’t want to be warned about, so writing to try to spread awareness among the less aware has seemed less useful than trying to offer tools and insight to see our ailing state and want to do something to fix it. Time will tell where that goes. I hope I’ll be able to find ways to make a positive difference.
James Lindsay (@ConceptualJames) is an irreverent and insightful force of nature, who’s immersed himself deeply in the abyss of present-day social critic culture and the postmodern philosophy from which it originates. He excels at dissecting the thinking behind cultural phenomena now in play, and laying the implications bare for much-needed exposure to daylight. His appearance on Joe Rogan’s show this week was a well-worthwhile dive into the insane times we live in, tracing the origins of the toxic theories responsible for present lunacies back to their sources.
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.
Academy of Ideas has produced some profoundly insightful content. I ran across and re-watched this video in particular recently, and find deep relevance in it for the time and troubling phenomena we’re living through. Especially striking is Jung’s assessment that “psychic disturbances are far more dangerous than epidemics [of physical disease]”.
Much to that point, the following sounds all too familiar:
When it is understood that a flood of negative emotions, in conjunction with a weak and insecure sense of self, can trigger a descent into madness, it becomes clear how a mass psychosis can occur. A population first needs to be induced into a state of intense fear or anxiety by threats real, imagined, or fabricated. And once in a state of panic, the door is opened for either the positive or negative reaction to unfold. If a society is composed of self-reliant, resilient, and inwardly strong individuals, a positive reaction can take place. But if it is composed of mainly weak, insecure, and helpless individuals, a descent into the delusions of a mass psychosis becomes a real possibility.
People can be tricked into accepting, in repeated small increments, massive changes that they would never have put up with all at once. This appears to be true of both individuals and entire populations. It’s a fact of human nature that I suppose is the darker side of our characteristic adaptability, and appears to have been instrumental in reaching the sad state I find us in. This phenomenon has been on my mind in recent years, perhaps because I’ve now lived long enough to witness the long arc of its consequences and see how much of our condition it appears to explain.
We in the USA are both blessed and perhaps cursed to be a remarkably accepting, easygoing culture. This assertion runs contrary to the oft-repeated slanders that we are cruel and intolerant, but it is demonstrably true. How else could we reach a point where we’ve allowed nearly every institution to be slowly but steadily turned against us, infiltrated by people bent on the systematic dismantling of our foundational values and the very essence of who we are? The trope of insufficient tolerance and kindness will continue to be leveled against us, precisely because our good nature abhors and recoils from such accusations, causing us to capitulate with muted objections, one small increment at a time. The trope is employed, because it is effective, because we are kind.
If there is a limiting factor to the cumulative damage such incrementalism can inflict, it may be impatience. Some can’t help but want to push this transformation faster, even when things are going their way in the long term, and in their moments of eager overreach they eventually push us too far all at once. The threshold of our easygoing nature is exceeded, and we become alerted to what is going on. We are living in a time of sustained impatient overreach that seems to have crossed the line of acceptability for many. My own personal line has certainly been crossed. I expect this to inject some salutary feedback into phenomena that have been trending badly for far too long, but it remains to be seen whether that will be enough.
I was raised by two loving parents, in a better time for which I am deeply grateful, to live with integrity and virtue in a world that no longer exists. The world that has supplanted it is decidedly done with me and those who share my values, and the feeling has become mutual. My parents’ passing in 2016 and 2020 feels like a key inflection point in that conclusion, taken together with the realization that my sons are now old enough that they will start to be impacted by the wounded state we’re in. I’ve been an easygoing guy all my life, but I can no longer accept and accommodate things that are toxic to my nature and threaten my children’s future. Now is the time to draw the line and stand for my convictions, against cultural tides that mean harm to all that I love, buoyed by the gift of the better world I have seen and know is possible, and deep gratitude for having known it. I’ll be walking with greater resolve toward the metaphorical battles that must be fought, to save the future I hold dear, and I expect to be thinking, writing, and publishing more here and in my other outlets in pursuit of that.
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.
