Thanks, reader:

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A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…

Repost-Classical Liberalism Via Friesian.Com-‘Exchange with Tomaz Castello Branco on John Gray’

The radical and rationalist project, anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism: Repost-From Michael Totten At World Affairs: “Noam Chomsky: The Last Totalitarian”

Somewhere from the old aristocratic Russia softly speaks a keen mind in beautiful, strange English: Michael Dirda At The Washington Post Reviews ‘Nabokov in America’

How might this relate to the Heglian/post-Marxist project via ‘The End Of History’: Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’

Via Youtube-‘Week 2 Leo Strauss-The Three Waves Of Modernity’

A proposition: Deeply embedded principles, ingrained into habit and character in a single individual, are rarely enough to withstand the force of a mob. When you were thirteen, maybe you were invited to a party. Excited, you picked a loud, purple shirt from your brother’s closet. A girl who will be at the party said maybe she thinks you’re pretty cute. A faint purple glow suddenly appears around the edges of the shirt as you try it on.

In the steaming hothouse of a suburban basement later that night, two cool girls are seen turning away, snickering, while a pretty audible ‘nice shirt faggot’ erupts from a pack of skaters devouring a pizza.

Perhaps, after waking up the next morning, you slip ol’ purp back into your brother’s closet; the aura now gone as it disappears from view.

I look around and see high IQ individuals within institutions no less subject to group dynamics, intellectual fashions and passing fads. In fact, upon examination, I see similar stuff within myself.

From my perspective, collectivist action under liberal ideals (‘democracy,’ ‘equality’, ) has already consigned individual freedoms (speech, religion, conscience) to secondary importance. ‘Culture’ comes to depend upon a series of emergent moral causes. Supposedly these causes are ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ but they function more as ideas, actors, belief and group-dynamics do.

At least within groups where truth and constraining principles are embedded within the pursuit of power, do individual principles stand a chance. You’d be hard pressed to find a religious commandment or Church hierarchy free from human ignorance, hubris, sexual dynamics and self-interest.

Or a military hierarchy for that matter.

What I expect, but don’t exactly predict: An American cultural and political center will be philosophically closer to Great Britain and other European centers (more stasis, more grievance and more rigid hierarchies). An American politics will likely display a more open spoils-distribution system. Perhaps we’ll see an American ‘center’ with its own unique saving graces and destructive vices (more commercial, more ‘Puritan’ cum ‘Romantic’ etc).

The recent growth and success of the DSA is but one consequence of the experiments we’ve been running, and I don’t expect the conductors of these experiments to ‘scientifically’ examine the results anytime soon. Many liberal individualists will lock arms some of the time (around sinecures, established interests and core beliefs more often…such is humanity). Such individualists will often do so against elements of the radical Left.

Elements of the right will be more European and identity-based than before, with no shortage of ignorance, ass-covering and rule-enforcement. Politicians are no strangers to navigating group-dynamics. Sometimes you go along to get along. Sometimes individual courage and truth is subject to party membership. Sometimes genuine truth and creative possibility are subject to practical power.

Perhaps we’re living through a kind of ‘unwinding’, but also a period of massive technological changes and genuine progress.

I dunno.