Traditions emerge for a reason. Society is impossible without them. Traditions provide lenses, rules, norms, and expectations that help make sense of the world, harmonize competing aims and interests, provide stability, and enable long-term planning. But tradition can be tyrannical. Traditions can oppress, restrict, stagnate, and destroy individuals and society. So where’s the line? When does tradition become tyranny?
Tag: peace
“But There Are Limits!”
If you advocate free speech, free movement, freedom in exchange, and freedom to engage in any peaceful activity an individual desires, you will hear this objection.
The Liberal Spirit and Its Opposite, Alt-Rightism
Maybe a few self-described libertarians cling to the idea that property is essentially about exclusion, but they are fated to hit a wall: liberalism is a spirit as well as a set of ideas, and it cannot be turned against itself. It fosters human solidarity, not separation. Libertarianism, like its precursor, is an answer to the question: under what conditions do reasoning social animals best flourish? In answering that question the way it has, liberalism offers no home to sowers of division.
The Problem with Ancap Thought Experiments
Yes, you can make a point with using an example of a small number of people interacting in an isolated system, but you could just as easily create a thought experiment starting from our current situation that people might find easier to follow. Such a thought experiment might look something like this.
Peaceful Anarchism 020 – Suffering is the Greatest Teacher (7m)
Peaceful Anarchism 020, “Many of us tend to shy away from and avoid suffering, hardship, and pain. It is only natural since our bodies are constructed to desire pleasure and shun discomfort. It is our biological imperative. Nevertheless, sometimes it becomes necessary to override our limbic system base desires in order to attain a nobler goal.”
Four Decades of Middle Eastern Disaster: The Proximate Cause
Almost all of the Middle East’s disasters over the past four decades can be credibly traced back to a single highly specific major event: the Iranian Revolution. Let me chronicle the tragic trail of dominoes.
The Myth of ‘Good Government’
The history of the US is not that of good government gone bad, but of bad government remaining bad. Yes, it’s improved a bit in some areas even as it has worsened in others, but when it comes to its central evils—plundering, kidnapping, caging, and killing people—it continues to follow the pattern of cruel oppression which has always defined it.
“Faith” Is Your Attitude Toward Reality
The faith that actually matters is how you are predisposed to judge reality and to act. If you cultivate that, it will prepare you to act almost automatically for the good – particularly in crises, when it’s especially important that s
Breaking up is Hard to do. Or is it?
“A cliche is haunting America — the cliche of a second civil war,” writes Jesse Walker in the Los Angeles Times. Pundits left and right wax ominous over the prospect of a permanent break in American society along partisan Republican/Democratic lines, citing outbreaks of street fighting a la Berkeley and Charlottesville.
Everyone Misses This Lesson on Political Power From “Game of Thrones”
Getting a seat on the Iron Throne is a pretty raw deal, and even if you have it, you might now have it for long. So why do Game of Thrones‘s rulers spill so much blood to get there? Why not consolidate their own power elsewhere? And why does the question of who sits in leadership draw so many other people into the sinkhole of war?