1) Unity.A common enemy (not usually the state, but a person of low moral character, an ineffectual leader, and/or a charlatan) galvanizes good libertarians to band together and fight against that person’s specific tyranny or fight to gain better direction for the movement. This is a period of great unity and friendship, as minor differences […]
In Ancient Greece sophists were teachers who taught virtue, which in those days generally meant the art of statesmanship, to young men rich enough to afford their services. Sophistry, as their art was called, is a trade much criticized in the dialogues of Plato, where Socrates attacks not only the practice of teaching for a […]
T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men and Sean Dempsey’s America, 2023 both confront the spiritual and moral decay of civilization, but they do so from opposite emotional poles. Eliot’s poem is elegiac: a whispered lament for a world hollowed out by inertia and disillusionment. His “stuffed men” drift without agency, trapped in the shadow between […]
