No Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. [P]eople will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

-Neil Postman

Dystopia has long been a creative playground for real warnings from fictional settings, sweeping across a range of imagined futures: Huxley’s Brave New World seduces its citizens into docile compliance through cheap pleasure and perpetual distraction, while Orwell’s 1984 crushes them with overwhelming surveillance and ever-present fear. Countless variations—societies undone by ecological collapse, runaway algorithms, or mass infertility—have given us a broad genre exploring dark futures that offer a cautionary lesson for errant denizens of the present.

These myriad visions vary in their methods of control, but they are united in the shared premise that gears of oppression set in motion by human nature can be wielded to strip entire populations of meaning and control. Increasingly, though, the public fixation with dystopia feels less hypothetical: polls finding record-low trust in institutions, historically high levels of self-reported loneliness, and emerging angst toward a relentless, ever-present force capturing and monetizing our every waking hour have all fueled a growing feeling that dystopia is already here.

In his 2018 book Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker tackles this rising sentiment with an argument that has since taken hold among the intelligentsia and the elite: despite widespread perception of a world deteriorating, things are actually better than they have ever been.

Enlightenment Now’s attention to subjective well-being is palpably secondary.1 It arrived at its conclusion predominantly by synthesizing data collected on several dimensions of objective well-being including life expectancy, rates of violence, and economic growth. I already have questions. How do we know these are the categories that correspond with human flourishing? If these objective measures don’t line up with public sentiment, in what way is the world better? Does that not suggest they’ve failed to capture what is needed to support subjective well-being?

They don’t, in fact, appear to line up. In the years since Enlightenment Now, when asked in Gallup’s Mood of the Nation surveys “In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?” responses oscillate between 18% and 38% satisfaction.2 Of late, a full 78% of Americans are dissatisfied with the country’s “moral and ethical climate,” 73% are dissatisfied with public education, 72% are dissatisfied with the size and influence of corporations, and 69% are dissatisfied with income inequality.3 And yet, Pinker’s barometer remains wildly positive.

The adage “the map is not the territory” comes to mind. But that adage doesn’t seem to have currency with a mentality singularly focused on the question, “but what do peer reviewed, IRB-approved studies of narrow metrics administered almost exclusively to American college students have to say?”4 Anything that can’t be analyzed within this paradigm isn’t worth knowing. “The map is not the territory” has been replaced with “do not attempt to make sense of the territory; the only things that are true are what our cartographers put into these maps.”

Pinker’s faith in the modern priesthood of truth cartographers (of which, not coincidentally, he is one) is so strong that when the priesthood’s map of human happiness conflicts with the actual territory, the response is that we’re all simply wrong about our own subjective well-being and need to be educated on the matter.5 His attitude here is not unusual. It follows from a broader sentiment popular among the economic and cultural elite that truth itself should be institutionalized.

This is core to the story of our dystopia: modern society demands we subordinate our agency and judgment to sterile institutions that dictate a narrow, hollow set of values, purposes, and uses for agency. But before we can diagnose or offer solutions, we need a better understanding of the territory that constitutes genuine well-being.

The Hard Problem of Well-Being

What makes a fulfilling life is one of humanity’s most eternal questions. I won’t claim a full answer, but if our modern priesthood of institutional science has come up so short, the next place to look is back to cultures and ideas with lasting, time-tested success.

Cultures accumulate wisdom directly from the human experience. Those that miss the mark don’t last. Cultures develop maps, yes, but any culture or practice that survives for thousands of years, at a minimum, has something figured out about the territory. And looking for themes common to all these successful cultures and practices can help us get to a high degree of confidence on some of the fundamentals.

As it turns out, the most enduring cultures and practices (predating peer review by millennia) converge on a few core ideas.

There Are Virtues and it is Good to Cultivate Them. Some traits and practices lead to happier, more fulfilled humans in healthier societies. A culture can maintain its own health, and the well-being of its members, by encouraging the cultivation of those traits and practices. Hinduism defines virtue around dharma, that which sustains the universe. Buddhism formalizes virtue in service of dharma as The Noble Eightfold Path. The Greeks contemplated and debated competing frameworks of virtue ethics that endure today. The Abrahamic religions juxtapose holy virtues with sin, the temptations of our nature that we succumb to at our peril.

What commonalities do we find among these virtues?

We have a responsibility to better the world we live in, and those that we live with in it. Almost every tradition praises values centered around duty and obligation. Confucianism (a philosophy with widespread influence on East Asian cultures even today), Buddhism, and Hinduism all preach our obligations to others as a core value. Christianity dictates that we “give justice to the weak and the orphan.” Islam demands justice and charity. Judaism preaches tikkun olam, or ‘repair the world.’

Obligation is mediated by duty. We owe the greatest duty to family, friends, community—those closest to us in whatever hierarchy defines our society. Duty lends itself to an internal locus of control over a practical sphere of influence. This is required to direct our agency to service.

We have a responsibility to better ourselves and to temper our desires in accordance with our responsibilities to the world and to others. Buddhism teaches that desire is the source of suffering. Daoism emphasizes balance and avoiding extremes while Greek philosophers gave us Epicurean moderation and the Stoic emphasis on living in accordance with nature. The Abrahamic religions all warn of the evils of greed and unchecked desire.

Impotence, incompetence, and cowardice serve neither the self nor the world. Strength is celebrated, but importantly mediated by these other virtues. Seen in the light of service, responsibility, and moderation, strength is less a tool for domination and more a tool to wield in service of the Good. This strength is not just physical. In Buddhism, mental fortitude is a core virtue to cultivate. Hinduism preaches the need for physical and spiritual strength for personal empowerment. The Abrahamic religions teach that strength of mind, body, and spirit are essential to effectuating justice.

We Must Find Our Proper Place in a Greater Whole. A structural observation of universal virtues is that they emphasize our contextual, not absolute importance in relation to a greater whole, and they optimize the individual’s ability to serve that greater whole. Every enduring culture agrees. What ‘you’ are is fundamentally defined in the context of the larger world you are living in and contributing to. Buddhism names Nirvana, a state of perfect oneness with the universe, as the highest form of consciousness. Hinduism names Brahman as the ultimate reality, and its core prescription is realizing the self in relation with that ultimate reality. While Hindus have many deities, they are all fragments of the greater truth that is ultimate reality, the supreme god.

Moving west, the idea is concretized as a single entity. Although he has many names (Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, God), he is one being. But Abrahamic theology does not divorce this single entity from the whole of existence, or from the self. God is being itself and we are made in the image of God.

The Individual Still Matters, and Has a Few Core Needs. Our place in the greater whole implies a noteworthy corollary— as part of the great whole, which is self-evidently important, we also have importance. Every successful tradition develops values and practices to care and provide for the individual. In Greek philosophy, moderation promises sustainable pleasure over a lifetime. In Abrahamic traditions, a day of rest is necessary to recharge and recenter the self.6 Work for worldly gain, pursuit of status, and all other manners of productive enterprise need a pause button. Eastern traditions give us yoga, meditation, and mindfulness as practices to connect with greater purpose while nourishing the self.

Everywhere, we see similar contours take shape: Virtue has an important role in self-actualization. It is meant to be cultivated (1) to be of use (2) toward a meaningful aim bigger than ourselves. It helps us identify the right purpose and gives us the agency to strive toward it. These are the cornerstones of feeling like a full adult human. Purpose is the ‘why,’ the orienting principle for life itself. Agency is the ability to effectively act toward that purpose.

What’s Wrong Today?

As individual beings, we need to feel some meaningful choice and ability to contribute in our own way to a purpose that gives us meaning. Today, we are stripped of both purpose and agency, methodically, by a total inversion of the virtues synthesized by millennia of accumulated wisdom.

Gone is duty and obligation. Self-interest is the foundational paradigm we use to make sense of individuals and their interactions with one another, and the codified engine of the most significant agentic force in modern society: corporations.

Gone is the community where duty and obligation were directed. Workplace culture is our primary connection to other adults. Gone is the entire idea of obligation in accordance with duty. The taxes collected from the work we do are sent to an esoteric State that administers that money in increasingly ineffable ways, replacing wholesale the agentic act of giving.

Gone is our agency to contribute to a greater good. With no community to care for, we are offered only national politics and intractable (by design) policy standoffs. We have no agency to meaningfully act toward these ideas. All we have are institutions to appeal to, asking them to act for us.

Gone are shared history, national identity, local community, and anything that could be the foundation for a greater whole in a cohesive society to provide people a meaningful connection to it. Religion, another possible foundation for this connection, has waned as well. Identitarian political groups capitalize off this void, selling a corrupted and corrupting alternative more interested in dominating out groups and consolidating national political power than the day-to-day lives of adherents.

Gone is the quest to find one’s place in a greater whole. The individual is an atom, or at most part of a nuclear family. Because the atomic individual is prime, purpose and agency are meant to seek pleasure and avoid pain for that individual. We seem to have forgotten that without commitment to something outside ourselves we are aimless, without moderation pleasures become hollow, and without the voluntary suffering that comes with striving we cannot build competence and self-worth. Without competence and self-worth, we cannot contribute to any meaningful or worthwhile enterprise.

Time is our fundamental resource. We trade it for tangible resources, for the pursuit of status, for the fostering of connection, and for whatever else we are oriented toward. Without purpose we trade time haphazardly, meaninglessly. Without agency, our time is taken rather than traded, and we are not individual, conscious parts of a dynamic whole. We are cogs in a machine. If we are cogs in a machine, we are replaceable by any other cog that can be molded to do the same work, animate or otherwise. If we are replaceable by inanimate cogs, where is our worth derived? How does our humanity fit into a greater whole?

Cogs are only useful inside machines, and we call the machines we fit inside ‘institutions.’ Today’s institutions have consolidated immense power and have quite effectively become the guarantors of a society of cogs without purpose or agency by institutionalizing every aspect of our lives.

The Institutionalization of Everything

Humans are institutionalized starting at ever-younger ages, to the point where modern parents now call daycare for their babies and toddlers ‘school.’ The Political Left’s platform to address the difficulties of parenting is to universalize the institutionalization of those babies and toddlers. (I am not even sure what The Political Right’s platform to address the difficulties of parenting is.)

Most of childhood has been institutionalized. Students are given an absolute authority to obey, and that authority wields the weight of the institution. These students don’t resolve disputes. They appeal to an authority within the institution who does. They sit in seats all day, rewarded for docility and passivity. They don’t set goals or orient their own purpose. They are given assignments—discrete hoops to jump through designed and meted out by the institution. These assignments replace free play, a practice well-known in developmental psychology (and to every parent in human history until about 30 years ago) to be necessary for developing agency and competence in children. In 1990, elementary school students in the US typically enjoyed 60 to 90 minutes of recess every day. Today, the average recess per day is 25 minutes. Free, unstructured time has given way to structure and control.

In virtually every aspect of life, this kind of regimented control by an institutional authority has crept in. Birth is staged in a sterile hospital bureaucracy; baby’s first days are inundated with a flood of institutionalized bureaucratic hoop jumping (a reminder early on that the State’s acceptance of your role as parent is conditioned on a rubric). Childhood is rationed through standardized curricula designed to teach to standardized tests, which prepare students for even more institutionalized schooling. Travel requires a near-total surrender of legal rights to both private and governmental authorities who subject you to queues, scans, interrogation, and pat downs. Romance filters through dating platforms’ matching algorithms. Friendship is flattened into a social graph for Big Tech to mediate and monetize. The effect is a kind of soft expropriation: our time, relationships, and identities are routed through professional gatekeepers whose institutional logic—optimize, monetize, mitigate risk—quietly, inexorably sanitizes the messier, freer rhythms that make life feel lived rather than consumed.

It’s no wonder most young people today report not knowing how to make friends or find partners outside of the structure and guidance of institutions. It’s also no wonder that mental health issues have risen dramatically in recent decades to unprecedented levels. We are not designed for lives confined to rigid, sterile institutions. We are not wired to find happiness in perpetual childhood, where an omnipresent authority lays out your choices, arranges your human connections, and curates the structure of your days.

All of this is fundamentally anti-human, and the result is a system that molds a raw population of agentic people into docile cogs who do not know how to exercise agency or form purpose outside of the institutions erected to leverage them as “human resources.” The cogs constitute a machine of ever-increasing complexity, a machine nominally and paradoxically said to be serving human needs. That machine consumes both agency and purpose. And the engine of that machine is in an office park adorned with cubicles.

Cube Farms and Corporate Sharecropping

Work for a company in exchange for a salary is the fundamental engine of modern society. Everything from your health care to your social life (such that it is) revolves around the immense (and growing) gravitational force of the workplace. That force controls greater and greater shares of society’s wealth, giving it massive influence over the aims of our time and effort each day of our lives. Our foundational human needs for purpose and agency are leased wholesale to these corporations.

This modern workplace should not be conflated with ‘capitalism.’ Capitalism is the idea that every individual should legally and in-practice own their own labor, and should be able to freely exchange that labor how they see fit.

Corporatism was the strategy that arose to collect, capture, and control that labor in institutions of concentrated power. The modern Republican Party loves to call itself ‘The Party of Lincoln,’ but the actual Party of Lincoln in its time saw wage labor as a temporary condition and necessary evil to amass the personal capital required to be a free adult. In fact, in political propaganda leading up to the Civil War, Southern propagandists often compared Northern wage workers with Southern slaves to argue the North had its own form of slavery.7

This political conception of wage work as a temporary tool to buy freedom was the prime selling point of the enterprise, and Lincoln’s own rejoinder differentiating it from slavery. But that conception is starkly juxtaposed with the wage work of today. The modern workplace is designed to ensure your exchange of labor never amasses you the freedom to leave. The political and social realms likewise envision an entire life spent earning your living from an employer, until you retire decrepit or die working.

All of this is justified to the modern (small ‘l’) libertarian ethos because, at every step of the way, you are ‘voluntarily’ choosing to work. But how voluntary is our work when our childhoods are designed to strip us of agency and make us reliant on institutions for stability and direction, when fewer, larger companies control more and more of the economy, and when providing for our own needs directly with our own productivity happens less and less, in favor of exchanging money earned working for the services of others.8

Admittedly, the idea that we are increasingly stripped of freedom by modern careers is counterintuitive. Calling back to Pinker’s map of increased human flourishing, it is certainly true that the world today is richer than it has ever been, and Americans are the richest group of all. This point is regularly deployed to shut down any argument along the lines I’m making here. And it’s usually effective, at least on the surface. We remind ourselves that, yes, we have so much and are so fortunate and maybe it really was absurd to question the system supposedly designed to serve us and make us rich.

And yet, even when we tell ourselves all of this, even when we accept it on the surface, something remains off. No void fills, no feeling of agency rushes in. We sublimate ourselves to a grind that the culture insists will provide us with everything we need while ignoring the unease building inside us when those unnamed needs aren’t met.

Eventually, we crave outlets. And today, those outlets have been meticulously engineered (by many of the same corporations that provide our wage work) to siphon everything they can from us, give nothing of real value in return, and trap us in a vicious cycle that makes true escape less and less likely.

Digital Escapism and the Attention Strip‑Mine

Without grasping that purpose and agency is what we lack, we turn to escapism to fill the void. But the technology of modern escapism is just architected to devour more. As work took over more of our lives, technology advanced to make us more isolated than ever. An increasing share of our time is spent working (even at home, where a portable screen with push notifications keeps us ever on-call) and turning to digital escapism for microbreaks that fill in the remaining minutes of our days. A vanishing share of our time is spent with friends and family. Isolation has been steadily growing for decades, but the pandemic accelerated it dramatically.

When we aren’t in the office, we are at home, and in our hermetically sealed homes we are all ‘consumers.’ Amazon delivers your household goods and your toys. DoorDash brings your takeout and even your groceries. Countless apps branded ‘Social’ provide the facsimile of connection modernity has to offer.

This consumption is the primary way we contribute to the economy. If GDP is the one greater good modernity has on offer, the exercise of agency toward that purpose is consumption. And now we have the Attention Economy. Easy, cheap, frequent consumption of content. You can’t even remember what you read or saw after an hour of doom scrolling, and you probably didn’t even realize an hour passed. But the hour is gone just the same.

This is the true cost of the Attention Economy. Work bleeds into escapism. Our attention wanes, our drive halts. We are consumed by our limitless consumption of nominally ‘free’ content. ‘I don’t pay for content.’ But you do, and the cost is high. We all say “I don’t have time for anything anymore.” But where does that time go? The one fundamental resource we have is taken from us, and we are hard pressed to say what we got in return.

Our last fading bit of agency was to choose which content we passively consumed. But even that is gone now. Most web traffic today comes from smart phones, and most of that comes from a few apps. Our last vestige of autonomy, choosing the content we passively consume, is surrended to an algorithm.

In the brilliant ‘You Are Not A Gadget,’ Jaron Lanier notes the shift that happened in online platforms over the past 30 years:

“Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavour of person-hood. MySpace preserved some of that flavour, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely. If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other forms.”

Personality, flavor, perspective, agency. All of these things are sapped from modern internet “Platforms.” The internet was institutionalized. Over time, any differentiating features between the few institutions on offer are massaged out to reach more users, to capture more attention, to take more from us. TikTok validated a model and now we have Shorts on YouTube, Reels on Instagram and Facebook, and those same clips on Twitter feeds woven between 280 character diatribes.

Even long-form news articles are increasingly consumed in the bandwidth of a Tweet. Studies consistently show the majority of people only read the headlines of news stories, which not insignificantly are written by marketers, not journalists.9 Those headlines are Retweeted, discussed in Reels, and become the news. We express joy at the headlines we already wanted to believe, and we perform outrage at the headlines we didn’t. Our relationship with the internet today is short dopaminergic hits, ad nauseum, throughout the day, to fill in every uncomfortable moment where we would otherwise be alone with our thoughts or our work. The average person today looks at their phone 144 times a day, for a total of 4 and a half hours of screen time.10 This is where our time went.

The last two places on the internet with anything to offer a longer attention span are YouTube (whose UI is shifting bit by bit to give more prominence to Shorts) and Podcasts. Because of this, there is no shortage of news headlines (and probably the articles, but nobody is reading them to find out) painting both as dangerous hotbeds of radicalization. It’s best to keep doomscrolling your TikTok feed instead.

And all of these Platforms are fueled by ads. Thus completes the ensnaring cycle of our modern dystopia. We work jobs we don’t want for long hours we wish we didn’t have to give up, to make money that we are convinced to spend while mindlessly consuming what we erroneously believe to be an escape. The ads are the point. The purpose of everything you read and watch is to capture your attention and keep you spending money, which requires you to work longer hours in a job that is no longer getting you a single step closer to freedom.

There is a temptation to regard these ads as a nuisance, an annoying roadblock to tolerate for the stuff we want to consume. But these companies aren’t stupid, and if they pay close attention to anything, it’s money. Businesses track a metric called Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) to know how much revenue they can expect to take in for every dollar spent on ads. The most common cited target ROAS is 4:1 and some studies have pegged the actual average ROAS across all industries in the US at approximately 3:1.

Last year in the US more than $500 billion was spent on advertising, yielding a return of about $1.5 trillion in additional revenue from advertising. Very few people seem to think advertising works on them, but most of us can’t be right.

And this is just specific revenue linked with specific ads. There is no way to quantify how much more we spend because of the general, pervasive force of consumer culture (which the barrage of ads in all domains of life contributes to). We are conditioned to define ourselves by the things we buy. We are conscious of being judged or just left out for the things we don’t buy. We come to believe the things we buy will make us happy, finally. But the dopamine hit comes from the act of buying, and it quickly wears off until the next time we buy again. There is no limit to the amount of money companies will take from you in the pursuit of happiness. And there is no dollar amount that will actually get you there.

All of this contributes to something very important to modern economies: the velocity of money. Investors and companies both benefit from a higher velocity of money. It is said that consumers benefit, too, but in what way? Clearly, we get more stuff for less money. But is that intrinsically good? If you can have any widget you want delivered overnight with your Prime membership for an affordable price (and you can Buy Now, Pay Later to make any price affordable!) but you don’t need that widget, and you won’t even want it anymore a week after you buy it, how did you benefit? And what if you’re caught in a loop, continuously doing this in search of something you’ll never find?

But while the disposable widgets we have to be convinced to want are more affordable than ever, the things we actually need—housing, education,11 health care—are more expensive than ever. The number one cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. is health care costs. The only reason student loans don’t have the top spot is that, legally, they aren’t dischargeable in bankruptcy.

This makes us feel unable to provide for ourselves, and powerless. We spend even more on frivolities to regain what little control and power we can. The results of our lifelong institutionalization are on full display: hedonic pleasure is our only meaning, GDP is the only greater whole, and consumption is our only agentic activity toward those ends.

None of this ever makes us happier or more fulfilled, but we are continually told it will, and so we continually try. We know something is wrong, but because so much of this is habituated and ‘just part of life,’ we fail to put words to the problem. Around we go, again and again: still no purpose, still no meaning, all of our time taken from us, and nothing to show for it.

Escape, not Escapism

To escape our modern dystopia, we have to reject these modern maps drilled into us by institutions committed to stripping us of agency and conforming us to a hollow higher purpose without meaning.

Escapism will not set us free. Escapism is a fantasy, a habitual pattern of activity within a constrained system that temporarily lets you forget you are in that system. The reason escapism is appealing is that it gives us something that can be accomplished in the time horizon of the modern attention span. But escapism keeps us inside the dystopia.

To reclaim agency, we must reject permanent institutional wardship. You can just do things. Minimize (or eliminate) time spent on any platform with (1) infinite scroll, (2) an algorithmic timeline, and (3) a business model whose core metric is your “time on platform.” For me, Twitter is the last platform I use that fits this description. I still have my account and some mutuals I genuinely enjoy and get meaningful interaction with. But I have deleted the app from my phone, and I blocked the website from my phone’s browser. That means any time I engage with Twitter, it is deliberate, and the cost to my time is clear.

To move past the compulsive obsession with things, we need to shed the nudges that reinforce our identity as “consumers.” Pay for the ad-free version of any service you value, and stop using ad-supported services you wouldn’t pay for. If you aren’t willing to pay, it isn’t worth doing. And it certainly isn’t worth doing for the hidden cost of all your time, attention, and willpower. Consume deliberately, in moderation, and ensure the costs are clear to you.

Remember that spending money does not make you free. Having money does. Detach your identity from purchases. Buy things you need. Don’t eliminate discretionary spending entirely, but try a cooling off period before purchases, or a leisure budget, or some other practice to curb consumption. Start thinking of money that you keep as buying you freedom. I started adulthood poor and have gradually made more money every stage of my life.

Spend your free time intentionally. Find (or pick back up) hobbies that actively engage your mind, rather than passively consume. If you have a leisure budget, prioritize spending it on things like this — things where you consciously choose to spend the time, that require active thinking and doing, that let you recharge from responsibilities, and that ideally come with a community. A piece of advise that’s suited me well: if you work with your body, recharge with your mind; and vice versa.

When you do passively consume, do it with intentionality, not burning bits of time throughout the day. Prioritize longer form content. If you think a 30 minute video is too long, realize that you spend far more than that on shorter content without consciously making the choice to. With intentionality, you choose the time you spend and make it a treat you feel like you can earn, rather than something bad you feel vaguely guilty for doing that disappears all of your time.

Experience time with your own thoughts. Boredom is not a bug — it’s a feature. Inspiration will not hit scrolling a content feed. You will be amazed what your mind can do when it is not overwhelmed with constant empty consumption.

The goal is to use our agency, even in leisure, and to regain the attention span to help us do it. Ours is atrophied, but it can be rehabilitated.

With agency in hand, we need coherent purpose to direct it. And to reclaim purpose, we must embrace the time-tested wisdom that we are not meant to be atomized, and a meaningful life grows from finding our place in a greater whole. Reconnect with friends, family, and community. This is what we have been missing.

Only you can identify your higher purpose, but it will flow from finding your proper place within a greater whole. Your proper place is the place that honors your individual traits and allows you to exercise agency in a way that feels durably meaningful.

And when you do, it will feel like “an illicit act of rebellion” against modern institutionalism, like you got away with something:

It felt mischievous, almost illegal. The feeling resembled pulling off a heist. It reminded me of the excitement, the nervous feeling in my stomach I felt when my friends and I stole the doors off the classrooms at our high school as part of a senior prank. Sowing the seeds, covering them lazily with my bare feet, watching for rain and crows…it all felt like an illicit act of rebellion.12

Experience time with other people. Dunking on Twitter is not connection. Neither is scrolling the manufactured lives presented on Instagram. We lost community, but the raw materials are still there. Communities don’t span continents and they’re not dictated by legislatures. They’re the culture that emerges from real people and the connections we form with them.

Be less afraid to talk to strangers. Be less prickly to strangers who talk to you. (We aren’t broken. We’re just out of practice.) Keep up with your neighbors. Attend block parties. If there aren’t any, maybe plan one. If you attend church, get to know your congregants. If you have a hobby, look for people to share it with. Make time with friends regular and organic. Don’t relegate it to the adult version of playdates. Make time with family sacred and intentional. If you have a household, avoid nights with everyone on the couch, silently looking at their phones and scrolling in their own atomized world. Do not limit visiting relatives outside your household to holidays.

The time and attention required for these new meaningful priorities necessitates a hard look at our relationship to work. Escaping consumerism means we spend much less money. We can work less, change careers, or save more money to build more options for the future.

Work is not bad, and working hard does actually bring people meaning and satisfaction. But warping all aspects of life around work is bad. If we’re lucky, the work we do can be in direct service to the greater purpose we identify with. For most of us, though, it is primarily (if not exclusively) the thing we do to provide for ourselves and our families. It is backwards to allow that thing to become the point of our lives.

Don’t let your employer own your time and attention all hours of the day and night—or if you do, ensure you understand the trade and that it serves your higher purpose in the final analysis. If undue sacrifice is a non-negotiable where you work, make a plan to leave. If you are thinking of making that change, consider your own business. If planned and executed properly, this is the ultimate freedom. It also has positive effects on your community, and can elevate you to a position to community-build. There are risks, but those risks are often overstated,13 and we are far below historic levels of self-employment today.

Even if you don’t go into business yourself, make an effort to support those who do. Paying a little more for something you can get cheaper from Jeff Bezos may seem like a sacrifice, but this assessment fails to take into account the hidden costs. The reason a historically small number of corporations control an unprecedented share of the total economy, the goods we can choose from, and the jobs we can work, is because we voted with our dollars for that to happen.

Hidden costs are lurking everywhere in the story of our modern dystopia. Less agency was the price we paid for cheaper widgets. Less purpose was the price we paid for rejecting time-tested wisdom in favor of quick, easy dopamine hits. Less belonging was the price we paid for elevating self-interest as the basis for society and the human connections that form it. All of this helped increase the velocity of money, but it didn’t serve us.

Our way out is to identify and refuse to pay the hidden costs; to make choices that pay off some time after an artificially limited attention span loses the plot; to reclaim our agency, build our communities, value our friends and families, find our meaning and purpose within a larger whole we feel identified with, and exercise our agency in service to it.

Our way out is to move, bit by bit, toward a society built for people.

“Any given law will do the opposite of its name.”

-Elon Musk

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched at the start of Donald Trump’s second term and led by titan of industry Elon Musk, has captured the headlines with its swift, significant action and its bold promise to streamline the federal government, cut wasteful spending, and reduce the ballooning national deficit. On the surface, it’s an appealing mission: who wouldn’t want a more efficient, less bureaucratic Washington? But scratch beneath that surface, and the cracks begin to show.

DOGE’s approach, simply put, could never meaningfully address our national debt crisis. Elon fully understands this; he’s just hoping that you don’t. While the pretense for DOGE is deficit reduction, if you look thoughtfully at what it's set up to do, its actual goal becomes clearer.

A Real Crisis

U.S. federal debt is up to a staggering $36 trillion. Merely servicing interest on that debt now costs nearly $1 trillion annually. Over the next decade, those interest payments alone are projected to total $13.8 trillion. It bears emphasis that this is merely interest—e.g., the amount necessary simply to tread water and to keep from drowning. We would need even greater investment to actually begin to tackle that debt. This is a crisis. Soon, interest on the debt will be the single largest line-item in the federal budget. And if the past is any indication, this cost will only continue to grow.

But DOGE does nothing meaningful to address any of this.

According to data from the U.S. Treasury’s Fiscal Data portal for Fiscal Year 2025, the federal budget is dominated by a short list of budgetary leviathans. Social Security consumes 21% of the budget, Medicare 15%, National Defense 14%, and interest on the national debt another 13%. Together, these categories—along with veterans’ benefits—account for the vast majority of federal expenditures. Meanwhile, most all of the federal bureaucracy cited as DOGE’s primary target for austerity combined represents just 3% of the budget. That means, if you assumed the entire bureaucracy gave us no societal benefit (a bold assumption) and simply closed almost every federal agency, 97% of federal spending would continue undaunted.

If the goal were truly to shrink the $2 trillion deficit, DOGE would need to confront these behemoths head-on. But doing so is politically toxic. Social Security and Medicare are sacrosanct for retirees, a massive and vocal voting bloc. Defense spending, meanwhile, enjoys the backing of a very influential segment of the nation’s power brokers. And interest on the debt can’t be reduced without either raising taxes (a non-starter for Trump) or lowering interest rates (which risks runaway inflation and a stain on the reputation of Trump’s economy).

That leaves the other 3% of federal spending. And if 3% of federal spending is receiving 90% of the focus from a taskforce charged with improving government efficiency, it’s pretty clear that the needle is not going to move on spending.

Worse, by fixating on the federal bureaucracy and sloganeering a veneer of deficit reduction and efficiency, DOGE creates the illusion of action while sidestepping the real culprits behind the deficit. The public risks being lulled into believing these trivial financial cuts will solve a problem that requires far deeper reforms.

This selective focus isn’t just inefficient; it’s a deliberate distraction. And nothing makes that fact more clear than Trump’s and Elon’s recent shift to messaging around a “DOGE dividend”—which is suggested could give checks for as much as $5,000 directly to voters. But if we have already conceded the money being spent is deficit spending (e.g., not tax dollars being collected), then such a dividend is just more federal deficit spending to cut checks to voters, deepening the very crisis DOGE claims to be addressing.

If that sounds familiar, it should be. Promising cash to voters in lieu of competent governance is the modus operandi of modern politicians—and it’s the reason we have a federal debt crisis today.

DOGE’s True Purpose

If deficit reduction isn’t the true goal, what is? The answer is not so secret, and Trump has been saying it since the campaign trail: "I am your retribution."

The federal bureaucracy is the poster child of Democratic institutional petty elites—the bread and butter of DNC voter rolls—and Trump is going after them.

DOGE’s actions echo Trump’s sentiment, “I am your warrior, I am your justice,” targeting agencies and programs associated with Democratic priorities and political control, such as DEI initiatives and federal workforce regulations.

Elon Musk has been just about as explicit here as Trump. Speaking at CPAC just this month, he described DOGE’s dividend plan as “the spoils of battle,” evoking the idea of a victory for his and Trump’s supporters over a political adversary.

The initiative’s visceral popularity with Trump’s base—cheering blows to the “liberal bureaucracy”—further underscores this purpose. They are happy to wear the mantle of deficit hawk, but any scrutiny of DOGE’s effectiveness at actually addressing the deficit elicits a response that devolves into discussion of the bureaucracy’s loyalty to the DNC, endemic DEI initiatives, and other culture war grievances.

And to be clear, I am by no means suggesting there isn’t waste or excess in the federal bureaucracy, nor do I even disagree with the claim that there is political bias in which segments of the population the bureaucracy represents and serves. I agree that reform is necessary (although I am much more comfortable with intelligent, concerted reform that lobbing veritable mortars at our institutions and hoping we hit more of the harmful stuff than the helpful stuff).

But whether those grievances have merit is a separate issue. My point here is that none of these are the stated justification for DOGE. This is because Trump and Elon both understand that would not be politically tenable.

For median voters, tired of partisan battles and back-and-forth cycles of political retribution, DOGE’s cover story is an important one. It offers a story far more palatable than yet another cycle of retribution. This ruse allows Trump and Musk to appeal to their core supporters and wage a culture war battle, plunder and all, while they message fiscal responsibility to the public without facing hard choices that would actually address the deficit.

DOGE’s strategy of retributive political plundering isn’t new; it’s just another iteration of a broader cycle of political dysfunction. For decades, American politics has been defined by leaders replacing policy substance with promises of financial benefits to their supporters—tax cuts, subsidies, or, in this case, dividends—while kicking the deficit can down the road (or worse, pretending to address it). The result is a national debt that is on track to reach a record share of the economy under the next administration, regardless of who’s in charge. Trump’s first term added $7.8 trillion to the debt, much of it through tax cuts and COVID relief, while Biden’s term added another $7.2 trillion, including significant non-COVID spending.

And while massive seemingly-make-believe numbers may feel far-removed from everyday Americans, this politics of plundering is actually at the heart of the economic grievances shared by millions of Americans.

Fifty Years of Kleptocracy

Culture war skirmishes keep us angry at each other, and political plundering acts as an opiate for the masses that masks a deeper, more sinister theft that continues undeterred under every new administration, Republican or Democrat.

Deficit spending is tantamount to stealing from the future to fund the present. But future generations burdened with debt aren’t the only victims of this con. Also hurt are today’s workers and savers, whose labor and purchasing power are eroded by deficit spending and quantitative easing. As interest payments consume more of the budget, the government prints more money to artificially reduce its debt burden, thereby inflating capital assets and devaluing the dollar you earn.

The results have been consistent, unequivocal, and devastating. Over the past half-century, wages for most Americans have barely kept pace with inflation, while government debt is dampened by that same inflation and the stock market has soared, benefiting the asset-owning elite. This systematic and continuing wealth transfer, driven by a monetary system that rewards capital over labor, reveals the real “parasitic class.”

Elon Musk won't solve this problem. Donald Trump won't solve this problem. Kamala Harris won't solve this problem. Nancy Pelosi won't solve this problem. They're all hell-bent on making it worse. The only difference is which mob they're promising to enrich in the process.

If we want to actually solve the problem that's burying the federal budget in debt payments, incentivizing the government to crank up inflation to ease its debt burden, and continuing the explosive growth of stock prices to insulate the elite from the broader economic malaise, we must break out of the endless tit-for-tat cycle of plunder politics.

A Way Out

The solution isn’t glamorous. We need austerity: Medicare, Social Security, and military spending (together accounting for most of federal spending) must face cuts.

But we also need to stop making regular Americans foot the bill. As long as we continue our current system of deficit spending and quantitative easing, every single downstream economic indicator is fraudulent accounting. GDP is not “the economy.” The Dow Jones Industrial Average is not “the economy.” We need to break the stranglehold on society stealing our productivity and paying it out to the asset-owning class at the top. A little bit of austerity is more palatable if working people can finally see their wages grow again.

In the end, what we are seeing now is the same old anti-populist playbook dusted off time and time again to control the masses. So long as the ruling elite can pit factions of working class against one another, none of those factions will see the bigger con stealing from all of them.

Historically, the working class wins if and only if it can see through this mirage and come together to demand real reform.

The alternative is continuing the cycle of retributive political plundering. We install our leader, punish our enemies, and line our pockets. They respond in kind. And given our current trajectory, I’m afraid, that cycle ends in a very dark place.

“I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women.”
― John Taylor Gatto

Few passages have stuck with as deep an impact as Postman’s account of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in the seminal ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death.’ In 1854 and 1858, Lincoln and Douglas had two series of debates in towns throughout Illinois. During that same time, less than 10% of people attended a high school, and an even smaller number attended college. But the literacy rate was 90% and small towns full of “uneducated” literates flocked to these complex and deeply substantive debates that sometimes lasted as long as 7 hours.

Fast forward to today: what percentage of college students or graduates would “swipe left” on a 7-minute video for going too long or having too slow a pace?

It should be clear that people can be thoughtful and knowledgeable without institutionalized education. It should be equally clear that people can be thoughtless and ignorant even after years of institutionalized education. The goal of good institutionalized education should be to produce a population of adults more thoughtful and better educated than the same population would be if they were set loose with resources for learning and an empowered sense of agency to learn on their own.

There are few left who will defend the accomplishments of American education. The Department of Education was established 45 years ago, but it is a struggle to point to any concrete proofs justifying this centralized bureaucracy for administering education. Aside from overseeing decades of consistently worsening K-12 education, the DOE also administers a college student loan system described even by its defenders as “in crisis.” College appears to be indoctrinating more, educating less, all with a price tag increasing at a rate that could run circles around the rate of inflation.

It’s hard to argue fundamental change isn’t necessary. But complex reform in any sphere is a daunting task in today’s political climate of sheer dysfunction. Radical poles vie for national power and demand of the masses in the middle, “you’re either with us or against us.”

The only way forward is a grand bargain that gives both poles some of what they want, demands mutual concessions, and moves us far away from the utterly derelict system we are propping up today. Institutionalized education today is a money pit actively harming society. Everyone, especially those who claim to value education, should want to change that.

Below is a proposal guaranteed to include some provisions that make you cheer, and others that make you bristle. This is necessary. A real solution won’t give anyone on warring sides of an issue everything they want, but it will give students what they need.

Abolish the Department of Education

We’re jumping right into it. Already half of you are cheering and half are bristling. The cheering half needs no persuasion here. So, to the bristling half, what does the Department of Education actually do that you are afraid to lose?

Here is a broad view of what the Department of Education does:

• provides funding to the states for primary and secondary school, including funding for: students with learning disabilities; gifted programs; programs for low-income students;

• Establishes national academic standards for K-12 schools to influence the primary academic standards set by states;

• Administers federal student loans for college education; and

• Collects educational data from the 50 states.

The cost is not small. The DOE employees nearly 5,000 bureaucrats and, funding given to the states for actual education aside, spends billions to administer its programs. As discussed below, everything the DOE does can be done without it, except for one thing: we will no longer have a centralized authority able to dictate educational standards.

Is this a downside? It’s hard to see how it could be. Again, the DOE has existed for 45 years. What data can anyone point to that shows this power to centrally dictate educational standards has translated to any improvement in educational outcomes?

And that central authority for administering funding gives the federal government a set of carrots and sticks to control states. For instance, the Biden Administration’s DOE implemented new rule making in 2022 that cuts free and reduced lunch funding for low-income students in schools that don’t allow trans athletes to compete in girl’s sports, use girl’s bathrooms and locker rooms, and more.

The incoming Trump Administration’s DOE could just as easily hold funding hostage to enforce its own culture war agenda.

Let States Establish Their Own Academic Standards and Compete

As an initial matter, it bears emphasis that states already have the primary role in developing their own academic standards. Through its system of carrots and sticks, the DOE simply places limitations on that role.

But even so, states like Oregon are still able to abolish reading, writing, and math standards in the name of equity. So the “guard rails” of national standards don’t appear to actually do much.

Instead, we should let states freely compete in defining their own curricula.

Current K-12 Funding Will Become Block Grants

The funding currently gatekept by the DOE will not go away if the DOE closes its doors. The laws that establish this funding exist independently of the DOE and, absent an administering body, will be given directly to the states as block grants.

This means states will continue to receive full funding for special education, gifted programs, low-income student support, etc.

The only thing that goes away is the federal government’s ability to wield that funding as a cudgel and threaten to withhold it based on ideological demands. Again, this cuts both ways. Democratic and Republican presidents alike currently wield this power.

On net, a national bureaucratic entity with the power to establish standards is a downside. We should eliminate this easy exploit that holds our children’s education hostage to national culture war skirmishes.

We Can Solve The Student Loan Crisis Too

What about administering federal student loans? In short, we won’t anymore.

All outstanding federal student loans will be forgiven. It is worth noting that taxpayers have already paid for these loans. The damage was done when they were disbursed. Most graduates chip away at interest on their debt and never fully repay it. The government never hoped to recoup a fraction of the taxpayer money it doled it. We need to cut our losses and stop the future bleeding.

To that end, the federal government should cease offering student loans to college students altogether. These loan programs have been a disaster. They have made higher education radically more expensive for no benefit, while at the same time turning college into a program of indentured servitude. Professors don’t get paid more. Student-to-faculty ratios haven’t improved. Instead, college administration has exploded, turning a university system that was once a world wonder into a modern bureaucratic nightmare that students and professors alike navigate with nothing short of sheer misery.

So how will students afford college?

End Subsidies to Private Colleges and Make Public Universities Tuition-Free

My plan also proposes that we abolish Pell Grants. In addition to funding public education, Pell Grants serve as massive subsidies private colleges with outrageous endowments as well as windfalls to predatory for-profit colleges. With the elimination of federally-backed student loans and Pell Grants, every private college will rise or fall on its merit.

Public universities, on the other hand, will be made tuition-free. This sound expensive, but the jaw-dropping fact is that eliminating Pell Grants and eliminating public university tuition on net saves taxpayer money.

Private universities can (and already do) administer their own aid programs to students, including need-based grants and merit-based scholarships. Private banks can offer student loans, but they will have to do so with an honest risk-assessment: will these loans actually be paid back? Doubtlessly, private schools will have to reduce administrative bloat to cut costs, and they will have to provide real results for students to be a worthwhile expense.

The administrative bloat in public universities will be cut, too. Students won’t receive unending government-backed student loans anymore, which were responsible for exploding costs. The federal funding given to states will come back down to earth. If those states want to preserve their bloated bureaucratic administrations, they will have to extract higher taxes directly from taxpayers, who will have something to say about it.

The student loan program hid these costs. Forgiving student loans wouldn’t cost taxpayers any money. The reason the proposal is so incendiary is that it reveals how much money has already been taken from taxpayers and given to universities.

Direct taxes are more tangible, and require more political capital to enact. States will be more reticent to enact a new tax to hire a new Vice-Dean of Student Culture than they were to jack up tuition, which just increased the amount of federally-backed loans each student took out to cover that rising tuition.

Embrace the Experiment

Our current system has unequivocally earned its failing grade. No sane person should want to preserve it. My proposal gives conservatives some of what they want: ending federally-backed student loans, abolishing the DOE and returning all curriculum-planning to the states; and it gives liberals and progressives some of what they want: continued funding for K-12 programs, tuition-free college, and student loan forgiveness.

It also emphasizes a diverse marketplace where 50 different Departments of Education will have more freedom and funding to improve education where it’s actually administered—in the trenches. The states with the best plans will distinguish themselves, and the less successful states can copy their homework.

The university system in particular will be set free. Students will no longer be indentured servants in training, and taxpayers will no longer be pinatas beaten to fund an ever-growing bureaucratic college administration. Tuition-free public colleges will set a standard and cost won’t be a barrier for attendance. Private colleges will innovate to compete and offer an education worth paying for.

No side will get everything it wants, but Americans might finally get what they need—an education system to be proud of. Let’s end the madness and let a 350 million flowers bloom.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.

- George Washington, 1794 Farewell Address

In a recent discussion turned political, a friend demanded I declare whether I thought the Democratic Party or the Republican Party represented a “greater threat of authoritarianism.” For any smart, educated, reasonable adult, the answer should be obvious, right? The media spent several months in 2016 hyping up Donald Trump in coordination with the Hillary Clinton Campaign1—an era including a gushing appearance on Stephen Colbert that has all been memory-holed—before shifting to the last 8 years characterized by repeated, increasingly emphatic proclamations that “Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.”

Is Trump A Threat?

A torrent of exaggerated and outright manufactured scandals throughout Donald Trump’s presidency have understandably jaded millions of people. No, Trump was not an “illegitimate president.”2 He was legitimately elected under our constitution. No, Trump was not a Kremlin plant.3 If Russian interfered at all, it was not in collusion with Trump, it was the standard kind of interference Russia, China, the US, Israel, and a whole host of other countries routinely engage in (troll farms, narrative stoking, etc.), and there is no indication it tipped the scales, much less decided the outcome. And no, Trump did not refer to neo-Nazis as “very fine people.”4 The media dishonestly cut that soundbite and put it on replay ad nauseam. To this day the claim is impressively sticky.

I will grant all of this because it is true. But if we are acknowledging truths, we must also acknowledge that Trump did sow doubt baselessly about the integrity of numerous state elections (and privately confided he knew the doubt was baseless). Trump did float schemes to swap popularly-elected slates of electors with loyalists to certify the election in his favor. Trump did lean on at least one state election official to change the votes counted. Trump did pressure Vice President Pence, in public and in private, to ignore the electors and certify the election in his favor. And on the day of certification, Trump did give supporters ambiguous calls-to-arms and when the protests turned into an illegal mob he waffled and bid time to see how it would all play out. This ‘wait and see’ approach ensured Trump did nothing overtly illegal to stoke an insurrection, but that he would be ready to reap the benefits if things went ‘his way.’

And yes, the majority of those present on January 6 really were just protesters who got caught up in crowd hysteria and turned into trespassers. But there were also bona fide plots, backed by armed and coordinated militants, to alter the certification. Insurrection or not, January 6 came with the most overt force in service of attempting to directly alter the results of an election the U.S. has seen in my life time.

Our Political Immune System

In the Federalist Papers, Hamilton lays out the founding fathers’ historical accounting of the nature of republics, where they are weakest, and why they fail. Relevant here is a passage early on, from Federalist No. 1, where Hamilton articulates what is, in his view, the greatest threat to a democratic society:

“[A] dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”

Our founding fathers were keenly aware of, and crafted a constitution designed to impede the ambitions of flattering would-be tyrants. Our constitutional order has an immune system for this standard line of attack.

This, of course, is never a guarantee, and so cannot excuse being entirely flippant about demagogic attacks. In psychology, there is a model of disorder known as the “Diathesis-Stress Model,” or more plainly as the “Stress-Vulnerability Model.” The model says that a given person has a certain level of vulnerability to a given disorder and that environmental stressors trigger the disorder if they exceed the threshold of vulnerability. In other words: we have a level of a natural resistance, high or low, to disorders that can be overcome by sufficiently strong environmental stressors.

The application of the Diathesis-Stress Model to our constitution and its vulnerability to despotism isn’t hard to see. And critically, just as a more or less healthy person can strengthen or weaken their immune system (or in the case of psychological health, their cognitive resilience) over time with the right or wrong treatment of one’s body, so does our political body strengthen or weaken its inherent resilience to demagoguery.

Populist moments—where the interests and agendas of the elite are so detached from popular interests that the non-elite reach a breaking point and temporarily upend the existing power structure—act both as direct stressors and, when endured chronically or handled poorly, weaken the health and resilience of a republic to future occurrences. In other words: populist moments both test whether the system’s current resilience is sufficient, and risk lowering the system’s future resilience.

We have had one term of Donald Trump in the oval office. Looking through the lens of the Diathesis-Stress Model, we have proven our resilience to demagoguery was greater than the magnitude of the stressor presented by Trump. Joe Biden, a historically unpopular politician (with three failed presidential bids under his belt), defeated Trump in the 2020 General Election, 306 to 232 electoral votes, and by a difference of 6 million popular votes. The election was certified. Dozens of rioters and insurrectionists have been convicted and imprisoned for their role in January 6. In the carefully-chosen words of George W. Bush, “Mission Accomplished.”

And so in order for a resurgent Trump Campaign to present a new credible “threat to democracy,” one of two possibilities would have to be true: (a) the threat (e.g. magnitude of stressor) he presents would need to be increased; or (b) our threshold of resilience would need to be decreased.

It would be imprudent, if not naive, to dismiss Trump as less of a threat than during his first term but, on balance, a full accounting doesn’t suggest the threat he presents has increased. As of July 30, 2024, Trump’s favorability in polling was 43% and his unfavorability was 52%—a net unfavorability of nearly 9%.5 This is slightly up from his all-time low just after the January 6 riots, but is lower than his favorability going into office in 2016 and lower than his favorability the month he lost the 2020 election. Our republic’s immune system is on alert. His attempts to lean on the Georgia Secretary of State are a matter of public record (and are subject to an ongoing court case). January 6 was a salient day in public memory and will color any future conduct that doesn’t pass the smell test.

An argument that has been advanced to suggest he does pose a greater threat is that he has shed the traditional party operatives that shackled him during his first term, replacing them with loyalists, and so he will be less encumbered to wield the power of the executive in a second term. There is truth to this observation, but a cornerstone of our constitutional order’s immune system is the checks that other branches put on each other. Trump will be freer to act within the confines of the White House, but the other edifices of government won’t have gone away.

No, if Trump presents a real threat more likely to overcome our political body than in his first term, it would much more likely be due to option b—our threshold of resilience would need to be decreased.

An Auto-Immune Response

Immune systems are incredible. They are set up with ‘hard coded’ rules—prior, known threats to look out for—but also with the flexibility to learn and identify new threats to the body. And with this system, our bodies successfully fight off and survive in the face of infinite future potential combinations of otherwise lethal infections.

So too with our political body. It was set up with explicit mechanisms to combat anticipated threats such as demagoguery, tyranny of the majority, and authoritarian overreach against individual rights. But the founders designing our government in the 18th century couldn’t have anticipated every form those threats could take. A formulaic list of ‘threats of demagoguery’ could never suffice for long.

And so the tools and exact mechanisms of defense against these threats evolve with time, changing the political body as a consequence. And not all of those potential changes are for the good.

Immune systems can go awry in a few ways. One, they can respond to a harmless stimulus incorrectly believing it to be a threat. Two, they can respond too strongly to a real threat, doing more harm to the body than was justifiable given the risk of harm. And three, they can sustain a runaway immune reaction that does not stop even after the external threat is neutralized, thus causing a chronic and potentially life threatening harm.

Our political body suffers from the same kinds of errant auto-immune disorders. Threats to security are met with kinetic authority, necessarily curbing freedom. This kinetic response can be too strong, too broad in its application, too persistent, or even wholly unnecessary given the misperception of a threat. There is no way, structurally, to prevent these auto-immune issues; it is the cost we pay for a dynamic immune system that needs the capacity to grow and change to meet as-yet unanticipated threats to the political body. The cure must be post hoc, with the political body discerning the need to remediate the errant immune response and acting properly on that discernment.

The problem is, to mix metaphors, there are certain political genies that cannot be put back in the bottle. The term often used to describe the slow decay of democratic societies into weaker, more vulnerable systems is ‘norm erosion.’ Democracies rely on codified laws and uncodified norms to bound the behavior of current and aspiring leaders. This gives us a vigorous immune system that can respond to threats without killing ourselves in the process. Over time, however, norms erode. Once a norm has been eroded, it becomes nearly impossible to reverse course. Politicians will use their political enemy’s past transgressions as justification for their present and future transgressions, which in turn justifies their enemies’ further erosion of norms. Nobody wants to play by a rule that nobody else seems to be playing by.

The Surest Threat to Democracy

Each broken norm weakens the political body, and lowers its tolerance threshold for future stressors. This is an important although perhaps obvious observation: more norm-eroded societies are more vulnerable to authoritarian threats.

The problem is that norm erosions happen in the name of expediency in times of peril. When external threats to security or internal threats to freedom are perceived, the political body wants a fast, strong, and reassuring response. Perversely, potential threats to freedom lead to demands to curtail freedom.

This sheds new light on our earlier calculations of the threat Trump posed and poses to democracy. The auto-immune response to Trump’s presidency is still alive and well. While presidents cannot be completely above the law, and while at least one criminal case pending against Trump (regarding his efforts to overturn the 2020 election) may have merit and if true would justify prosecuting a former political leader, the case where he was convicted was a different story. A prosecutor who ran for office on the platform of finding and pursuing grounds to prosecute Trump brought a case against him using an election law that is routinely violated (including by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Election, before she ultimately settled the violation with the FEC for a large six-figure fine) and was past its statute of limitations for enforcement. This expired election law violation combined with an obscure New York state law in a novel legal way to sidestep the statute of limitations and upgrade the violation to a felony. Political norms have long held that the bar to prosecute a political figure should be high and should not be frivolously ignored. This flimsy of a case should never have been the first criminal prosecution of a former president.

Before that, gaggles of intelligence community officials tripped over themselves to declare true breaking news ‘misinformation,’ causing real and widespread censorship of that true information to minimize that story’s impact on the 2020 election.6 This was only possible because social media platforms, where an uncomfortably high percentage of all political discourse happens today, have back door censorship partnerships with the federal government,7 and the censorship apparatus is explicitly wielded to favor and silence speech based on viewpoint. All of this was the political body’s immune response to the perceived authoritarian threat posed by Donald Trump. To prevent authoritarian takeover, it became more authoritarian.

In pursuit of Trump, that auto-immune response has grown the government-media-tech conglomerate into a potent force. Today, reporting on social media discourse has become a near-complete stand-in for traditional media’s interfacing with the public to report on popular opinion. As a result, successfully censoring (or elevating) ideas and stories on social media platforms sculpts the image of the public’s views into a contorted version that is in turn reported by the news media back to the public, thus creating a back propagating system that defines the popular perception of acceptable views.

It’s vertical integration for industrialized thought control.

The latest taste of this well-oiled machine came with the Trump-Biden debate and the ensuing political fallout. In unison, liberal-leaning media (all of the mainstream media minus Fox News) suddenly backed a narrative it had for years labeled as ‘right wing misinformation’ and refused to report on fully and honestly: Joe Biden is mentally unfit. The monolithic machine waged a PR war to force Biden’s resignation in concert with every top Democrat in the party working behind the scenes toward the same goal. When the two-pronged pressure finally produced Biden’s resignation from the 2024 campaign, every outlet and every politician published gushing political eulogies, remarking on his unique bravery and heroism in this political moment. Within days, a candidate who never broke 5% of the vote and never won a single delegate in her 2020 primary was anointed by the media, universally endorsed by the party, and narratives propagated from the media-party machine began to spread through the assembly line of lips eagerly waiting to receive the message to broadcast.

The media seems willing to enter uncharted dystopian territory in its ‘fight against authoritarianism.’ In just this past week, the media has been caught in at least 3 brazen attempts to rewrite history for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign against Trump. First, Axios stealth edited its prior claims that Harris had been Biden’s border czar when the Harris Campaign wanted to pivot away from that messaging, and then actually characterized the border czar claim as Republican disinformation.8 Second, a 2019 GovTrack report card had previously ranked Kamala Harris as “the most liberal Senator” in Congress. After Harris stepped up on the presidential ticket in July, Republican attack ads began to highlight this past distinction to paint her as far left. In response, GovTrack deleted the page from 2019.9 And third, when first running for president in 2020, Kamala repeatedly and unequivocally supported a fracking ban. Now in the 2024 general election, her campaign did not simply change her position—they put out a statement characterizing the ensuing media controversy as “Trump’s lies about fracking bans.” Politico and CNN gave the Harris Campaign a hand in this new tack, both correcting “the Trump Campaign’s allegations” that Harris wanted to ban fracking and failing to mention that, more than mere ‘Republican allegations,’ this was Kamala Harris’s official stated position on fracking until 5 minutes ago.

When the media has a narrative, it presses it.

The government-media-corporate conglomerate that defines popular discourse today can manufacture and propagate any view that benefits its members with blazing speed, efficiency, and effectiveness. And worst of all: many Americans are not only unalarmed, but knowingly and explicitly support all of it. This kind of forceful power-concentrating immune response by a political body is the precise response a factioned society calls for when it feels under threat from another faction.

A word to the wise, however, every power you imbue your faction-controlled government with will come to be used against you by a rival faction when they take power. Their side will demand it, appealing to your prior abuses and “the naivety of playing fair.” Your side will in turn become more alarmed, more threatened, and demand more severe measures. On and on it will go with only a single possible terminus.

Inevitably, maddeningly, we will all be clamoring for it. Whether it’s slowly, gradually through the norm erosion and eventual total corruption of our ruling institutions, or suddenly from a Trumpian figure who finally presents a threat strong enough to overcome the weakened immune system of our corrupted political body, there is one thing I can predict with near-certainty: our full turn to authoritarianism will be met with the support of millions, jubilant in their victory over tyranny.

More than a thousand people have already been killed, with thousands more wounded, just days after Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel. Israeli and Hamas fighters are among the dead and wounded, but so are civilians, from both sides and from abroad.

The Hamas militants’ unspeakable act of terrorism was the worst civilian massacre in Israeli history, killing at least 260 civilians with countless more taken hostage. A coordinated military response was inevitable. Perhaps just as inevitable, although more lamentably so, was the tenor of the Israeli response.

In televised comments, Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant explained that he had ordered “a complete siege on Gaza,” an area densely populated with more than 2 million Palestinians. This siege entails “No electricity. No food. No fuel. No water.” He emphasized that “we are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”

What Does Dehumanization Accomplish?

It bears emphasis that Hamas committed heinous acts which justify a strong military response. I do not oppose Israeli military action in Gaza. (In fact, I support it.) What I do oppose, what I always oppose, is language tailored explicitly to dehumanize the enemy.

The first pushback I receive to saying this is that what Hamas did (and have a track record of doing) is monstrous. I agree. And I support Israel’s military response to this attack. But does dehumanizing Palestinians aid in the military objective? It couldn’t possibly—nor is it designed to. It is designed to harden civilians’ hearts to any violence that may be inflicted in Gaza, but Israeli civilians no doubt already vehemently support the military operation. It defies belief that failing to dehumanize the target would render Israeli citizens too soft to support the war effort.

The second pushback I receive is that we shouldn’t defang ourselves in opposing evil. And again, I agree. But doesn’t condemning Hamas as terrorists who committed evil acts necessitating swift military justice accomplish the goal? There is no end to the appropriate invectives that can be brought to bear here. Going further, lowering the enemy below the level of “human” isn’t even helpful in accomplishing this goal. Animals are not typically credited with having agency and therefore are rarely seen as anything like morally culpable. A full human committing a fully evil act is the most condemnable thing there is.

The real question is: what does dehumanizing accomplish that simply condemning and vowing to exact justice does not? I think it’s clear. Gallant’s dehumanizing language came in the same breath as his announcement that he was concertedly depriving all of Gaza of “electricity, food, fuel, and water.” We’re two days in, this is not the last escalation we will see. His language seems tailored to encourage enough contempt that any action taken against Palestine, no matter how harsh, inhumane, or illegal, would garner the necessary public support.

The Power of Dehumanization

This reveals the central aim and raw potency of dehumanization whenever it’s employed—once the target is dehumanized, nothing is off limits. There is sanctity to human life. We can hunt animals for food, or even sport, but humans can only be killed when justified. We believe that humans can be punished when their actions call for punishment, but we also believe they can never be raped, tortured, enslaved, or indiscriminately killed en masse. Some lines cannot be crossed.

And yet, all of these things have followed from regimes in power who dehumanized their enemies. To the Germans, Jews were rats; to the Hutus, the Tutsis were cockroaches. To all “enlightened” societies looking to preserve the economic benefits of slavery, Africans were sub-human.

Dehumanizing the enemy is the most fundamentally important moral line not to cross, precisely because every worse moral line you can think of lies past the line of dehumanization. The line may seem banal, and in many ways it is. But its banality gives way to profound consequences. It is the last bulwark between civil societies and unspeakable acts.

And it is just as important to hold the line when the enemy is guilty of dehumanizing themselves. Rape is not a civilized response to rape, nor is enslaving to slavery, nor eradication to genocide. One of the high moral watermarks of Western society—and truly a marvel given the potential for wrath latent in human nature—was the Marshall Plan and the Nuremberg Trials, where German society was occupied and rebuilt and individual Germans were tried, convicted, and executed for their heinous crimes carried out during the Holocaust. They were not subjected to an Aryan Holocaust. They were not tortured, starved, sterilized, or any of the other methods of cruelty the Germans inflicted on their dehumanized Jewish captives. And we (rightfully) see that as a moral victory of the West.

The Line Between Good and Evil

To a modern civilized society steeped in stability, these concerns no doubt seem like hyperbole. But time and time again, humans prove more than capable of backsliding into depravity. Israel is not immune. (Nor is Europe or the US for that matter.)

The most fundamental difference between an Israeli soldier and Hamas militant is which side of the border they were born on, and to which parents. There but for the grace of God go I.

The capacity for evil lives in all our hearts. Each line we cross takes us a step closer. The line we must never cross is the line that says none of the other lines actually matter, not for them at least. Not for the animals.

“Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.”

-Jonathan Haidt

Narcissism is one of those funny words that has a thorough and fulsome technical definition as well as a more vague, intuitive layman definition. To the average person, narcissist is (more or less) the word that describes a person who is self-centered and vain. This doesn’t contradict technical definition per se. Moreso, it simplifies it.

In psychology, narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by a pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy.1 This definition, abstracted to the level of population, is a remarkably useful model for understanding the profound tribal fracturing society is suffering today. To that end, the DSM guidance for diagnosing narcissistic personality disorder is by observing at least five of the following:

• Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements, expects to be recognized as superior without actually completing the achievements)

• Is preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, brilliance, beauty, or perfect love.

• Believes that they are "special" and can only be understood by or should only associate with other special people (or institutions).

• Requires excessive admiration.

• Has a sense of entitlement, such as an unreasonable expectation of favorable treatment or compliance with his or her expectations).

• Is exploitative and takes advantage of others to achieve their own ends.

• Lacks empathy and is unwilling to identify with the needs of others.

• Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of them.

• Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors and attitudes2

Narcissism Writ Large

If an individual can be narcissistic, can a group be? At the very least, there’s value in engaging with the metaphor. We do this will all sorts of human traits. Groups can be generous, kind, creative, superficial, selfish, antagonistic, etc. And these group traits seem to be more than just a collection of individuals exhibiting the same personal trait. Some groups foster charity, but not every group member need be naturally charitable. Others foster high productivity while undoubtedly having some natural slackers. There’s something special about the social dynamics of a group that can spawn emergent traits, embodied in the group itself.

So too with narcissism. A group of people can emergently be infatuated with itself and derisive of any outside groups or individuals that don’t sufficiently feed into its grandiosity and self-importance, even if many (or most) of its members aren’t themselves narcissists. In fact, a remarkable amount of the social behaviors observably emergent in modern political tribes is in line with the DSM factors for narcissistic personality disorder. In other words, we have a ‘tribal narcissism’ problem. To wit:

Grandiosity: Partisans increasingly believe the country has “lost its way” (conservatives) or is “irredeemably immoral” (progressives) and that only the enlightened “red pilled” (conservatives) or “woke” (progressives) can save all of society from the existential threat. If the tribe does not win the culture war, their thinking goes, we will all collapse into dystopian ruin.

Fantastic thinking: The vocal activist class uses “enlightened centrist” as a pejorative. They do not see compromise as a legitimate political strategy, even though any lasting change in a large, diverse democracy requires it. Instead, they are convinced their exact, idealized policy proscriptions are possible and are indeed the only legitimate solution. Activist conservatives and progressives alike envision a utopia of their ideological making, and won’t accept the need to diverge from that vision.

Exclusive Association: More and more, association with people guilty of Wrong Think is discouraged, even punished. The in-group forces consensus, and members fall in line (or are treated harshly). Disagreement is incredibly uncomfortable. Reasoning is seen as a tool for equivocating “enlightened centrists.” And so anyone who disagrees with obviously correct ideas that are obviously necessary to save the world should be avoided.

Require Admiration: Performative public agreement with the tribe’s ideas is integral to good standing. Certain people or groups of people are elevated canonized, such as police, soldiers, and ‘job-creators,’ (conservatives) or racial minorities, LGBTQIA+, and ‘allies’ (progressives). Not only is criticism of the canonized forbidden, there is an affirmative expectation of vocalizing praise and admiration.

Entitlement and Expectations of Favoritism: Activists on both sides are obsessed with pointing out the other side’s hypocrisy. Their own hypocrisy is beyond scrutiny, however, and is in fact justified. Society, in turn, is obligated to contort to their utopian vision automatically—anyone who requires persuading, after all, is one of the bad people. Existing laws, constitutional principles, and other guard rails that get in the way of the tribe’s goals are denounced and loyal tribalists call for their abolition.

Exploitative: Everything is instrumental, and anything that isn’t instrumental is expendable.

Lack Empathy. Anyone who disagrees with the tribe must do so because they’re bad faith, dishonest, and have evil intentions. The idea that someone with the necessary requisite knowledge and good intentions could possibly come to a conclusion different from the tribe is seen as absurd. Different walks of life that produce different values and needs are not valid. Even the activists that emphasize empathy, “lived experience,” and “different ways of being” (progressives) consistently only do so when those different experiences and ways of being are in line with their tribe’s values and goals.

Entitlement, Envy, and Resentment. Modern politics at their core are driven by entitlement, envy, and resentment. Conservative activism is driven by the idea that small town America had prosperity taken from it (entitlement), and that prosperity was unjustly transferred to tribal enemies (envy and resentment). Progressive activism is driven by the idea that historically disadvantaged groups should be given structural advantages going forward (entitlement), and that exploitative capitalists are hoarding prosperity that should be taken from them by progressive reform (envy and resentment).

Arrogant, Haughty Attitudes: Those outside of the tribe are smeared as ‘libtards’ and ‘snowflakes’ (conservatives), ‘deplorables’ and ‘MAGAts’ (progressives), or other de-humanizing pejoratives. For individuals that come into the tribe’s crosshairs, nothing is off limits: threats of violence, threats of rape, harassment, financial ruin, doxing, etc. Tribe members are then duty-bound to vocalize support for and defense of these behaviors, because the targets are evil, sub-human, and deserve it.

Defeating Tribal Narcissism

Treating narcissistic personality disorder is notoriously difficult, but therapists who tackle the problem do so by directly facing the patient with the cognitive distortions that underly the disease. And so the first step to defeating tribal narcissism, as cliche as it sounds, is to recognize and understanding it.

Tribal narcissism has one key attribute that personal narcissism lacks, and it’s the secret sauce that keeps it alive: tribal narcissism is encouraged and socially enforced. The dictate to forced consensus and cutting from your life those who disagree with the tribe is designed to leave you with only other tribalists who will affirm your tribal narcissism (and police you, to make sure you don’t stray from it). The result is a society of clashing narcissistic tribes, each demanding fealty. And when those tribes demand we see everything through their tribal lens, through their narcissistic mirrors, then all of society (and truth itself) becomes obfuscated in a proverbial hall of mirrors.

If we’re looking for a way out, there’s some good news. The views that hold our entire society captive today are only actually held firmly by a few vocal, fervent activists. Their support is meticulously bolstered through a combination of carrots and sticks: community and belonging (“As a fellow tribalist, you are just and good.”) as well as fearmongering and rage-bating (“Look how bad the bad guys are! They will doom us all if you don’t fall in line!”), with some motte and baileys sprinkled in to help loyal tribalists turn their eyes from the dangers of their own tribe (e.g., “Abolish the police doesn’t literally mean abolish the police” or the short list of books conservatives highlight in Congressional hearings vs. the long list of books taken out of schools by conservative state governments).

The only way out is to reject this social dynamic. Enough people must reject the idea that you are guilty by association for having friends guilty of Wrong Think. Enough people must reject the practice of loyalty oaths outright and refuse to treat people differently who don’t submit to them. Enough people must reject the idea that any one ideological side can have a total victory in a large, diverse democracy, and must acknowledge that compromise and bargains are fundamentally necessary. Enough people must refuse to keep applying double-standards where tribal allies’ actions are infinitely justifiable and tribal enemies’ actions are infinitely deplorable.

When a therapist attempts to treat a narcissist, their goal is to help the patient (1) see their own characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, and importance in a more realistic and integrated light, and (2) build empathy and interest for others above and beyond their instrumental use to the narcissist. On the tribal level, this means owning up to your tribe’s own shortcomings, blind spots, imperfections, acknowledging and rejecting the excesses on your tribal fringe, and admitting the need to compromise in a large, diverse democracy where ideological consensus can never be achieved. It also means re-humanizing the outgroup as well as seeking to understand the experiences and motivations that would lead a smart, well-intentioned person to think differently from you.

If you can read this whole article and nod your head thinking of the other side, you’re half way there. Now turn your attention on yourself. If narcissism can be simply and somewhat glibly defined as the compulsion to look in the mirror with excessive adulation, then the cure starts with turning a more critical eye toward that mirror.

For if liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.

-Aristotle (Politics)

Here is a thought experiment. Consider two hypothetical societies. The first is a constitutional dictatorship with a history and culture of open debate and constitutional provisions that reflect that history. Policy advocacy groups are free to advocate; media openly broadcasts government missteps; public debate is lively. Subjects of the dictatorship are able to freely consider all of this information. This is reflected in the constitution. But also reflected in the constitution is that they have no vote. The dictator rules by decree, and those decrees become the law of the land.

The second society is a pure democracy where every adult citizen casts a vote. No governing body, other than the people, has the power to pass any law. All legislation is by referendum. But this society has a history and culture of idea suppression. Strong social pressure to conform was long ago codified into laws placing strict limits on what information can be broadcast on the airwaves. Media only broadcasts views sanctioned by the society’s elite. That elite sets the Overton window, and the rest of society behaves accordingly for fear of social or even legal reprisal. Dissenting views are censored in media, and dissenters are lawfully jailed under the society’s robust Disinformation Laws.

Which society is more ‘free’? Over time, which society’s laws will come to more closely reflect the will of its population?

You may be surprised to find yourself unable to conclude that the nominal democracy is freer than the dictatorship. You may feel like they’re a wash. You may even have the intuition that the dictatorship is more free and will more closely reflect the will of the people.

I believe the former intuition is onto something. And the latter intuition is undergirded by a deep, universal truth that should tell us something about the nature of democracy.

Natural Law’s Check on Government

Where does power lie? In a state of nature, the now-cliché adage “might makes right” applies. As philosophers like Hobbes have argued, government is the exchange of that state of nature, and the pure insecure freedom it provides, for a provider of security.

The exchange of freedom for security, i.e. the “social contract,” is an active, dynamic relationship between a state and its people. It’s renegotiated with changing social values, changing laws, and changing regimes.

Nobody signs an actual contract before joining society. You’re born into it and you don’t have a choice. The same applies to the hundreds of millions of other people you share society with. But hundreds of millions, that’s a lot of people. And, under the right conditions, that’s a lot of power.

And that’s the rub. No matter what laws or rules your society imposes, the mass of people living in that society threaten to upend it if the government oversteps too far. The people in a society will only accept so much deprivation, limitation, abuse, before the social contract starts to look like such a bad deal that they have nothing left to lose. And so, while individuals are thrust into the social contract without explicit consent, the mass of people together hold a last-ditch veto power to void the contract in its entirety.

How Do We Explain Abusive Despot States?

Okay, that all sounds well and good for ivory tower philosophical pontification, but in the real world there are incredibly abusive despot states like North Korea that seem to stick around.

American Conservatives point to the right to bear arms as the ultimate check against government tyranny. Indeed, North Korea places strict controls on firearms. But North Korean gun control isn’t any more onerous than, say, gun control in South Korea, or Japan, Singapore, Australia, or countless other countries that no sane person would argue are anywhere near as totalitarian and oppressive as North Korea.

And consider Russia: Russia has elections. Russia has universal suffrage (women in the old U.S.S.R. had the right to vote even before their American counterparts). Russia has relatively permissive gun laws and a gun culture that, while it is dwarfed by America’s, far surpasses gun culture in most of the developed world. In fact, while the U.S.S.R. ushered in a brief period of severe firearm restrictions, Russia has otherwise always had a heavily armed populace.

Granted, this well-armed populace did overthrow their emperor. Natural law’s check on government came for Russia’s last Czar in 1917 in the throes of World War I, but that was only after centuries of imperial rule, most of which coincided with some of the most grueling feudal conditions in all of the west. Clearly, an armed populace deprived of dignity and rights isn’t a sufficient condition for popular uprising.

Oppressive despot state can last, and the common variable to all those that do is idea suppression. A stronger police state, a greater willingness to brutalize your population, these are all things that make popular uprising more difficult but that only moves the threshold for when revolution occurs. Systemic idea suppression, the ability of an authority to obfuscate reality and define truth, is the only sure-fire way for a government to completely decouple itself from the will of its people.

The example of China drives home this point. China is a totalitarian regime balancing two highly conflicting interests. To assert itself on the world stage and have its desired impact on geopolitics, China needs a reasonably well-educated and productive populace. But to maintain domestic dominance, it needs to suppress dissident ideas and control the flow of information. Even with the CCP’s seemingly iron grip on the domestic front, the regime’s overstepping with Covid caused enough popular backlash that the Chinese government has had to change tack and offer concessions to the people.

Even the CCP isn’t completely decoupled from natural law’s check on government because it can’t commit itself to totally depriving its people of information and agency to draw conclusions and manifest their wills in the external society.

Government as a Conduit for Popular Preference

Now let’s circle back to the hypothetical set out in this article’s opening. The reason our nominal dictatorship is actually more free and more reflective of the population’s preferences than the nominal democracy in the long run is because the dictator’s populace has not been deprived of their ability to take in information, or to discuss and assess it. That population will know it if and when the dictatorial government strays from popular preference. And the dictator knows that, if they stray too far, the populace still has natural law’s check on government.

Ultimately, government is the conduit mediating a population’s preferences and the nation’s aggregate policies, rules, and people that implement them. Successful monarchies (e.g. England), the ones that lasted, understood this, and their governance to varying degrees reflected popular preference.

It is important to note, though, that these societies never mirror popular preference, nor does any society for very long. This is because a perfect mirror, also known as mob rule, is both highly volatile and subject to intolerable extremes. The Founding Fathers of the United States understood this. It’s emphasized at length in the Federalist Papers, and its at the core of many of our constitution’s “anti-democratic” provisions.

And so, one way to see different systems of government is as differently-tuned conduits to harness, channel, and smooth out the implementation of popular preference. A monarchy is a highly conservative conduit, designed to err toward blunting the raw will of the populace and only move where absolutely necessary to preserve its power. If it’s too conservative, however, it will meet its end at the hand of natural law’s check on government.

As information has become more democratized, with possibly the single most significant advance being the printing press and the Gutenberg bible in the 1400s, we have seen a trend toward government conduits blunting public sentiment less and reflecting it more. Democratic republics, a relatively new conduit technology in human history, are still experimenting with the tuning process. How much do you directly effectuate popular preference? How much do you blunt or counter it with other checks in the governing structure?

But explicitly democratic governments are far more modern than the broader trend of societies becoming more reflective of the will of the people. In other words, societies started to become more democratic before governments did.

The Open Exchange of Ideas is Democracy

To summarize, the proliferation of knowledge through societies has tended to increase the degree to which they reflect public sentiment, i.e., these societies become more democratic, regardless of whether those societies’ governing structures had explicitly democratic features.

Governments that suppress information and the individual’s ability to make their own judgments, on the other hand, tend to decrease the degree to which those governments reflect public sentiment, i.e., these societies become less democratic, even when those governments have explicitly democratic features.

What does this tell us? First, it tells us democratic government is not synonymous with democracy in any meaningful sense. Democratic government is a technology that came into popular use hundreds of years after the general trend of “more democratic societies” began to take off. It’s a tool designed to effectuate democratic society.

If democratic governing structures like suffrage aren’t democracy, just tools to facilitate it, then what is democracy?

Democracy is a kind of society where citizens take in information, come to conclusions, develop views, and make those views manifest in the external society, causing that external society to change or stay stable in accordance with the aggregate views of the population.

The open exchange of ideas is core to every part of that definition. We take in information mostly through the exchange of ideas, whether its a book, article, news broadcast, podcast, formal debate, or an informal discussion online or in person. We come to conclusions by digesting information and considering the arguments that present that information. Then we make our conclusions manifest by sharing them with others, who may or may not be persuaded by us.

Popular sentiment can only grow and change if ideas spread. Persuasion in turn is one of only two ways ideas can spread (the other being force). Citizens cannot come to conclusions and act to manifest their will without the free exchange of ideas. And if citizens cannot come to conclusions or manifest their informed individual wills, how can any policy their government produces be said to be “democratic”? Even if that policy is implemented by referendum.

The only alternatives to the free exchange of ideas are various flavors of authoritarianism. You can have your pick: despotism, aristocracy, theocracy, plutocracy, technocracy. But whatever group’s will manifests in your society, it cannot be that of the people broadly.

Mob Rule and Clamors for Authoritarianism

The dance between democratic mechanisms and non-democratic ones is a delicate balance. Too much democracy and you get tyranny of the majority, mob rule, government captured by moral panics, and all the other baggage that comes with. Not enough and you get authoritarianism.

But rising contempt for the free exchange of ideas will only strengthen populist anger. You can’t abolish natural law’s check on government. But if you try to neutralize the threat by suppressing the free flow of ideas, you risk plunging society into an era of genuine authoritarianism (or losing and ushering in a reign of terror).

The fact is, the best defense against rising support for authoritarianism is a level-headed populace whose whims don’t engender fear. If you don’t have that, your goal needs to be to restore it. We need to revive our culture of a marketplace of ideas, which has been supplanted today by a marketplace of engagement that validates feelings and stokes hatred rather than pursuing the truth.

And the best defense against rising populism and calls for mob rule is an elite that earns trust, and doesn’t overstep its mandate. Large societies need authorities. Complex societies need experts. But in a democratic society, they don’t rule by decree. They have to use persuasion, because the only alternative is coercion or force. The more you clamor to silence dissenters and anoint certain experts (the ones you agree with, of course, because the others are quacks), the more you stoke the mob, and add to its ranks. The only way to shrink its ranks is to rehabilitate trust in expertise—which means more honesty, more access to information, less lying, and less open fetishization of rule by technocracy.

We are playing with too many fires all at once. I’m increasingly afraid we will get very badly burnt. There is a narrow path left back to safety. I hope that we can marshal the will to take it.

“Of course governments want to shape and control the public conversation, and will use every method at their disposal to do so, including the media.”
― Jack Dorsey

“Private speech isn’t free speech.”
― someone on Twitter, probably

In my lifetime, I have seen the Democratic Party go from the party of free speech and fear of corporate power to the party of “private corporations can do what they want.”

The Republican Party, for its part, has always subordinated free speech to social etiquette, orthodoxy, and order. With the Left’s recently growing distaste for open discourse, the Right seized the opportunity to give itself a PR makeover, but its commitment to free speech beyond Republican-friendly speech hasn’t much changed.

And so now both parties LARP as the party of free speech when it suits their culture war goals, but neither believes in free speech as a broadly-applicable principle. This is a precarious position—we are left with no major political force truly in support of free speech.

Free Speech as a Culture War Flashpoint

As free speech has risen to become a preeminent battlefront in the culture war, the biggest and loudest theater being contested is social media. I have argued at length that social media isn’t a marketplace of ideas but a marketplace of engagement with more perverse incentives at odds with truthseeking. Despite this, social media remains the most pivotal hub of the modern public square. Until we fix that, it’s what we’ve got. Social media is where millions of Americans engage in discourse every day. It’s where traditional media determines public sentiment (which in turn drives the focus of news). It’s where the journalists working for traditional media build and maintain their “professional brand.” And it’s where academics cultivate a public image.

In sum, all of our traditional major sensemaking institutions are at this point deeply reliant on—and shaped by!—social media.

And so, for anyone with something approximating a traditional liberal view on free speech, the growing popular calls for mass censorship on social media (and platforms eagerly answering those calls) are alarming. The Twitter Files, an ongoing effort by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger to report on the contents of internal Twitter documents selected by Elon Musk to leak, brings the issue front-and-center.

In turn, responses from the Left that “they’re a private company, they can do what they want” are alive and well. The argument often seems to go hand-in-hand with an almost comical conflation of free speech and the 1st Amendment. “What about free speech?” a commenter will ask, to which the responses comes in droves, “It’s a private company, there is no free speech issue.”

Of course, free speech is a centuries-old collection of ideas in philosophy and political science concerned with the protection of the individual’s right to freely think and communicate. These ideas predate the 1st Amendment by hundreds of years, and they were never limited only to concerns of government censorship. Corporate power and the tyranny of mobs have historically been just as dangerous to free thought.

But these avenues of censorship aren’t illegal, they’re just bad for the free exchange of ideas. For conduct to violate Americans’ constitutional rights, we need what the courts refer to as “state action.”

What the Law Actually Says

“Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” So begins the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. These words are the entirety of the statutory text constitutionally guaranteeing free speech against government imposition.

If anyone tries to tell you 1st Amendment law is simple, though, they’re either clueless or lying. Hundreds of cases in the judiciary have fleshed out the contours of constitutional speech protections. Too much ink has been spilled on the subject to cover it all, but suffice to say the law is far more developed than the single, solitary sentence of the 1st Amendment would suggest. For example, the 1st Amendment doesn’t just apply to laws, but to any government action. It applies to all levels of government, from local to federal.

And most critical to our discussion, it can apply to private actors working with the government or fulfilling a “traditional governmental role.” As the Supreme Court explained in Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co., Inc., 500 U.S. 614 (1991),

"Although the conduct of private parties lies beyond the Constitution's scope in most instances, governmental authority may dominate an activity to such an extent that its participants must be deemed to act with the authority of the government and, as a result, be subject to constitutional constraints."

The test developed by the courts is known as “state action doctrine,” and it implicates the actions of private actors in three main ways:

(i) the private entity performs a traditional, exclusive public function;
(ii) the government coerces or compels the private entity to take an action; or
(iii) the government acts jointly with the private entity.

We can ignore (i) because the meaning of “traditional, exclusive public function” is very narrow and courts would not apply it here. But both (ii) and (iii) are potentially implicated, and so we should examine the Twitter Files with both in mind.

What The Twitter Files Show So Far

It bears emphasis that we still don’t know the full contents of the Twitter Files. The “Twitter Files” story is being released in successive pieces by different journalists who have been given access to the Files. To date, the Twitter Files consist of:

1: The Twitter Files (by Matt Taibbi)
2: Twitter’s Secret Blacklists (by Bari Weiss)
3: The Removal of Donald Trump Oct 2020-Jan 6, 2021 (by Matt Taibbi)
4: The Removal of Donald Trump Jan 7 (by Michael Shellenberger)
5: The Removal of Donald Trump from Twitter (by Bari Weiss)

I won’t cover everything released so far, but I will provide some highlights relevant to our 1st Amendment lens:

• Insiders can use backchannels with Twitter to get content banned. Taibbi describes the practice as “constant.” There are examples in the Files of both the Trump Administration and the Biden campaign (before his presidency) successfully lobbying to censor content. According to Taibbi, “[t]his system wasn't balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right.” This is true. In fact, according to Shellenberger, “In 2018, 2020, and 2022, 96%, 98%, & 99% of Twitter staff's political donations went to Democrats.”

• Twitter took unprecedented steps to censor the Hunter Biden Laptop story, including deleting links, banning accounts, and preventing users from DMing the story. Twitter’s position was that it violated the “hacked materials” policy, but internally the company acknowledged it was mere speculation that the materials were hacked and the rule was used as pretense.

• Twitter had a secret blacklist of users whose posts were prevented from trending. Twitter previously publicly stated it didn’t do this. One user blacklisted was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford who was vocal about policy concerns related to school closings during covid. Dr. Bhattacharya was not an outlier—the blacklist consistently skewed toward silencing voices critical of the public health response to covid.

• A secret group called the Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support (SIP-PES) handled higher profile censorship within the company. Internal documents show the group acknowledging there were no policy reasons for bans they were handing out. Banning decisions would start with Tweets the SIP-PES disagreed with, and then the group worked backwards to find a policy justification for censoring.

• Fusing automated and manual moderation, Twitter also employs ad hoc bots, which it can “spin up” with certain rules to monitor Twitter activity and take specified actions based on the specified rules.

• Twitter moderation shifted from a mix of rules-based automated moderation with some subjective decisions made by the SIP-PES to, by around the time of January 6, a more ad hoc system based on more subjective censorship criteria and increasing direct involvement with “federal agencies.”

• Those federal agencies were the FBI, DHS, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Twitter moderation met with them secretly on a weekly basis. Twitter employees involved in these meetings hid the nature of the meetings on their calendars, for optics. In public-facing comments, Twitter vaguely credits “partnerships” used to help determine content for censorship, in lieu of naming the FBI or the DHS, also for optics. Employees understood this should not be public knowledge.

• In conjunction with clandestine government “partners,” Right wing Tweeters voicing concerns over election integrity were routinely targeted, whereas similar Leftwing Tweeters voicing concerns over election integrity were given cover. This appears to have happened, at least in part, while Trump was still in office.

• Jack Dorsey resisted many of Twitter’s incremental shifts toward more censorship, but his staff continued to work on him. During and after January 6, while Dorsey was on vacation, staff were pushing ad hoc rules changes specifically to try and ban Trump permanently. 300 Twitter employees signed an open letter pressuring Dorsey to ban Trump, which was published by the Washington Post. Despite these calls, internal discussions repeatedly affirmed that Trump was not violating Twitter’s Terms of Service. Of course, employees were ultimately successful in getting Trump banned. In contrast, other world leaders who unequivocally incited specific acts of mass violence have never been banned from Twitter.

Assuming There is Government Action, Does it Violate the 1st Amendment?

With these facts in mind, before we turn back to the state action doctrine, we have to answer a threshold question: even if there were government action, would the kind of moderation detailed in The Twitter Files violate the 1st Amendment?

Put simply: yes. Under the 1st Amendment, government cannot censor speech just because it thinks the claims are false. Government cannot censor speech because it thinks the claims will threaten public health. And government cannot censor speech because it’s worried some people will be inspired to break the law. (The closest legal analog here is “incitement to imminent lawless action” and that is a very high threshold not met by any of the content so far discussed in the Twitter Files).

No 1st Amendment attorney worth their salt would tell you the government could legally engage in the kind of censorship we’ve been able to glimpse from the Twitter Files. And so now to the $64,000 question: was the government engaged in censorship? Or can this conduct only be ascribed to Twitter?

Did the Government Coerce Twitter to Censor?

Under the “compulsion test,” conduct is only deemed state action where the government “has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State.”

The best argument I can give supporting coercion is that social media’s legal protections under Section 230 have been a hotly debated public issue. Democratic lawmakers (like Elizabeth Warren) have campaigned on the need to regulate social media more. The companies may believe cooperating with the government on issues of censorship will save it from more comprehensive regulations, which threaten the companies’ profits.

Still, so much of the Twitter Files suggests a strong internally-motivated push for the kinds of censorship coming out of Twitter’s “partnerships.” This is by no means the explicit legal test, but I think of it as the standard for legal entrapment—the question is “without government influence, would they have still done what they did?”

The answer here, at least in most cases, appears to be yes. In other cases, Twitter wouldn’t have censored simply because it would not have known what to censor. In that regard, the relationship between Twitter and government does seem more like a “partnership”—the government points, and Twitter shoots. On the whole, the Twitter Files paint the picture of a back door alliance between Twitter censors and the parts of government ideologically aligned with them. Which leads us to the last prong…

Did the Government and Twitter Act Jointly?

The “joint action test” requires that “the state has so far insinuated itself into a position of interdependence with the private entity that it must be recognized as a joint participant in the challenged activity.”

If there is state action here, it’s under the joint action test. And facts unearthed so far support a joint action theory. For example, there are direct, concrete examples of the Trump Administration using backchannels within Twitter to censor content. We see the same with the Biden campaign, although I didn’t see examples in the Twitter Files of the Biden Administration doing so after he took office. (More on that below.)

More glaring are the weekly meetings between Twitter moderation team members and the FBI, DHS, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Twitter employees involved knew to keep these meetings secret, and it’s not hard to see why: at the very least, it creates the appearance of active government involvement in censorship.

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What’s Missing From the Twitter Files?

To go further, we would really need to know more about what happened at those meetings, and that information is not likely forthcoming in future Twitter Files releases. There would need to be investigations, but by whom? What arm of federal law enforcement isn’t potentially compromised in this, I’ll say it, conspiracy? A massive government-allied corporation with direct, unfettered access to controls on the volume and reach of millions of Americans’ speech, who hears what and who gets to speak at all—this sounds like law enforcement’s wet dream.

We also don’t know how long this censorship partnership lasted, or if it’s ongoing. Glaringly missing from the Twitter Files is any discussion around censorship in the present, as Elon Musk captains the ship. The reason this is glaring, of course, is because Musk leaked the Twitter Files, and he almost certainly would have chosen which files to leak (and which not to leak) with intentionality.

For this last point, we all need to see through the act. Musk is not a principled ideological actor championing free speech. For all the good he has done, he is still a self-interested billionaire who managed to build the world’s (second) largest fortune. That doesn’t happen by accident. He is smart, sophisticated, and in recent years has become increasingly adept at riding culture war waves to increase his publicity and, in turn, his bottom line.

Whether Musk leaked the Twitter Files simply to distance himself from the previous, unabashedly pro-Democratic version of Twitter and is still actively “partnering” (read: conspiring) with federal agencies to enact massive censorship campaigns is a question we can’t yet answer. But maybe there are hints out there in the public domain. Maybe I’ll leave you with one straight from the horse’s mouth:

This was a real brief really submitted to the Supreme Court in a real pending case.1 The brief contains numerous nuggets of comedic gold: introducing The Onion as “the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage” and touting “a daily readership of 4.3 trillion” that “has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history”; noting that “the Onion’s keen, fact-driven reportage has been cited favorably by one or more local courts, as well as Iran and the Chinese state-run media”; and boasting that “the Onion’s journalists have garnered a sterling reputation for accurately forecasting future events. One such coup was The Onion’s scoop revealing that a former president kept nuclear secrets strewn around his beach home’s basement three years before it even happened.”

As with much great humor, however, when you sift through the jokes to the essence of the piece, you find a substantive message at its core, well-written and thoroughly persuasive. Here, the Onion’s argument is that satire cannot be forced to warn the reader ahead of time that it is indeed satire because doing so ruins the joke—and disarms the inherent power of the medium. The brief is a superb historic exploration and philosophical argument for the existence of satire. It notes:

It really is an old trick. The word “parody” stretches back to the Hellenic world. It originates in the prefix para, meaning an alteration, and the suffix ode, referring to the poetry form known as an ode. One of its earliest practitioners was the first-century B.C. poet Horace, whose Satires would replicate the exact form known as an ode—mimicking its meter, its subject matter, even its self-serious tone—but tweaking it ever so slightly so that the form was able to mock its own idiocies.

In a ballsy dig at the entire legal profession, The Onion’s brief continues:

That leverage of form—the mimicry of a particular idiom in order to heighten dissonance between form and content—is what generates parody’s rhetorical power. Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 580-81 (1994) (“Parody needs to mimic an original to make its point.”). If parody did not deliver that advantage, then no one would use it. Everyone would simply draft straight, logical, uninspiring legal briefs instead.

(A hilarious jab to include in a legal filing to the Supreme Court!)

The Onion’s justification for parody and satire culminates in this brilliantly-worded paragraph, stating better than I ever could that:

Importantly, parody provides functionality and value to a writer or a social commentator that might not be possible by, say, simply stating a critique outright and avoiding all the confusion of readers mistaking it for the real deal. One of parody’s most powerful capacities is rhetorical: It gives people the ability to mimic the voice of a serious authority—whether that’s the dry news-speak of the Associated Press or the legalese of a court’s majority opinion—and thereby kneecap the authority from within. Parodists can take apart an authoritarian’s cult of personality, point out the rhetorical tricks that politicians use to mislead their constituents, and even undercut a government institution’s real-world attempts at propaganda. Farah, 736 F.3d at 536 (noting that the point of parody is to “censure the vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings of an individual or society”) (cleaned up).

The War on Humor

That dictators and tyrants don’t like humor is a well-known and near universal phenomenon. Almost a decade ago, Srdja Popovic and Mladen Joksic noted in Why Dictators Don’t Like Jokes2 that:

There is a reason why humor is infusing the arsenal of the 21st-century protestor: It works. For one, humor breaks fear and builds confidence. It also adds a necessary cool factor, which helps movements attract new members. Finally, humor can incite clumsy reactions from a movement’s opponents. The best acts of laughtivism force their targets into lose-lose scenarios, undermining the credibility of a regime no matter how they respond. These acts move beyond mere pranks; they help corrode the very mortar that keeps most dictators in place: Fear.

In the U.S., humor has long played a cat-and-mouse game with attempts at censorship from the powerful. One of the greatest and most influential comedians of all time, Lenny Bruce, was a frequent target of law enforcement during his era. That was a half-century ago. Gone are the days where stand-up could plausibly land you in jail, at least in the United States. The First Amendment and its modern interpretation by the courts stands out as one genuine example of ‘American Exceptionalism.’

But outside the courts, hostility to humor lives on. During my childhood and adolescence, in the 90s and aughts, Republicans were seen as the party opposed to humor. Since at least 2012, that title has begun to shift. Democrats, particularly college educated Democrats, have taken on the anti-comedy mantle. So much so that some well-known comedians have been vocal about the fact that comedy is so poorly received by college students (historically perhaps the most irreverent American demographic) that they are refusing to do shows on college campuses altogether.3

Perhaps not coincidentally, this seems to align with the relative shift in cultural power between the Right and the Left over the past several decades. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the Right enjoyed a great deal of latitude to denounce 'unpatriotic' speech. As public support for the War on Terror waned and a new brand of identitarian leftist thought rapidly grew in popularity, the cultural Left gradually became ascendant in virtually every one of our cultural institutions—news media, film and television, higher education, corporate board rooms, and more.

The political Right still opposes humor where it retains its last vestiges of power (the Supreme Court case of Novak discussed above is an excellent example of this) but the trend is clear—the factions most opposed to humor are the factions whose power can be challenged by it.

To understand why the powerful hate comedy, and why humor seems so vitally important to the human condition, we must address a simple yet crucial question—what is the purpose of humor? By my estimation, there are at least 3 main purposes, and each is a kind of superpower uniquely available to comedy.

Why Comedy?

1. The Emperor Has No Clothes

The first and perhaps most widely discussed purpose of humor is to “speak truth to power.” Disarming the hold of a very serious ruling class by showcasing its absurdity and pointing out that “the Emperor has no clothes” is one of comedy’s most unique superpowers. As The Onion so deftly pointed out in the amicus brief above, a short and sweet bit of comedy can accomplish what no amount of dry argumentation could ever dream of. This fact exemplifies Marshall McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message,”4 in that the medium of comedy conveys a kind of content—content which comedy is uniquely good at conveying.

If this were the only purpose of humor, the modern leftist argument against certain kinds of comedy would be quite compelling. The argument goes that comedy designed to “punch up” is tailored to this purpose of speaking truth to power. Comedy that “punches down”, however, misses this aim and instead harms the vulnerable. That kind of comedy, therefore, should be opposed and stamped out.

But this isn’t comedy’s sole purpose. So what other messages are conveyed by the medium and why do they matter?

2. Disarming Tyrannical Ideas

The broader potential of humor can be unpacked once we acknowledge that tyrannical regimes aren’t the only things that hold power over us. As we noted above from Why Dictators Don’t Like Jokes, “[t]hese acts move beyond mere pranks; they help corrode the very mortar that keeps most dictators in place: Fear.” So too with tyrannical ideas.

This is, in my estimation, what most edgy humor is aimed at. Jokes about casual sex, for example, disarm the power of slut shaming. Self-deprecating humor ridicules the oppressive critical thoughts we can have about ourselves, weaking their hold. Profane comedy routines reject the social conventions of arbitrarily taboo words. Deliberately offensive comedy is a rebuke of high society’s propensity to demand decorum through self-policed speech. These are all ideas that manifest in our minds to tyrannical effect. Comedy lets us confront these ideas head on and “kneecap the authority from within” in a way that “breaks fear and builds confidence.”

Another example that comes to mind and is always good for a chuckle is the classic joke that something is “gayer than eight dudes blowing nine dudes.” When I was younger, my friends and I loved to use that joke to describe banal things like Rom Coms, cuddling with a girlfriend, or talking about your feelings. This addressed and ridiculed two tyrannical ideas simultaneously: the idea that “real men” were dour and unemotional, and the idea that being gay was a bad or shameful thing.

Critically, many people who experience stigma find power in humor. This is why brilliant black comedians emerged as the modern American reckoning with race began in earnest in the 1960s. In the 70s we had Richard Pryor. In the 80s, Eddie Murphy. Both men brilliantly, comedically, and deftly handled issues of race, disarming the tyranny of racist ideas for all audience members and providing catharsis for black audience members. Stand-up comedian Dave Chappelle began his career in the 90s and rose to become perhaps the most ubiquitous comedian of his time in the early 2000s with the creation and instant popularity of Chappelle’s Show, the inaugural episode of which depicted a fake Dateline episode chronicling the story of a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan who didn’t know he was black because he was also blind.

Many of Pryor’s, Murphy’s, and Chappelle’s most impacting bits played with stereotypes and presented them without the disclaimer that “these stereotypes are being conveyed for satirical purposes and I do not endorse them.” As The Onion noted in its amicus brief, such unsubtle disclaimers “would have spoiled the joke and come off as more than a bit stodgy. But more importantly, it would have disarmed the power that comes with a form devouring itself. For millennia, this has been the rhythm of parody.”

3. Embracing Absurdity—A Hack to Reach Outside of Your Locus of Control

To understand comedy’s last superpower, we have to turn the clock back further than Richard Pryor or Lenny Bruce. Buddhism unearthed this immensely powerful psychological insight more than two thousand years ago. In that same era, the stoics discovered their own brand of the same insight. In fact, the idea has been discovered and codified in some way by most successful, longstanding cultural traditions. And so while comedy’s final superpower isn’t unique to the medium, it does put humor in good company.

The idea is simple: you cannot always control what happens to you, but you can always control how you experience it.

Articulating this insight is easy. Doing it in practice is really hard. Meditation offers the promise of controlling your internal, subjective experience with hundreds and thousands of hours of practice.5 Seneca and Marcus Aurelius promise a similar kind of control; you need only devote your entire life to rigid adherence to cardinal virtues. In that vein, humor is a veritable lifehack, giving you microdoses of this power with the utterance of a few well-crafted words.

Most people who have endured disadvantaged lives and retain a positive attitude instinctively understand what I’m getting at. The world (and the lives we live within it) is full of misery, turmoil, and suffering much of which is so cosmically unjustified that being the subject of that misery, turmoil, and suffering rises to the level of pure absurdity. Often, especially in the short-term, there is absolutely nothing the afflicted can do to fix their situation. To maintain sanity (and some semblance of hope) we turn to humor. Laughing at the terrible circumstances that weigh us down can’t change those circumstances, but much like years of disciplined meditation or a life of virtue free from passion, they can take the sting out of it and help us cope internally.

I grew up poor. I raised myself from the age of 15. I love humor that makes fun of the experience of living in poverty. When I was struggling the most financially, in my teens and early twenties, I listened to a brilliant Louis C.K. bit dozens of times that was all about being broke. Listening to this bit, dubbed "The Bank," did nothing to help my financial situation, which I slowly, gradually, eventually climbed out of by getting a college degree, working as a programmer, going to law school, and now practicing law. In the intervening years, though, humor like C.K.’s “The Bank” bit elevated my subjective experience, allowed me to find amusement in the absurdity of my situation, and laugh it off instead of wallowing in the misery that I would have been entirely justified in feeling (but utterly unserved by).6

No Comedy is Off Limits—It’s Just Not For You

All three superpowers are part of a broader prescription for better lives and a better society: take life seriously, but not too seriously. Take tyranny seriously because it is real, but not too seriously lest you feed it and it grows. Take your insecurities seriously because they signal areas for growth, but not too seriously or they will bury you. Take your strengths seriously because competence serves you (and others) well, but not so seriously that ego consumes you. Take your identity seriously to stay true to yourself, but not too seriously or you will hold fast to it like scripture and cease to grow.

All of these superpowers embedded in the medium of comedy lead to a crucial insight—no comedy expressed in the spirit of genuine humor should be off limits. If you hear a bit of comedy and the only subjective response you can muster is being offended, then that comedy simply isn’t for you.

To go further, to demand that the offending comedy not exist, is to proclaim that the superpowers of disarming tyrannical ideas and coping with the absurd be forcibly taken away from those people who would benefit from them. Indeed, in trying to snuff out comedy we are meddling with primordial forces. The human faculty of humor goes back quite far:

Using two pieces of available evidence, a minimum figure for the age of humor can be proposed. First, humorous conversation has been observed by the pioneering anthropologists in first contact with Australian aboriginals (Chewings, 1936; Schulze, 1891). Second, it appears that Australian aboriginals have been essentially genetically isolated for at least 35,000 years (O'Connell and Allen, 1998). If genetic factors dictate the fundamental ability to perceive or produce humor (and barring convergent evolution), then 35,000 years may reflect a minimum age for humor in Homo sapiens.7

The inference, then, is that humor is an evolutionary adaptation for humans, something deeply encoded into our nature. The idea of Chesterton’s Fence comes to mind—something ancient, something with a powerful and lasting presence, shouldn’t be discarded without understanding it merely because it stands in the way of some new, shiny, salient objective. Not to mention, a fence that so many people seem to intuitively seek out and use.

People intuitively understand this—this is why nobody wants to be seen as the enemy of humor. We live in highly polarized, politically partisan times. On every issue imaginable, each side desperately wants to claim the moral high ground in this terribly destructive culture war. With humor, as with free speech, both sides are lying through their teeth. They seek to protect the speech they like, and to support the comedy that conveys a message they approve of. This is untenable, and must be opposed.

Because of my unique life path, I know a lot of people from many different walks of life. The vast majority of people I know who advocate for shutting down certain kinds of comedy as “offensive” have lived notably privileged lives. The vast majority of people I know who have lived disadvantaged and difficult lives, on the other hand, do not share this impulse. There is good reason for this disparity in attitude.

I think about my own life experience. I think about the friends I’ve had who lived through their own kinds of adversity, and who have wrestled with their own kinds of stigma. And now, reading through The Onion’s amicus brief in the Novak case, I feel compelled to say: if you are advocating for silencing certain humor that you don’t find funny, you are on the wrong side of history. Stop. Don’t seek to destroy what you can’t understand. Ignore it, and let that humor help the people who will find joy in it.

Conversely, the political Right endlessly appeals to the Free Exercise while ignoring or explaining away the Establishment Clause. They are very sensitive to government infringement on their ability to openly practice their religion, but mostly insensitive to potential governmental endorsement of religion, especially their own.

Both clauses sit side-by-side in the brief, to-the-point 45 words comprising the text of the First Amendment. Where the Establishment Clause is concerned with the government favoring or endorsing a particular religion or religions, the Free Exercise clause is concerned with the opposite, that is, with the government disfavoring or actively impeding a particular religion or religions.

Frustratingly, most partisans today are only concerned with one or the other of these two pieces of the puzzle. And yet, it’s the interplay of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause that strike a necessary delicate balance as part of the broader “freedom of consciousness” the First Amendment aspires to protect. The government is not the Pope, and it shouldn’t be in the business of decreeing any kind of canon.

This understanding of the First Amendment should be obvious on its face, but self-interested motivated reasoning is a powerful force, especially in today’s climate encouraging black-and-white, all-or-nothing reasoning. Complexity is dismissed as a dogwhistle. Views are designed as shibboleths, not earnestly calibrated to solve problems. But, as the Supreme Court decision in Carson v. Makin reminded me this week: when your views are insensitive to the inescapable feedback of reality, you are inevitably in for a rude awakening.1

What’s more, I immediately noticed an eerie familiarity in the clueless reaction on the Left. The Court in Carson held that Maine’s private school voucher program can’t exclude religious schools. Hadn’t I just gone through this already?

Deja Judicata

In the summer of 2017, I worked as a law clerk at the Freedom from Religion Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin. FFRF is, in their own words, an organization that “works as an umbrella for those who are free from religion and are committed to the cherished principle of separation of state and church.”2 FFRF is an unabashedly partisan organization. They are atheists—“freethinkers” in their parlance—who don’t like religion personally and advocate for its exclusion from the public sphere principally.

Thus, FFRF’s advocacy makes frequent appeals to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

I had gripes with FFRF’s ideological blinders and motivation to ignore the Free Exercise Clause, but I spent my summer there because I recognized they do good and important work on Establishment Clause issues—something I found and still find to be vitally important to a free society.

During my summer at FFRF, a proverbial bombshell hit the office. In June 2017, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer.3 Trinity Lutheran implicated a Tennessee state law allocating funding for nonprofit organizations installing playground surfaces made from recycled tires. The agency responsible for doling out the funds, however, had an explicit policy of denying funds to any religious organization that applied.

Trinity Lutheran Church applied for funding to renovate its playground, was denied funding, and sued. The church argued that when you make funding generally available to nonprofits but then single out and exclude religious nonprofits (for funding that has nothing to do with religious activities), you violate the Free Exercise Clause.

In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court agreed.

This is where that previously-discussed interplay between the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause comes into play. If we were to pass a law earmarking funding either (a) targeted at religious organizations, or (b) for a religious purpose, that would be a clear signal of government endorsement of religion, implicating the Establishment Clause. Here, the target was nonprofits generally and the subject was renovating playgrounds—a fundamentally secular purpose. To single out and exclude religious nonprofits would be to disfavor those organizations in relation to secular nonprofits. Such signals of disfavor implicate the Free Exercise Clause.4

Virtually everyone in the office treated the decision as cataclysmic, unexpected, and the death knell of the separation of church and state. I found this reaction to be utterly bizarre because, quite simply, I thought the outcome was obvious, routine, and completely parsimonious with existing First Amendment law.

That experience at FFRF stuck with me. All week, morale was measurably down throughout the office. It took several days for the shock and confusion to wear off the staff there. The whole thing puzzled me because these people were paid to understand the First Amendment and there was no intelligent explanation for their headless chicken routine. But there it was, clear as day.

Granted, the media has fault in this. It is egregiously bad at reporting legal decisions. Headlines are routinely more broad-sweeping and grandiose than the narrower, more nuanced legal opinions they’re reporting on. But thinking adults have a responsibility to make sense of the world themselves, and we’ve been failing.

The Definition of an Insane Worldview

The mass hysteria provoked by the Supreme Court’s decision in Carson this week immediately evoked my experience at FFRF and the memory of Trinity Lutheran. Once again, a state had made public funding generally available for a secular purpose. Once again, that state had specifically singled out and excluded religious institutions from that funding, which had nothing to do with religious activities. And once again, the Supreme Court had ruled that exclusion was unconstitutional.

The two cases were only a few years apart. Worse, there was yet another intervening case with an identical holding, this time directly implicating secular and non-secular private schools. In 2020, Espinoza v. Montana Dept. of Revenue clarified that you cannot make funding available for students to attend private schools and then single out and exclude religious schools.5 Yet the political Left seemed to have learned nothing from Trinity Lutheran and Espinoza. Instead, they trotted out the same doomsaying arguments a third time: “The Supreme Court held that states are required to fund churches,” “the wall between church and state is being torn down,” etc.

In 2017, I tried to help my office mates see that they wouldn’t have been blind-sided by the opinion if they understood the factual nuance from a sober vantage point. I tried to explain that the decision does not erode the wall separating church and state, because the decision doesn’t compel any state to fund any church. It simply prohibits states from excluding churches that would otherwise qualify for funding allocated generally for a secular purpose. I tried again in 2020, when the Court handed down its decision in Espinoza.

Those arguments fell on deaf ears, and here we are again.

And so, I reiterate: the decision in Carson does not erode the wall separating church and state, because it doesn’t compel any state to fund any church. It simply prohibits states from excluding churches that would otherwise qualify for funding allocated for a secular purpose.

It is critical we learn from this. When your ideologically-motivated understanding of the world repeatedly leaves you blind-sided by events that others seemed to expect and soberly understand in context, you are being intellectually shackled and your ideology needs modification. Simply insisting, again and again, against the disconfirming feedback of reality, that your ideological understanding is correct, is the definition of insanity.

And even if you prioritize your ideological purpose above comprehensive understanding, refusing to understand this the first, second, and third time it hits you aside the head actually hurts your cause. Put simply, you are a more effective advocate when you understand base reality, when you don’t force an incorrect understanding of that reality upon yourself and your allies.

After being thrice blind-sided, I have to ask: why continue to shackle yourself with ideological insanity?

While the substance of these laws may sound familiar to the ears of a Westerner in 2022, their method of enactment is somewhat less so. These policies were not passed into law by the Reichstag (Weimar’s equivalent to parliament or congress). Instead, they were promulgated by one man, German Chancellor Franz von Papen, under powers invoked by President von Hindenburg through Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution. Article 48 contemplated the use of temporary dictatorial powers in case of emergency. The Article reads in part:

If public security and order are seriously disturbed or endangered within the German Reich, the President of the Reich may take measures necessary for their restoration, intervening if need be with the assistance of the armed forces. For this purpose he may suspend for a while, in whole or in part, the fundamental rights provided in Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153.

This was not the first time Article 48 had been invoked by the president to grant the chancellor emergency dictatorial powers. In fact, in the Weimar Republic’s short life, emergency powers were invoked more than one hundred times. Increasingly, Article 48 came to be seen as a routine tool to circumvent the impotence of a dysfunctional Reichstag incapable of or unwilling to legislate or govern as the president and chancellor wanted.

Nor was this the last time Article 48 was invoked. Even if we never learned the details and legal minutia, nearly 90 years later adults across the world are familiar with the result of President von Hindenburg’s famous invocation of Article 48 in February 1933 to grant emergency dictatorial powers to the German chancellor newly appointed to succeed von Papen (after a German general’s brief stint in the office)—Adolph Hitler.

The Weimar Constitution was never officially dissolved in Hitler’s lifetime. The Nazi government codified its dictatorship with the Enabling Act (enacted, of course, under Article 48). Article 48 and the Enabling Act functioned as a proverbial rubber stamp, “enabling” total Nazi rule for all 12 years of Hitler’s thousand-year Reich. This political theater continued even after President von Hindenburg’s death, whereupon Hitler dissolved the office of the presidency entirely (under, you guessed it, Article 48 and the Enabling Act). The theater finally ended in April 1945 at the end of Hitler’s pistol, which he turned on himself with the Red Army overtaking Berlin.

Power vs. Constitutional Order

In a country like the United States, does law stem from the pure exercise of power or from constitutional order? This is a relatively abstract point of academic discussion, but periodically the public takes popular interest in the question. The latest swell of interest has been stoked by the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which if published will overturn Roe v. Wade and remove the federal guarantee of abortion rights to women nationwide. The uproar and collective frustration on the political left has invigorated overnight the sentiment that our constitution specifically and the laws that govern our country broadly “aren’t real” and that the only thing that matters in law is the exercise of power.

A professor of constitutional law at Georgia State tweeted as much to his more than 30,000 followers:

Bill Maher echoed this sentiment to an even larger audience last week in his May 6 episode of Real Time, saying:

It’s not really about the laws or the constitution. Whenever I see a lawyer, whether it’s on TV or in an ad, anywhere, they’re always in a room with an entire wall of law books behind them. An entire wall. It’s what you fucking think. What you feel, and then you’ll find something in that wall of books to back it up.

I truly sympathize with this perspective, but it is ultimately wrong. And embracing it is equal parts foolish and dangerous. Much like currency, law is a human construct. But that doesn’t mean it’s “not real.” Law is less tangible and more tenuous than other human constructs, but it is quite real. The different laws written to govern different societies across the globe demonstrably produce different results in practice. Hitler tried and failed to overthrow the Weimar Republic in a pure exercise of power during the Beer Hall Putsch, and it landed him in prison. But the government was impotent and ineffectual. Released after serving 9 months of a 5-year sentence, Hitler realized he would need to come to power through the rule of law set forth by the Weimar Constitution. And that’s what he did. This is precisely why the modern-day Federal Republic of Germany, having learned hard lessons from the rise and fall of Hitler’s Third Reich, significantly curbed executive power in its constitution.

And yet, the Weimar Constitution did not intend for Article 48 to bring about a permanent dictatorship. Its abuse and overuse (and public apathy) transformed it. Closer to home, constitutional metamorphosis has been comparatively less stark in the United States. For all our faults, we have never constitutionally assented to open dictatorship. One could argue that this is due to the fact that the framers of our constitution were already fearful of executive power, which is reflected in the delicate checks and balances built into our three “co-equal branches of government.” Still, the executive branch today enjoys more power than the Constitution ever contemplated. And ‘judicial review,’ the Supreme Court’s power to review constitutional questions, was established by the Court itself, not within the four corners of the Constitution.

What of our latest source of unrest? The draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade implicates stare decisis, the legal doctrine that judicial rulings should be based upon existing precedent, which should not be overturned except in extraordinary circumstances. Stare decisis, however, does not require the Supreme Court to stick to existing precedent no matter what. If that were true, the Court could never have overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that racial segregation was constitutional. Nor could it have ever overruled Baker v. Nelson, which held that the constitution didn’t protect same-sex couples’ right to marriage. Stare decisis is a complicated doctrine, and necessarily so to account for the competing needs of stability of law on the one hand and constant-but-gradual societal change on the other.

Stare decisis is a procedural doctrine, but modern discourse cares very little for the nuances of procedure. Instead, partisans are obsessively devoted to results-oriented thinking. The political left didn’t feel that law was fiction when Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy or when Obergefell v. Hodges overturned Baker. And if overturning Roe leads the left to feel that law isn’t real, the holding in Roe itself spurred the same sentiment on the political right. According to those and other critics, the constitutional right to privacy enshrined in Griswold and extended in Roe is completely fabricated. And yet, in 2008 those same critics celebrated the Supreme Court’s invention of an individual right to unregulated gun ownership in District of Columbia v. Heller, an interpretation of the Second Amendment dreamed up and peddled by the NRA to increase gun sales.

The Willful Erosion of Constitutional Guard Rails

The truth is, modern partisans want law to be power. Stare decisis when it suits your goals. Judicial activism when your side holds the court. Appeal to these principles is couched in sophisticated arguments, but it is carefully selective and ultimately stems from convenience in order to reach some political goal. In our viciously partisan sociopolitical landscape, opponents’ victories are increasingly seen as exercises of pure power, justifying equal and opposite exercises of pure power. And the danger is, the more society embraces this jaded view, the more it becomes true.

The right has long sought to cloak political opponents on the left in the trappings of communist totalitarianism. Now the modern left increasingly labels any political goal of the right as “fascism.” The decision to overturn Roe and leave the question of abortion to elected legislatures is cast as “anti-democratic.” The cynical modern thinker pretends to see no difference between out-and-out dictatorships and constitutional governments overstepping and widening their reach.

And in an act of tragic irony, the behavior engendered by that view over time gradually, inexorably, causes the difference to fade, hit an event horizon, and ultimately vanish.

Constitutional order does not establish impenetrable hard lines. What it does do is generate various sources of inertia and guard rails to dampen the exercise of power. Even when one party controls both houses of Congress and the presidency, it does not enjoy a dictatorship. It inevitably passes the reins of power to the opposing party, knowing that party will not have a dictatorship either.

The embittered ideological fervor capturing both sides of American politics today is driving us toward an event horizon now. Our obsession with law as power will take us over it. Students at Yale Law, the most prestigious law school in the country and the school with the most influence on our laws and government, seem to be relishing the thought:

Democratic republics tend to collapse into dictatorships. Sometimes the erosion of constitutional order takes centuries, as with the Roman Republic. Sometimes it takes decades, as with the Weimar Republic.

Germans living in the 1920s and early 30s jaded by the expedient partisan erosion of constitutional order may have seen the ever-increasing use of Article 48 decrees as a sign that “law is power” and constitutional order wasn’t real. Those Germans who lived through the Third Reich and witnessed true rule through the pure exercise of power, however, learned the difference.

There can be no doubt that the current student debt landscape is in crisis. The average student debt held by borrowers has reached $37,113.1 Tuition has increased at twice the rate of inflation for decades now,2 with absolutely no commensurate increase in quality of education. Yet faculty pay is stagnant. Instead, most of this increased revenue has been shoveled into an ever-more-bloated administrative apparatus taking over universities. In the 2018-2019 academic year, actual instruction accounted for just 27% of public university expenses, down from 41% in the 1980s.3 Administrative expenses, on the other hand, have increased tenfold.4

Remarkably, runaway costs have not stifled university enrollment. This is because Pell grants and government-backed loans eliminate price sensitivity for prospective students, who will always get enough “financial aid” (including loans) to cover every penny of cost of attendance and living.  This removes the biggest potential check against undue price hikes by universities.  There’s no incentive to run a tight ship.  Future graduates (and the economy at large) pay the price.

Loan forgiveness without fundamental reforms will do nothing—we will be back in the exact same crisis in a decade or two. Thus, any proposal for forgiveness must include reforms that ensure we address the underlying problem. Ideally, a proposal would include concessions to both Democrats and Republicans—a requirement for effective legislation in a diverse democracy we seem to have all but forgotten in modern times.

So how do we get there?

The Price Tag on Loan Forgiveness is Much Lower Than Advertised

The oft-cited figure for total forgiveness is $1.7 trillion. Critics of forgiveness frame this as a gargantuan sum we cannot and should not shell out to “bail out” young people who got in over their heads. Proponents often point to the fact that the 2016 tax cut was estimated to cost $1.5 trillion over 10 years. In their accounting, we always have money for certain people (and companies) but not those who need it most.

In fact, the actual “cost of forgiveness” is much lower. Student loans are funded by taxpayers at the time they are taken out and that money goes to schools immediately. The universities have already been paid, and the taxpayers have already ponied up. The government, in turn, is left with a promissory note—a legal document that says the student promises to pay back the amount plus interest. On the balance sheet, this is an asset that brings in a trickle of income each year. In 2019, the last year the government collected student loan payments before our current ever-lengthening freeze, the government collected $70 billion, just 2% of federal revenue that year.5 That’s also just 2.6% of total student debt.  And since aggregate debt is growing much, much faster than it’s being paid down, the disparity will only increase with time.

In reality, much of that $1.7 trillion will never be paid back, regardless of whether we implement widespread forgiveness. The more tuition and loan balances detach from the reality of ability to repay, the more students will be perpetually saddled with income-based repayment plans until they are either able to take advantage of 10-year or 25-year loan forgiveness programs or they die.  In either event, the remaining loan balance is never collected (student loan debt is discharged at death). That piece of paper the government has becomes worthless.

Thus, the real cost of student loan forgiveness is whatever amount borrowers will actually pay back in their lifetimes. And that amount is much less than the $1.7 trillion face value of the government’s promissory notes. In fact, at any given time almost half of all student loan borrowers aren’t even paying on their loans.6 This is due to a combination of forbearance, deferment, grace periods, default, and borrowers still in school or back in school again. Even when you exclude those borrowers still in school, more than a third of borrowers aren’t paying down their loans at all.  Millions are in default.  Millions more are behind on payments.  In fact, before the student loan repayment freeze imposed during the pandemic, only 18 million borrowers holding $685.5 billion of the total $1.7 trillion student debt were in active repayment at all.7

For the 52% of borrowers (18.5 million people) who are paying something each month toward their student loans, 8.5 million are enrolled in payment plans that cap monthly payments based on income.8  Unless their financial situations radically change, virtually none of these borrowers will ever repay the balance of their loans.

The System That Got Us Here is Utterly Broken

This underscores the fundamental problem—borrowers were sold a bill of goods, and they are now holding a tremendous amount of bad debt. To continue to insist the government is sitting on $1.7 trillion in promissory note value is to engage in a kind of fantasy thinking.

It is clear, therefore, that the system that brought us to this point is fundamentally broken and must be bulldozed and rebuilt from the ground up. Saddling millions of newly educated (prospective) middle-class Americans with lifelong debt as a standard rite of passage is an undue permanent shackle on the economy, not to mention millions of people’s lives.

Still, many Americans work fervently to repay their student loans. Many more never take out a single dollar in federal student loans. Opponents of student loan forgiveness point to the unfairness for these groups.

Below is my proposed blueprint forward. This blueprint has components that appeal to the political left as well as the right. It addresses the unfairness to those who paid off their loans or never took out any in the first place. It proposes a new system that makes education more accessible while ensuring we don’t have another student debt crisis a decade or two down the line. Best of all, it should save taxpayer money rather than further increase government spending.

A Blueprint Forward

(1) Forgive All Student Debt

The first step is simple, albeit controversial.  Forgive all student debt.

Why not impose a forgiveness cap per borrower?

In reality, such a cap has no relation to any of the goals of our reform. If somebody is buried in debt, partial forgiveness might be effectively the same as no forgiveness at all. If you are a social worker or public defender making $45,000 a year with $120,000 in student debt, for example, reducing your loan balance from $120,000 to $70,000 does not change the fact that it is impossible for you to ever repay your loan balance.  Almost 3 million borrowers have more than $100,000 in student debt.  This is less than 10% of borrowers, but for each of those borrowers, their crushing debt is fundamentally life-altering.  If the goal of forgiveness is to help graduates out of impossible situations resulting from a broken system, partial forgiveness leaves too many borrowers in need behind, and for too little benefit.

Why not means-test loan forgiveness?

Limiting forgiveness to borrowers below a certain threshold at least makes more sense than placing caps on the amount of forgiveness. Afterall, does a borrower making $150,000 a year need a bail out? Probably not, but as I will discuss further below, my proposed new system will ensure that going forward no American is required to take on student loans to earn a degree. Total forgiveness is the closest we can come to putting current and past graduates on the same footing as future students.

Finally, the administrative burden associated with means-testing government programs often costs more than it actually saves.  There is no reason to needlessly take on these costs to find a few needles in a haystack comprised of 44 million pieces of straw.

(2) Give Non-Debt Holders a Commensurate Tax Credit

The average holder of public student loan debt owes $37,000. Giving a tax credit in that amount to all taxpaying adults who did not benefit from loan forgiveness should address concerns of unfairness.

This credit can be paid out over a ten-year period so that each year non-debt holding taxpayers receive a $3,700 tax credit. (Note: in a sense, student debt holders experience forgiveness over time as well, since most would not have paid off their entire loan balance in one lump sum but rather over several decades, if ever).

(3) Make All Public Colleges Tuition-Free

Public universities should be a free option for students looking for higher education without taking on student debt.  As discussed further below, existing federal funding from the failed legacy system of student aid can be reallocated to the states and apportioned at the state level.  This funding can be made contingent on those states’ public schools agreeing not to charge students tuition for attendance.

To bring down the currently sky-high costs associated with post-secondary education, it will be necessary to cap the ratio of administrative staff to enrolled students. And since this blueprint will bar schools from continuing their current trend of aggressively increasing tuition each year (with no tuition to increase), they will have to run a tighter ship, ensuring costs don’t balloon again down the road.

Students choosing to work part-time will find that covering their cost of living is much more manageable than tackling today’s astronomical tuition costs. Additionally, the federal work-study program could be left intact because this program actually costs the federal government very little in the aggregate and provides effective, targeted aid for less advantaged students.  Finally, individual states and universities have existing programs to help provide students with scholarships and financial aid. The funding from such programs can be repurposed to help address students’ cost-of-living.

(4) Abolish Pell Grants, Student Debt Tax Credits, and Other Federal Aid Programs

Aside from work-study, this blueprint proposes we abolish all federal aid programs. With free public college, we don’t need them anymore.

How much money will this save? It turns out, more than universal tuition-free college will cost.

How is that possible?

In the past decade, the annual total Pell grant disbursement has ranged from $26 billion and $42 billion.9 This is a need-based grant paid out to public and private universities for each student whose family earns less than $50,000. For students who attend private schools, this is a direct government subsidy to that private school. The federal government additionally forgoes tens of billions of dollars each year in higher education-related tax credits, including student loan interest deductions, the American Opportunity Tax Credit, and 529 plans.10  The actual figures fluctuate year-to-year, but the total cost of federal aid (excluding loans) ranges from about $60 to $90 billion annual.

And the annual cost of all tuition paid for public schools? Even at the current highly inflated tuition rates necessary to upkeep massive administrative bloat (which this blueprint would slash by capping administrative staff), public schools took in between $60.27 billion and $82.78 billion in tuition annually between the 2010/2011 academic year and the 2018/2019 academic year.11

Most of the tax breaks above are rendered superfluous by a system without federal student loans.  The remaining program, 529 plans, disproportionately benefits the wealthy,12 and would be less necessary in any event in a world with universal tuition-free college. Pell grants represent massive subsidies to private colleges, including predatory for-profit colleges. If the government gets out of the business of propping up private schools and providing college-related tax breaks to the upper class, it can rejuvenate public schools with a universal tuition-free model while saving taxpayer money.

(5) Allow Private Colleges to Compete Without Government Subsidies

Prospective students are still free to seek student loans in the private market, of course, but those loans will no longer be guaranteed by the government. And private colleges are free to keep their current levels of administrative bloat and commensurately astronomical tuition rates. Doing so, however, when prospective students have a completely free alternative in a public option, would be economically ruinous for those universities, whose admissions numbers would plummet.

Therefore, private colleges will naturally be incentivized to cut costs and offer more sane tuition rates. Massive endowments and existing scholarship and grant programs can help ensure greater access to students that don’t come from advantaged backgrounds. And with tighter competition from public schools enticing more students away from private schools, those private schools will have more incentive than ever to welcome students from less advantaged backgrounds.

(6) Profit

The current system is completely broken. The government is sitting on $1.7 trillion in bad debts, a fraction of which it can actually hope to recover. We got here because of a system with students lacking price sensitivity (because the government ensures no matter how expensive school is, you can borrow enough to pay for it) and universities shamelessly increasing costs year after year to rake in more government dollars.

The government can’t (and shouldn’t) force private institutions to fix their broken business model, but it can right its own ship and stop throwing money at mismanaged private schools. The money it saves by doing this is more than enough to create a completely tuition-free model for future students.  That model will compel private institutions to shape up in order to compete.

Taxpayers win. Graduates win. Students win.

Who loses? (a) Private schools, who have until now turned the federal government into a veritable piñata of virtually no-strings-attached bags of cash; and (b) university administrators, who have rapidly soaked up an increasingly larger share of university budgets for decades without any indication they’re actually improving the quality of education anywhere.

Considering what we stand to gain, I think we can live with that.

[T]he best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.

— J. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Abrams v. United States (1919)

Justice Holmes is perhaps the most well-known and oft-cited Supreme Court justice on First Amendment law.  His defense of free speech as a market competition to hone and select the best ideas would be refined by Justice William Douglas a few decades later to the pithier phrase “marketplace of ideas.”

Most today are aware of the marketplace of ideas argument in favor of free speech.  Increasingly, the modern Left grows skeptical of the whole enterprise while the Right clutches it as a sword to fight for its space in a radically new public forum—social media.  The modern Left speaks of unprecedented levels of dangerous speech, while the modern Right speaks of unprecedented levels of censorship.  Neither is true.  Every era has been defined by an orthodoxy and the heretical views that threaten its social order.  This dynamic always produces censorship.  The extraordinary thing about our time is that we enjoy less censorship, more speech protection, and greater access to platforms to disseminate it than at any previous time in history.

This seems to present a paradox. If free speech selects the best ideas and discerns truth, and we live in an era of unprecedented free speech, shouldn’t we then be living in a golden era of ideas and collective understanding?  Instead, phrases like “fake news,” “disinformation,” and “erosion of shared truth” inundate our lexicon, often wielded passionately and aggressively in the embittered exchanges that define our time.

In such an atmosphere, it’s hardly a surprise that well-meaning Americans could turn against free speech.  But if speech really is the problem, we’re in trouble.  Altering human behavior happens one of two ways—persuasion or force.  Everything we call ‘progress’ has involved the thoughtful exchange of ideas, the use of violence, or both.

Not all ideas are of equal value, and not all change is progress.  But which ideas are valued, spread, and adopted depends on the environment where ideas are exchanged.  This is the heart of the problem.  Free speech and the marketplace of ideas are often conflated, but they are in fact two separate, equally necessary components of an ideal system.  In a healthy marketplace of ideas, the currency of speech is exchanged in such a way that, over time, good ideas tend to spread and bad ideas tend to die.

So why has the currency of speech become so detached from the goal of better collective understanding?  Is free speech really worthless?  Maybe, but the value of a currency depends on the market it’s exchanged in.

The Ideal of Free Speech

The Supreme Court coined the phrase “marketplace of ideas,” but it didn’t invent the concept.  The Justices of the 20th century who shaped First Amendment Law into what it is today drew from theories of free speech developed and refined over several centuries. English philosopher John Stuart Mill built on those centuries of theory for his own writings on free speech, and Mill’s writing directly influenced the Supreme Court and the modern evolution of First Amendment Law.  Mill’s central argument in favor of free speech is laid out in On Liberty and essentially boils down to three points.1

(1)   The unpopular view may be right, and the establishment view may be wrong.

As Mill put it, “[a]ll silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”  If you seek to silence a view, how do you know it contains no truth worth knowing?  You can only really know if you’ve dealt in the exchange of that idea and examined it yourself.  Should the next generation of thinkers be deprived of their chance to do the same?

Furthermore, progress in a society is impossible without minority views gaining steam and overtaking majority ones.  Every prevailing orthodoxy in history believed it was correct, and every new idea that brought society forward had to compete with that self-assured orthodoxy at a structural disadvantage.

(2)   The views you support, even if true, are weaker without engaging with opposing views.

I see two parts to this point. The first is encapsulated in one of the more famous passages from Mill’s On Liberty:

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.

A deeper understanding of opposing views refines your own view, along with your ability to defend it.

Second, silencing opposition may seem easier than addressing it, but in practice this tactic is terribly ineffective.  Since understanding a view you aren’t allowed to consider is impossible, the majority position must be adopted with limited understanding.  Once shakey believers encounter a well-articulated argument in favor of the heretical view, they may be surprised by how persuasive it is.  This isn’t academic speculation.  History is replete with majoritarian-turned-dissenters who discovered a forbidden view wasn’t as outrageous as its straw man appeared and, as a result, felt deceived and flipped sides.

This happens because, as history shows, attempting to silence speech simply doesn’t work.  A perfect illustration comes from the infamous Roman practice of damnatio memoriae, which Eric Berkowitz describes in his book Dangerous Ideas as a practice “involv[ing] some combination of destroying or mutilating images of the condemned[,] a ban on using the person’s name, and the deletion of the person from public records.”  As a testament to the impotence of damnation memoriae, we still know the names, stories, and heretical views of countless Roman figures who were subject to it, two thousand years after their death (some notable examples being the Emperors Nero and Caligula).

Another notch in the belt of Rome’s failed thought suppression campaigns is Christianity itself, the most widespread religion in the world today with over two billion adherents.  Christians in the Roman Empire were persecuted, imprisoned, and executed for their beliefs.  Under these conditions, the heretical views of Christianity nonetheless survived for hundreds of years before Constantine ultimately decreed a reversal in the orthodoxy.  Constantine’s new Christian orthodoxy quickly settled into its role persecuting the minority views that opposed it.

Time and again orthodoxies attempt to snuff out dissenting speech, and time and again they fail.

(3)   Competing views often contain different parts of a greater truth.

As Mill wrote in On Liberty:

Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.  They are a part of the truth; sometimes a greater, sometimes a smaller part, but exaggerated, distorted, and disjoined from the truths by which they ought to be accompanied and limited.  Heretical opinions, on the other hand, are generally some of these suppressed and neglected truths, bursting the bonds which kept them down, and either seeking reconciliation with the truth contained in the common opinion, or fronting it as enemies, and setting themselves up, with similar exclusiveness, as the whole truth.

A glaring modern example can be seen in the debate between globalization and domestic production.  For decades in elite Democratic circles, arguing that exporting jobs or importing labor could hurt domestic wages had the result of instantly branding oneself as a close-minded, nationalist bigot.  This truism was so tightly enforced that merely expressing a preference for “Made in the USA” was seen as a “dog whistle.” 

As a result of this forced consensus and the policy that followed, both frustratingly and predictably, wages in the U.S. flattened and remained flat for fifty years.  The Democratic Party bled blue-collar workers from its base, who felt the costs tangibly in their daily lives while the political elite on the Left grew disinterested (whereas the elite on the Right weren’t interested to begin with).  Real wages only began to break the stasis under protectionist policy implemented by a president whose campaign cashed in on populist anger.  Under pressure, a stage full of 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls decried free trade agreements previously regarded by the party as sacred. The slight bump in workers’ wages transformed into a sharp spike when a global pandemic-induced worker shortage and pent-up demand drove power back into the hands of workers.  Under crumbling supply chains, the revealed fragility of our global system (and the reminder that not all the players are geopolitically aligned) has brought “Made in the USA” back into the Overton window.

Here, silencing the heretical view masked a deeply impactful macroeconomic truth that could have averted untold financial anguish.  Yet, the orthodox view contained truth, too.  It was and remains true that the American Right stoked the flames of economic insecurity with the accelerant of xenophobia.  The consequences have been widespread and palpable.

Stumbling in Pursuit of the Ideal

While Justice Holmes’s musing on the “free trade in ideas” are well-known, what is less known is that they appeared in his dissents.  The majority in Abrams, the Supreme Court case quoted at the start, upheld a twenty-year prison sentence under the Espionage Act.  The crime?  Distributing leaflets arguing for labor strikes and opposing military involvement in Revolutionary Russia (what would ultimately become the Soviet Union). 

Abrams wasn’t a freak occurrence, either. The Espionage Act justified the censorship of boundless speech, explicitly grounded on probably the most popular justification for speech censorship in the history of human civilization—disagreeing with the establishment view is itself harmful to society and therefore “treason,” or “sedition.”

Today, no court in the United States would convict a defendant on those charges, and if they did, the conviction would swiftly be thrown out on appeal.  What changed?  In the intervening century, the sentiments expressed in Supreme Court dissents like Holmes’s slowly became Supreme Court majority opinions, expanding the scope of the First Amendment based upon the ideas of thinkers like Mill and severely limiting the government’s power to censor, regulate, or otherwise control speech.

The First Amendment deals almost exclusively with government censorship. but Mill and other free speech advocates were just as concerned with private censorship. Afterall, powerful private actors are just as capable of suppressing, distorting, and controlling the marketplace of ideas.  Mill was particularly concerned with moral panics and mob rule imposing forced consensus.  Today, the modern Right beats this drum against social media, while the Left tends to dismiss it as “not a First Amendment issue” and “corporations exercising their right to exclude.”

Ideologically, this is a startling role reversal, but practically it isn’t all that surprising.  The Right is the minority faction in the culture today (not necessarily by numbers, but demonstrably by cultural power). Minority factions invariably suffer more speech suppression and are consequently more motivated to support free speech.  At the same time, social media, the preeminent private censor, is under public pressure to reign in "dangerous speech,” and they know the Left wields the cultural power.  Under these conditions, Facebook and Twitter can be seen applying more lenient standards to speech coming from the Left than from the Right.  These companies are acting as conduits for the forces of social conformity Mill feared.

Still, it bears emphasizing that there is something historically unique about this otherwise prototypical suppression of minority views.  Heretical views today enjoy a larger megaphone than humanity could have imagined possible for even the most popular views 50 years ago. If a conservative thinker in Missouri wants to thoughtfully make the case for a conservative idea, they can take to the internet and give a curious thinker 1,000 miles away in New York the opportunity to discover the argument and consider it for themself.

It's true that not all censored conservative speech is inciting violence, deliberately spreading dangerous lies, or otherwise void of reasoned thought, but a lot of it is.  The Left has its share of these views, too, and one thing all of these extreme ideologies have in common in today’s world is that they are uncomfortably popular and, imbued by the amplifying effects of social media, spread like wildfire.

How Sensemaking Unraveled in an Era of Unprecedented Free Speech

In this era of unprecedented free speech, how are deranged ideologies and selective or outright fabricated facts spreading so effectively?  Where is the philosopher’s paradise Mill promised?

The simple answer that “the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work” is unsatisfying, and very likely wrong.  Tellingly, opponents of free speech never offer an alternate system for adjudicating the merit of ideas other than “my ideas are right, good people know it, and an authority should enforce them.”  Granted, even in a healthy marketplace of ideas, open discourse can’t perfectly select for better ideas.  Yet over time, a functional marketplace of ideas will select for better ideas more consistently than any other system we know of.

The marketplace of ideas is an aspirational construct society moves toward as more interactions between people involve candid truth-seeking and good faith exchange.  Conversely, it moves further away when exchanges involve bad faith and participants prioritize other goals over seeking truth.  Another necessary ingredient is critical thinking, which is why Mill was quite concerned with logic, reasoning, and philosophy of science.

As a born-and-bred Midwesterner, the canonical example in my mind of idealized exchanges approaching a marketplace of ideas is the Lincoln-Douglas debates. In 1858, incumbent U.S. Senator from Illinois Stephen Douglas squared off in seven debates across the state with his Republican opponent, Abraham Lincoln.  These debates couldn’t be more different than the televised events hosted by our corporate media today that nonetheless go by the same name.  The format was 60 minutes for the opening candidate, 90 minutes for the opposition’s reply, and finally 30 minutes for the first candidate’s rebuttal.  There were no private sector media personalities curating “gotcha” questions, no 30-second rebuttals designed to produce snappy back-and-forths. Each candidate spoke long-form on substantive issues and his adversary engaged in kind.  In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman details an earlier debate between Lincoln and Douglas in Peoria, Illinois in 1854 that bears emphasizing:

Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond.  When Lincoln’s turn came, he reminded the audience that it was already 5 p.m., that he would probably require as much time as Douglas and that Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal.  He proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner, and return refreshed for four more hours of talk.  The audience amiably agreed, and matters proceeded as Lincoln had outlined.

As Postman noted of the large audiences the debates drew, “[t]hese were people who regarded such events as essential to their political education, who took them to be an integral part of their social lives, and were quite accustomed to extended oratorical performances.”

Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, laments the deterioration of serious thinking in American society, which Postman saw as stemming from modern mediums all but demanding we sacrifice our attention spans for dopamine hits. Postman was beginning to see how corporate incentives were reshaping the marketplace of ideas, but he couldn’t have imagined thirty-six years ago just how much worse things would get with the advent of the internet and social media.

Here lies our problem, decades in the making and now at a fever pitch.  To select for better ideas, we need the currency of speech and a functioning marketplace of ideas.  What we have instead is an inflated currency with fewer and fewer vestiges of earnest truth-seeking and thoughtful exchange to trade it in.  Mob rule, witch trials, moral panics, and repressive regimes all kill the marketplace of ideas but they also deface the currency of speech.  What would it look like if speech remained nominally free and open (and was even amplified) but the marketplace of ideas was replaced by something else?  It would look like 2021. It would look like the marketplace of engagement.

The new marketplace isn’t driven by a desire to seek truth.  Predominantly taken over by social media, it’s driven by a shareholder demand for greater profit, which requires perpetually increasing “user engagement.”  The savvy professionals at Facebook and Twitter realized long ago that the fastest way to more engagement is to ensure as many interactions as possible either (a) simply reinforce what we think we already know, or (b) make us really, really angry at people we already hate.  This new way of thinking spreads far beyond the pixels on our screens, altering the way we think and interact in all facets of life. Both on the internet and offline, the marketplace of ideas has been largely replaced with a new market driven by bias-affirmation and emotion-stoking.

Speech has never been less restricted, and speech has never been easier to push out into the world.  Yet, this inflated currency is no longer circulating through the marketplace of ideas.  The market for the “free trade of ideas” philosophers and jurists saw as necessary to discover better truth has been supplanted by a massive, ever-present dopamine-hit machine that, by its nature, is driven by forces fundamentally incompatible with a marketplace of ideas.  The marketplace of ideas requires an open mind.  The marketplace of engagement encourages us to close ourselves off to information that challenges us.  The marketplace of ideas requires the willingness to be wrong and the motivation to seek truth.  The marketplace of engagement leans into confirmation bias—“Everyone I respect agrees with me”—and source bias—"I don’t like the source you rely on, so I don’t even have to examine your claim.”  The marketplace of ideas requires critical thinking and deep diving into complex issues.  The marketplace of engagement barrages you with simplified memes that compress the complexities of reality into a few words that tell you exactly what you want to hear.

Perversely, the fact that the marketplace of engagement is nothing like a marketplace of ideas is far from obvious.  The corporate leviathans running social media, looming over a larger and larger portion of all human interaction, invest hefty sums to give us the disturbingly persuasive illusion that we’re simply encountering and choosing to engage with ideas in an open marketplace.  In reality, every single post or Tweet you see was chosen by an algorithm behind the scenes based on how the company thinks it can squeeze the most engagement out of you.

It’s no wonder so many, Left and Right, think decent people all agree with them—social media’s algorithms selectively curate the posts that will make you feel this way.  It’s no wonder so many, Left and Right, think the enemy tribe is uniformly dishonorable, dishonest, stupid, and evil—social media’s algorithms selectively curate the posts that will make you feel this way.  What you see in the marketplace of engagement is not representative of anything other than the simple hedonic levers a megacorporation determined it needs to pull to maintain your engagement.

The political extremes in American politics have benefited significantly from the marketplace of engagement. Social media users are marks, disarmed of their desire to engage in thoughtful discourse and challenge their own beliefs.  The bias-affirmation and emotion-stoking of the new marketplace perfectly prime them to convert to one or the other of the two political poles.  This sheds new light on the issue of modern censorship discussed earlier.  Social media censorship is not pushing conservatives (and other heterodox thinkers branded as conservatives) out of a marketplace of ideas where well-crafted views could otherwise be exchanged and considered by truth-seeking interlocutors.  The biggest barrier to a good faith conservative convincing others of their thoughtful ideas isn’t social media censorship—it’s social media’s blanket elevation of and our growing preference for bias-affirming and emotion-stoking ideas over nuanced and thoughtful ones.

What’s left to fight for, then, is simply a platform in the marketplace of engagement to confirm biases and stoke emotions as ammunition in an escalating culture war. Nominally, we are free to push out as much speech as we please.  But the incentive structure is clear: speech that does not affirm or stoke is so devalued in the marketplace of engagement that it is often rendered virtually worthless.  Speech that fails to affirm our biases or stoke the right emotions is punished by one tribe or the other.  In the marketplace of engagement, even if nuanced, well-reasoned speech reaches some listeners, the half-witted takedown of that speech calibrated to affirm preexisting biases and stoke emotions will receive orders of magnitude more engagement, more shares, and therefore be presented to more people as their AI-powered reality. Any single nuanced heterodox view pushed into the marketplace of engagement generates an overwhelming amount of opposed bias-affirming and emotion-stoking responses.

The common refrain that “Twitter isn’t real life” is becoming less and less true every day, and the response that you can simply opt out is utterly unhelpful. If you completely ignore social media, your mental health might be better for it, but it won’t change the fact that millions of people are exchanging their speech in the marketplace of engagement.  It won’t change the fact that our news industry uses social media ‘discourse’ as a stand-in for public opinion.  It won’t change the fact that politicians and corporations warp their behavior based on the sentiment mined from social media. And it won’t change the fact that this confluence of factors spreads the marketplace of engagement far beyond the borders of social media.

There is no cutting the Gordian Knot here.  While loud factions leverage bias-affirmation and emotion-stoking within the marketplace of engagement to advance their culture war, we must hold fast to what remains of our sanity and realize the only way forward is to reject the Pavlovian incentives of the new marketplace.  It won’t happen on Twitter or Facebook, but simply moving exchanges off those platforms won’t solve the problem, either. It starts with you, and me, and how we choose to engage with others we encounter, especially when we reach areas of disagreement.  Do we perpetuate the influence of the marketplace of engagement, eradicating persuasion and leaving violence as the only available tool for change?  Or do we replant the seeds of thoughtful discourse and have the earnest truth-seeking exchanges that will reconstruct a saner, more durable marketplace of ideas?

Until then, we can have the best, freest speech in the world, but it won’t be worth anything.

Before I touched the case, the Taliban had already murdered the translator’s sister.  His mother and younger brother were in hiding, and it was our goal to bring them to the US to where the translator had already relocated.  Humanitarian parole was the final possible avenue to accomplishing that goal.  We failed.  The US government's attitude in this rejection was characteristic bureaucratic callousness—“You can seek asylum in India.”  In other words, we don’t care if your family aids our military against a dangerous enemy and you are consequently targeted for execution by that enemy. Look somewhere else for help. 

I don’t know if that family ever succeeded in fleeing to India or if the Taliban succeeded in killing them.  Worse, this story is depressingly emblematic of an entire population of people now at the mercy of a resurgent regime that summarily executes dissident citizens as a matter of course.  Even if our bureaucratic behemoth were less Kafkaesque and more efficiently benevolent, it would be impossible at this event horizon to protect the people left behind who we induced (at their peril) to rely on our protection.  The conclusion is as simple as it is mortifying—there will be a massive surge in systematic, senseless, unjust repression and killing in Afghanistan and we bear responsibility.

Depending on your preconceived stance on the US invasion of Afghanistan, our continued involvement there, and the right and wrong way to leave, you are either nodding your head in emphatic agreement while slotting the story into your argument for a continued American presence there, or frustratedly focusing on who to blame and how “there was no good way to leave, but we had to.”

Either way, just stop.

Putting aside for a moment whether the outpouring of very real human suffering in Afghanistan is convenient or inconvenient for your preferred political view, the very fact of it is tragic and merits both public attention and collective solemnity.  Forget about Joe Biden for a moment.  Forget about Donald Trump.  Forget about all the politicians you may want to vindicate or condemn.  The suffering and death in Afghanistan now aren’t about our domestic ideological war, although they are undoubtedly downwind of it in tragic ways.  In fact, our pathological impulse to interpret everything in the world through the lens of the American ideological war is precisely the phenomenological framework under which people 7,000 miles away in Kabul or Kandahar were unwittingly cast as expendable roles in the ideology porn of our political theater in the first place.

Take this as an exercise in mindfulness.  Seek out stories of people living, struggling, and dying in Afghanistan right now.  Try to sit with their experience free from the impulse to shoehorn it into your political narrative.

Sit with our Afghan allies, like my former client, who risked life and limb to help the US in our efforts in Afghanistan, just or unjust.  While we read news of the Taliban decrees sentencing them to death, we do not learn their names (they are redacted from reports to protect the identities of those still living). Sit with the men and women who clung to the outside of airplanes taking off in their attempts to flee the Taliban resurgence. Sit with the untold number who were not able to leave Afghanistan before the Taliban swept back over the country and now have no avenue of escape after the Taliban sealed off the airport in Kabul. 

Sit with the Americans in Afghanistan now who don’t want to evacuate without their Afghan families who have no way out.  Sit with the 169 Afghans and 13 Americans killed in the suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport last week. Sit with Mohammed Jan Sultani, a 25-year-old martial arts champion. Mohammed was killed in the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport this week. Sit with Najma Sadeqi, a 20-year-old journalist student who died in the same attack.

Sit with the generation of Afghan women who were educated and “came of age believing they were free to pursue their dreams” free from the Taliban’s brutal oppression of women.  Sit with the more than 300 of those women who have been killed this year alone.  Sit with those who survived to see the resurgent Taliban, same as the old Taliban, and to see citizens of Kabul scramble to paint over pictures of women in Kabul the day the Taliban took the city.  Sit with Shirin Tabriq, a female teacher who tried to flee Afghanistan as the Taliban retook control.  Shirin spent five days outside the airport in Kabul attempting to leave before giving up hope and returning home resigned to her new life under Taliban rule.

Sit with the artists of Afghanistan whose creative calling imbues the culture with vibrance and life.  Sit with Malina Suliman, an artist who fled Kandahar seven years ago to escape Taliban oppression and now looks back home to a new wave of artists under the ever-greater threat of death.  Sit with Fawad Andarabi, a folk singer who sang that “There is no country in the world like my homeland, a proud nation.  Our beautiful valley, our great-grandparents’ homeland.”   Fawad was shot in the head by the Taliban days after a Taliban spokesperson said in an interview with The New York Times that music would once again be banned in Afghanistan. 

To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest that we shouldn’t have opinions on the wisdom of entering Iraq, of our continued presence there, or the right and wrong way to leave. It’s an important issue and citizens of a democratic society should think deeply about the decisions they help influence, however weakly.  Nor am I invoking the “school shooting grievance period” argument from the political right (as some hawkish left outlets appear to be doing) that we should wait to have any policy views for some arbitrary period of time. On the contrary, emotion can validly inform reasoning.

What I mean to say is that there is intrinsic value in seeing human suffering and seeking to connect with that suffering in an exercise of pure empathy without compulsively, narcissistically seeking to fit it into our own political narratives thousands of miles removed from life and death in Afghanistan.  Our citizenship demands of us to think through policy issues carefully.  But our humanity demands of us to strive to empathize with the lives of others.  When any exercise of empathy must be tied to our own agendas, we lose a bit of our humanity.

By all means, think about what these tragedies mean for domestic policy. But don’t just do that. A good litmus test is whether you can share in the empathic exercise with somebody who holds policy views opposed to yours and grieve together without devolving into an argument. If you can’t, then you are failing.

Do not let your perceived democratic duty or your preoccupation with ideological gamesmanship encroach on your humanity.  Whatever your narrative, be able to set it down and sit with these people.

My home life was tumultuous. I had countless run-ins with violent boyfriends (and violent grandparents once the boyfriends left and we moved three children and one adult into a single bedroom in their house).  My journal counted down the days until I turned 15 and could be legally emancipated. In the meantime, I was berated, belittled, punched, kicked, choked, spit on, and thrown into walls until I’d had enough.  It felt like I was living underwater, suffocating.  I didn't make it to 15. Leaving home gave me a gasp of air, but making my own way was an exercise in treading water without having learned to swim.  It was all I could do to keep from drowning.

On my own, I lied about my age to get work.  I slept over at friends' houses or on park benches.  I still remember a particularly cold Illinois winter night when my body woke me up violently shivering as if to say “do something or die.”  Eventually, the family of one close friend caught on to my painfully consistent attempts to stay over, and a bed was set up for me in the back of an unfinished basement.  Another family took me in for the latter portion of my senior year.  This new stability was comforting, but I never escaped the feeling of being a burden. That feeling pushed me to rent my first apartment at 17.

More than a decade later, I am now an attorney.  I worked a few years in software engineering out of college before moving on to law school and then to a law firm.  I work on plaintiff’s class action lawsuits representing “the little guy” against abusive employers and dishonest companies.  In many ways, it's a natural fit. Still, in other ways I remain an obvious outsider in my profession.  Like most lawyers, I am politically minded.  Yet, while my political outlook is deeply informed by my upbringing, I typically do not bring up my past in political discussion.  The few times I have didn’t end well.  Perhaps surprisingly, to this day every person who has belittled my earlier struggles has been on the political left.  This is not a consequence of petty tribalism—after all, I am unmistakably liberal.  My sin was apostasy. As a poor liberal, I rose to the Gated Institutions of the modern liberal elite, where I was supposed to adopt the Gated Institutional Narrative.  Instead, I smuggled in an understanding of the world entirely foreign to its neatly curated safe spaces.

My “miseducation” started early and not in a classroom.  We moved from the city to rural Illinois when I was too young to remember.  At home, I took in the perspective of my urban poor mother, but I was otherwise steeped in smalltown America.  I have always been politically liberal, and I’ve never had much of a filter for my other quirks.  I stuck out like a sore thumb in rural Illinois.  Other kids mercilessly bullied me throughout my childhood, which provided a lesson in the consequences of being different.  Still, I liked to debate and discuss, especially with adults who knew more than me.  It helped sharpen my thinking, as nobody ever just agreed with my left-leaning opinions.  It also taught me to connect with people of differing views to find common ground. 

The kind of learning that happens in school, however, was not a priority for me.  I found it difficult to care.  I worked 45–50 hour weeks at McDonald’s for $6.00 an hour (somehow never receiving a single hour of overtime), at times working weeks in a row without a day off.  Tired from overwork, I slept through many of my classes.  Starting in high school I got into a lot of fights, and I lost track of how many detentions and suspensions I racked up.  I never did my homework.  And while I failed to see how that should distinguish me from the hordes of students who sat in the hallways each morning copying the work of 1 or 2 bookworms eager to trade answers for a morsel of social capital, it did distinguish us—they got As and I got Ds.  This was another early lesson I stubbornly chose not to learn: you get ahead not by aptitude or grit, but by jumping through the hoops set out for you.  After a while, I didn’t see the point of hoop-jumping anyway.  No college with standards would accept a small-town kid with a 1.7 GPA, and I figured I couldn’t afford college anyway.

I knew the military was a common route for kids without money or other prospects, and so the Marine Corps seemed like a reasonable next step.  I joined a recruit pool where my incompetent and dishonest recruiter lied to me about the MOS (military occupational specialty—the term for your job in the Marine Corps or Army) I would be assigned.  He was pushed out of the Corps before I was scheduled to ship out to basic, and the recruiter who replaced him was more honest.  After learning that I had almost signed away my life for a job I didn’t even know I was assigned, I panicked and backed out.  Living in the kind of small-town that revered military service, that choice weighed heavily on me for some time.

With my military plans out the window and only a few weeks before the academic year was slated to begin, some friends pushed me to enroll in a nearby community college.  I applied and received my acceptance email an hour later.  It felt good to be accepted somewhere.  Thus began a new era in my life, where financial aid took the day-to-day pressure off and classes on a myriad of subjects captured my interest.  I learned that I loved to learn about anything and everything.  I quickly moved to a four-year university, had a son with my girlfriend at the time, and finished my degree as that relationship fell apart and I had to begin negotiating our shared custody.  I felt terrible for creating yet another broken home, but I have made sure to be present and impactful in my son’s life.

Socially and politically, my time in higher education was eye-opening.  I had always thought the “liberal elite” caricatures coming from small-town conservatives were right-wing talking points, but at my prestigious university bursting with affluent young liberals I found these talking points embodied by real people.  As a poor kid who thought he was sneaking his way into the ranks of brilliant thinkers with deep knowledge and broad perspective, what I encountered instead was a class of elites-by-inheritance with no idea how the world worked outside of their crib-to-consulting pipeline.  They repeated the same lines, shared the same conclusions, and conspicuously justified their engineered uniformity of thought as having learned “expert consensus.”  While this mentality is totally calcified today, I saw the seeds of it forming a decade ago.  It was particularly salient to me that their consensus was utterly detached from the realities of the world I had lived in.

The situation worsened when I started law school in 2015.  Despite entering one of the most highly ranked law schools in the country, I felt surrounded by anti-intellectualism, bizarre cultish behavior, and genuine hysteria.  The examples abound.  One of my classmates got a pro bono visit to a prison canceled because she put “human” under the field marked “race” on some paperwork to prove a point.  I cannot say whether the prisoners she and other volunteers were supposed to visit ever got legal counsel.  I can only say that at other times this same student offered a more precise answer to the question of her racial identity—she was Indian but “identified as black.”

In my Torts class, a woman argued her belief that a fetus was not a human until it fully exited the birth canal and so she reasoned there were no moral implications whatsoever with aborting it on its way out after a full-term pregnancy if that was the mother’s choice.  It would be immoral, however, to judge her for choosing to do so.  In Criminal Law, a student argued her view that defendants accused of rape should be presumed guilty and be required to affirmatively prove their innocence.  In a seminar entitled “Hard Feelings,” we delved into topics such as forgiveness and mercy.  A student in that seminar argued the left should abandon free speech principles because conservatives “did it first” during the McCarthy era.

My Philosophy of Law class once planned to have an open discussion on abortion and moral philosophy.  Ahead of that discussion, the professor received several emails concerned that this topic could not possibly be met with earnest discussion.  He brought up these emails to the class, gave us a well-intentioned lecture on the importance of open discourse, stated we would go forward with the discussion, and asserted that it would be a free and open exchange.  He was right on one count.  The discussion did go forward, but it was not free, and it was not open.

I attended exactly one meeting of the Poverty Law Society before abandoning that mirage of familiarity.  The group didn’t appear to have any regard for the dignity of the individuals in poverty, approaching the topic instead with a sanctimonious and naive “I will be their savior” attitude.  Just as bad was the total conflation of being poor with being black.  Or in the words of our President, “poor kids are just as bright as white kids.”  In the single meeting I attended, every time a different affluent student took their turn telling their story and explaining why we should vote for them to be the president of the Poverty Law Society, the room snapped their fingers in support.  I later asked what the deal was with the finger-snapping and was told that many people interpret clapping as “violence.”  The Poverty Law Society’s peaceable finger snaps were notably muted, however, when I suggested during discussion that we should give attention to the fact that poor people, like all people, want to feel agency and power over their own lives, and we should offer tools that will help them with that.  I made the same point in a different campus discussion, and a classmate responded that it was a “terrifyingly effective argument for conservatism.”

Outside of the classroom, I was routinely shut out of discourse based on immutable group traits, which my classmates were increasingly and openly willing to use to prejudge speakers and preempt dialog.  In one discussion, an affluent classmate interrupted me and told me I couldn’t contribute to a conversation on poverty because I was a “straight white male.”  Since she was a “female person of color,” this summary dismissal was routine and accepted.  In discourse within the Gated Institutions, everything is now about immutable group characteristics.  If you share surface-level traits with an “oppressed class,” you are personally oppressed and your voice is elevated.  If you shared surface-level traits with an “oppressor class,” however, you’re personally an oppressor or a “colonizer.”  Your perspectives can be dismissed without consideration.  Your words can even be deemed violence, based solely on the listener’s subjective judgment. 

Nor did it make a difference to acknowledge the fact that I never experienced systemic racism before attempting to explain the kinds of systemic adversity I did experience.  In the Gated Institutional Narrative, “oppressors” cannot experience any kind of systemic adversity.  Thus, my race routinely gave cover to lash out at me for not simply falling in line with the Narrative.  It gave the new left, a group that prides itself on compassion, permission to harshly and sometimes cruelly dismiss my life experience, or as one person put it, my “whining” that “white people have problems too.” 

This isn’t to say that a breakout disadvantaged racial minority could speak sense to any of these people, either.  Those within the Gated Institutions simply will not see outside of the Narrative, instead instinctively putting their education to work in rationalizing away any dissent.  Armed with the conviction that they have learned the correct “expert consensus,” they lift up consensus thinkers and ostracize heterodoxy.  Their groupthink comes with a degree—a credential to set them apart from the uncredentialed.  In their view, these uneducated masses simply can’t understand how the world works, even though their “uneducated” lives come with deep experience in the messy, complex, and often arduous world outside of the Gated Institutions and their safe spaces.

When Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016, I was in my second year of law school.  My classmates were uniformly mortified and shocked.  Over the next few days, many cried.  One student who I saw crying was Muslim, and I felt for her.  I was disgusted at our new president-elect, but like many minorities and countless struggling Americans, I was not one bit surprised.  While our Gated Institutional Narrative did not permit us to entertain the real possibility that Donald Trump might actually win, my miseducation did.  And the people surrounding me had spent the last year demonstrating exactly how a country could go insane enough to elect Donald Trump as president.

Today, all of these people have JDs from one of the highest-ranked law schools in the country.  Our employment data is public knowledge.  The median starting salary for my graduating class was $190,000 (the median starting salary at every top law school is always the same as the market rate for corporate law firms).  About half of my class took jobs with “biglaw” firms—large firms with more than 500 attorneys that typically represent corporate and ultra-rich clients.  These firms almost always represent employers against employees, corporations against consumers, white-collar criminals against prosecution, or just help large corporations absorb other large corporations, concentrating markets and reducing overhead (read: jobs) to ‘increase shareholder value.’  Critically to the public image of those firms, they do all of those things with an increasingly ethnically and gender-diverse team of lawyers.  Any moral harm to the work they do is laundered through the all-important shield of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Most of my fellow law graduates are not only amassing wealth and comfort, but they have never been physically unsafe in their entire lives.  Yet paradoxically, they increasingly feel unsafe because of words.  From the haven of their swanky apartments in the Gold Coast in Chicago or the Upper East Side of Manhattan, they Tweet in support of silencing speech—now synonymous with violence.  They endorse utopian and deeply unpopular ideas like abolishing the police for all of us, including for the less advantaged who are under threat of more harm than mere words or handclapping can inflict.  While many of us outside the Gated Institutions have had first-hand experience with bad policing and emphatically support significant reform, the elite genuinely does not know that the disadvantaged (including disadvantaged black people) overwhelmingly oppose abolishing the police.  This problem is emblematic of a pervasive pattern: engrossed in its a priori universe, this elite cannot grasp or even imagine the real problems that exist outside of its walled-off safe spaces.

Instead of listening and learning from these (actually) diverse perspectives, the elite holds up racial tokens to support the Narrative (a dehumanizing practice the left can at least recognize as sinister when we call out the political right for doing it).  This gives truth to the lie—they claim to give “lived experience” primacy, but they only accept the lived experience of pre-selected views permitted within the Gated Institutions.  Sometimes these tokens are already-affluent minorities who came from the same crib-to-consulting pipeline with the Narrative as their birthright.  Other times they are newly minted elites of diverse color whose cost-of-admission into the Gated Institutions is to adopt the Narrative, attack divergent thought, and serve 5-7 years in mergers and acquisitions with a fast track to partner.  Diversity, equity, and inclusion.

After time and reflection, I now call these people what they are—illiberal.  They demand consensus, abhor true scientific skepticism or rigorous thought, ignore experiences inconvenient to the Narrative, and cast speech as “violence” to justify their advocacy to ban it.  And while this illiberal movement did not swallow up all my classmates (I met some brilliant and thoughtful minds during my time in law school) it was far too widespread to discount.

Conservative friends often ask why I don’t just become conservative, or libertarian.  I still find this question bizarre.  As illiberal as these elite "liberals" are, I fail to see how that should alter my worldview or foundational principles.  I still believe in progressive taxes, robust safety nets, the need for universal healthcare, guaranteed family leave, police reform, and continued efforts to rectify structural inequality (racial, class-based, sex, gender, and otherwise).  I wrote an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in 2016 opposing Trump’s Muslim travel ban.  I’ve helped immigrants naturalize.  I’ve worked on appellate cases for the wrongfully convicted (and the rightfully convicted but over-sentenced).  Today, I represent employees whose wages have been stolen from them, workers who have suffered from discrimination in the workplace, and consumers defrauded by unscrupulous corporations.  I don’t speak the words of the illiberal elite’s new orthodoxy.  My actions make my progressivism clear.

Yet, as long as today’s progressive movement is popularly defined by hyper-proscriptive elites and uber-online ideologues who confuse groupthink with “expert consensus,” disavow reasoning in favor of selectively curated “lived experience” tailored to support the Narrative, obsess over semantics while ignoring the real conditions of adversity, and refuse to consider any modifications to their narrow, deceptively under-educated worldviews, I have little faith in progress.  Nor does simply “joining the other team” solve anything.  In fact, our society would be in even worse shape if the extremes of the right had all of the cultural and economic power that now resides with the illiberal elite on the left. 

After all these years, I still feel homeless. This time I don’t know what to do.

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