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Dialectic Brainwashing is the most conservative form of information control because it uses force to change minds. Propaganda, as we have seen in my last article, can be used by both conservatives and liberals. Both forms of entertainment are really politically apathetic, as they try to distract and provide escape from political and economic realities. Rhetoric is the essence of liberal viewpoints dating all the way back to debate among the classical Greeks. Dialectic was also used among the Greeks. It was used for conservative purposes by Plato and later by Hegel while Marx used dialectic to...

Ronnie McBrayer Jacques Ellul once said, “In a society like ours, it is almost impossible for a person to be held responsible for anything. For each person carries out an individual task disconnected from the whole.” He then illustrated his point by example of a bursting dam.  The dam breaks. A village is washed away. There is incalculable human loss. Who is responsible? No, not “who should be scapegoated?” Just simple responsibility: Whose action or inaction, neglect or incompetence, led to this disaster? In most cases, per Ellul, there is no easy answer to the question. The enginee...

April 1, 2021 We ought to ask ourselves what public schools will look like and feel like once radical educrats and politicos agree to reopen them. I think schools will re-open across the board, but only when our ruling class is good and ready for that. The big question is what the Wuhan-induced closures seem to accomplish for these elites and what sort of school-scape they have envisioned for the future. What will the student body look like? The parents of public-school students? The curriculum? I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think we can infer eight negative outcomes down the pike afte...

Hopelessly polarized though our era in global politics seems, we may be grateful that it pales in comparison with the first half of the twentieth century. What had begun as a rhetorical battle between competing political ideals ended with total war. The tendency for grand political narratives to fanaticize and foster totalitarianism inspired The Open Society and Its Enemies, a famous 1945 book by the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper. The book’s message for us today is that the threat to democratic, “open” societies is not misinformation or ignorance but rather fanatical certain...

The Convivial Society   To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.” — Wendell Berry, “To know the dark” Welcome to the latest installment of the Convivial Society, especially to those of you who are relatively new around here. This is a full newsletter with a longish essay and much else. Also, this time around, I’m not addressing a crisis de jour, and I hope that comes off as a feature rather than a bug. Over this past year, I have found myself writing about current events a good deal mo...