In a 2021 AIER essay, “Liberating Yourself from Faucism,” I wrote: “The issue isn’t Anthony Fauci’s failings. The problem is Faucism, the fantastical belief that wise and beneficent experts should rule.”

Five years later, many remain committed Faucists — not just in support of Dr. Fauci, but in support of the failed idea that Americans should conform to expert rule.

John Stuart Mill would say Faucism took hold because, even before the pandemic, many Americans had already weakened the habits that make liberty possible: independent judgment, moral courage, and resistance to the “tyranny of the prevailing opinion.”

Dr. Scott Atlas, who, during the pandemic, served as a COVID advisor to President Trump, was one of those attacked by Fauci for holding a different view on pandemic policy.

In a recent speech, Atlas argued Fauci didn’t create moral cowardice during the pandemic; he exposed the rot that was already there. Atlas pointed out, “Institutions that existed to protect freedom instead suspended it, and did so not only from the top down, but with the willing compliance — often the enthusiastic compliance — of free people themselves.”

Atlas spoke not to “relitigate grievances… but because the silence that followed the pandemic malfeasance, silence that is still here today, is itself the real danger.”

I share Atlas’s alarm because I see the same moral rot in the unwillingness of many institutions to confront their capture by illiberal forces.

The Tyranny of Conformity

Atlas’s warning is powerful because it points beyond the failures of one official or one policy. It raises the deeper question that Mill spent much of On Liberty answering: What happens to a people when they become accustomed to measuring truth and conscience by the opinion currently rewarded by respectable society?

Mill observed that the impulse to impose our opinions on others “is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature, that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything but want of power.”

When we don’t have coercive power, we constrain ourselves, but that no more proves our character than claiming a person who never drives is a safe driver. We may feel certain about our opinions, but what do we do with those “certain” opinions when we have power over others?

When we think of tyranny, we think of the coercive power of government. But Mill warned that when society itself becomes the tyrant, its means “are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates.” When “penetrating more deeply into the details of life,” such “social tyranny” can be “more formidable than many kinds of political oppression” because “it leaves fewer means of escape.” This tyranny ends up “enslaving the soul itself.”

People stop developing and consulting their moral convictions and instead ask what opinion is required of them in their position. Mill writes that when going down this path of accommodation, “it does not occur to [us] to have any inclination, except for what is customary.” What happens next is that “the mind itself is bowed to the yoke,” until “by dint of not following [our] own nature, [we] have no nature to follow.”

There it is. If you have been wondering how anyone can still carry water for Dr. Fauci, Mill offers a penetrating answer: Prolonged conformity can leave people with little independent moral character to consult when it matters.

Mill is scathing. He argues that those who make no choices but follow “custom” lose their humanity: “The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice.”

Mill reminds us of what should be obvious but to many no longer is: “The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used.”

What Faucism produces is not simply a nation of liars. It is arguably worse because it seems respectable: a nation of people who learn to put private judgment in one compartment and public speech in another.

People shaped by such a regime, Mill says, are “mere conformers to commonplace,” whose arguments on “great subjects are meant for their hearers” rather than drawn from their own convictions. Those who avoid that fate do so by shrinking their attention to small matters that are safe to discuss “without venturing into the region of principles.”

Consider the academic who says one thing in the hallway and another in the faculty meeting; the pediatrician who thought emergency vaccines and masks for children were a potential disaster but still posted the recommended language for public consumption; or the epidemiologist who had doubts about Fauci’s claims but stayed silent.

How to Recover Moral Courage

Liberation begins by recovering the human faculties weakened by conformity: judgment, conscience, and the courage to stand apart.

Don’t wait for others to go first. We increase our moral courage by recognizing our vital duty to humanity. Mill declares, “The mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.”

Be eccentric. Be noticed. Mill argues, “Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.”

Standing against the cheering crowd requires engaging the mind rather than surrendering it, because, as Mill pointedly writes, “He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.”

The Courage to Be Wrong

Dare to be gracefully wrong. Ultimately, the moral courage to stand alone is justified by the immense value of truth-seeking rather than the cheap pleasure of being “right.” I find Mill’s words inspirational:

To discover to the world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant; to prove to it that it had been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow-creatures.

You may have noticed how few people, perhaps including yourself, are capable of being gracefully “wrong.” Our ego equates being wrong with losing its unique identity. Few of us have taken to heart David Hume’s great lesson that, since our self-identity is ephemeral, there is rarely a reason to get defensive about our opinions. We can argue our position, when necessary, but trying to control others to get our way is dysfunctional behavior. Worse still is harming others to get our way.

Beyond Tribal Loyalty

Surrender tribal loyalties in favor of classical liberal principles. Mill recognized that human beings naturally seek the comfort of their sect or party. Those who stood by Dr. Fauci when he proclaimed that criticizing him was “criticizing science” did a disservice to public health. Doctors who approved “transgender body modification requests,” even when doing so went against “their best medical judgment,” irreparably harmed vulnerable teenagers. Prioritizing tribal conformity over humanity is demonstrated by those on the right who ignore antisemitism cloaked in nationalist or conspiratorial rhetoric, or those on the left who ignore it when cloaked in anti-colonial or anti-Zionist rhetoric.

Mill understood that liberty is not sustained merely by laws or institutions; it is sustained by men and women willing to choose moral responsibility over comfortable conformity.

Faucism did not begin with Fauci, and it will not end with him. It will end only when enough people refuse to let prevailing opinion do their thinking for them. The foundation of a free society and a fully human life rests on our commitment to the independent use of conscience.

This essay was originally published at the American Institute for Economic Research.

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Our study of The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis concludes this week with Session 8. The next program at Mindset Shifts U will be announced next week.

We are again reminded to watch our minds with non-judgmental awareness and willingly bring our egoic selves to the Light; so that by grace, the illusions of our dark side begin to dissolve.

Right at the start of Letter 27, Screwtape instructs Wormwood in how to use distractions that cross the mind of his praying patient:

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David McCullough Jr. is a high school English teacher and the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough. In 2012, his “You Are Not Special” graduation speech went viral. His speech is more relevant than ever, and not just for new graduates.

McCullough tells the graduates, “You are not special. You are not exceptional.” He continues,

Contrary to what your U-9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you… you’re nothing special.

Imagine what McCullough might say to a group of adults: Contrary to what your job title or the size of your house suggests, despite your Diamond Medallion status on Delta Airlines, your platinum status at Marriott, and no matter that you are the only person in your neighborhood to drive a Tesla X SUV…you’re nothing special.  

Putting us in our place, McCullough exhorts, “Your planet, I’ll remind you, is not the center of its solar system, your solar system is not the center of its galaxy, your galaxy is not the center of the universe. In fact, astrophysicists assure us the universe has no center; therefore, you cannot be it.”

We can all recall a time when we put ourselves at the center of the universe. We may have felt frustration when the traffic on the highway didn’t part like the Red Sea. We may have become indignant while sitting in a crowded physician’s waiting room, not knowing a genuine emergency has caused the delay.       

Most people we encounter today will treat us like the ordinary person we are. Meeting our goals may be the most important thing in the world to us, but not to them.

Know What Is Important

About goals: Do we even know what is important?  McCullough believes we have “come to love accolades more than genuine achievement.”

When accolades become “the point,” McCullough cautions, “We’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole.”

Echoing the wisdom of Viktor Frankl, McCullough points out that the path to fulfillment is never direct: “Like accolades ought to be, the fulfilling life is a consequence, a gratifying byproduct. It’s what happens when you’re thinking about [and doing] more important things.”

A purpose beyond self-aggrandizement leads to the good life. McCullough advises, “Exercise free will and creative, independent thought not for the satisfactions they will bring you, but for the good they will do others, the rest of the 6.8 billion—and those who will follow them.”

We can’t lead a meaningful life when our mind is full of look at me thoughts of specialness.

Taking Action

What do we when we find ourselves thinking and acting in ways to reinforce our specialness?

In his book, One Small Step Can Change Your Life, psychologist Robert Maurer applies kaizen, a Japanese organizational development strategy, to personal change. To change, rather than relying on easily depleted willpower or overly ambitious targets that set you up for failure, deploy small steps. Maurer writes, 

Small actions take very little time or money, and they are agreeable even to those of us who haven’t laid up bulk supplies of willpower. Small actions trick the brain into thinking: Hey, this change is so tiny that it’s no big deal. No need to get worked up. No risk of failure or unhappiness here. By outfoxing the fear response, small actions allow the brain to build up new, permanent habits— at a pace that may be surprisingly brisk.

Suppose your specialness takes the form of overspending. Maurer prescribes, as a first step, taking one item out of your shopping cart. Suppose you are too special to tidy your home? Maurer recommends tidying up for just 5 minutes.

Maurer assures us, “By taking steps so tiny that they seem trivial or laughable, you’ll sail past obstacles that have defeated you before.”

Kaizen is a method of change for those who are willing to give up being special. No sweeping changes, no grandiose plans, just simple, small actions that will compound into a purposeful life. 

Special people don’t take simple, small steps. Instead, they craft grand plans. One year later, while sitting on the couch, they may see nothing has changed and blame the world for its failure to recognize their greatness.

Start Before You’re Ready

When we give in to our need to be special, we have no one to blame for the lack of fulfillment we experience. Self-aggrandizement leads only to temporary highs. McCullough said,

The fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life, is an achievement, not something that fell into your lap because you’re a nice person or Mommy ordered it from the caterer. You’ll note the founding fathers took pains to secure your inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—quite an active word, pursuit—which leaves, I should think, little time for lying around watching parrots roller-skate on YouTube.

There will never be a better moment to pivot away from being special. In his book Do the Work, Steven Pressfield observes how our thinking will derail us if we let it: “The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications, and a million reasons why we can’t/ shouldn’t/ won’t do what we know we need to do.”

Since our desire to be special will come again and our mind will always be able to make excuses, Pressfield advises, “Start before you’re ready.”

The world may or may not acknowledge what you achieve, but “the fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life” will be yours.

This essay was initially published at Intellectual Takeout.

In this fragmented world, a universal religion is impossible, but I think a universal experience of God is possible.

This week, in Letter 23, Lewis mentions Jesus for the only time in The Screwtape Letters. I could ignore the mention since, for some, the name is controversial, or I can try to add a bit of value to your reading. I’ll ask for your indulgence as I try my best to do the latter.

When we think of Jesus, many of us immediately think of Jesus Christ. That is natural, but it can also make the word Christ feel narrower than Lewis’s larger concern: how easily the ego shrinks transcendent reality into a usable image.

Richard Rohr is an American Franciscan priest who has written multiple books. In The Universal Christ, Rohr points to the universality of the word Christ as he asks,

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Elizabeth Gilbert’s mega-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, has inspired millions towards a journey of self-discovery. C.S. Lewis might wonder how much of that discovery was guided by Screwtape and what self is being discovered.

Many believe Gilbert is wise. Gilbert made the Time Magazine list of 100 most influential people in the world, and she was named to Oprah’s SuperSoul 100 list of visionaries and influential leaders.

In Eat Pray Love, Gilbert shares what she has learned about happiness:

Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

Gilbert’s idea of “fighting” and “striving” for happiness is popular. Over 1600 fans of Eat Pray Love quote this passage approvingly at GoodReads.com, the social cataloging website for books. While this idea of "fighting and striving" for bliss has been shared in millions of online searches, it perfectly taps into a self-focused cultural zeitgeist that values being true to one's desires above any rules, restrictions, or commitments. Gilbert’s ideas are popular, but many popular ideas are wrong.

Gilbert would have us believe there is a direct path to happiness that each of us can navigate. In Gilbert’s case, today’s right partner or circumstance may be replaced by a better one tomorrow, as one reaches for more happiness. But Gilbert’s path to happiness is misdirected. A bottomless appetite seeking better circumstances is antithetical to happiness.

Eli Finkel is a psychology professor at Northwestern University. In his book The All or Nothing Marriage, Finkel explains how Gilbert taps into our “cultural zeitgeist—the contemporary American hunger for a life that is true to the self rather than beholden to rules and restrictions.”

Finkel points out that at the beginning of Eat Pray Love, Gilbert is “married to a loving, decent” man and “knows it,” but “settling for love and decency doesn’t feel like an option for [her].”

In Eat Pray Love, Gilbert claims to find happiness and her true self. She falls in love with José Nunes (called Felipe in the book) a Brazilian-Australian importer. In her follow-up book to Eat Pray Love, Committed, Gilbert marries Nunes; she presumably lives happily ever after. Not so fast. In 2016, she left Nunes for Rayya Elias.

As Finkel points out, “This is the second time Gilbert has divorced an impressive and appealing partner who generally treated their relationship with respect and dignity.” Finkel adds:

Fairy tales and romantic comedies often depict getting married at the end of the story—the beginning of the happily-ever after. From the perspective of a relationship scientist, such stories are more farce than romance. Building a happy marriage requires that spouses successfully navigate a dense thicket of challenges and opportunities, frequently without a good map of the route ahead.

Finkel is rightly concerned about the mindset we bring to our marriages. He cautions, “Just as we have increasingly looked to our marriage to help us fulfill higher-level needs, we have decreasingly invested the time and energy required for the marriage to meet these expectations.”

In a 2015 New York Times essay “Confessions of a Seduction Addict,” Gilbert confesses that in her youth she “careened from one intimate [non-monogamous] entanglement to the next — dozens of them — without so much as a day off between romances.”

“Sex was just the gateway drug,” she writes. Gilbert was after “seduction”:

Seduction is the art of coercing somebody to desire you, of orchestrating somebody else’s longings to suit your own hungry agenda. Seduction was never a casual sport for me; it was more like a heist, adrenalizing and urgent. I would plan the heist for months, scouting out the target, looking for unguarded entries. Then I would break into his deepest vault, steal all his emotional currency and spend it on myself.

“Steal…emotional currency and spend it on myself?” What can be more vicious? Is this a journey of spiritual awakening, or is it a form of emotional cannibalism, trying to consume others to fill a void we refuse to face inside ourselves?

Gilbert claims to be past such foolishness. But notice, her mindset seems to be unchanged. She’s sleeping with fewer people, but she is still seeking happiness through external means. Like all of us, with such a mindset we become emotional cannibals, trying to steal from others what we think we don’t have inside.

Rather than rely on Gilbert’s facile but flawed narrative as a path for self-discovery and happiness why not study the real masters?

Examine the purpose of your life, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl would recommend. Life demands of us “right action and right conduct,” writes Frankl in one of the most profound books of the 20th century, Man’s Search for Meaning. Drawing on his experiences as a prisoner in concentration camps, Frankl observes, “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” “What [is] really needed [is] a fundamental change in our attitude toward life.”

In a book filled with wisdom, perhaps the most famous passage from Man’s Search for Meaning is a prescription for Gilbert and for all of us:

Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run — in the long run, I say! — success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

Happiness and success will “follow” us when we live by “right action and conduct.” Stop seeking happiness. Live by a higher purpose.

Frankl’s advice is a real prescription for a happier life and a better world. To find real joy, we do not need to travel the world demanding more; we must undergo a fundamental revolution in our attitude, shifting our focus from what we can take from life to what life expects from us.

A version of this essay was originally published at Intellectual Takeout.

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This week Lewis teaches us lessons about love; lessons he taught in his many other books, too.

We don’t have to wait too long to encounter mistaken ideas about love. Perhaps you have watched an episode of Love is Blind or Love Island?

“Reality” show contestants are looking for love, but most seem to hold mistaken beliefs about the nature of love.

If love is understood primarily as a feeling to secure, then the rest of a relationship becomes a test of whether that feeling stays intense. If love is understood as a capacity to practice being loving, then what comes after falling in love is not disappointment but attention, discipline, sacrifice, and growth.

With their attention riveted on who would make them happy and fulfill their needs, the contestants express their feelings to each other and the camera:

You are the one who has the power to define my fate.

You were made in a factory, put together for me.

He assured me that I will always make him happy, no matter what.

I’ve waited so long to find the perfect person.

I love the way he makes me feel.

Contestants endlessly dissect and measure both their feelings and those of their partner, asking questions like, “Do you still feel the same way you did last night about me?”

In past sessions on Constructive Living, David Reynold taught that feelings are not meant to be the control center of our lives. Before we apply that lesson to love, let’s briefly review his five principles about feelings.

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The most dangerous bureaucrats are not always those who know they are doing wrong. Sometimes they are those who persuade themselves that deceit, coercion, and cruelty are justified because they serve a higher good.

During the pandemic, University of California professor of medicine Dr. Vinay Prasad warned that public-health officials were sacrificing credibility by hiding uncomfortable facts, issuing misleading guidance, and making claims that could not withstand scrutiny:

Throughout the pandemic, public-health officials have omitted uncomfortable truths, made misleading statements, and advanced demonstrably false assertions. In the information era, where what one says is easily accessible and anyone may read primary literature, these falsehoods will be increasingly recognized and severely damage the field’s credibility.

Prasad wrote, “We must carefully remove the power we have granted public health, which has often been misused.”

When Prasad wrote those words, he did not yet know the full extent of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s deceptions; the latest revelation is that Fauci withheld information about vaccine risks to pregnant women.

In Vasily Grossman’s great Russian novel Life and Fate, two scientists discuss their frustration with a highly politicized bureaucracy, where a political error could lead to a purge. Of the bureaucrat currently in charge of their lab, one scientist says, “he’s not such a bad type.” Grossman then offers the lesson: “By the way, do you know the difference between a good type and a bad type? A good type is someone who behaves swinishly in spite of himself!”

Generalized beyond Grossman’s scene, the lesson is that bureaucracies can reward people for betraying the public trust. Employees may feel uneasy about what they are doing, but the institution can still make wrongdoing appear routine, necessary, or even virtuous.

Among the most horrifying passages in Life and Fate are those in which Grossman describes what went into building the gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps. Hitler, Himmler, and Eichmann did not pluck these horrors from thin air. Gas chambers were not products sold in the marketplace. They required thousands of coordinated actions by a bureaucracy and military willing to follow insane and criminal orders. Tens of thousands of educated people had to obey, design, transport, calculate, record, and enforce.

Grossman illustrates this machinery through Obersturmbannführer Liss’s visit to the Voss engineering works:

The Voss works had been entrusted with an important part of the order and Liss was satisfied with their work. The directors had devoted considerable thought to the project and were keeping precisely to the specifications. The mechanical engineers had improved the construction of the conveyors, and the thermal technicians had developed a more economical system for heating the ovens.

Grossman then widens the indictment, showing that the process depended not only on party officials and soldiers but also on educated specialists who lent technical competence to evil:

Liss refused an invitation to observe the experiments being conducted in the laboratory. He did, however, look through pages of records signed by various physiologists, chemists and biochemists. He also met the young researchers responsible for the experiments: a physiologist and a biochemist (both women), a specialist in pathological anatomy, a chemist who specialized in organic compounds with a low boiling-point, and Professor Fischer himself, the toxicologist who was in charge of the group.

Still, much more was needed. Grossman explains:

A railway track had been laid down, leading directly off the main line to the construction site. The tour of inspection began with the depots alongside the railway line. First, under an awning, was the sorting depot. This was filled with component parts of a variety of machines, tubes and pipes of every diameter, unassembled conveyor belts, fans and ventilators, ball-mills for human bones, gas and electricity meters soon to be mounted on control panels, drums of cable, cement, tip-wagons, heaps of rails, and office furniture.

Grossman continues with construction details and descriptions of those who kept the camps running. One such figure is Private Roze, whose job was “to watch through the inspection-window”; when the killing was complete, he ordered the gas chamber emptied and checked that the dentists worked “efficiently and honestly.” Those dentists were extracting gold dental work from the murdered:

At the end of each day one of the dentists would hand Roze a small packet containing several gold crowns. Although this represented only an insignificant fraction of the precious metal taken every day to the camp authorities, Roze had twice handed over almost a kilo of gold to his wife. This was their bright future, their dream of a peaceful old age. As a young man, Roze had been weak and timid, unable to play an active part in life’s struggle. He had never doubted that the Party had set itself one aim only: the well-being of the small and weak. He had already experienced the benefits of Hitler’s policies; life had improved immeasurably for him and his family.

The Party looked out for “the small and weak,” Roze reasoned. If his conscience was pricked, he could tell himself, I am not a criminal; I am merely serving the “common good.” Grossman writes, “People struggling for their particular good always attempt to dress it up as a universal good. They say: my good coincides with the universal good; my good is essential not only to me but to everyone; in achieving my good, I serve the universal good.”

When people comply with bureaucratic orders to commit unimaginable atrocities, they can rationalize away their criminality by appealing to the common good. Grossman writes, “The air is full of the groans and cries of the condemned. The sky has turned black; the sun has been extinguished by the smoke of the gas ovens. And even these crimes, crimes never before seen in the Universe—even by Man on Earth—have been committed in the name of good.”

There are no gas chambers in America, and it is unlikely there ever will be. The point is not equivalence; it is that public institutions, when granted extralegal power and shielded from accountability, can divide citizens into the obedient and disobedient, the clean and unclean, and then treat coercion as moral duty.

As with Private Roze, many who cooperated with Dr. Fauci and the COVID bureaucracy benefited from the continuation of the crisis. Some had professional, political, or financial incentives to perpetuate emergency conditions. Musa al-Gharbi, a sociology fellow at Columbia University, observed why many academics and bureaucrats were reluctant to let COVID recede:

A constellation of scholars, bureaucrats and pundits seem invested in COVID remaining a “crisis” indefinitely. As the political scientist Oren Cass put it, many have been granted more money, prestige and institutional power than they have ever had in the wake of the pandemic. For them, a “return to normal” would mean a return to being largely ignored and exerting marginal influence over society. It would mean losing new revenue streams they have grown accustomed to, and so on. In light of this reality, it is perfectly natural that many experts, administrators and “talking heads” would be disinclined to return to “normal” – loss aversion is a powerful cognitive bias. However, recognizing these impulses as banal (rather than nefarious) does not render them unproblematic. They can skew policymaking and expert advice towards continued invasive policies and a continued sense of panic in ways that are excessive and pernicious.

The danger is not only that institutions reward dishonesty. It is also that they teach us to treat silence as prudence. Once professional advancement, social approval, or institutional loyalty depends on not saying what one sees, the lie no longer requires only active liars; it requires the quiet cooperation of people who know better.

Of Stalin’s crimes, Grossman shows how silence enabled lies and horrors: “We remained silent in 1937 when thousands of innocent people were executed. Or rather some of us—the best of us—remained silent. Others applauded noisily. And we remained silent during the horrors of general collectivization.” If the “best of us” remain silent when institutions lie, then the battle for freedom has already been badly compromised.

While we wait for others to wake up, Grossman believed we can choose “everyday human kindness.” “Ordinary people bear love in their hearts,” he wrote, and “are naturally full of love and pity for any living thing. At the end of the day’s work they prefer the warmth of the hearth to a bonfire in the public square.” Kindness, Grossman adds, “is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!”

Life is not evil, but bureaucracies will be cruel when power is unchecked, and conscience is subordinated to institutional loyalty. Grossman’s warning is that ordinary people can help make evil and cruelty look virtuous to some. Despite being lionized by celebrities, much of the public, the medical industry, and the news media, Dr. Fauci will be remembered as one of the cruelest American bureaucrats in history.

Wednesday’s essay pairs very well with Session 5.

If you have read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, you may have thought of Tolle’s book when you read Letter 15. You may have also thought of our previous work with Oliver Burkeman or the Stoics and on and on.

That’s not a surprise. Lewis’s idea that the “Present” is the portal to eternity is a mainstay idea in the perennial philosophy.

Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations 3.10, “Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already or is impossible to see. The span we live is small—small as the corner of the earth in which we live it.”

Marcus, like almost all of us, found it easy to ignore his mortality. In Meditations 4.17, he again reminded himself “not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you.”

Lewis wants to help us live that truth and not merely remember it as a nice saying. And that is easier said than done. Marcus wrote in 9.6, “Objective judgment, now, at this very moment. Unselfish action, now, at this very moment. Willing acceptance—now, at this very moment—of all external events. That’s all you need.”

All we need? Many times, it doesn’t feel that way, and that is what trips us up. When it seems that something else is needed, we consult the past and project into the future, and we become incapable of right action now.

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This is an expanded version of an essay first published in 2025. It pairs perfectly with Session 5 of The Screwtape Letters, which is coming on Saturday.

This photo was taken on August 2, 2025, from an unpaved country lane in New Hampshire, USA. These scenes are common in New England, but perhaps because of the remoteness of the location, the transcendent beauty stopped my mind in its tracks. I felt like I had stepped into an Andrew Wyeth painting. My mind imagined for an instant Wyeth’s neighbor, Christina, no longer crippled, walking in the fields.

Later in her life, when Christina could no longer even crawl in the field in front of her house, she would see Wyeth’s painting in her mind’s eye: "Andy put me where he knew I wanted to be. Now that I can’t be there anymore, all I do is think of that picture, and I’m there."

We are spiritual crawlers, and on the days we are so broken that we can’t even crawl, authors like Lewis get us back in our field. That is why we do our work at Mindset Shifts U.

Whether we are aware of it or not, we are always searching for transcendence; when we get glimpses of it, our minds still and are at rest. Those still feelings enveloped me the rest of the day; gratitude for all that I am blessed with but didn’t create was the natural emotion that arose. The dinner my wife made for me that evening never tasted more exquisite, and the qualities of the fresh-picked vegetables from her garden were never more palpable.

The scene I witnessed had nothing to do—but everything to do—with my state of mind. We all know that the stillness we seek is not dependent on something external. We have “ordinary” moments throughout the day when we sink into that peace and see that it is not dependent on an object. Yet the beauty we seem to experience outside us is a representation of the beauty that is inside of us. The beauty and our mind are one.

Our work is not to seek this transcendence directly but to become more aware of our internal barriers to experiencing what is always there. Peak experiences occur within the mind when it slows; nothing special is needed.

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Oliver Burkeman is a contemporary author whose book, Four Thousand Weeks, pointed us to a liberating mindset about time when we studied his book at Mindset Shifts U:

The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.

Burkeman didn’t give us more to do; he gave us a framework for subtracting what was in the way.

In her classic of children’s literature, Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt opens with this evocative line, “The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.”

Babbit continues, “The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.”

Tuck Everlasting tells the story of the Tuck family, who stop aging after drinking from a magical spring. The Tucks seem to be living the transhumanist dream, but perpetual living teaches them otherwise.

Burkeman presents the alternative to absurd transhumanist fantasies:

Seeing and accepting our limited powers over our time can prompt us to question the very idea that time is something you use in the first place. There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.

Winnie Foster is Tuck Everlasting’s protagonist—she has to decide whether to drink the spring’s waters. The patriarch of the Tuck family is not enamored by his eternal life. He explains to Winnie that in nature, nothing stays the same:

“Know what that is, all around us, Winnie?” said Tuck, his voice low. “Life. Moving, growing, changing, never the same two minutes together. This water, you look out at it every morning, and it looks the same, but it ain’t. All night long it’s been moving, coming in through the stream back there to the west, slipping out through the stream down east here, always quiet, always new, moving on. You can’t hardly see the current, can you?... But it’s always there, the water’s always moving on, and someday, after a long while, it comes to the ocean.”

Eternal life is not part of nature, Tuck explains: “Everything’s a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way it is.”

Tuck laments being stuck off the “wheel”: “That’s what us Tucks are, Winnie. Stuck so’s we can’t move on. We ain’t part of the wheel no more. Dropped off, Winnie. Left behind. And everywhere around us, things is moving and growing and changing.”

Burkeman would say what good is living forever if we are not using time wisely:

Most of us invest a lot of energy, one way or another, in trying to avoid fully experiencing the reality in which we find ourselves. We don’t want to feel the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path, or what ideas about ourselves it could be time to give up.

Tuck adds, “Dying’s part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can’t pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that’s the blessing.”

Without dying, there is no living. Tuck learned, “So you can’t call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.”

What you think about the “wheel” and “being part of the whole thing” determines the quality of each day of your life. Burkeman advises we improve the quality of our day by recognizing the FOMO mindset that drives our behavior. We live fully when we realize we will miss out:

Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.

Followers of the transhumanist movement believe humans will achieve super-longevity and, perhaps one day, live forever.

Ray Kurzweil, the author of books predicting a coming technological “singularity,” is perhaps the most prominent transhumanist.

The singularity refers to the date machines obtain human intelligence; Kurzweil sees that happening by 2045. Kurzweil foresees people “merging with the [machine] intelligence we have created.”

Followers active in the movement, like Kurzweil, take an unfathomable number of nutritional supplements each day. Those supplements, transhumanists believe, slow the aging process. Forestalling aging allows time for science to kick in, allowing them to achieve immortality. Some transhumanists believe their consciousness will be uploaded into a machine or a new body, perhaps even a younger cloned version of themselves.  

The transhumanist movement is based on the premise that the seat of our consciousness is in our brains. Are our thoughts nothing more than a bunch of “electrochemical reactions” as our brain neurons send their signals?

Scientists have never been able to prove the brain is the seat of consciousness. Some scientists hypothesize that consciousness is non-local, residing “in  a field surrounding the brain in another dimension.” Such theories posit the “body [is] a conduit and a collaborator with consciousness.”  

If consciousness is not located in the brain, those dreaming of endlessly downloading their essence into better bodies will never have their dreams of longevity fulfilled. They have been seduced by the prevailing fantasy that consciousness arises from matter.

On a related issue, in this short video, one of the leading computer scientists and philosophers on the nature of consciousness, Bernardo Kastrup, explains why AI can never become conscious. Kastrup's worldview begins with the understanding that consciousness didn’t arise from matter. Kastrup has pointedly said “the chance that a silicon computer will be conscious is just about the same as the chance that my computer will pee on my desk if I run an accurate simulation of kidney function on it.”

But is the dream of perpetual life a good one in the first place? Perhaps transhumanists have a distorted understanding of the meaning of life.

Transhumanists would be aghast at the idea that their goal is to be “like rocks beside the road.” Yet, if they want to differ from the “whole thing,” separated from all of life, will their dream of specialness be a blessing or a curse? Tuck Everlasting provokes us to reflect on what living really means. Living is to make meaning by focusing on what truly matters.

Today, are we using time wisely? Perhaps, for example, anxiety is in the way. Our goal is not to live without anxiety but to create meaning even when anxiety is present. Burkeman explains:

James Hollis recommends asking of every significant decision in life: “Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?” The question circumvents the urge to make decisions in the service of alleviating anxiety and instead helps you make contact with your deeper intentions for your time.

The first week of August is a fine time to experience the beauty that arises as our mind stills.

If I believed that my life would last forever, I could never take my life to be at stake, and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my time.

—Martin Hägglund

As Tuck Everlasting closes, a “toad was squatting in the middle of the road, quite unconcerned. In the other lane, a pickup truck rattled by, and against the breeze it made, the toad shut its eyes tightly. But it did not move.”

“Tuck waited till the truck had passed, and then he picked up the toad and carried it to the weeds along the road’s edge. ‘Durn fool thing must think it’s going to live forever.’”

On Saturday, we will continue our work with C.S. Lewis, who did his best to help us rise above our foolhardy ego.

In my leadership workshops and MBA classes, I used The Heart Aroused by the poet David Whyte. Whyte brought his evocative poetry into the business community and, in the process, helped many people see beyond the script their egos have made for their lives. In The Heart Aroused, he quotes a participant in his workshop for AT&T managers: “Ten years ago, I turned my face for a moment, and it became my life.”

Whyte reveals that as the manager read her regrets, the room was “stricken with silence.” He adds, “We have patience for everything but what is most important to us… We turn our face for a moment and tell ourselves we will be sure to get back to it.”

We may lack courage to follow our path, yet we don’t abandon it either. Then ten years later, in Whyte’s words, “we wonder what in God’s name has happened to us.”

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Whatever Rand Paul draws out of Dr. Anthony Fauci in the Senate today, Fauci’s admirers are unlikely to reconsider their faith in him. To them, he remains less a fallible public official than a secular saint of science.

Paul has exposed a side of Dr. Fauci that his admirers prefer not to see: the narcissism of a public official who became accustomed to applause, deference, and celebrity treatment. From Dr. Fauci’s diary:

Big front page article about me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable person in the world. (The misspellings and the arrogance are both Fauci’s)

Yes, Dr. Fauci has the emotional IQ of an eight-year-old, which would be only his problem if he didn’t use the coercive power of government to harm millions of Americans as well as destroy countless businesses.

That is the personal vanity side of the story. The deeper problem is institutional: once government officials are treated as arbiters of scientific truth, dissent becomes a political offense rather than a normal part of inquiry. The issue was never only Fauci; it was the state power that allowed one official consensus to become compulsory.

Barbara Streisand was one of Fauci’s true believers. “Streisand expressed her appreciation for his ‘constant guidance, patience and reassurance.’”

Streisand reportedly even reached out to Fauci directly for medical advice, including whether she and her husband James Brolin should get COVID-19 boosters. The episode is small, but it captures the larger habit of treating Fauci as a private oracle rather than a public servant whose authority should be questioned.

When bad medicine is not backed by state power, its destructive force is limited. The worst scientists in the world can advance their ideas and yet cause little harm if others are free to reject those ideas and experiment with other pathways. As Karl Popper pointed out, errors are corrected by “conjecture and refutation.” Human beings can be vicious in defending their position, and when the vicious and incompetent deploy the power of government, errors are compounded with deadly consequences.    

History is clear about the terrible consequences when state power decides science; millions of lives have been lost. Sam Kean reports on deadly science under Stalin. The science of genetics was dismissed as contrary to Marxist doctrine; Stalin preferred the theories of Trofim Lysenko.

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet-era “biologist,” a crackpot, and one of the biggest mass-murderers in history. Kean relates, “Lysenko promoted the Marxist idea that the environment alone shapes plants and animals. Put them in the proper setting and expose them to the right stimuli, he declared, and you can remake them to an almost infinite degree.” Lysenko was sure he could grow orange trees in Siberia.

Kean describes Lysenko’s method: “Lysenko began to ‘educate’ Soviet crops to sprout at different times of the year by soaking them in freezing water, among other practices. He then claimed that future generations of crops would remember these environmental cues and, even without being treated themselves, would inherit the beneficial traits.” 

Sounds insane? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago, Vol 1, gives an example of Lysenko at work:

In 1934 Pskov agronomists sowed flax on the snow—exactly as Lysenko had ordered. The seeds swelled up, grew moldy, and died. The big fields lay empty for a year. Lysenko could not say that the snow was a kulak or that he himself was an ass. He accused the agronomists of being kulaks and of distorting his technology. And the agronomists went off to Siberia.

If Lysenko had been born in America, few people would have even heard his insane theories. But Lysenko had the power of Stalin behind him. Stalin was looking for an answer to famines caused by his collectivization policies. Kean writes: 

In the late 1920s and early 1930s Joseph Stalin—with Lysenko’s backing—had instituted a catastrophic scheme to “modernize” Soviet agriculture, forcing millions of people to join collective, state-run farms. Widespread crop failure and famine resulted. Stalin refused to change course, however, and ordered Lysenko to remedy the disaster with methods based on his radical new ideas. Lysenko forced farmers to plant seeds very close together, for instance, since according to his “law of the life of species,” plants from the same “class” never compete with one another. He also forbade all use of fertilizers and pesticides.

In the novel Everything Flows, the great Soviet-era novelist Vasily Grossman sarcastically refers to Lysenko as “the famous agronomist” who resorted to “police methods.” Kean explains the consequences of these police methods:

Unable to silence Western critics, Lysenko still tried to eliminate all dissent within the Soviet Union. Scientists who refused to renounce genetics found themselves at the mercy of the secret police. The lucky ones simply got dismissed from their posts and were left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were rounded up and dumped into prisons or psychiatric hospitals. Several got sentenced to death as enemies of the state or, fittingly, starved in their jail cells (most notably the botanist Nikolai Vavilov). Before the 1930s, the Soviet Union had arguably the best genetics community in the world. Lysenko gutted it, and by some accounts set Russian biology back a half-century.

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You would be wrong if you think sanity was restored quickly after Stalin died. In her biography of Grossman, Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century, Alexandra Popoff writes, “In fact, many of the opportunists and denouncers who drove talented people out of the sciences and other spheres of life maintained their key position in the post-Stalinist era.”

You will miss the point if you think the horrors of Lysenkoism are merely due to the wrong people being in power. The horrors of science dictated by central planners are not, as Friedrich Hayek writes in The Road to Serfdom, “mere accidental by-products which have nothing to do with the essential character of a planned or totalitarian system.” 

Better people in charge won’t prevent the worst. Hayek explains, “Once science has to serve, not truth, but the interests of a class, a community, or a state, the sole task of argument and discussion is to vindicate and to spread still further the beliefs by which the whole life of the community is directed.” 

Fauci and Lysenko are similar in mindset. Both demonstrated intolerance to challenges to their ideas and eagerly deployed government coercion. The significant difference between these two is that Fauci operated in a system with more checks on his power.

Intellectual intolerance of challenging ideas is not a recent phenomenon. The Road to Serfdom was published in 1944, and already intellectuals espousing collectivist ideas were enabling the burning of ideas in “free” societies:

Perhaps the most alarming fact is that contempt for intellectual liberty is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system is established but one which can be found everywhere among intellectuals who have embraced a collectivist faith and who are acclaimed as intellectual leaders even in countries still under a liberal regime. Not only is even the worst oppression condoned if it is committed in the name of socialism, and the creation of a totalitarian system openly advocated by people who pretend to speak for the scientists of liberal countries; intolerance, too, is openly extolled. 

“Truth,” Hayek explains, is redefined by the intolerant. No longer “something to be found,” truth “becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of the organized effort and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it.”

“Complete cynicism” crowds out “the spirit of independent inquiry and of the belief in the power of rational conviction.” Abandoned is the principle that “individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief.”

Like Lysenkoism, Faucism, CDC science, FDA science, and HHS science displayed the characteristics of totalitarianism that Hayek warns of. The odds are vanishingly small that any of today’s totalitarian “scientists” but Hayek anticipated their playbook:

1. “The whole apparatus for spreading knowledge— the schools and the press, radio and motion picture—will be used exclusively to spread those views which, whether true or false, will strengthen the belief in the rightness of the decisions taken by the authority; and all information that might cause doubt or hesitation will be withheld.

2. The probable effect on the people’s loyalty to the system becomes the only criterion for deciding whether a particular piece of information is to be published or suppressed.

3. Everything which might cause doubt about the wisdom of the government or create discontent will be kept from the people. 

4. The basis of unfavorable comparisons with conditions elsewhere, the knowledge of possible alternatives to the course actually taken, information which might suggest failure on the part of the government to live up to its promises or to take advantage of opportunities to improve conditions—all will be suppressed.” 

During the pandemic, the United States went further down the road to serfdom. Here is the question that should haunt us all: Why were there so few doctors who stood up to Dr. Fauci?

During the pandemic, Johns Hopkins medical professor Marty Makary and Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg reported on “relentless” calls they receive from “doctors and scientists at the top levels of the NIH, FDA and CDC.” These professionals “are variously frustrated, exasperated and alarmed about the direction of the agencies to which they have devoted their careers.”

One senior FDA official said, “It’s like a horror movie I’m being forced to watch and I can’t close my eyes. People are getting bad advice and we can’t say anything.”

The official was referring to the authorization, without clinical evidence, of “Covid vaccines for infants and toddlers” and “booster shots for young children.”

No official would go on record, yet they are haunted by the impact of political decisions on vaccines, school closures, and masks, especially on children.

One official put it this way: “I can’t tell you how many people at the FDA have told me, ‘I don’t like any of this, but I just need to make it to my retirement.’” 

Yet, when we are tempted to sit in judgment of the decisions made by others who acquiesce to totalitarian forces, consider this universal story told by David Whyte in his book The Heart Aroused:

A man I know finds himself in a meeting room at the very edge of speech; he is approaching his moment of reckoning, he is looking for support from his fellow executives around the table … the CEO is pacing up and down on the slate gray carpet. He has asked, in no uncertain terms, for their opinion of the plan he wants to put through. “I want to know what you all think about this,” he demands, “on a scale of one to ten.” 

Whyte explained the CEO is testy and has made it plain by his behavior that he wants to hear “ten.” Whyte’s friend thinks the plan is terrible and has heard that other executives in the room think so too. As the CEO goes around the room, Whyte’s friend hears his fellow executives say “ten.” When it is his turn, “against everything he believes, (Whyte’s friend) hears a mouselike, faraway voice, his own, saying ‘ten’.”

Solzhenitsyn observed, “Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.” The courage to say “one” is cultivated through sustained practice. There are consequences, to yourself and others, of saying “ten.” 

Freedom cannot survive when too few people say “one” to those who are drunk on power.

The courageous voice that says “one” exists in every human being. That voice lies dormant until we value the voice. The tyrants in our midst are counting on human weakness to follow the voice that says “ten.”

Portions of this essay were originally published at the American Institute for Economic Research.

If you want to tame your own voice that says “ten,” our work at Mindset Shifts U will assist. Right now, we are in the early sessions of our work with The Screwtape Letters.

Wormwood has written to report what he thinks is good news. His patient’s religious phase, he says, is “dying away.” The early warmth has gone out of it. The man still goes through the motions, but in a low mood. Wormwood, being young, thinks the patient has accepted defeat.

Screwtape’s reply in Letter 8 is withering. He begins by insulting his nephew’s education and then asks a question that stops us in our tracks: “Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?”

In explaining the law to Wormwood, Screwtape reveals why dying-away periods are not evidence that the spiritual life has failed. They are the conditions under which a person begins to choose apart from mood.

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In Goethe’s 1797 poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the apprentice, alone in his master’s house, wants to multiply himself to shirk his work. He enchants a broom to fetch water from the well so he will not have to. The broom, lacking any cognitive abilities or self-awareness, executes the command relentlessly.

When the apprentice tries to stop it, he discovers he does not know the deactivation spell. He chops the broom in two, and now there are two brooms mindlessly fetching water. The house floods.

Delegation to a thing without cognitive or moral understanding can’t multiply the self, but it does amplify a part of the self that gave the order.

Despite adaptations of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in popular culture, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and many others seem to have missed the lesson. They have their own fantasies about reducing their workload and extending control.

Mark Zuckerberg believes an AI representation of himself can be his “broom,” and reportedly, Meta is developing “a photorealistic, three-dimensional AI avatar.” Trained on Zuckerberg’s mannerisms, remarks, and corporate strategies, this avatar is designed to interact with Meta employees, answering questions and offering managerial guidance on his behalf.

Similarly, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Block, laid off a massive portion of his workforce and expressed a desire to use an AI “intelligence layer” to completely flatten the management hierarchy. Dorsey envisions a scenario in which middle management is eliminated, and all 6,000 employees report directly to him via an AI intermediary.

Flattening an organization may be an admirable goal, yielding adaptive outcomes. But will AI get you there? (And is it even necessary? Decades before AI, W.L. Gore and Associates, of Gore-Tex fame, began reaping the benefits of a hierarchy-free organization, and they are still going strong.)

Can Machines Be Conscious

The work of Federico Faggin, the pioneering physicist and inventor of the first commercial microprocessor, provides a scientific and philosophical rebuttal to the idea that AI could ever serve as a genuine leader.

When Zuckerberg and Dorsey attempt to replace human managers with an “intelligence layer,” they are replacing human understanding with blind algorithmic execution. Faggin explains in his book Irreducible “that unconscious matter cannot produce consciousness.”

Faggin argues that human intelligence is superior because it depends on genuine comprehension, a “non-algorithmic property of consciousness that computers can never possess.” Machines may process data faster, but, in his view, “true intelligence is the ability to comprehend,” which means “to go beyond the immediate meaning of symbols” by grasping their broader context. True intelligence remains beyond the reach of a machine.

Placing AI in a leadership position means handing authority over to a mechanism that can only mimic intelligence but fundamentally lacks the intuition, empathy, and ethical judgment required to lead.

Faggin writes, “Meaning, understanding, and free-will decisions do not exist within a computer.” Faggin notes that the Italian word conoscere means the knowing that rests on “experience and comprehension,” while sapere describes “the knowing by heart of someone who repeats what he does not understand.” Computers do not comprehend. Self-awareness cannot arise out of matter.

No consciousness is present in Zuckerberg’s avatar on a video call with an employee. It does not understand the employee’s question; it will pattern-match a response. When the employee leaves the call believing she has “talked to Mark,” she has in fact talked to an echo of Zuckerberg’s prior understanding.

Faggin’s point is not a romantic, goal-line defense of humanity; it is rooted in scientific rigor. Only the employee receiving AI “guidance” is capable of understanding. The conversation is asymmetrical; one party is conscious; the other is reciting.

An executive’s value to the firm lies in the entrepreneurial capacity to recognize when a situation does not fit the existing pattern, which is precisely the part that cannot be modeled. What the avatar reliably reproduces is the part of the CEO that is already cliché, the part that employees endure in boring meetings.

Another philosopher/computer scientist, Bernardo Kastrup, in his book Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell, writes, “AI chatbots are not intelligent in any way remotely akin to how you and I are intelligent.” They are, he says, “merely natural language interfaces to search engines” and “in fact have no understanding of what they are saying; none whatsoever.”

Kastrup warns of dangers, both psychological and spiritual. Because the output arrives in conversational prose, “we no longer see the sources of the information being conveyed to us,” and we begin to treat the answers “as if they were truths pronounced by an all-knowing oracle who understands what it is saying.” He warns we are losing “our ability to be critical of [AI’s] answers.”

In The Daimon and the Soul of the West, Kastrup observes that many have convinced themselves that they are masters of reality: “We tell ourselves that we can be whoever we like to be; that we can not only do as we want, but—absurdly—want as we want. Masters of the self we are—or so we want to believe.” Deluded CEOs attempt to play God within their corporate fiefdoms, seeking to control thousands of people simultaneously without the messy, unpredictable friction of actual human relationships.

So, what does this have to do with you and me? Why might so many of us voluntarily surrender our agency to digital tyranny?

The Threat to Civilization

Rod Dreher, the author of the excellent Live Not by Lies, has been sounding the alarm about where this reality-defying hubris may lead society.

In his chilling essay, “AI And Weimar America,” Dreher argues that the same misunderstanding that leads CEOs to deploy AI intermediaries is pushing human civilization toward a catastrophic surrender of its own agency.

This voluntary surrender of power is Dreher’s primary concern. He asks whether we are sleepwalking into creating an AI “neo-Caesar” that will rule over us, not because it seized power but because we willingly handed over the keys to civilization for the sake of convenience and efficiency.

Dreher draws a dark parallel between our current era and the “psychosocial” conditions of pre-Nazi Germany. Having written about Weimar Germany here and here, I find Dreher’s parallel a yellow flag worth our consideration.

He notes that the youth of the Weimar Republic were “socially atomized, adrift from their own authoritative traditions and institutions, and stressed maximally by the chaos that they had been living through.”

Just as dictators of the past offered relief from misery in exchange for absolute surrender, the new technological rulers will offer a digital savior. Dreher predicts that we will “surrender our agency and humanity to some form of managerial technocracy that uses superintelligent AI to win our allegiance by promising us stability and happiness in exchange for our liberty.” Those who don’t accept the deal “will be dealt with.”

Dreher’s warning is that this digital tyranny will be embraced by a public eager to escape the responsibilities of freedom. Many people will welcome the AI Caesar, doing “anything to relieve them from the psychic burden of living.” They will prefer to live inside a “pleasing, comforting lie,” much like a lonely person finding happiness with an AI lover they know is fake, rather than face the harsh truths of reality.

However, the core existential threat Dreher identifies is not a violent, cinematic machine uprising. The true terror lies in human complicity and voluntary surrender. Are we, Dreher wonders, on a trajectory to intentionally hand over the foundational pillars of civilization to AI systems?

AI’s growing fluency is precisely the danger, because it widens the gap between how conscious it seems and how absent consciousness is.

No matter how much AI flatters you, it doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t appreciate you or understand you. It never will.

A broom cannot know what a house or civilization is for. Neither can an AI Caesar. Goethe’s apprentice did not know the deactivation spell to end the flood. We know it perfectly: respect dispersed intelligence, accept the responsibilities of freedom, and govern ourselves. Some have simply decided they would rather drown than govern themselves.

This essay was originally published at the Advocates for Self Government.

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If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you. Your support makes this work possible and helps keep these essays and conversations going. If you’re not yet a subscriber, I hope you’ll consider joining us. You will receive access to all sessions of Mindset Shifts U.

If you read my Substack because you’re willing to explore the internal barriers that limit agency in your life, our current Mindset Shifts U program on The Screwtape Letters can help you deepen that work.

We are just at the beginning of our 8 sessions on The Screwtape Letters. There is still time to join.

Letters 5, 6, and 7 are written against the backdrop of the Second World War, but their actual subject is how the mind responds to uncertainty.

The three letters move through a single pattern. Letter 5 shows how a crisis can puncture the illusion that ordinary life will continue indefinitely. Letter 6 shows how uncertainty tempts the mind to abandon the present for imagined futures. Letter 7 shows how even serious commitments can become substitutes for the inner work they were meant to serve.

Letter 5 begins with Screwtape expressing dissatisfaction with his tempter nephew.

Wormwood has written back to say he is “delirious with joy” because Europe has gone to war. He has been savoring the patient’s sleepless nights, playing on his fear, working the “terror-pictures of the future” like a musician working a crowd. He is very pleased with himself. Screwtape’s reply is brisk and contemptuous: Wormwood is not delirious. He is drunk. He has tasted, for the first time, the anguish of a human soul, and it has gone to his head. This is understandable in a young tempter. It is also, Screwtape explains, a serious professional error.

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This is a supplement to Session 1 of The Screwtape Letters.

For easy reference, I have begun compiling all exercises for our sessions.

The first time I read The Screwtape Letters, I never considered whether C.S. Lewis believed that the destructive voice in our heads comes from external tempters. It did not matter to me. The story worked because it exposed familiar habits of mind: distraction, self-importance, resentment, rationalization, and the subtle ways we drift away from Reality.

That’s just my personal preference, though. For some, the big picture up front is helpful.

In this supplement to Session 1, I want to explore Lewis’s metaphysics while also offering an alternative way to read The Screwtape Letters that remains consistent with Lewis’s moral insight yet does not require belief in demonic forces.

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The goal is not self-improvement by force of will, but clearer attention to the small movements of thought, desire, and response that shape daily life.

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I’ve lost count of the number of times the simple wisdom in Letter 1 has assisted me, and at the same time, the number of times I have forgotten Lewis’s core idea. Am I an especially slow learner? We will see in Screwtape Letter 8 that Lewis believed the “undulation” of remembering and forgetting is part of human nature and should be respected rather than fought against. As we consider the letters, you may observe undulation during the upcoming week

In Letter 1, a man is reading in the British Museum. His mind has begun, slowly and against the usual grain of his days, to move toward something valuable. We could say he is in a state of flow. The reading has done something to his attention, quieted it, turned it toward an important question, a place Screwtape doesn’t want him to go.

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Human freedom stands above everything. There is no end in the world for the sake of which it is permissible to sacrifice human freedom.— Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows

Can the transformation of America into a ‘State without freedom’ be stopped? Is it possible to learn of the dangers to freedom and human progress without first living through our own bitter experiences?

I know it is fashionable to believe that the new wave of communist/Islamist candidates is hardly a threat to become mainstream outside of blue urban centers in the United States. History says we are one economic crisis away from that view being proven wrong.

Someone who has never met you concludes that your words, or your silence, or the work you do mark you as an enemy of the right people, of progress, of justice itself. Each time it happens, more people are cowed into silence, hoping they won’t be called a Zionist, a racist, a transphobe, and on and on.

We like to believe this is a new affliction, something technology brought into the world. It is not. The impulse to divide humanity into the pure and the guilty, and then to hand that division to power, is among the oldest human appetites. What is new is how much we have forgotten about where the appetite leads once it is fed.

Vasily Grossman needed no reminding of the danger of totalitarianism. A Soviet war correspondent who watched both Nazi and Stalinist terror at close range, he set down in his gripping novel Everything Flows an account of the triumph of totalitarian politics over economics and human decency. Those of you who have read my essays for a while know that I consider Life and Fate among the greatest novels ever written.

In our own moment, many argue that an entire economic order is guilty by its nature: that markets and free exchange are merely the machinery of oppression, and that anyone who defends them stands, knowingly or not, with the oppressor. And now, like yesteryear, Jews are again branded as a group responsible for the oppression.

“Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” Ibram X. Kendi wrote. Declare a whole order of free life guilty, and you have licensed its replacement. What replaces it is always the same: a world in which every decision is political, and freedom is snuffed out.

F.A. Hayek understood the trade the accusers imagine they are offering. In a free market, he explained, human beings adjust to forces no one designed. The proposed alternative—direction by some self-proclaimed wise people—sounds gentler until you live under it. The market leaves a person a choice among hard options; the planner leaves him none. It is better, Hayek observed, “to have a choice between several unpleasant alternatives than being coerced into one.”

Grossman shows what the coercion looked like when it won.

The Bolshevik revolutionaries built, in his telling, “a State such as the world had never seen,” and told themselves the cruelty was owed to deliver the happiness of working people. For true believers, he writes, for a time it was “the happiest, most romantic period of their life.” Then the state they had armed turned on them: “They themselves had forged the sword of the Revolution — and now this sword was falling on their heads.”

The men who filled the prisons had built those prisons for others. They had denounced, and now they were denounced. This is the appetite for enemies followed to its end: it never runs short of enemies, because it learns to manufacture them. A single letter of denunciation could end a life. Children were taught to inform on their parents. Stalin’s agents were instructed that they had “neither father nor mother, neither brothers nor sisters”— only the Party.

Those agents were not monsters by birth. They were men who had surrendered the one faculty that makes conscience possible —what Adam Smith called the impartial spectator, the loving witness each of us carries within, by whose eyes we learn to judge our own conduct. Silence that witness, put the leader’s will in his place, and a man will do anything “in the spirit of Stalin” and feel clean doing it. Non-freedom does not merely cage people. It hollows them and then kills them.

“No one was safe.” Grossman’s roll of the arrested runs from “secretaries of district and provincial Party committees” through commanders, engineers, and ambassadors to “university professors” — the whole apparatus of a society, fed into the machine. Prisoners were held until they recited the confession the investigator required, until they agreed to have been foreign agents and saboteurs. Stalin’s plans had to appear infallible; when plans failed, conspirators were invented to carry the blame.

And what was built with all this terror? Grossman’s answer is unsparing: “But men were building what no man needed. All of these projects—the White Sea canal, the arctic mines, the railways constructed north of the Arctic Circle… were of no use to anyone.”

The point was never the canal. The point was the shackle. “The State created by Lenin and consolidated by Stalin was founded not on economics but on politics,” Grossman writes. Every act of it “an absolute triumph of politics over economics.” W.E.B. Du Bois surveyed the same regime in 1940 and waved off the murders: With all of it, he judged, the Soviets had “accomplished more than they destroyed.” Those who lived under the accomplishment knew better. Freedom, Grossman insists, is not a price worth paying for anyone’s blueprint of progress.

The victorious state served no one but itself. It kept the vocabulary of the people as “a mere wrapping, a verbal husk, an empty shell.” It staged the forms of a free society while emptying them of life: “a mock parliament … mock elections, mock trade unions, a mock society, and a mockery of social life.”

Between the market and the state lies a third space — the unforced associations, congregations, unions, and civic bodies through which free people govern themselves. The State without freedom cannot abide that space. It rarely bothers to abolish it; more often it hollows it, keeping the shell and killing the thing inside. “The State was no longer a servant but a grim autocrat.”

Take that self-government from a man and you have taken everything. “A man cannot sow what he wants to sow,” Grossman writes. “Whatever the earth bears, it bears according to the instructions of the State without freedom.” The West grew by the growth of freedom; Russia, he concludes, grew by the growth of totalitarian slavery.

Look now at the softer version taking shape closer to home. Individuals learn to fear their own speech. Schools shape opinions more than they train minds. Subsidy steers capital into ventures no free customer would fund. All of it is totalitarian politics crowding out human agency.

Despite being on the frontlines of the horrors of communism and Nazism, Grossman remained optimistic. There is, he believed, a “natural and indestructible aspiration toward freedom:” Skyscrapers and cannon and empires, he wrote, are “only mist and fog” that will be blown away. Grossman wrote, “Only one true force remains; only one true force continues to evolve and live; and this force is liberty. To a man, to live means to be free.” What is inhuman, he adds, “is senseless and useless”—and so it cannot finally last.

Read Grossman. He will cure you forever of the idea that you can reach a noble end by taking someone else’s freedom. The thing you build will turn on you and devour you. His lessons were paid for in bitter lessons, and they apply anywhere the appetite for enemies is fed and freedom is called a luxury.

The question he leaves us is not whether the pattern could repeat here in America. It is whether we still believe, as he did, that freedom stands above everything— or whether we will trade it away, a piece at a time, to stand with the self-righteous mob driven by hate, fear, and ignorance. Everything depends on our answer to that question.

If you want to be a brave voice that stands on the side of freedom, please consider joining us for our upcoming study of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. Lewis will help you remove your internal barriers to choosing your own freedom. The program begins Saturday.

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According to a late 2025 Heartland Institute/Rasmussen Reports poll, “58 percent of likely voters aged 18 to 39 support government-run grocery stores in every town in America.” Fifty-one percent of younger likely voters “say they would like to see a democratic socialist win the White House in 2028.”

It’s easy to see such numbers and fall into despair about America’s prospects.

If you have ever been tempted to withdraw from public concerns and enjoy your own life, who could blame you?

Tom Paine would.

When we think of Paine, we think of his 1776 Common Sense, a book that made the case for independence. An incredible twenty percent of Americans at that time owned a copy.

Today, the challenge is not winning independence but preserving liberty. For that latter challenge, Paine’s The American Crisis offers valuable practical guidance.

The American Crisis is not a single book but a wartime serial of sixteen pamphlets, thirteen of which are numbered. Pamphlet 1, written in December 1776 when the Revolutionary War was going badly, opens with perhaps the most famous Paine line: “THESE are the times that try men’s souls.”

The opening paragraph of Pamphlet 1 is packed with poetic wisdom, including: “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”

Is this the source of the threat specific to America’s 250th birthday? Are we like the proverbial fish, asking what water is? Our liberty can seem less like an achievement to be defended than an inheritance too easily taken for granted. What is unknown and unvalued goes unguarded.

Not knowing our precious heritage and the conditions under which humanity thrives may lead to apathy and leave liberty defenseless. Other people’s apathy toward the crisis facing us is no excuse for our own withdrawal from civic life. Paine wrote, “’Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.”

“All nations and ages” are subject to panics. To Paine and others, a panic was a contagious, collective fear that swept through a population faster than reason could overcome it.

Economic downturns were called panics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I fear we are one severe economic panic away from an American crisis that will widen partisan gulfs beyond repair and make the preferences expressed in the Heartland poll a dystopian reality.

Panics, Paine observed, “produce as much good as hurt,” adding that “their peculiar advantage is that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered.”

A touchstone was an instrument of a jeweler or merchant, a tablet of dark stone against which you rubbed a piece of gold or silver. If you merely judged the metal by its surface, you might be defrauded. So when Paine calls panic a touchstone, he means that a crisis is the “stone” people rub against, and the streak shows what they are actually made of, whatever they had appeared to be.

In good times, those truly committed to the principles of liberty and those who merely profess them can sound alike, because no crisis has yet arisen to separate them.

Crucially, the crisis does not manufacture hypocrisy; it exposes what beliefs are already there but hidden. As Paine put it, panics “sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world.”

Untested virtue is unverified virtue. We cannot know whether our attachment to liberty is true metal or cheap alloy until it is tested against the stone, because until then, the two appear identical.

And I’m not merely referring to those on the “other side” of our own beliefs.

The COVID-19 panic revealed erstwhile champions of liberty clamoring for extraordinary government interventions they purport to oppose. Their professed principles should have made them more wary of concentrated power and emergency policymaking. When the cause of liberty needed their voice, they were in retreat. They were a modern-day version of Paine’s “summer soldier,” shrinking from the service of liberty.

Most people experience a crisis as pure loss. Paine sees something else in it. It exposes hypocrisy, reveals one’s true allies, and strengthens those who hold fast to their principles. Paine wrote, “The mind soon grows through them [panics], and acquires a firmer habit than before.” The summer soldiers reveal themselves.

Today, constitutional limits do not command much public reverence. We routinely elect candidates who promise policies that stretch or violate constitutional limits. The oath they swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” is treated less as a binding principle than as ceremonial language.

Meanwhile, the public drifts back to its favorite distractions as liberty continues to erode. In Common Sense, Paine identified this complacency as a grave threat to liberty: “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.”

The republic is endangered wherever arbitrary power becomes normalized.

Another form of acquiescence to arbitrary power is the habit of helpless complaint—asking why things must be this way while forgetting that much of history is the struggle against precisely such conditions.

In “On Providence,” the Stoic philosopher Seneca explains, much as Paine does, that what we label as bad things can be a gift of providence.

Seneca urges us to think of adversity as training. What moral man, he asks, “is not hungry for honest work and ready to undertake duties at great risk?”

Demetrius, a philosopher exiled by Nero, is quoted by Seneca as saying, “Nothing seems to me more unhappy than someone to whom nothing adverse has ever happened.” These adverse events, Seneca argues, allow people to test themselves.

Seneca’s untested man is the philosophical twin of Paine’s “summer soldier.” Both thinkers understood that a life entirely shielded from friction produces a character lacking resilience. Adversity tests personal virtue and, on a societal level, reveals whether we truly value liberty.

Paine railed against the selfish, short-term thinking of a man who stood at a tavern with his child and said, “Well! give me peace in my day.” Paine argued the mindset of a “generous parent” must be forward-looking: “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” Preserving liberty requires accepting present friction so that future generations inherit a free society, rather than pushing the burden of conflict down the road.

Paine wrote, “I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.”

This is a mindset of liberty: the recognition that external conditions (the “crisis”) do not dictate one’s internal resolve. It is the conscious choice to meet centralized power or societal panic with calm, reasoned fortitude rather than despair.

People who inherit liberty cannot know whether they still deserve it until liberty is put in jeopardy. Each of us answers, rubbed against the touchstone.

The summer soldier still has time to become something else. That, and not despair, is Paine’s message for America at 250.

This essay was originally published at the American Institute for Economic Research.

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The next program at Mindset Shifts U, for paid subscribers, is on C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. If you fear you have become a summer soldier, Lewis is an essential tonic. He exposes the mindset traps that hinder your personal effectiveness and harm your relationships.

I was a young man when America celebrated its 200^th birthday in 1976. New York City put on a grand show. The West Side Highway was closed so that millions could walk it and watch the spectacular display of tall ships from around the world sailing up the Hudson River.

In the evening, over the New York Harbor, Disney put on arguably the greatest fireworks display in American history, again in front of millions.

I recall no security concerns. The 1970s were a time of economic stagflation, yet I recall no large scale societal recoil against America’s founding transcendental principles. Transcendent because they are principles aligned with humanity, which, when followed, enable individuals and societies to flourish.

Now, 50 years later, those principles are no longer widely understood or shared. A toxic brew of communism, wokeism, and Islamism is capturing the hearts and minds of our youth. I fear for our future, but I don’t believe the worst possibilities are baked in.

On this July 4^th my new essay based on Sam Adams’s The American Crisis will be posted at this Substack. Adams famously warned against the “summer soldier.” There is no hope if America’s “summer soldiers” who do understand the principles of classical liberalism continue to stand down or twist our nation’s heritage for fear of the reaction of others.

Paine believed “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

The next program at Mindset Shifts U, for paid subscribers, is on C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. If you fear you have become a summer soldier or doubt you have the fortitude to begin your personal world over again, Lewis is an essential tonic.

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This essay is a revised and expanded version of an essay I wrote for Intellectual Takeout in 2018.

This 4th of July, when you reflect on the future of liberty, you will not be alone. Many Americans believe freedom is in decline. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom confirms the decline. Their latest 2026 data reveal the United States is far from the freest country in the world; sadly, it is the 22nd freest country.

Are politicians to blame? Or do the politicians we elect merely reflect shifting societal attitudes towards freedom? Collectively, do we lack a freedom mindset?

In 1787, Ben Franklin was the oldest delegate to the Constitutional Convention. At the end of the last day of the convention, as Franklin left the hall, he was approached by Mrs. Powell of Philadelphia who asked, “Well, doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin famously responded, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

The keeping was never assigned to the framers. It was assigned to us.

And that same year, Franklin named its price: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

Franklin did not warn of invaders or tyrants. He warned of what a nation becomes when its people would rather be managed than be responsible. A self-governing people is not kept free by their founding documents. It is kept free by the character of its citizens and renewed one person at a time.

So the question for our 250^th is not whether America is still free. It is whether Americans are still the kind of people a free country requires.

Most people think themselves virtuous; it’s other people who lack virtues. Freedom, we may think, is declining because of them, not us. Clearly, we cannot all be right.

Many virtues help maintain freedom, beginning with keeping our word and honoring our contracts. Deceit corrodes liberty. Essential to freedom is respect for the rights and property of others—our rights are only as strong as our respect for the rights of others.

In his book, Wow, I’m An American, psychiatrist Peter Breggin argues that one of the most important virtues is taking responsibility for oneself and one’s actions. Many say they love freedom, but professed love is not enough. Breggin writes:

Human nature contains more than love of freedom and devotion to responsibility. Human nature has darker corners. Fear lurks in one terrifying corner and helplessness in another. Because human nature is imperfect, some people can always be whipped into hating and envying freedom and its wonderful rewards.

Breggin imagines “a world made up of two different people with very different and conflicting ideas about themselves and their basic rights.”

To one type of person, Breggin gives the name Dependence, and to the other, Independence. Describing Dependence, he writes, “Dependence doesn’t think he can earn enough money to pay for what he needs and wants, such as food, shelter, medical care, education, and retirement. He wants the government to provide these things for him.”

Dependence thinks he has a “right” to the “good life.” Dependence thinks his circumstances are unfair, and he wants government to “make up for this unfairness.”

On the other hand, Breggin explains, Independence wants government “to protect his freedom to take care of himself.”

Independence is “up to the challenge” of providing for himself and his loved ones. Breggin writes, “He believes that he has a right to take responsibility for himself and to keep most of his earnings for himself and his family.”

Breggin is not advocating a dog-eat-dog world. He understands that individuals fall on hard times and advocates for voluntary charity and volunteer work. Breggin argues that when we help those in need through government, most of our tax money “is wasted or gobbled up by the government and its interest groups.” Administrative costs are very high for government charity.

Another corrosive effect of government charity is observed by Breggin:

People like Dependence who do not like to take responsibility for themselves almost never give thanks for what they receive. People who wrangle favors out of other people, who get handouts, and who live off others almost always feel entitled rather than grateful. Without lifting a hand to get what they want, they nonetheless feel as if they deserve everything they get — and more. Indeed, they typically feel resentful towards the people who openly provide for them.

Is behaving like Dependence consistent with the best in human beings? Breggin says no. He writes, “I believe there is a core in every one of us that knows we should take responsibility and do what’s right. When we act in accordance with our true or best nature we feel good about ourselves.” In other words, the default setting in human beings, our true nature, is to be responsible.

When help is received, why does Dependence feel resentment instead of gratitude? Breggin explains,

Irresponsible people know they are offending their own true or best nature. They sense they are taking advantage of others. They are sunk into an unethical condition in which they cannot feel comfortable with themselves. They feel ashamed of themselves and they resent responsible people whose lives remind them about their own spiritually sorry condition.

Government charity encourages an ungrateful, entitled mindset, and a “spiritually sorry condition.” In this condition, we hide from our true nature.

To be sure, it is not just individuals who assume the persona of Dependence. It is all too common for firms to lobby government for subsidies and special protections from competition.

Just as dependent individuals eschew responsibility and run from their true nature, firms seeking protection from government destroy the true nature of capitalism.

Would Franklin say, I told you so? Is declining virtue the cause of America’s declining freedom? Have we met the enemy, and the enemy is us?

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argued that we each carry an “impartial spectator” — “the man within the breast” — whose approval we cannot do without. We desire, he wrote, “not only to be loved but to be lovely;” not only “to be praised,” but to be “worthy of praise.” A person may collect every benefit the state can dispense and still stand condemned before that inner judge, knowing none of it was earned.

The dependent man does not feel gratitude toward those who carry him. He feels resentment. Gratitude, for Smith, is the natural return for a benefit freely given between equals. On the other hand, the man who receives what he has not deserved senses the verdict of the spectator within and resents the benefactor who occasions it. He cannot meet his own conscience, so he looks away and blames the one who reminds him.

The true cost of trading independence for security is not the tax bill. It is the loss of self-respect. The signers pledged their honor because they understood that individuals who govern themselves can look their impartial spectator in their mind’s eye while those who have surrendered to government cannot. A nation of people who have forfeited self-respect, Franklin warned, will find it has more need of masters.

Our study of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments is in the Mindset Shifts U archives. Become a paid subscriber today and receive access to the archive of all past programs and soon to our upcoming sessions on C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters.

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