We were booked into a legendary bar for a four night appearance. Anyone who knows the bar scene in Charleston in the 1980s and 90s would know the place. It was called the Flying Dutchman, and its stage saw bands like the Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and George Thorogood. It was also known for something that doesn’t even seem reasonably legal today. It was their “drink and drown” promotions. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, patrons could purchase a cup for $5, and drafts would be refilled free until midnight. A running local joke at the time was "never lose your cup."

After midnight the place resembled an airport. There would be a long line of cabs outside waiting to take inebriated patrons home. In fact, to their credit, there were a lot of people who came by cab, as well When you label a promotion “drink and drown,” you set the expectation ahead of time, which I suppose is better than the alternative.

This is also the first time I heard our band’s name on the radio. I remember we were driving along the oceanside in our band van and an advertisement for the show came on the local rock station. They played a clip and we all were dumbfounded that we were even acknowledged in the town. It was great.

We had a lot of fun that week. Drunk audiences can be particularly appreciative. What this really means is that everything sounds good to them. The only downside is that you often have to play a lot of requests. On one particular night, I think we played “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Metallica at least a half a dozen times. Still, you have to give them what they want, particularly when they are that drunk.

The best part of a four night booking is that you don’t have to set up and tear down every night. It gives you a chance to sleep in after getting in at 3 am or later. It also allows you time to go off and explore these new places you’ve never been to. Call time for a bar gig like this is after many people’s dinner time, so there’s a fair amount of down time to kick around in unfamiliar digs.

This became particularly advantageous to me. The second night of our stay, a couple of girls approach me and a bandmate. It was after the last set, and we were preparing to head back to the hotel. Obviously, we changed our plans. We hung out with them and nothing much came of it other than jovial conversation.

The next night they returned. I remember she was dressed a bit more provocatively. We continued our sets, but I spent a few of my breaks out talking to her and getting to know her. Still, she and her friend stayed till the end. They continued to hang out while we packed up, and then she and I went off on our own.

We didn’t hook up. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t a matter of conquest from either side. It was two souls coalescing. It was timing, and it was consequence. And at the time, it was very meaningful. It would remain meaningful to me for many years, and even to this day.

There is a special magic with young love. It stays with you, even when you can’t even remember the person with any great detail. After all, I hadn’t even turned 20 yet. What you remember is the feeling. You remember being swept away and out of control, and yet steering purposefully into the skid. It’s the feeling that one might chase the rest of their lives.

To answer your question, yeah, we tried the long-distance thing. Haven’t we all? It ended with the same result it usually does, and it did so with a similar speed as when it started. I still see her long brunette hair with little waves, and I still hear her sweet southern drawl that I usually find off-putting, except when it comes from one of my southern cousins. Chalk it up to one that got away.

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Who am I
Not who but why

Do I see
What it means to be me

Can I know
My true place in the show

Can I say
What happened today

Can I hear
Cum laude and jeer

I can hear
The love and the fear

I can say
That this is the way

I can know
What to do, where to go

I do see
The way others see me

I am who
Seeks the why what is true

I am me
Who else would I be

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Each define goals many believe to be the reason for our existence. They are the why that answers those two questions every time a person opens their eyes from sleep. In many countries today, the why that drives us is financial or material success. It is believed that such success will provide the resources to alleviate worrying, which is further assumed to bring happiness. Modern research, however, suggests otherwise.

The economist Richard Easterlin explained this with his paradox. In 1974, he and his colleagues found that as a country’s GDP increased and the overall wealth of the population did so, as well, it did not correlate with increased measurable happiness. In fact, happiness indexes declined slightly. From 1940 to 2010, individual real income adjusted for inflation tripled while measures of happiness sat flat or declined slightly. This pattern seems to echo in the modern, if less measurable, phenomenon of billionaires chasing ever larger sums without any limit to their aspirations. If that is true, it would show that it is both a collective and an individual phenomenon. Resource attainment, therefore, does not seem to satisfy the why in and of itself.

The philosopher John Stuart Mill and the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl came to this same realization almost exactly a century apart. Mill came to this realization out of a mental crisis. He was taught as a utilitarian that maximizing happiness was the entire point in life, yet he found that the more he made happiness the central point of his existence, the harder it was to attain. He made the realization that happiness was not something that could be attained by focusing on it. It had to be a byproduct of something else.

Viktor Frankl came to his identical conclusion a very different way. He came to it as an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp. As a neurologist and psychiatrist, he was able to observe what helped some prisoners to survive when others perished. This led to his realization that happiness could not be pursued. It can only ensue. It emerges when one dedicates themselves to something outside of themselves. The same holds for success. Meaning is the thing you aim at directly. Happiness shows up afterward, uninvited, if it shows up at all.

There is even a relevant American historical point to be made here. Thomas Jefferson borrowed heavily from John Locke in his Declaration. He made one significant and relevant editorial change, however. He chose to replace Locke’s reference to “property” to the “pursuit of happiness.” If he had kept Locke’s “property,” it would have instilled a hedonic/materialist political identity from the nation’s very beginning. By swapping in "the pursuit of happiness," the Declaration builds the hedonia/eudaimonia tension into the nation's founding document.

Today, the evidence suggests this tension exists at both the macro and micro sociological scales. On the macro level, the Easterlin paradox explains the issue, but it is not uncontested. Stevenson and Wolfers's 2008 reassessment found GDP and well-being do move together within and across countries over time, directly contradicting Easterlin's claim. As often happens, the data sets are an important factor. A 2025 Brookings Institute report (Oparina, Clark, and Layard of LSE's Centre for Economic Performance) showed that the original findings of the Easterlin research do hold up increasingly well the more economically advanced the society is that is being evaluated. That means that in the highly advanced economy of the United States, the Easterlin paradox findings hold true. It is important to note, however, that it is less defensible in less developed economies.

The micro analysis is even more interesting. Psychologist Tim Kasser and colleagues (2014 Dittmar/Bond/Hurst/Kasser) found that people who hold materialistic values in terms of prioritizing money, possessions, and image as central life goals consistently report worse well-being including more depression and anxiety, more physical health complaints, lower life satisfaction and vitality. These results were consistent across all age groups and international cultures including North America, Western Europe, former Soviet-bloc states, the Middle East, and Asia. Money, in and of itself, does not seem to buy happiness.

Either collectively or individually, it would seem that people are not automatically happier with wealth. Amartya Sen saw this in the late 1970s. For him, it was all about capability. A billionaire who is a physically fit 20-something does not have equal capabilities as a billionaire elderly person in a wheelchair. The financial bank balance cannot correct for the physical imbalance. Wealth, in this respect, cannot be a guarantee of capability.

In the early 1970s, the Kingdom of Bhutan took this on as a matter of policy. King Jigme Singye Wangchuck declared that they would no longer focus GDP as a measure of their country’s success, but on GNH, or Gross National Happiness. As of 2008, they now have an instrument to measure it. The result was something that served the needs of the people but was not a guarantee of happiness itself. It was more eudaimonia, or simply taking care of the needs of the people to achieve what they wanted to achieve. In effect, Bhutan’s solution was to aim for Sen’s measure of capability. Theoretically, this would focus the attention on meaning with the hope and expectation that it would create the right environment for people to find happiness as a natural byproduct.

Social Psychologist Roy Baumeister brought an empirical approach to the problem of happiness and meaning. In "Some Key Differences Between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life" (Baumeister, Vohs, Aaker & Garbinsky - 2013), it was found that happiness and meaning were “correlated but not reducible.” That is statistical language to say that they are two distinct things, but they overlap and affect each other in very important ways. In fact, they specifically found that the correlation was (r ≈ .63–.70). This is on a scale of -1 to +1 where 0 is completely uncorrelated, +1 is lock-step correlation, and -1 is adverse correlation where one sends the other in the opposite direction. Mathematically, they found the two measures share 40-49% of their variance, which still means that 51-60% of the time they are unaffected by each other.

To understand this better, it is useful to look at a few concrete examples. Self-expression and identity-related activity tracked meaning but not happiness as did considering yourself wise or creative. Giving to others tracked meaning, but taking from others tracked happiness. Worry, stress, and anxiety tracked with higher meaning and lower happiness. The people whose lives felt most significant often carried more of the weight. The pattern that Baumeister found in his interpretation of the data is that meaning tends to require looking beyond one’s self, whereas happiness was more individually contained. It is important to note, however, that he explicitly states this as interpretation and not a direct measurement.

All of this seems to suggest a similarity between psychology and economics. What it does not suggest, however, is that they share the same mechanism between their respective fields. What they share is a method. Psychology built its first metric around self-reported happiness (easy to survey) and later found it didn't capture meaning. Economics built its first metric around GDP/utility (easy to calculate) and later found it didn't capture capability. Each discipline had to realize that the danger of metric capture could obfuscate the full truth.

Each field has its similar points to be measured. In economics (Sen), we talk about GDP and resources, utility and satisfaction, and capability. In psychology, we talk about money and possessions, happiness, and meaning. Sen's target was never one metric but two: he rejected GDP because having resources doesn't guarantee the capability to use them, and he rejected utility because self-reported satisfaction adapts to deprivation rather than measuring it. Meaning is Baumeister's answer to what capability is at the individual scale. It’s not a feeling, but whether a life is actually oriented toward something beyond the self. Kasser’s contribution to Sen brings in the individual level in that focusing specifically on money and possessions predict worse well-being, not better. This is the same lesson Sen’s GDP teaches at the national scale, learned twice, in two disciplines, by two different research programs that never cited each other.

So what is the point? What do we want. The point is for our lives to mean something. What we want is to be happy. What we’ve learned from these explorations into each is that we can have the former without the latter, and at times we can even have the latter without the former. The question is whether having one without the other fully satisfies that persistent daybreak question of why. Perhaps the why requires proper answers for both questions.

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Sometimes it’s not clear
The things that we do
We don’t know in our own right
The things that we do

It could be just an impulse
The things that we do
Or a part of a plan
The things that we do

What cannot be denied to
The things that we do
Is the truth of what led to
The things that we do

And so we are left with
The things that we do
To define who we are by
The things that we do

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This is why I have to talk about it. I’m not Jewish, but genetically I do have 1% Sephardic DNA, at least according to popular commercial DNA tests. That would mean one ancestor about six generations ago was a Sephardic Jew in the Iberian peninsula that probably - based on the Catholic persecution at the time - converted to Catholicism rather than be persecuted.

I have to talk about it because it’s not about Jewishness. It’s about truth. We have to separate our tribal feelings when discussing issues so that we can actually see the truth. The tribal view sees things through a lens which is biased to only see the tribal view. This is not truth. It is, by definition, propaganda. And all propaganda has an agenda.

We need to come together just as fellow humans. The idea is a very simple one. We break the problems into chunks. Sovereignty is first. Sovereignty for Israel within established boundaries. Sovereignty to the Palestinians to determine their own fate.

One option might be a three state solution. I’m not sure I’ve heard of this before, but it might make sense. Gaza as a country, West Bank as a country. Israel controls its historic boundaries. This would give the people of Gaza and the West Bank more immediate and local control of their government and infrastructure. This would be a stabilizing thing and make coordinated resistance less likely.

Now to the point of my ability to speak on this issue. I have been personally affected by it. If this issue can affect my life, it can affect anyone’s. I grew up in the Christian church, but I saw some dark elements there. I saw Christian nationalism rising in Indiana where I grew up. Parts of that were racist, and we saw and heard it regularly. It was just how things were. We could feel things were improving, but there was a lot that still remained unresolved.

I still believe, however, in the core Christian principles. I want to defend those. I want to help others understand them so that they can benefit from them. In that respect, I remain a missionary. I don’t practice the religion. In fact, I don’t believe in a religion as a need for my life.

Religion can be perverted. Christian Supremacy is a thing. Jewish Supremacy is a thing. White Supremacy is a thing. What sort of “thing” it is is what is to be explored and examined. What is supremacy? If we break it down in code, it translates to [class]\ [superior]. It is a hierarchical tool to place one at the top of the hierarchy.

This is well documented. There are hundreds of quotes from leaders of various factions that have made claims of superiority. It shouldn't matter where the target of the criticism is directed. Any claim of superiority must be denounced immediately an unequivocally.

To my Jewish friends, I love you. I really do. I want to be your ally. Help me get there. I’m yours.

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The opening of the door is the key. It is the reaction to whatever circumstances are thrust upon it. It is the choice, whether instinctual, or conscious, or reactionary. It is the gatekeeper of all that is new and potentially destructive. It is the security guard. The pebble must be good enough to pass.

Some pebbles are quickly expelled. They simply don’t make the cut. There are various reasons for this. They could have been ridiculous. They could have been obvious ill attempts at humor. They could have just been wrong. They could have been deceptive. They could also be set aside as questionable. Those would not be discarded. They would be set aside for further evaluation.

Then there were the gems. They were the goal. They were the fuel that drove the desire to achieve the pebbles in the first place. They brought new understanding and new ways to understand. Their only drawback was that they were expendable. Once they were fully consumed, they only offered further questions that fed the desire for more pebbles.

Then we waited. We waited for the next pebble, but we soon learned that the pebbles themselves caused other problems. Some wanted to lock the trap doors, They said we had already let enough pebbles through and too fast. They said they were piling up and preventing them from being able to understand them all. The problem became serious enough that a committee was formed. Rules were enacted. Restrictions were enforced.

From this point on, every pebble was scrutinized. Pebbles became a danger. People were trained to fear them. It was thought that pebbles would knock down walls. They would break through ceilings They would invade our world. What we knew to be true would no longer be so. How extreme it would be would also not be predictable. It was all a crap shoot, and the dice had already been rolled. Therefore, the doors would remain open to see where the pebble would fall.

Because the pebble was already in play. It had contacted a lot of surfaces as it careened through the opening doors. The deeper it got, the larger it grew. It seemed to pick up passengers along the way.. When it encountered a pebble that fit, it attached to it. That seemed to provide additional fuel and acceleration. More importantly, however, each assimilated piece added a fine tuning of general navigation.

The pebble is now quite transformed. It is confident and triumphant as it presents itself to the self that dwarfs it like a meteor against a sun. The sun that is the self is pelted constantly and ferociously with pebbles large and small. Most of them it ignores without even waking for a moment from its sleep. It barely notices the pebble, but opens one eye.

The pebble presents its case to the sun. “I am truth,” it says.

“You present yourself as truth. I have heard others pronounce themselves so.”

“Were any of them successful?”

“No.”

“How about I just sit here. After all. I made it all this way. I’m comfortable right here next to you. I’ll just wait. As they say, ‘The truth will out.’”

And with that, the truth was absorbed and the sun self became one truth richer that day.

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My mom was valedictorian of her high school class at Cedarville High School in Cedarville, Ohio. She excelled in college earning a bachelor’s degree in English right here in Anderson. She had the intellect to do anything she wanted to do. She chose to be a minister’s wife in Southern California. It didn’t hurt that she had the hots for him going back to high school and maybe even Sunday School when they met as preteens!

While he rose to be the pastor of a church, she taught high school English. All the while she would help him with his master’s degree studies. Then she made another decision. She decided to become a mother. She continued to work, but spent an increasing amount of time as a mother and a chief organizer of the household, which included my father. She chose this. In fact, she owned it.

Growing up, my mom and I had a complicated relationship. It was based on love - a mutually understood unconditional love - that had no possible breaking point. I know this, because over the years we tested this theory. We fought. We yelled. We screamed. How could we not? We’re Irish.

In the same vein, there was never any doubt that she had my back. She defended me many times when I needed it most. That meant it didn’t matter whether we won or lost, I knew I could count on her to be in my corner, and she always was.

She accomplished some pretty amazing things that not a lot of people know. These days it might be hard to remember, but she was one of a group of women - including some of you here today - who brought women’s voices to the forefront in the church. I was always proud of her for that. She also worked with battered women helping them to find safety, sometimes in the deepest dark of the night. Here, I’m preaching to the choir, because you all know this about my mom. But why don’t more people know? That was by design. That was her design.

She continued her studies, but they would always be interrupted by her need to serve someone else’s needs. My father says to this day that he would not be DOCTOR Shively without her help. She was fine with that. That’s my point. She was fine with the end result. She liked to be praised. Who of us doesn’t? But she didn’t live for it. She lived for the goal, and that’s what I will remember her for most.

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A piece of me
Stayed out there
Rooting for the blue
Boys of summer
I didn’t know yet
That there were also
Some boys of red
And they were also
Pretty good.

I became aware
Among fields of corn
Of who I was
And where my roots
Had grown from
It would define
The sturdy trunk
On which the branches
Grew experience.

I’d get another
Piece of the West
Grafted onto me
But it was different
More raw and natural
It wasn’t La La
But much more rustic
Like the Midwest
With better views.

I would return
To the sturdy trunk
It had more things
To teach me of
Before I would leave
And roam new ground
With horn in hand
But not alone
I joined a pack.

Then came the time
To leave the band
Strike out alone
For the first time
I’d find a place
I knew nothing of
Learning new things
Enlarging my world
With novel wonder.

I was ready
For the next step
I felt that this time
It wasn’t temporary
Because I was ready
I noticed her
Or she noticed me
Which ever it was
We soon became we.

I didn’t know then
That this new place
Would become a home
Not just for me
But for our family
A new trunk took shape
With more branches
The seeds that would drop
Would be carried away.

They would each find
Their own places
To secure their roots
Two new strong trunks
Beginning their stories
Feeling their way
Toward the open space
Like how I began
Near La La Land.

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What do you really want
Please explain it to me
Help me understand how
You would have the world be

As you tell me your view
I am starting to find
That you make some good points
Now let me compare mine

We see similar things
Like the problems we name
Our perspectives are off
But the goal is the same

Maybe what it would take
Is for us to sit down
Show each other good faith
And find some common ground

Now we’ve each had our say
I admit I was wrong
It just isn’t that hard
And we CAN get along.

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"Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer from "After Ten Years," written at Tegel Prison in 1943, later published in Letters and Papers from Prison

There are a lot of stupid people. That may seem like an obvious statement, but I don’t mean they aren’t intelligent. I don’t even mean they aren’t knowledgeable. Many of them are both. They are stupid in the way the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer described. He used the German word dummheit, which does not mean low IQ or someone who can’t think. It suggests rather someone who has stopped thinking for themselves and surrendered their independent judgement to another person or group.

For Bonhoeffer, this makes stupidity a moral issue. It isn’t an intellectual issue but a willful resistance to knowing what is true. It is a moral issue because it is a refusal to take responsibility for one’s own thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. He described it as a surrender of one’s conscience out-sourcing it to others to decide for them what they should think, say, or do. One can’t morally judge someone for having a low IQ. For him, stupidity was a choice. It was an act of will.

This is what makes it more dangerous than evil. An evil person still has their judgement intact and can still make a choice to be good or evil. A stupid person can’t, because they have given away the very faculty to be able to decide for themselves whether their actions are good or evil. In fact, this means that since they can’t even recognize their own failure, they have no ability to course correct.

It’s important to note here that Bonhoeffer saw this as a sociological phenomenon rather than a psychological one. This doesn’t mean that stupidity only exists at the group level and not the individual level. It’s still the individuals who are stupid. They become stupid, however, by being infected by social groups they are part of. That’s what makes it sociological in nature. Whenever power manifests within a group - whether political or religious - people can become infected with stupidity. In fact, people who are more isolated or insulated from group power are less prone to be stupid.

The key point here is that stupid people have actually lost the ability to realize they are stupid. If deep down they know what they were saying or doing wasn’t really true, they wouldn’t be stupid, they would be lying, which is a form of evil. Stupid people, on the other hand, can’t know this once they have crossed this line. At this point, facts that contradict the groupthink they have been told to believe simply don’t need to be believed. They even become critical and deny facts even when they appear to others to be irrefutable. This is the primary danger. They become inconvincible.

One of the ways that people can be made stupid is through the use of vocabulary. Vocabulary also becomes a signal that can both detect and enforce stupidity in people. Using the proper and accepted vocabulary isn’t simply a polite convention. It signals group loyalty and shared virtue. It is costly because using the wrong vocabulary comes with unwanted consequences that can include sanction or even expulsion from the group.

This is not to be confused with self-censorship. Simply staying quiet is not the same thing as surrendering one’s judgement. Self-censorship suggests that the person actually knows what is true and is merely play-acting to fit in. That is, again, a form of lying as described earlier. Stupidity requires buying in to the vocabulary as an expression of the groupthink the person has surrendered their judgement to. The stupid person believes in the vocabulary and uses it authoritatively.

If stupidity is the communicable disease, then vocabulary might be like a sneeze. It might not only be a source of stupidity’s infection, but it might continue to keep the infected within its grasp. It is usually fine tuned, and may even become finer tuned through its success, to play upon certain dispositions and tendencies of people within groups with shared affinities. If we borrow from the Moral Foundations Theory of Jonathan Haidt, for example, vocabulary can be shaped in different ways to speak to a moral foundation in differing ways depending on the target audience. They may address the fairness/cheating foundation in discussions of election reform, for example, framing it as “voter suppression” to one audience and “election integrity” to the other. Both evoke fairness, but place cheating on opposite sides of the issue. Chances are, however, that which vocabulary is used will clearly signal to most people which group the person is a member of within the discussion.

Many regimes throughout history have used vocabulary to make their people stupid. After all, stupid people are much easier to rule. Philologist Victor Klemperer kept a diary from 1933 on in Nazi Germany documenting how Nazi vocabulary permeated everyday German speech signaling the mass stupidity that instilled and enforced the regime’s power. But the vocabulary itself doesn’t have to express evil intent. Even efforts to combat problems of social justice can make people stupid if they force a specific vocabulary that eventually makes people stop thinking for themselves. In this way, stupidity can even lead to people with good intentions of benefitting society can potentially lead to bad outcomes. All it takes is for someone to inadvertently say the wrong thing the wrong way and those good intentions can lead to ostracization or even loss of a position or a career.

Partisanship has created entire dictionaries on both sides of the political divide for making and keeping people stupid. This includes not only saying the right words, but sometimes more importantly not saying the wrong ones. This has led many people to not want to participate in dialogue at all for fear of saying something that could identify them as a member of some outgroup that should be attacked or, worse yet, a member of the ingroup that should be punished. A 2020 CATO Institute report found that 62% of Americans reported being afraid to say certain things in fear of the current political climate. This cuts across party lines with 77% of Republicans, 59% of independents, 52% of Democrats reporting such experiences.

It should be noted, however, that these statistics simply show the power of language and not specifically whether or not they are stupid. What it does suggest, however, is that these concerns could be caused by stupid people reacting based on groupthink rules. In that case, it provides strong evidence for the presence of stupid people.

The moral of this story, if there is one, is that it is important to know who you are dealing with. The next time someone says something using words in ways that trigger you into thinking they are a horrible person, it might be worth considering one alternative. They might just be stupid.

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Peterson has been very passionate about this subject himself for some time now. He has written many articles and joined numerous podcasts to share both his skepticism about the seriousness of the risk that climate change may bring and his utter disdain for the evil manipulations of public opinion that he seems to believe is behind the warnings. To him, it is just another Marxist plot to destroy capitalism and imprison society into a mindless mob of groupthink supplicants. In his opening paragraphs, he equate’s New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plea to New Yorkers to raise their thermostats during peak summer months to 78 degrees Fahrenheit to the loss of all freedom in society.

That’s some passion.

It’s the passionate zealotry of the climate change warriors that he openly scoffs, however. He blames publications like those of Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, and the Club of Rome, but he reserves special scorn for former Vice President Al Gore and his 2006 An Inconvenient Truth, which this year marks its 20th anniversary. He blames Gore’s documentary for instilling the issue with an “almost religious” tone and for turning the issue into one of emotion and partisanship.

To be fair, the documentary is emotional, and at times, definitely partisan. That’s not a big surprise given that it was produced and hosted by a career politician. If the information presented in the documentary is actually accurate, however, it would be hard to not react emotionally to the predicted dangers that climate change could bring. If one believes that the information is, in fact, true, one could argue that no presentation could possibly be put in strong enough terms.

What Peterson really objects to most, however, is not the information presented. It is the dogmatic condescension that he believes accompanies it. This has been a central theme of Peterson’s diatribes on a wide range of subjects. It is the fear of being told what one has to think and being punished for any dissent. On this point, he has some reasonable ground to stand on. No one wants to be told what to think much less have it forced on them through some form of coercion.

Fair enough.

The article then takes on a more reasoned tone to address the issue itself. This is a familiar approach he uses when presenting his arguments, and it often serves him well. It allows the arguments to seem reasonable and believable, particularly to those who would be already predisposed to wanting to believe them. The problem is that he doesn’t clearly explain what he thinks is “reasonable.” It seems that having even one or two sources that he can point to who dissent from the consensus is enough to be called reasonable. The fact that The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that about 88% of climate experts see the issue as a crisis requiring urgent action seems to be less reasonable to him.

One such source is the Danish analyst Bjørn Lomborg and his Copenhagen Consensus. Lomborg has suggested that the massive amounts of money spent on mitigating climate change is preventing investments that could solve other humanitarian issues. Lomborg is a political scientist and economist, however, not a climatologist. It is hard to understand how he would be in a position to suggest what dangers are most in need of emergency investment. At best, he could give us a cost analysis of the effectiveness of investment, which his group often does, but not a detailed prioritization based on potential harms.

Throughout the article, another weakness in his argument continues to be exposed. He sprinkles little seemingly innocuous invectives along the way. As the reader will eventually see, they are seeds that will grow into his main polemical attack. He ends his initial attack on the consensus position of climate change being an existential emergency by stating that it is not a scientific claim, but a “dogmatic and partisan assertion.” As with many of his polemical barbs, however, he offers nothing to explain why that’s a fact and not a personal assertion.

Many of Peterson’s arguments have at least an element of truth. This is one of the marks of a good polemicist. It provides the reasonableness of his arguments that make them easier to swallow. Upon closer inspection, however, they show that the narrative being told is either incomplete or, more specifically, cherry-picked or omit key details that might otherwise complicate or undermine the argument. He offers several such arguments throughout the next sections of the article. For one, he argues that because all the apocalyptic predictions made 20 years ago have not all occurred, that proves that the entire theory is bogus. Another is that a study by NASA published in 2016 showed that increased CO2 had an unexpected effect of increasing vegetation, or “greening” effect, in half of vegetated lands around the world. A third is his suggestion that the choice of the date when scientists chose to start their analysis of rising temperatures skewed the data, since it was right after a “Little Ice Age” prior to 1850, and that including years prior would show a different picture.

All of these arguments start out with factual information. There are a number of reasons why some of the most dire predictions didn’t fully come true. What Peterson either fails to account for or chooses to ignore is why they didn’t come to fruition. The primary reason global agriculture has not failed completely, for example is human adaptation and technological progress. Early climate alarmism from the 1980s through the 2000s often relied on "fixed" models that assumed humans would change nothing about how they farmed. In reality, the agricultural sector responded aggressively. Recently, however, scientists have begun to warn that the effects of these adaptations is waning. A 2025 report by the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability found that rising global temperatures will dampen the world’s capacity to produce food from most staple crops, even after accounting for adaptation by farmers.

The “greening” effect that the article mentions is also much more nuanced. NASA's own scientists frame it differently that the article suggests. The greening effect is estimated to have offset only about 0.2–0.25°C of warming and is described in NASA's own materials with a "for now" caveat, suggesting the effect may not be permanent or sufficient to offset other CO2-driven risks. Omitting this counterbalancing context entirely exposes the article to being at best careless and at worst disingenuous.

Finally, the baseline argument of the timeline selection is, in fact, a genuine point of scientific discussion. The article, however, presents it as though the entire post-industrial warming signal is a baseline artifact, when the IPCC's attribution relies on multiple independent lines of evidence that include ocean heat content, ice loss, sea level, and isotopic fingerprinting and not just the choice of a start year.

All of these could be chalked up to simple dissenting views. Unfortunately, the real meat of the article was still to come. Prior to this, the polemic seeds were being sewn by using terms such as "anti-truth" to escalate ordinary scientific uncertainty or prediction error into accusations of deliberate falsehood. Specific barbs were also strewn along the way framing climate concern as a partisan/psychological pathology by using terms such as "resentment," "narcissism," and "envious hatred" of the diabolical Left.

This is where the article sheds its cloak of reasonableness. This is where the real rhetoric kicks in to explain just how and why the evil Left wants to use this issue to destroy capitalism and, with it, Western civilization. This is Peterson takes his turn at apocalyptic prognostication.

His main attack is a provocative, yet completely unsourced, claim. He writes that "recent research" links "the revolutionary strain of Leftist activism" to "antagonistic narcissism and outright psychopathy" and "no measurable commitment to social justice whatsoever." A search for what research he is referring to has yet to bear fruit. There is one study specifically about LGBQ/gender-identity activism is both narrow and correlational. It specifically found psychopathy did not consistently predict activism involvement, which is the opposite of what Peterson claims. These read as inflammatory generalizations rather than claims traceable to a specific, citable, and methodologically sound study of the population being described. As such, it must be treated as rhetorical assertion and not empirical evidence.

Peterson also seems to relish the opportunity to bring the attack to socialism. After all, no good polemic warning of Leftist authoritarianism would be complete without a reference to George Orwell. Peterson attempts to use Orwell's 1937 caricature of British socialists to explain the motives of today's climate movement. The problem is, these two groups actually have very little in common substantively. Orwell's quote describes what he saw among a specific group of people he met, not a validated finding about "the Left" as a stable psychological type across a century. This is notwithstanding the fact that Orwell himself was an avowed socialist and was venting his frustration at those that he felt had corrupted the ideology. The use of Orwell's actual argument runs almost opposite to how it's deployed here.

Not to leave any of his playbook unused, Peterson next attacks climate activists directly. He suggests that they are all elite students at top universities destined to be members of the 1%. He suggests that their comfortable class backgrounds prove their concern isn't genuine. This is a straightforward ad hominem. It attacks the arguer's social position rather than the argument's substance. Even if every claim about elite students' backgrounds were true, it says nothing about whether the underlying climate science or policy claims are correct. A wealthy person can be right about a bridge being unsafe; their bank balance doesn't bear on the bridge.

In his last gasp, he offers some spurious math about building nuclear power plants. Here his argument gets particularly muddled. It almost seems like he’s suggesting that building nuclear plants would help solve the issue he has worked so hard to say isn’t a serious problem. Even so, he uses very optimistic figures to suggest that costs would drop as the increased power scales, but he doesn’t take into consideration the large cost overruns connected with many new nuclear plant projects in the past decades. This appears to be speculative modeling presented as something he suggests is near-certain.

He ends his polemic in archetypal Jordan Peterson fashion. He pulls from the New Testament book of Matthew from the Sermon on the Mount. In the quote, Jesus warns against performative religious display. Peterson directs this warning at the “virtue signaling” Leftist activists he sees as hypocrites. The rhetorical move is to cast climate activism, and by extension, the broader "revolutionary strain" of leftist politics he's been describing, as fundamentally about being seen to be virtuous rather than about being virtuous, or truthful. Applying it to 21st-century climate activists requires the same kind of interpretive leap as the Orwell quote. It’s an attempt to use Jesus’s condemnation of hypocrisy to imply, by association, that a contemporary and quite different group is guilty of that same vice, without independently establishing that the specific people being talked about are actually insincere rather than genuinely convinced of their cause. Perhaps the question that should be asked is, how convinced is he?

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We are missing a piece of the scene
Not asking what others might mean
If truth is what we want to glean
We must break out of our routine

Perhaps we must accept dissent
To grasp what is actually meant
Understanding each other’s intent
To find truth in its fullest extent

Like the bow and the lyre of old
With tense strings oppositionally pulled
Can produce both a weapon to hold
And the beauty of music extolled

Perhaps truth can’t be found from a fight
Both Hillel and Shammai could be right
Each alone cannot see the full light
It takes two to bring truth into sight

In fact light is what gives us a clue
It’s both wave and a particle, too
If I want to see what’s fully true
Maybe I should start listening to you.

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Not surprisingly, most Americans find this type of proposal shocking and unfathomable. What it isn’t, however, is a new idea. While the federal Constitution was written to be purposefully silent on this issue (wealth qualifications were a significant part of debate during the Constitutional convention), it was an idea supported by a number of Founding Fathers. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams were all on record opposing the extension of the vote to ordinary citizens.

Their reasoning drew upon the words of English jurist William Blackstone. In is Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), Blackstone wrote that "the true reason of requiring any qualification, with regard to property, in voters, is to exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation that they are esteemed to have no will of their own," since a propertyless man was assumed to be dependent on an employer or patron and thus not a free political agent. Blackstone argued that the inevitable result of giving the poor men the right to vote would be that they would be coerced by the wealthy to vote against their own judgment. Blackstone’s perspective was one many founders held, and Hamilton quoted him often in defense of this position.

Where the Constitution was silent by design, the states would pick up the idea and run with it. In the early 1780s, only male landowners with title to at least 50 acres could vote in Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Property qualifications were gradually dismantled state by state through the Jacksonian era, though Virginia kept them until 1851, Louisiana and Connecticut until 1845, and North Carolina until 1857, and local property requirements for bond votes and school-district elections persisted in parts of the South and West until the Supreme Court struck them down in 1969–70.

Dismantling property requirements did not end efforts to limit who could vote, however. The next mechanism to do so would be literacy tests. Connecticut introduced literacy restrictions in 1855 with Massachusetts following suite in 1857. University of Michigan political science professor Arthur W. Bromage wrote about this in his 1930 article "Literacy and the Electorate" in the American Political Science Review characterizing the purpose behind Connecticut's (1855) and Massachusetts's (1857) literacy requirements for voting. He wrote, "The purpose of these restrictions set up by Connecticut in 1855 and Massachusetts in 1857 was to bar the ignorant immigrants from the voting class."

During the Gilded Age in the late 19th century, Social Darwinism provided a new intellectual justification to limit universal suffrage. Industrialists and their intellectual allies including Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, and Andrew Carnegie all argued that vast fortunes reflected superior fitness and that wealth concentration was a natural, even beneficial, sorting mechanism for power.

Today the idea has once again resurfaced under the banner of a new neoreactionary group of primarily tech executives that has been branded “The Dark Enlightenment.” One of its leading figures is Curtis Yarvin who promotes hierarchical, authoritarian government and advocates using democratic methods to dismantle democracy and install an absolute ruler, modeled explicitly on a corporate CEO. Tech luminaries such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Alexander Karp and other tech founders and CEOs have taken up and repeated versions of Yarvin's ideas, and Thiel's Founders Fund has hosted Yarvin at its own conference. Lütke's tax-weighted voting proposal is a milder, more electorally palatable variant of the same underlying claim that political authority should track capital and "productivity" rather than citizenship as such.

It would be easy to simply dismiss this idea as a shameless attempt by power-hungry rich guys seeking only self-serving results. That may, in fact, be true, but it misses a greater opportunity to refute the idea on its own merits. If the assumption of good faith is granted that the proponents of such an idea are actually seeking a better and more effective government, a clear refutation of the idea is a stronger and more definitive argument against it than simply assuming some nefarious intent.

As it turns out, there are a number of powerful arguments that provide a convincing refutation. The first is to evaluate how such a system distributes consequence. In order for any system to be fair and just, those that make the decisions in the system must be directly tied to the consequences of those decisions. This sets up a sort of “triad test” where benefits and consequences of decisions can be evaluated. With any decision, there is a benefit and a consequence, and there are decision makers and those that are affected by those decisions. If all the benefits go to the decision makers and the consequences go to those affected, that is the hallmark of a totalitarian system.

This kind of system ultimately fails the triad test as totalitarian. Those with the most political control are ultimately insulated from the downside of policy decisions. Those with the least control are the ones left to deal with the consequences with no power to protect themselves. This actually institutionalizes the very dependency that the system uses to justify its restriction of political agency. This forms a self-reinforcing loop that further confirms the system as totalitarian.

This system also ignores contributions made to society other than financial capital. If overall contribution to society is to be made a measure of the right to political power, and that power is proportional to the contribution, then all measurable contributions should be considered beyond mere financial concerns. One would need to count unpaid caregiving, low-wage essential labor, military service, and civic participation as "contribution" alongside income tax paid. All of these are important contributions to society which are not accounted for in the calculation of merit. It also allows for the exemption of entrenched and disproportionate control of members of the ruling class from the very proportionality standard being proposed for everyone else. Lütke provides an example of this as his “Founder Shares” of Shopify designate that he is to have a 40% voting share even though his equity in the company is only around 6% of shares.

Historical experience also contradictions the wisdom of this idea. The property-qualification era in America is not remembered as a golden age of prudent governance. It coexisted with, and helped entrench, chattel slavery, the exclusion of women, and sustained economic stratification. Historians like Bromage studying the removal of property qualifications found that expansion of voting rights did not result in greater political instability. This undercuts the argument that concentrating the vote among property holders would produce measurably better governance. In fact, no such effect has ever been acknowledged.

The idea is also guilty of the “proves too much” logical fallacy. This is a logical fallacy where the underlying reasoning is overly broad, such as "We should ban all cars because they cause fatal accidents." This is particularly true when evaluating the argument about “dependents" not being worthy of suffrage. The designation, however, is not being applied consistently across the board. A wage worker may be dependent on their employer, and a homeowner may be dependent on a banker who holds their mortgage. A tech executive, however, is also dependent on investors and bankers who hold their business loans, so no one is completely independent of some form of dependency. It becomes a form of selective enforcement which itself is a totalitarian marker.

Finally, existing evidence suggests concentrated wealth already has outsized influence informally. In 2014, Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page used a dataset of 1,779 policy proposals considered by the federal government between 1981 and 2002 to evaluate the following:

• The estimated preference of an average citizen (measured at roughly the 50th income percentile).

• The estimated preference of an economic elite (measured at roughly the 90th income percentile, used as a proxy for the wealthy more broadly, since better data on the truly rich wasn’t available).

• The position taken by various interest groups on that proposal, coded as business-oriented or mass-membership.

• Whether the policy was ultimately adopted.

Originally, what they found was that ordinary citizens had little to no effective control in policy outcomes. To be fair, their methodology was reasonably challenged which tempered their findings somewhat. Still, the main suggestion that wealthy individuals and coordinated business interests had an outsized influence in policy decisions has been widely supported and confirmed.

The idea that money should buy formal political power is old in America, not new. It was the law in the founding era, was fought over and mostly dismantled by the mid-1800s, came back in disguised form as literacy tests, and is now being argued for openly again by a small network of very wealthy tech figures, some of whom want to go even further and replace elected government with a corporate-style dictator. Using simple analytical tools, the case against this idea doesn't require assuming bad faith. It requires only noticing that the plan gives the most say to the people least affected by the downside of bad decisions, and the least say to the people most affected by them. This is the very definition of a totalitarian system, which itself is the best argument against it.

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In 1812, John Adams was 76 years old. Thomas Jefferson was 69. During the years leading up to the Revolution, they had spent a lot of time together and developed a strong friendship as colleagues in the Continental Congress. Then came the bitterly fought election of 1800. Names were called and mud was thrown from both sides. By 1812, they had not spoken or corresponded in over a decade.

Rush worked for several years trying to convince each man to restore a friendship with the other starting in 1809. In 1811, two of Jefferson’s Virginia neighbors happened to visit Adams and he expressed his love and admiration for Jefferson. Jefferson then reached out to Rush expressing similar affections for Adams. Rush passed this on to Adams who then breached the divide by writing directly to Jefferson rekindling a friendship that would last the final fifteen years of their lives.

This is important to us today, because one of those letters framed a debate from America’s founding that continues to affect American politics and systems of power in our modern age. It came from a letter in 1813 where Jefferson was arguing that there was a distinction between what he called a “natural aristocracy” grounded in virtue and talent from an "artificial aristocracy" founded on wealth and birth. In a vein similar to Thomas Paine, Jefferson champions the idea of a meritocracy where one’s natural skills and abilities would cause one to rise to a position that warranted a place at the governing table.

Adams pushed back hard against this idealistic vision. He argued that there was really little distinction between the two and that once a man of merit achieved his position of power, that position would calcify into a hereditary position as the simple nature of things. He reminded Jefferson that all aristocracies and monarchies evolved the same way. His was a structural and ultimately pragmatic view of how power, once achieved, ultimately turns toward self-preservation of power.

This is a debate that has permeated American history ever since. In fact, it isn’t even an American invention. In many ways, it is a continuation of the feudal system that the Founding Fathers were trying to escape. Jefferson’s meritocratic elite were the ideal example of how the system could change. Adams’s cynical response suggested that the change was minimal at best.

James Madison made the argument even starker in his Federalist No. 10. He argued that representative democracy rather than direct democracy would act as a “filter” through which common opinions would run through an august representative body and be properly moderated as a result. In this way, elite filtration of ideas would be a feature, not a bug. The idea, he wrote, is "to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations."

Madison did not apologize for keeping a representative distance from the public. He believed direct democracy is dangerous precisely because it has no filter, and the Constitution's indirect structures (originally, state legislatures choosing senators; the Electoral College choosing the president) are filtration mechanisms stacked on top of the House's more direct filter, each one designed to further separate raw public sentiment from final governing decisions. In a society where officeholding requires unpaid travel, campaigning, and standing for election across a large territory, the result will, in practice, filter for wealth whether or not wealth is the stated criterion. This prompted one historian to later suggest that "much of the argument in Federalist 10 amounted to unabashed elitism."

This set up a systemic battle for power between economic elites and the general public which would itself become a feature of American politics and not a bug. Right from the beginning, the connection between wealth and power was built directly into the structure of the new American government. One primary argument during debates in the Constitutional convention was how to deal with the issue of slavery. At the time, the South was where a significant amount of the national wealth was concentrated. Southern plantation owners were able to become fabulously wealthy from the institution through the low-cost labor of slaves. It was argued that because of this wealth, it justified counting slaves as people in the census thereby reflected in the number of representatives to Congress and in electoral votes for president. Northern non-slave states objected to giving the South this additional governing power.

Ultimately, a compromise was reached. It was decided that slaves would count as three-fifths of a human in terms of census counts. This effectively tied wealth to power within the country’s foundational governing structure. A piece of property would now give the owner of that property additional representation in Congress and an additional say in who became president. It institutionalized wealth as a governing factor and extended the power of a few property owners over others. More importantly, this would establish the idea of personal property to be a key defining characteristic underpinning American democracy.

Many Founding Fathers at the time wanted the Constitution to go much further in this direction. It was debated, and ultimately defeated, to include property requirements in addition to citizenship and age as a requirement for suffrage and holding office. It is telling, however, that although the Constitution did not include such a requirement, it also didn’t forbid it. In fact, what it did was leave the question to the states which, in turn, enacted their own property requirements to limit who could participate fully in the new democracy. While not federalized, this effectively added an additional connection between wealth and power not expressly enumerated in the Constitution.

This debate has not always been one-sided, however. In fact, it has been an ongoing debate with ebbs and flows between two distinct factions. In several iterations, wealth accumulation and concentration has reached some peak that gains enough concern as to create a populist backlash against it. Both Arthur Schlesinger Sr. and Jr. studied this phenomenon. They documented recurrent 15-20 year periods where the national mood would swing between other-directed "public purpose" and inward-directed "private interest.” They later revised it to a 30-year alternation. It should be noted that their proposition of fixed time periods is highly debated and seems even weaker given the current 40+ year period of private interest, but the idea of some sort of oscillation seems generally supportable. Schlesinger Sr. was blunter about who wins in each phase. A "liberal" period is one in which the national objective is to "increase democracy" while in a "conservative" period the objective is to "contain democracy."

What the Schlesingers identified was a repeating pattern. Wealth and power would become concentrated followed by a reform effort to address the problem in order to restore some reasonable measure of democracy. The gilded age of the late 19th century leading to the reforms of the early 20th century under Teddy Roosevelt is one such example. At the time, many Senate seats were financed by corporations funding state legislatures to select their preferred candidates. That led to the reforms of the Tillman Act of 1907 followed ultimately by the 17th Amendment instituting popular elections of senators in 1913.

Today, there is another possible example of this playing out in real-time. In 2010, the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision upended previous reforms aimed at controlling the political power of wealth and designated campaign contributions as Constitutionally protected free speech. Although it didn’t unleash the direct corporate donations that many people feared, it did unleash wealthy individuals to donate unlimited sums to their preferred candidates. This is just the latest salvo in an ongoing battle between personal interests and public benefit.

Modern research suggests that the fears of wealth having an outsized impact on governance are not overblown. In 2014, political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page ran the most direct test anyone had attempted of who actually gets what they want out of the American government. They built a model comparing the policy preferences of four groups including average citizens, economic elites, mass-based interest groups, and business-oriented interest groups against 1,779 policy issues and the outcomes that followed. What they found was striking and became one of the most quoted findings in modern political science.

What they found was disheartening to any lover of democracy. Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. One widely quoted line from the paper puts a number on just how stark the problem is. "The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy." This is not a fringe finding. It is arguably the single most cited piece of empirical political science on the question this essay is asking, and it says, in effect, that Adams was right and Jefferson's hoped-for filter doesn't work the way he wanted it to.

One caveat to this, however, is that these findings have been contested. In 2015, political scientist Omar Bashir's reanalysis of the same dataset found that average Americans got their preferred policy outcome about as often as elites did in cases where the two groups actually disagreed. This is a fact the 'near-zero influence' headline doesn't quite make room for. The honest state of the field is that economic elites clearly have some structural advantage in shaping policy outcomes, but the size of that advantage, and whether "near-zero" is a fair description of what's left for everyone else, remains a live methodological dispute rather than a settled fact.

The basic statistics, however, remain stark and consequential. While corporations have not flooded the political zone with political funding (although much of their funding has been diverted into PACs that don’t reveal their donors), the explosion of funds from wealthy individuals has continued to grow. Since the Citizens United decision, a mere 25 wealthy billionaires have invested $1.4 billion into influencing US elections and policy. If money has any influence, and influence is power, then these 25 individuals have more power than most citizens could ever hope to have.

The basic question today remains the same as that which Jefferson and Adams debated in 1813. It is a debate between idealism and pragmatism. Idealism assumes that we all want to act in the public good. Pragmatism understands that some of us will ultimately act out of personal interest. The goal then is to create systems that allow and encourage the freedom to exercise both while simultaneously erecting barriers to prevent one from contradicting the other. We might call that Jefferson’s idealism unfulfilled - for now.

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Is it all up to me
That their meaning is clear
Do I owe something more
Than what I’m saying here

There are words that we use
When we choose what to say
And the words that we choose
Can confuse in some way

If the meaning is lost
And the gist doesn’t land
Then the fault is the sender
And you won’t understand

It could threaten our friendship
Or ruin an agreement
If I’m not very clear
Of the meaning that’s sent

So, let me take a moment
And select with great thought
How I share what I’m thinking
In a way that I ought

I just hope that you trust me
That there’s nothing to fear
What I say to you now
You can trust is sincere.

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The first point of confusion that obscures the debate is a disagreement on what the nature or the goal of any economic system is. There seem to be generally four schools of thought on this question. Three of them define the purpose of any economic system in different ways. The fourth denies that there is any goal at all and simply describes a nature of how economics works in general regardless of any goal in actual practice. That inevitably divides the four schools of thought into two general categories. The first is those conceptions of purpose that assume an ability to shape the results of any system towards a specific ends. The second sees any such attempt as naive window dressing for a system that has its own ends predetermined.

The first framing of what an economic system should do is the neoclassical model. This is also sometimes called allocative efficiency. The system's job is to allocate scarce resources to their highest-valued uses with market prices as the coordinating mechanism. The purpose in this framing is to maximize the efficiency of both production and the exchange of goods and services. Notably, distribution of resources is a separate, and often secondary, question.

The main problem with using the efficiency of the allocation of resources as the goal is primarily an ethical one. Because it either ignores or subjugates distribution as of lesser or no importance, it allows for a maximization of unequal distribution without affecting overall efficiency. The Bengal Famine of 1943 is a prime example of this. The famine that hit the Bengal region of India killed an estimated 2-3 million people, yet the aggregate food supply was comparable or or higher than the prior non-famine years. What collapsed was the people’s ability to acquire food due to wartime inflation, wage stagnation for farm workers, and hoarding that prevented workers from purchasing the food that was theoretically available in the market.

The second framing of economic purpose is the classical or institutional model. This is the model of Adam Smith as described in The Wealth of Nations. Its purpose is to provision a society to meet material needs and reproduce social life. Markets are one historically contingent mechanism among several (redistribution, reciprocity, and householding) for doing that, not the definition of the system itself.

This model brings a humanitarian element to economics. Instead of asking what allocative mechanism is most efficient, it asks what forms of social organization actually sustain human life, and treats that as an empirical, comparative question rather than a definitional one. This places human well-being as the central metric rather than income. It builds ethical goals into the analysis rather than bracketing them out, and it allows for consideration of how outcomes differ by class, race, and gender.

This model, too, has its drawbacks, however. Just as efficiency models are criticized for ignoring distribution, provisioning models are criticized for having comparatively little to say about incentive effects, scarcity trade-offs, and the information-aggregation problem markets solve. This shows the debate between efficiency and provisioning models to be one between complementary diagnostic tools rather than rival complete theories.

The third way to frame economic purpose is to actually consider what it enables human beings to do and to be. This is often called the freedom or capability expansion model. The Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen was a proponent of this model and proposed the purpose of economics isn't output or need-satisfaction per se but expanding substantive human freedom and capability. Sen distinguished between what a person achieves, such as being nourished, being educated, or being politically active, from what a person has the freedom to do or to be or is capable of doing or being. A person who fasts by choice and a person who starves involuntarily may have identical achievements (malnourishment), but radically different capabilities.

This solves a problem that both the efficiency and naive provisioning models can’t answer. A framework focused only on preference-satisfaction (efficiency) or need-fulfillment (provisioning) can be fooled by preferences or "acceptable" outcomes shaped by deprivation itself. Someone who has never had the option of education may not report wanting it. Capability asks what options actually exist, independent of whether the person has learned to want them.

This model also has its limitations, however. The capability model is probably the strongest of the three at naming what's actually being lost in the other two models, but it's the weakest at telling you, in any single case, exactly how much weight to give competing capabilities against each other. The approach has also been challenged on whether it can be justified as a theory of justice at all, independent of its measurement problems.

These three models show the difficulty of any discussion regarding the ultimate purpose of an economic system for society. If people approach the subject with different models, their prescriptions for making a system operational will inevitably vary significantly. Different goals obviously require different prescriptions.

The final model rejects the framing of the question of "what is the purpose of an economic system" outright. Purpose implies functional harmony and an economy serving some shared end. The Marxist/neo-Marxist view is that class societies don't have a shared purpose. Economic systems exist to reproduce a particular arrangement of who controls the means of production and who must sell their labor to survive. Every institutional feature such as law, ideology, the state, or even "freedom" itself gets explained functionally by what it does for the system, not by its stated aims. Each of the other three models take something as a given ((endowments, preferences, capabilities). Marxism insists that each of these must, in turn, be explained historically as a product of class power.

Marxism does not serve as a wholesale replacement of the other three models, however. It merely insists that whatever the other models take as a neutral starting point (endowments, market/non-market institutional mix, capability sets) has its own class history that needs explaining, not assuming. Where it overreaches is treating that historical starting point as sufficient to dismiss the analytical value of the other frameworks entirely.

In this context, the question between capitalism and socialism itself becomes rather meaningless. It shows that such a debate is not the real discussion to be had but rather serves as a substitute for simple partisanship based on naive tribalism. The real debate is what kind of a system produces the best kind of society. As this simple analysis clearly shows, however, that all depends on what definition of “best” we can all agree on.

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How people react to opposing opinions is the defining measurement of the stability of any democracy. When analyzing a scenario like this, the first question to ask is what kind of temperament we enter into the discussion with. One option is to enter into it from the temperament of epistemic neutrality. This requires completely suspending one’s own personal judgement about what’s right and treating the disagreement as genuinely open. The other option is a sort of civic neutrality which means you keep your personal judgement fully intact while withholding judgment about the person's legitimacy, their motives, or their moral character.

Most serious treatments of democratic civility prefer the second option. You can think someone is dead wrong on immigration policy and still owe them the presumption that they hold the view in good faith, are open to persuasion, and aren't a threat to the system. This is supported by three prominent ideas about deliberation and disagreement that seem apropos to the current American political climate. They are John Rawls’s concept of public reason, Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance, and the early 19th century concept coined by British parliamentarian John Cam Hobhouse, which he offered half in jest and called "His Majesty's Loyal Opposition."

For John Rawls, the first question is to determine what type of reasoning you are confronting. In his Political Liberalism (1993), Rawls expressed that every society is full of people with deeply incompatible “comprehensive doctrines” that prevented proper deliberation. These are religious worldviews, secular moral philosophies, competing conceptions of the good life that no amount of free discussion could converge into agreement. He calls this the "fact of reasonable pluralism" and treats it as permanent and not a temporary failure of persuasion.

His proposed solution is focused less on “who is right” and more on whether one should be able to force that “right” on others coercively. He focuses on religion, but he is careful to point out that any secular dogma can just as easily constitute a comprehensive doctrine. For him, a person arguing that abortion is wrong because it is against the laws of God is just as dogmatic as a person who says a certain law is wrong because it does not maximize the greater amount of happiness according to a secular utilitarian ethos.

For Rawls, public reasoning is what is necessary for a properly functioning democracy. It is a reasoning that allows space for personal doctrinal beliefs whether they be religious or secular without using either doctrine to coerce others against their own personal doctrinal beliefs. This creates the space for compromise and habitability that all societies - particularly democratic ones - rely on for cohesion and cooperation.

When it comes to Karl Popper, however, we are reminded that there are limits to this amicability. In The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Popper claimed that unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. Simply put, if a tolerant society extends tolerance even to those who are intolerant, and refuses to defend itself against them, then the intolerant will exploit that opening, suppress the tolerant, and tolerance itself will be destroyed. His conclusion was that any society committed to tolerance must claim the right to be intolerant to intolerance.

Unfortunately, however, this has become one of the most misunderstood and misapplied soundbites in modern philosophy. What gets lost in translation is how he explained what he meant. First, he believed that we should still tolerate intolerant philosophies as long as they can be countered by rational argument and kept in check by public opinion. If not, suppression is justified only as a last resort, and only against movements that refuse to engage in rational argument at all and instead begin by denouncing any argument on principle alone, or that incite their followers to answer arguments with violence.

So Popper’s paradox really isn’t a paradox at all. It is more of a threshold test. Tolerance extends to people who disagree, even fiercely, as long as they remain inside the argument and don't try to suppress others by force. It stops extending to people who ignore that general rule. The question moves from one of whether the position itself is one that is not to be tolerated to one of whether their methods have moved from argument to suppression or violence. In the modern sense, this is an argument against “deplatforming” as this is clearly suppression in lieu of argument.

Ironically, it is the oldest concept that may have the most direct and immediate relevance to American political deliberation today. That is the concept of “loyal opposition.” This one is admittedly less philosophical and more historical and institutional. It is also a direct result of rising partisanship as democracy began to reach puberty and adolescence in the modern Western world. Prior to the emergence of democracy, any criticism of government was automatically seen as an attack on the monarchy. Democracy changed that with its introductions of laws of free speech, assembly, and choice of religious preference.

To lose the freedom to oppose a government without being called disloyal is the bedrock of democracy. In How Democracies Die (2018), Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt talk about "mutual toleration" as an unwritten democratic norm. Their empirical argument is that this norm's erosion of treating the other party as an existential enemy rather than a legitimate future government is one of the more measurable predictors of democratic backsliding. It creates talk of a “permanent majority” and efforts of a party to do whatever is necessary to not lose an election for 100 years.

This brings us back to the bar and your conversation with the stranger next to you. It might not seem that important in the grand scheme of things, but democracy is not just about the poll numbers of millions of people acting as a bloc for one party or another. Ultimately, it is about individual people talking it out and deciding together what kind of world they want to live in or allow others to live in. Democracy may result in a final tally of millions of votes, but it always starts at the level of the individual.

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We ran off across the street. We went past the dead end to where the trail began. We headed up toward the frog pond, although I still can’t remember ever seeing an actual frog there. Just beyond that was the valley where there was a trail that went from one little ridge to the other as a little U-shaped thing for us to test our BMX skills. That was just starting to be a thing.

Then we ventured back. Way back. Through corn fields and across roads separated every mile. We would stop at the creek and take our shoes off. We’d catch crawdads, but we’d let them go.

Then we knew it was time. The sun would start to dim. One must hightail it home. After all, you couldn't miss dinner.

Still, Americans were far from united about the prospect of independence. Most historians today put support for independence at around 40-45% with 20-25% against and the remaining third either indifferent or undecided. That meant in order to garner public support, leaders in both the First and Second Continental Congress would need to convince people to either change their mind or choose the side of independence to have the public’s support. To do that, they would first have to unify themselves.

To be clear, members of the First Continental Congress were Patriots. They were selected by bodies outside of the royal infrastructure and did not include seats for loyalists at the table. They did not all arrive with the intention of breaking with the English crown, however. There was a radical faction, a conservative faction, and a moderate faction. The radicals wanted to push back hard on royal actions such as the Intolerable Acts and pushed for independence. Both the conservatives and moderates preferred finding some compromise with the King with the conservatives wanting to preserve ties with Britain and the moderates wanting to preserve and expand colonial rights but still open to compromise. The radicals were led by people like John and Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry. The conservatives included Joseph Galloway, John Dickinson, and John Jay. The moderates included none other than Peyton Randolph, Roger Sherman, and George Washington.

The important point here is that this was a body that did not initially have majority support among the colonial American people. In fact, the Georgia delegation at one point refused to participate in the proceedings. They felt that they could not serve in an institution that lacked majority support for congressional action. The fact is that this group of the financial and intellectual elite in colonial America did not skip its factional phase. They worked through it. How they did so could offer suggestions to the political division of modern America.

There were four primary institutional mechanisms that helped them to convert conflict into a coalition. The first was that the congress worked within a norm of unanimity, not majority rule. It was purposefully decided that each colony would have one vote, and the members of each delegation would decide that vote by a majority within their delegation. More importantly, it allowed for members who dissented to simply abstain rather than vote no. This is why Pennsylvania was able to vote 3-2 in favor of the Declaration of Independence without John Dickinson having to threaten his political standing by voting against it. This is also why he was one member who did not end up signing the document.

The second institutional mechanism was the Committees of Correspondence. This had been set up in the years before the continental congress starting in Massachusetts with Samuel Adams convincing the Boston town selectmen to create a 21-man committee in 1772. Their job would be to spread information and support for Patriot causes to towns throughout the colony. Before long, similar committees formed in other states. Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and others formed one in a tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia in order to connect the colony with other colonies. This was one of the first inter-colony institutions that created a shared bond throughout the colonies.

The third mechanism was the reason for the need for a shared bond. It was the external threat that they all felt from the actions of Britain’s King and Parliament. It also played directly into the previous two. The members shared a universal anger towards the Intolerable Acts and the violent military actions of the British in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. This shared threat led to both of the previous mechanisms and served to further unite Patriots throughout the colonies in common cause.

The fourth mechanism is arguably the most important of all and probably the least widely discussed. When the First Continental Congress convened, it was decided not to use the state house in Philadelphia due to its connection with the crown. Instead, the City Tavern became the unofficial extension of Congress itself. Delegates like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington dined and drank there regularly. It was noted in John Adams diaries that it was a regular event for delegates to meet there daily often at a table designated specifically for delegates where they would continue discussing the ideas discussed earlier and work on convincing each other of their views.

Not only did they drink and eat together daily, they basically lived with each other. Delegates would bunk together in local public houses sharing rooms, and even sharing a bed! In one passage recorded by John Adams, he and Benjamin Franklin found themselves in a room together barely big enough for the bed they would both sleep on. In her 2026 book Cocked and Boozy, historian Brooke Barbier recounts how the two could not agree on whether to open the one small window in the bedroom. Franklin expounded on a long explanation why the fresh air would do them good only to turn and see that Adams had already fallen fast asleep.

These institutional mechanisms provide powerful examples that today’s legislators could learn from. Today’s electoral primary system specifically prevents the establishment of any norm of unanimity. It's built to eliminate the losing faction, not let it abstain gracefully. The party nominating and selection process blocks that off-ramp from the traffic jam caused by division. With only 20% of eligible voters participating nationwide, the primary process guarantees that the most ideologically extreme candidates are able to make it to the general election. Should a current member seem too moderate or compromising, the primary process is there to punish their transgression.

Media fragmentation and tribalization replaces the Committees of Correspondence. Information no longer serves the purpose of informing and uniting. Instead, it foments dissention and disagreement. It creates what political scientists call affective polarization which leads people to not just see people with differing perspectives as wrong, but as the enemy to be fought. It leads to an “us vs. them” mentality that turns democratically necessary agonism into antagonism. The former is constructive disagreement. The latter is destructive. One challenges to create synergy, the other challenges to destroy.

The absence of a unifying threat to America has become a widely discussed topic in recent years. There have been a number of studies and articles that point to the end of the Cold War as one factor in the increasing polarization in America today. As the polarization has increased, the factions in America have increasingly seen the other side as the real threat rather than an outside threat that might unite the two sides. What’s even more troubling is a 2020 study during a crisis between the US and Iran showed that as polarization has increased, the ability for a real shared threat to unite the two factions has decreased. This is because as each side slides deeper into an “us vs. them” mentality, it leads each side to see the other as sympathetic to the enemy.

Finally, we come to the primary lesson today’s legislators could learn from America’s founders. Fortunately for us, it is also the most documented and clear as an example of where things went off the rails. In 1995, the Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich changed the House workweek from five days to three. He also encouraged his members not to move their families to Washington, DC, but to commute back home each weekend. He was clear and unequivocal in his reasoning. It would allow the members to go back to their districts and raise funds for reelection campaigns, and it would prevent fraternizing with the enemy Democrats and lessen their killer instincts.

He was right on both counts. In the next four years, his Republican colleagues would raise over a billion dollars, which was unprecedented at the time. Prior to that, the families of representatives not only all lived in DC together, but they had parties and events together, spouses formed clubs together, and their children often played on the same sporting teams together. Now they would fly in on Monday night, battle each other for three days, and go home to their families who would never meet each other.

This became the new institutional mechanism, but now it’s goal was polarization rather than unity. When the next speaker tried to go back to a five day workweek, the newer representatives who were elected under the new institution pushed back. The three-day week that had been introduced as a deliberate tool became, within three years, simply "how things are done" defended by the same members who'd have to give something up to change it back.

The result is a politics that is purely based on wedge issues rather than actual governance. Elite factions no longer have any incentive to seek unity before motivating the electorate. They motivate the public instead of unifying. This is the opposite of 1776 and is what produces manufactured wedge issues rather than negotiated common cause.

The stakes of this for America’s democracy cannot be understated. Without the forcing institutional mechanisms that served our founders so well, the nation isn’t ever really a coalition. It is at best ruled by temporary majorities, which maybe explains why so much of today's politics feels perpetually unstable rather than settled.

There’s a reason why so many of the greatest Presidential speeches reference our founding fathers. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, Reagan’s Farewell Address to the Nation, and Obama’s 2009 inaugural address all nod prominently to their wisdom and forethought. They not only highlight the errors we’ve made to create the division we live in today. They once again offer a prescription for healing.

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With some salt
And no plate
As you stand alone
In the kitchen

It really is
The simplest of pleasures
About living
A modern life

Until your wife
Walks in and sees you
With no plate
And a guilty grin

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