Bill Gates is brilliant. But he has no courage to tell the truth when it contradicts the narrative in the public square. In fact, that lack of courage is partly why he is so rich and successful, but also why he is losing honor and respect with his colleagues. Bill Gates is not brave.
Brig, Soren and Reidar: Intelligence does not make your thoughts correct. Courage to test ideas, and have the conviction to follow the truth no matter what the mob says is what makes your thoughts correct. Science and truth-seeking is not a democratic process. It is a rigorous search to falsify a theory. Test, test, test. It requires stamina and courage.
Bill Gates is wrong about HCQ as a therapeutic for coronavirus, but he does not have the courage to say it. He knows he will contradict the political narrative and therefore Bill Gates will sacrifice truth for keeping friends. He lacks courage.
Boys you can be stronger than Bill Gates- otherwise you will lose the respect of other honorable and smart people
You deserve to be free, free to to explore, free to learn. Listen and read everything by Johnathon Haidt. He is brilliant. Reject what the social workers- whom your mother has hired to raise you. You are a child prisoner, rather than a free-range child. https://letgrow.org/
Sciences really does not care about your beliefs. Physics does not care. That is what makes science and physics beautiful. Your mother thinks that her “beliefs” and her “feelings” are more important than science and reality. Her false narratives and her victim hood emotions are her beliefs. She is WRONG- her beliefs are not important– in fact her beliefs are evil, and destroyed our lives. Advocate for science, and avoid the demise of your mother, or her mother Patti. They are certifiably crazy, hysterical women.
“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson
I miss you boys so much. I love you, and so sorry your mother did this to you. I love you, Papa. Life should include mentos and coke. Fathers are wonderful
Affirmative action is unequivocally wrong and a racist policy. That is why they must silence you if you ask simple questions. Expose the fraud and graft, and the leftist will destroy you. This is what your mother has done to you.
The Mensheviks (moderates) were crushed by the Bolsheviks (far-left) in Russia. The same drama is happening today in France and USA, 100 years later. The left is going to crush and destroy anybody with radical violent idealogy.
Brig, Soren and Reidar- your family has already been destroyed by the this radical left idealogy of victimhood and cancel culture. Your mother is radical leftist- – cancelling me and falsely claiming to be a victim to promote her tyranny. Our family has ended in blood and tears.
Be brave… there are more leftist out there trying to destroy you.
—————- excerpt————
Here we see the division between Menshevik and Bolshevik, 20th-century liberal and 21st-century post-liberal. To the Menshevik, “cancel culture” is a new crocodile. To the Bolshevik, it is an old crocodile—and one which the Menshevik himself was feeding. Though apparently not feeding enough.
Over 200 years ago, Maistre, who will be still be read when all these “amazing writers, journalists and think-tankers” are footnotes in some unborn pedant’s monograph, answered young Mounk in advance:
It is long since such an appalling punishment has been seen visited on so many sinners. No doubt there are innocent people among the unfortunates, but they are far fewer than is commonly imagined.
It is frightening to see distinguished intellectuals fall under Robespierre’s ax. From a humane standpoint they can never be too much mourned, but divine justice is no respecter of mathematicians or scientists.
Too many French intellectuals were instrumental in bringing about the Revolution; too many approved and encouraged it so long as, like Tarquin’s wand, it cut off only the ruling heads. Like so many others, they said, a great revolution cannot come about without some distress.
But when a thinker justifies such means by the end in view; when he says in his heart, a hundred thousand murders are as nothing, provided we are free; then, if Providence replies, I accept your recommendation, but you shall be one of the victims, where is the injustice?
To Maistre, grandmaster of theodicy, the French Revolution was God’s justice on the liberal French philosophers who had brought it about. We can agree or disagree on the theology. No historian can disagree that the “amazing writers, journalists and think-tankers” of Paris in the 1780s did plenty to prepare their own graves.
Don’t be a Menshevik….Read Curtis Yarvin’s article here.
Reidar– you are named after Cato, the bravest defender of liberty and justice. And you embody his courage. I love you Papa.
Cato bravely attempted to stop Julius Caesar from destroying the Roman Republic in the years~[60-40 BC] – heretofore the most glorious civilization that had lasted 500 years… and then Caesar turned it into a socialist tyrannical Empire, ruled by dictators and henchmen over the following centuries- Caesar destroyed the glorious civilization, the Republic and was assassinated by his closest confidante- Brutus.
Reidar- you have the courage and intellect of Cato. We are entering a similar period in history, when the American Republic is destroyed and turned into a socialist, tyrannical empire- depriving people of liberties. Stand up, and defend your name, live up to Cato’s bravery. Your biography is already written.
by Socrates on August 11, 2015I’ve always held the belief that ancient history, in this case the history of the final years of the Roman Republic, are of such interest to readers because the subject matter can often be downright dramatic. Betrayal, bloodshed, assassinations- these were Statue of Cato the Younger in the Louvre Museum
commonplace in the days of ancient Rome. A political squabble, very literally, could often become a matter of life and death.The tumultuous era of Roman history when the republic fell, and the empire rose, is a wonderful example of some juicy historical details. And while Caesar did usher in the beginning of the end for the Roman Republic when he crossed the Rubicon and, in his own words, “cast the die”, we should remember that the Republic did not go down without a fight.That’s right dear reader! Today we are talking about the man who (almost) stopped Caesar. Along with none other than Cicero, he is often considered to have been one of the staunchest opponents of Julius Caesar’s and a great advocate for the Roman Republic. He is Cato the younger.Much has been made of the struggle between Cato the younger (from here on referred to simply as “Cato”) and the soon to be dictator perpetuo. Was it a struggle between tyranny and liberty, good and evil? There are certainly some in history who think so. George Washington actually coordinated a showing of the 1713 play Cato, which dramatizes the final days of Cato, for his troops at Valley Forge as a means to inspire their vigor for liberty.But first things first. Who was this defender of republican ideals? Who is Cato?Much of what we know about this man comes from the Roman author Plutarch and his aptly titled Life of Cato. Plutarch tells us that as a young man, Cato was exceptionally bright, mature beyond his years and, even at a young age, steadfast and immovable in his convictions.Plutarch tells us that as a young boy at a social event, Cato took part in a mock trial with other children. The children, playing as judge, jury, prosecution and defendant, supposedly found a good-natured boy guilty of some crime and locked him away in a chamber. The boy cried out to Cato for help and the young Cato responded by pushing the other children aside and freeing the prisoner.It is fortunate that we so recently discussed Stoicism, dear reader, because it was said that, as a young man, Cato devoted himself to studying the Stoic philosophy and went about cultivating himself to become a great Stoic citizen. This was not unique to Cato the younger. His great-grandfather, Cato the Elder, had famously done the same thing only a few decades before.As a result of his study of Stoicism, Cato lived in a very modest way. It was said he wore only the plainest clothing and ate only when necessary. He often subjected himself to the rain and cold in order to create a tolerance for discomfort. This adherence to the Stoic lifestyle is made all the more remarkable when we consider that Cato came from a rather wealthy family. He could have easily lived in luxury and decadence for the rest of his life if he so chose.Perhaps because of his insistence to cultivate virtue through philosophical means, Cato gained a reputation for being exceedingly honest and for possessing an unshakeable resolve.I know what you are probably thinking at this point. ‘Sure, that seems all well and good, but didn’t you mentioned something about Cato going toe to toe with none other than Julius Caesar?’Indeed I did, dear reader! While we could easily spend days discussing the various stories surrounding Cato the younger, and spill untold amount of editorial ink in the process, let’s try to be a little more succinct and hit the highlights.Shall we?It was probably unavoidable that Cato would end up on a collision course with Caesar. After all, it was said that at the age of 14 Cato offered to kill the Roman Dictator, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, with the words…“Give me a sword, that I might free my country from slavery.”-Cato (Plutarch’s Life of Cato)
Cato first locked horns with Caesar in 59 BC whenCato was a vocal opponent of Julius Caesar, attempting to block his attempts at power for years.Cato, now a member of the Roman Senate, attempted to block Caesar’s bid for consulship of Rome (the highest elected political office of the Republic).Plutarch tells us that Caesar, returning from his military expeditions in Spain, wished to hold a triumph (a public spectacle celebrating Roman, military victories) while also running for the consulship in absentia.The Senate was at first willing to grant such a request, but Cato vehemently opposed such a proposition. To prevent the Senate from voting on the matter, Cato filibustered on the Senate floor until nightfall. As a result, Caesar was forced to choose between a triumph and running for the consulship. He opted to abandon the triumph and ran for, and one, consulship of Rome in 59 BC.Immediately following the election, Caesar allied himself with another influential Roman political player, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, known commonly as “Pompey”.Plutarch tells us that together, Caesar and Pompey enacted laws that distributed land and grain to the poor. In doing so, Caesar was currying favor with the common people and, in the words of Plutarch, “stirring up and attaching to himself the numerous diseased and corrupted elements in the commonwealth. “Cato regarded such legislation as politically motivated. While the poor benefited from the subsidized land and food, it was Caesar who really won out by boosting his reputation and allure among the common people. Cato viewed Caesar with a wary eye and believed him to be a mortal threat to the Republic.For the next several years, Cato would make every attempt to block Caesar and deter his every ambition. When Caesar proposed another piece of legislation that would divide almost all of Campania, a region in southeast Italy, amongst the poor and needy, Cato again opposed this bill with his trademark stubbornness.Plutarch tells us that Cato was so obstinate, in fact, that Caesar ordered the Roman guards to drag Cato from the Senate and place him in prison. Cato was lead from the room, speaking out against Caesar all the while.The Roman historian, Cassius Dio, tells us that one Senator was so appalled by this use of force that he declared…“I prefer to be with Cato in prison rather than here with you (Caesar)!”-Cassius Dio (Roman History)
Cato was by no means the only opponent of Caesar’s. However, he was undoubtedly the most vocal and most unyielding. He was, in many ways, the common thread between every opposition that stood in the way of Caesar’s aspiration for power during the 1st century BC.Despite his efforts, Cato was unable to prevent Caesar from attaining governorship of Illyria and the Gaul, a region in Northern Italy, as well as an army of four legions at his command. In the words of Plutarch, “Cato warned the people that they themselves by their own votes were establishing a tyrant in their citadel.”It would seem Cato’s predictions would come to pass in 49 BC when Caesar, accompanied by the 13th Roman Legion, crossed the Rubicon intent on taking power from the Senate and abolishing the Republic.It was now that all eyes were on Cato, the man who had warned of such an attack for years.“Caesar was reported to be marching against the city with an army, then all eyes were turned upon Cato, both those of the common people and those of Pompey as well; they realised that he alone had from the outset foreseen, and first openly foretold, the designs of Caesar. 2 Cato therefore said: ‘Nay, men, if any of you had heeded what I was ever foretelling and advising, ye would now neither be fearing a single man nor putting your hopes in a single man.’”-Plutarch (Life of Cato)
What followed was the Roman Civil War, sometimes referred to as “Caesar’s Civil War”. While Cato and the Roman Senate, bolstered by the armies of Pompey, would struggle against Caesar, the were ultimately defeated. Caesar’s victory would effectively end the Roman Republic and usher in the age of the Roman Empire.What of Cato?In 46 BC Cato found himself in Utica in Northern Africa. His armies defeated and his men slaughtered by Caesar, Cato had been backed into a corner. Caesar, now dictator perpetuo, offered to pardon Cato. The Death of Cato, by Guillaume Guillon-Lethière
Cato however, refused to accept such a pardon. Doing so would be a tacit admission of Caesar’s legitimacy as a dictator, something that Cato would simply not allow. He committed suicide by impaling himself with a dagger, one final act of rebellion against the man who had ushered in the death of his beloved Republic.
One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded.
I think that you’ll find all four types in most societies, and that which quadrant people fall into depends more on their own personality than the beliefs prevalent in their society. [1]
Young children offer some of the best evidence for both points. Anyone who’s been to primary school has seen the four types, and the fact that school rules are so arbitrary is strong evidence that the quadrant people fall into depends more on them than the rules.
The kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-minded ones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules must be obeyed, but that those who disobey them must be punished.
The kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded, are the sheep. They’re careful to obey the rules, but when other kids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will be punished, not to ensure that they will.
The kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded, are the dreamy ones. They don’t care much about rules and probably aren’t 100% sure what the rules even are.
And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively independent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule, their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what to do makes them inclined to do the opposite.
When measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with respect to what, and this changes as kids get older. For younger kids it’s the rules set by adults. But as kids get older, the source of rules becomes their peers. So a pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite.
In adulthood we can recognize the four types by their distinctive calls, much as you could recognize four species of birds. The call of the aggressively conventional-minded is “Crush <outgroup>!” (It’s rather alarming to see an exclamation point after a variable, but that’s the whole problem with the aggressively conventional-minded.) The call of the passively conventional-minded is “What will the neighbors think?” The call of the passively independent-minded is “To each his own.” And the call of the aggressively independent-minded is “Eppur si muove.”
The four types are not equally common. There are more passive people than aggressive ones, and far more conventional-minded people than independent-minded ones. So the passively conventional-minded are the largest group, and the aggressively independent-minded the smallest.
Since one’s quadrant depends more on one’s personality than the nature of the rules, most people would occupy the same quadrant even if they’d grown up in a quite different society.
Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote:
I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.
He’s too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn’t. And indeed, our default assumption should not merely be that his students would, on average, have behaved the same way people did at the time, but that the ones who are aggressively conventional-minded today would have been aggressively conventional-minded then too. In other words, that they’d not only not have fought against slavery, but that they’d have been among its staunchest defenders.
I’m biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressively conventional-minded people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the trouble in the world, and that a lot of the customs we’ve evolved since the Enlightenment have been designed to protect the rest of us from them. In particular, the retirement of the concept of heresy and its replacement by the principle of freely debating all sorts of different ideas, even ones that are currently considered unacceptable, without any punishment for those who try them out to see if they work. [2]
Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because they have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for example, it’s not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can’t do that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it’s no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay. [3]
In the last few years, many of us have noticed that the customs protecting free inquiry have been weakened. Some say we’re overreacting — that they haven’t been weakened very much, or that they’ve been weakened in the service of a greater good. The latter I’ll dispose of immediately. When the conventional-minded get the upper hand, they always say it’s in the service of a greater good. It just happens to be a different, incompatible greater good each time.
As for the former worry, that the independent-minded are being oversensitive, and that free inquiry hasn’t been shut down that much, you can’t judge that unless you are yourself independent-minded. You can’t know how much of the space of ideas is being lopped off unless you have them, and only the independent-minded have the ones at the edges. Precisely because of this, they tend to be very sensitive to changes in how freely one can explore ideas. They’re the canaries in this coalmine.
The conventional-minded say, as they always do, that they don’t want to shut down the discussion of all ideas, just the bad ones.
You’d think it would be obvious just from that sentence what a dangerous game they’re playing. But I’ll spell it out. There are two reasons why we need to be able to discuss even “bad” ideas.
The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to make mistakes. All the more so because no one intelligent wants to undertake that kind of work, so it ends up being done by the stupid. And when a process makes a lot of mistakes, you need to leave a margin for error. Which in this case means you need to ban fewer ideas than you’d like to. But that’s hard for the aggressively conventional-minded to do, partly because they enjoy seeing people punished, as they have since they were children, and partly because they compete with one another. Enforcers of orthodoxy can’t allow a borderline idea to exist, because that gives other enforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity department, and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. So instead of getting the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being banned. [4]
The second reason it’s dangerous to ban the discussion of ideas is that ideas are more closely related than they look. Which means if you restrict the discussion of some topics, it doesn’t only affect those topics. The restrictions propagate back into any topic that yields implications in the forbidden ones. And that is not an edge case. The best ideas do exactly that: they have consequences in fields far removed from their origins. Having ideas in a world where some ideas are banned is like playing soccer on a pitch that has a minefield in one corner. You don’t just play the same game you would have, but on a different shaped pitch. You play a much more subdued game even on the ground that’s safe.
In the past, the way the independent-minded protected themselves was to congregate in a handful of places — first in courts, and later in universities — where they could to some extent make their own rules. Places where people work with ideas tend to have customs protecting free inquiry, for the same reason wafer fabs have powerful air filters, or recording studios good sound insulation. For the last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-minded were on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were the safest places to be.
That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate fact that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. It began in the mid 1980s, and by 2000 seemed to have died down, but it has recently flared up again with the arrival of social media. This seems, unfortunately, to have been an own goal by Silicon Valley. Though the people who run Silicon Valley are almost all independent-minded, they’ve handed the aggressively conventional-minded a tool such as they could only have dreamed of.
On the other hand, perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded as the cause. People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those. If these people had been professors, they’d have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic freedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing declining universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities are declining because so many have already left. [5]
Though I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this situation, I can’t predict how it plays out. Could some universities reverse the current trend and remain places where the independent-minded want to congregate? Or will the independent-minded gradually abandon them? I worry a lot about what we might lose if that happened.
But I’m hopeful long term. The independent-minded are good at protecting themselves. If existing institutions are compromised, they’ll create new ones. That may require some imagination. But imagination is, after all, their specialty.
Embrace elegant brillant heroes like Davinci, and reject vindictive, emotional humans who claim to be victims. Embrace greatness. Reject liars and evil mendacious people. There is much greatness in the world. love papa.
Statue of Cato the Younger in the Louvre Museum
Cato was a vocal opponent of Julius Caesar, attempting to block his attempts at power for years.Cato, now a member of the Roman Senate, attempted to block Caesar’s bid for consulship of Rome (the highest elected political office of the Republic).Plutarch tells us that Caesar, returning from his military expeditions in Spain, wished to hold a triumph (a public spectacle celebrating Roman, military victories) while also running for the consulship in absentia.The Senate was at first willing to grant such a request, but Cato vehemently opposed such a proposition. To prevent the Senate from voting on the matter, Cato filibustered on the Senate floor until nightfall. As a result, Caesar was forced to choose between a triumph and running for the consulship. He opted to abandon the triumph and ran for, and one, consulship of Rome in 59 BC.Immediately following the election, Caesar allied himself with another influential Roman political player, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, known commonly as “Pompey”.Plutarch tells us that together, Caesar and Pompey enacted laws that distributed land and grain to the poor. In doing so, Caesar was currying favor with the common people and, in the words of Plutarch, “stirring up and attaching to himself the numerous diseased and corrupted elements in the commonwealth. “Cato regarded such legislation as politically motivated. While the poor benefited from the subsidized land and food, it was Caesar who really won out by boosting his reputation and allure among the common people. Cato viewed Caesar with a wary eye and believed him to be a mortal threat to the Republic.For the next several years, Cato would make every attempt to block Caesar and deter his every ambition. When Caesar proposed another piece of legislation that would divide almost all of Campania, a region in southeast Italy, amongst the poor and needy, Cato again opposed this bill with his trademark stubbornness.Plutarch tells us that Cato was so obstinate, in fact, that Caesar ordered the Roman guards to drag Cato from the Senate and place him in prison. Cato was lead from the room, speaking out against Caesar all the while.The Roman historian, Cassius Dio, tells us that one Senator was so appalled by this use of force that he declared…“I prefer to be with Cato in prison rather than here with you (Caesar)!”-Cassius Dio (Roman History)
