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In reflecting on my “sermon” yesterday (Republican Virtue and the Unchained Prometheus: The Crossroads of Moral Restraint and the Iron Cage of Rationality), I thought it necessary to present a critique of Karl Marx’s observation regarding the production of ideas and the relation of the means of production, a subject about which I have written many times. In approaching this matter, I have quoted favorably part of a passage from his 1845 The German Ideology, which establishes an essential truth, one I still find compelling: 

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class that has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence, of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess, among other things, consciousness and, therefore, think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. 

However, Marx immediately follows this with an example that gets to the heart of the problem with communist thinking, that of reductionism: “For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an ‘eternal law.’” In this example, the reader is to accept that the principle of separation of powers is an ideology that disguises ruling class power by projecting the principle as a universal one rather than an emergent or practical doctrine that prevents the domination of any one party in a reasonable system checked by ethical ideals that may, in fact, be rooted in human nature (Marx has a tortured relationship with human nature, as readers will soon see). In the case of ideals that elevate liberty above tyranny, such as those of a free republic, separation of powers may not be ideological deception but rather an arrangement that preserves liberty for all by constraining both the tyranny of the majority and rule by the minority of the opulent, and by giving a voice to the people. 

Let’s allow Marx to continue for a moment longer: 

If now in considering the course of history we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or those ideas were dominant at a given time, without bothering ourselves about the conditions of production the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas, we can say, for instance, that during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honor, loyalty, etc. were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts freedom, equality, etc. The ruling class itself, on the whole, imagines this to be so.  This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e., ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.

The reader might suspect here that Marx talks himself out of his own position, since it is the ideals of duty, freedom, equality, and so forth, ideals that represent the common interests of all members of society, that come to hold sway in development and thus limit the actions of the ruling class. Is that not a good thing? Should we not recognize this before rejecting the separation of powers and putting our fate into the hands of the masses (direct democracy, i.e., majoritarianism) or a vanguard that claims to represent the popular interests with no checks on its power (i.e., the dictatorship of the proletariat)? Rejecting these ideals as inverted projections of aristocratic and bourgeois power risks abandoning them to mob rule or to the channeling of those passions by a new aristocracy for its own ends, whether in the form of a communist or corporate (read fascist) master, rather than grasping that some arrangements allow human nature to find its expression in just social arrangements in free and open relations—such as those identified in yesterday’s essay. 

Marx’s claim that the ruling class in every era (except the original one, which I will come to) controls not only the material foundations of society but also its intellectual life has long been regarded as one of his most penetrating insights. Again, I have quoted the useful part of his formulation several times on this platform. I do find it useful, especially with the emergence of the corporate state and technocratic rule under late capitalism. But in light of what I have just presented, revisiting that formulation becomes a necessity; I cannot just leave that “out there.” Marx’s assertion that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” precludes the possibility that the ideas that it manufactures serve other interests beyond those of the ruling class. To be sure, ideas are ultimately expressions of underlying material relationships, but these relationships are determined by really-existing human beings; dominant moral or political concepts are not merely notions articulating and justifying the interests of the class that rules. While Marx’s argument rightly underscores the intimate connection between power and the circulation of ideas, Marx extends the claim in a way that exposes the limitations of his framework, ultimately undermining his attempt to reduce political ideals to mere instruments of class domination.

One might object that The German Ideology was an immature work. Marx was, after all, only 27 years old. But the formulation Marx sets down here informs decades of his work. He repeats in so many words the formulation in the Preface to his 1859 Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy: “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” This is a solid critique of idealism, but what about human nature? Is it possible that social consciousness is, at least to some degree, rooted in the anthropology of our species?

Marx’s own example of the separation of powers in The German Ideology illustrates the problem. He argues that in a society where the aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and monarchy compete for power, the separation of powers becomes the prevailing doctrine, presented as an “eternal law,” though it merely reflects the accommodation among ruling groups. In this reading, the principle of divided government is not a constitutional innovation grounded in moral or practical insight but a veil concealing shared domination. This interpretation ignores why such principles emerge in the first place: not as disguises or distortions but as carefully crafted mechanisms that prevent precisely the kinds of domination that Marx suggests they hide.

Consider the American Republic. In a republic committed to preserving liberty, the separation of powers operates as a check on both the tyranny of the majority and the concentration of authority in the hands of the wealthy. It is not ideological mystification but a structural arrangement that protects the freedom of all by limiting the capacity of any faction to rule unchecked—the opposite of what is desired by the corporate state represented by the Democratic Party and those elements of the Republican establishment that oppose the return to constitutional principle. (Speaking of young men, Alexander Hamilton, one of the principal designers of federalism, was not much older than Marx when he penned 51 of the Federalist Papers’ 85 installments that helped secure the Constitution’s ratification in 1788.)

The tension in Marx’s account becomes sharper as he goes on. He notes that historians often speak of different ages as being governed by different dominant ideals—again, honor under aristocracy, equality and freedom under the bourgeoisie—and he insists that these are merely the ruling class projecting its own interests in universal form. Yet he also describes the way such ideals assume an increasingly abstract and universal character, appealing to members of all classes. What explains this? The stupidity of the common man? Perhaps. Marx does portray this as a necessary tactic of every new ruling class: its interests must be presented as the interests of all, and its concepts must appear as universally valid principles. But in characterizing the process this way, Marx acknowledges that these ideals take on an authority that exceeds the narrow interests of any particular group. Moreover, by reducing these to class power (as he does in the 1959 Preface), he precludes the possibility that these ideas may exist in human nature, finding their expression in social arrangements appropriate to that nature. Could it be that concepts such as duty, equality, liberty, and constitutional restraint resonate across social boundaries not because they serve a ruling class, but because they articulate widely felt moral intuitions and fundamental features of human social life?

I need to bring into the discussion Marx’s concept of “species-being” (Gattungswesen) presented in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. His conception of human nature provides a critical lens through which to evaluate his account of ruling ideas. Here, for Marx, humans are essentially creative and social beings whose nature is realized through conscious, productive activity shared with others. Labor is not merely a means of survival but a vehicle for self-expression and the fulfillment of human potential (echoes of John Locke). Yet in The German Ideology, he reduces moral and political ideals to instruments of class domination, leaving little room to consider how these ideals might genuinely facilitate the realization of species-being. Principles such as equality and liberty, and their elevation through constitutional government (or their expression under the original conditions of primitive communism, i.e., hunter and gatherer societies), do more than conceal or obscure ruling-class interests—they create social conditions under which humans can exercise their inherent capacities for cooperation, creativity, and rational deliberation.

Viewed through the lens of species-being, then, universal ideals may be understood not merely as ideological projections but as giving rise to structures that enable humans to develop and express their essential nature. Thus, Marx’s framework contains the seeds of a tension (not unexpected in the dialectical working out of opposing ideas if we are to be charitable): if human nature is cooperative and creative, i.e., social in a uniquely human way, some moral and political ideals must have real normative force, independent of ruling-class interests, because they sustain the conditions necessary for human flourishing. How would our species otherwise have survived for hundreds of thousands of years of its existence? Surely, we can assume that such conditions are to some significant extent universal; we are, after all, all members of the same species. Given this, does it now follow that some conditions facilitate the expression of that nature, while other conditions corrupt and suppress it?

There is a normative contradiction in Marx’s theory: Marx denies that universal moral ideals possess genuine validity, yet he relies on a universal moral horizon—human emancipation rooted in a conception of species-being—to condemn class domination. This view is even more problematic given the fact of individual differentiation across a range of attributes (Marx does not deny the Darwinian conception of natural history, nor should he). It follows from the stubborn truth of human differences that, with the complexification of social ecology over time, driven by technological innovation, itself an expression of man’s creativity, social segmentation is an inevitable development. It was his colleague, Frederich Engels, in part relying on Marx’s notes concerning Lewis Henry Morgan’s 1877 Ancient Society, who made this very argument in explaining the emergence of social class in his 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. To put this another way, Marx treats all universals as ideological illusions while simultaneously appealing to a universal to ground his critique: again, the original conditions of humanity, primitive communism, the condition before the segmentation of human society.

Secondly, there is a historical contradiction: Marx claims that ruling ideas exist to reinforce ruling-class power, but the very political institutions he dismisses as ideological—bills of rights, checks on authority, constitutions, representative assemblies—have, uncorrupted by ideology and money-power, functioned precisely to limit the power of elites, thus creating the grounds for equality before the law, which Marx cannot easily dismiss as an ideological prop. Although he attempts to reduce formal equality and all the rest of it to ideological tools of ruling class power, these institutions have constrained monarchs, curbed aristocratic privilege, and held economic elites accountable to broader publics. Their effect and purpose have been to redistribute power, not conceal it—first civil rights, then political rights, and finally social rights (as T.H. Marshall showed in his seminal 1949 essay “Citizenship and Social Class”). Marx’s framework cannot account for such developments without mischaracterizing them.

What Marx misses—or conveniently skirts—is that many political ideals and institutions endure not because they mystify domination but because they successfully channel enduring features of human nature, which, I argue in this previous essay, are realized through Protestantism. Marx says as much in one of his earliest works. I have discussed this matter before, but it takes on new significance for me considering what I am grappling with in these essays. In “On the Jewish Question,” published in 1844, Marx contrasts what he calls “theoretical Christianity” with “practical Judaism” to illustrate his concern with the relationship between ideas and material life. Anticipating Max Weber, Marx characterizes theoretical Christianity as a religion of abstract, universal principles, emphasizing contemplation and moral ideals rather than concrete human needs or social relations (see Anticipating Weber: Revisiting Marx and the “Jewish Question”). Practical Judaism, in contrast, is oriented toward everyday life, the world of commerce, property, and sensuous (sinnlich) social activity. Yet, as Weber suggests, Protestantism permits Christians to pursue the worldly pursuits Judaism valorizes within moral constraints that emerge from a cultural system that cannot be reduced to material relations.

By drawing this distinction, Marx argues that genuine human liberation requires attention to material and social conditions, not just abstract legal or moral principles. My reaction to this observation now is: of course. But more must be said; for human beings, made aware of their individuality, their creative productive power, desire liberty, resent arbitrary power, respond to principles of equality and fairness, and seek institutions that distribute authority in ways that protect against abuses. Their individuality is an a priori condition unrealized by millennia of subjection.

A communist would find individualism a barrier to the project to reconstruct society along collectivist lines, since he would have to suppose that individuality is not a product of a constrained human nature, as Thomas Sowell puts it, constraints imposed not by subjection but by natural history, but rather an infinitely malleable nature, which is to say no nature at all. Yet constitutional structures such as the separation of powers survive because they work for all, not because they allow one group to exploit and oppress the other; they bind rulers and ruled alike, limit the sway of passion and unbridled self-interest, and make room for the exercise of reason regulated by civic responsibility and deliberation, which are simultaneously self-interested and solidarity-building. These practices reflect insights into human nature that transcend class interest, and they represent achievements in political thought that Marx’s reductionist framework cannot—or dare not—fully acknowledge.

I will, of course, defend Marx’s desire for a more equitable social result. He saw collectivism as a means to greater individual liberty; with exclusive control over the productive means of production, the people would be a liberty to produce for themselves. It may very well be the case that the emerging automated society will, if the people demand it, free all from necessary labor (if they don’t, then neofeudalism and administrative management is likely mankind’s fate). But, in the end, and it pains me to admit this, Marx hobbles his own argument. By reducing ideals such as equality, liberty, and the rule of law to ideological projections, he obscures the fact that these ideals—again, uncorrupted by ideology and money-power—serve as constraints on the very powers he believes they rationalize.

Marx recognizes that universal principles come to dominate political discourse, yet he cannot explain their force without conceding, however obscuring that concession in a barrage of verbiage, that they speak to genuine human concerns. Thus, in opposition to his point, the universalization of such ideas does not merely disguise class rule—it limits it. In the final analysis, the most coherent conclusion is not Marx’s explicit one, but the one he tries to avoid: that certain political ideals and constitutional forms are not tools of domination but the means by which free people secure just social relations against domination in the first place.

This is why we must reject the claim that the desire for more equitable social arrangements is the exclusive domain of those advocating social justice. Might more just social arrangements be achieved by pushing even further the liberal ideals that have emancipated over the centuries and across the planet billions of human beings from communism, fascism, monarchy, and primitive religion? The question answers itself. We certainly don’t need to wonder what will happen to democracy and liberty under communist rule. Humanity already tried that. With terrible results.

* * *

I want to append to this essay a few kind words about Karl Marx, since it may seem that I am abandoning him, especially in light of my recent alignment with populist politics, where so many resist appreciating the man’s contributions to the scientific study of economics and history. I have argued before that Marxian thought—not his political project, but his contribution to anthropology and sociology—ought to serve as a foundational paradigm for the social sciences, including the study of history. In Marx and Darwin: Pioneers of Scientific Inquiry in Social and Natural History, I clarify that when I say I identify as a Marxist, I mean it in the same way one might say they identify as a Darwinist. In the annals of intellectual history, Marx is to social history what Darwin is to natural history.

In Marxist but not Socialist, I elaborate on this point by citing Christopher Hitchens’ remark during a 2006 town hall in Pennsylvania: “I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist.” Hitchens explained that he remained impressed by Marxism’s analytical rigor and historical insight—its capacity to illuminate the deep structures and internal contradictions of capitalist society, and to reveal the underlying causes of inequality and social unrest. He was particularly drawn to Marxism’s emphasis on economic justice: its vision of a society in which opportunities and resources are more equitably distributed and the needs of the many take precedence over the privileges of the few. (See also Why I am not a Socialist.)

Hitchens, of course, began his political life as a committed socialist, deeply involved with the International Socialists, a Trotskyist organization. Over time, he became disillusioned with socialism as a workable political project. By the 1990s and 2000s, he believed that much of what passed for socialism had degenerated into a form of corrupt populism, and he no longer regarded the international working-class movement he had once envisioned as a plausible engine of global change. This growing disappointment led him to step back from socialism as a political goal. He also came to see capitalism as a far more revolutionary force for good; in his estimation, the bourgeois revolution still had unfinished business.

After 9/11, Hitchens aligned himself with certain strands of neoconservative foreign policy. This shift reflected his deep loathing of clerical fascism, particularly in its contemporary Islamic form. He came to view the struggle against Islam and other totalitarian movements as a moral imperative. This stance placed him at odds with much of the left (this would be even more true today), even though he remained steadfast in his defense of liberal, secular values against what he perceived as existential threats. Throughout all this, he upheld his commitments to civil liberties and human rights. (Then again, today’s left can hardly be counted upon to defend liberal, secular values, civil liberties, and all the rest of it. Indeed, the New Left appears to be very much against these Old Left ideas.)

Despite these political shifts, Hitchens continued to describe himself as a Marxist—intellectually, if not politically. It is in this sense that I echo his formulation: Marxist, but not socialist. What he sought to preserve in Marxism is the same thing I aim to preserve: the method, specifically, the materialist conception of history. This approach holds that economic and material forces—rather than ideals or metaphysical motivations—ultimately drive the development of human societies. No Geist is unfolding the world toward a teleological end. Like Hitchens, I still regard Marx’s analytical framework as an effective tool for understanding historical dynamics and the transformative power of capitalism, even as I reject socialist politics in practice.

I’m an atheist. Don’t let that frighten you—I think Christians (some, anyway) will appreciate what I have to say in this essay. For years, though, admittedly, I called myself an antitheist. I wasn’t merely a non-believer (that hasn’t changed); I was an active opponent of religion. I have moderated my position over the years. Today, I will tell you that it depends on the specific religion being discussed as to whether I would actively oppose it. In other words, I am no longer an antitheist.

In the two decades between my self-identification as an antitheist and my selective opposition to religious faiths, I learned, or more accurately have admitted, to two things: (a) not all religions are equal (or are all cultures); (b) Christianity—especially Protestantism—provided the indispensable moral guardrails for the Enlightenment it helped give birth to. Reason in its product, intellectual and technological, must be constrained by those guardrails if it is to remain reasonable.

The first lesson is blunt: Christianity and Judaism are, for the most part, good; Islam is, in its totality, bad. The first two are creators and sustainers of civilizations built on liberty and individual rights. The third is civilization-destroying—an ideology of the barbarian. Centuries and our present experience testify to the truth of these claims. Yet we have not learned the lessons this history teaches us. We have let the barbarians inside the gates. If we do nothing, we will pay with our dignity and our freedom. Indeed, if Islam is allowed to become hegemonic, the West will enter a New Dark Ages. Women will become second-class subjects of a clerical fascist order, and gays will be killed or transed. Islam is not the only threat to dignity and freedom, of course, which I will come to later in this essay. But it is a useful tool for those who seek to replace late capitalism with a neo-feudalist world order.

The second lesson is this: the soil in which both Protestantism and the Enlightenment grew was capitalism—first its legal emergence eight centuries ago, as lawyers for the nascent bourgeoisie argued for property rights in medieval courts, and then its consolidation as a world system during the Long Century (roughly 1450–1620), from there spreading globally. Capitalism requires rationalism; rationalism, over time, fractured the Catholic monopoly (and eventually compelled even Catholicism to resemble Protestantism). Rationalism depends on capitalism. However, neither capitalism nor rationalism can survive without the guardrails of Christianity, since both depend on republican virtue and the centrality of the individual. The American Founders understood this and seized a moment that world history will almost certainly never repeat. They saw a path to freedom. Keeping open that path requires preserving the foundation they set down in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, its Bill of Rights, and the American System.

In the clip I share below, Dave Brat conveys the position I have come to over the last several years. He said this in dialogue with Steve Bannon on the latter’s War Room podcast. But before you get to that, some background on Brat and his perspective will help clarify his argument and the one I advance in this essay. It is his remarks that inspire my essay (sermon?) this Sunday afternoon.

Brat served as the US Representative for Virginia’s 7th congressional district from 2014 to 2019. In 2014, he gained national attention by defeating (by a large margin) House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary—the first time a sitting House Majority Leader had ever lost a primary. Brat narrowly lost his 2018 re-election bid to Democrat Abigail Spanberger. Spanberger, readers may already know, just won the 2025 Virginia gubernatorial election this month. Brat’s close defeat to Spanberger, and her subsequent victory over Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by a double-digit margin, testifies to the alarming political shift in the state of Virginia, the home of both James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.

Brat is a frequent guest on Bannon’s War Room, which I encourage visitors to this platform to follow. Brat is not merely a former congressman; he has a long history in academia. Brat joined the faculty of Randolph–Macon College in 1996 as an economics professor. Randolph–Macon is a private liberal arts college in Ashland, Virginia (founded in 1830, it’s the oldest Methodist-run college in continuous operation in the country). For six years, Brat chaired the College’s department of ethics and business. Since January 2019, he has served as dean of the Liberty University School of Business.

Brat’s core argument is that Adam Smith’s invisible hand theory, advanced in the latter’s magisterial The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 (the very year American patriots declared war on the British monarchy), is properly understood in the context of Christian moral philosophy, albeit eschewing rigid Puritanism. Brat’s position is supported by Smith’s earlier work, his 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, wherein Smith roots sympathy in human nature. He argues that benevolence, justice, prudence, and self-command are genuine virtues. His nature intact, man therefore praises generosity and justice even when they go against his immediate self-interest. However, the natural moral sentiments and the impartial spectator mechanism Smith describes in this work can be systematically corrupted, even disabled, by certain belief systems, social structures, and passions.

The man of system, or the man whose public spirit is supposed to be wholly engrossed by the view of some favourite plan of government, or of some favourite scheme of politics, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit, and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. (Part VI, Section II, Chapter II, “Of the character of virtue”)

Here, Smith anticipates what we now call ideological thinking: the belief that society can and should be remade according to an abstract blueprint, regardless of the moral intuitions, sentiments, and traditions of the people in it. The ideologue overrides the organic corrections of the impartial spectator (simultaneously the source of natural market relations and social solidarity) with top-down rationalistic schemes. Thus, Smith recognizes that the innate capacity for sympathy and impartial moral judgment in man can be disordered and perverted by extreme religious doctrines that crush ordinary human sentiments; partisan faction and spirit; rationalistic ideological schemes (“the man of system”); and the cultural worship of wealth and power.

Must-see segment from Steve Bannon’s War Room: https://t.co/TvZhJvnAzp

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) November 23, 2025

Some may hear Brat and think he is rejecting reason. This is why I spent time explaining his position; he is not rejecting reason. What he is saying is that, without moral guardrails, the centrality of individualism, a proper understanding of human nature, and the modern nation-state (and the Peace of Westphalia) that Protestantism made possible, we get corporatism and communism—both irrational, totalitarian, destroyers of virtue-guided reason. Corporatists (the transnationalist corporate project) and today’s communists (the Red-Green Alliance) see in Islam a common weapon for disordering reason guided by the ethical constraints conducive to natural moral reasoning. Protestantism’s great achievement, which, as Max Weber (and Karl Marx before him) recognized, is the realization in Christianity of practical Jewish culture. Thus, the construct of a Judeo-Christian tradition is not a propaganda tool to advance the interests of Israel, but rather recognition of the legacy of Jewish culture in modern Christian thought.

For his part, Weber mourned the broken link between freedom and reason. The great sociologist even folded Nietzsche’s “death of God” thesis into the core of his argument that, once religion ceases to underwrite Western values, morality, and purpose, society is left unmoored. Weber saw that Nietzsche grasped the tragedy that the Enlightenment and the rise of science, what Weber describes metaphorically as the unshackling of the Titan Prometheus (which I will explain in greater detail later in this essay), had effectively cancelled the Christian god, leaving no philosophical foundation for ethics or truth. Nietzsche’s prediction that this would lead to nihilism was the correct diagnosis of the problem of our age. We indeed see nihilism everywhere today. We see it in the delusion that a man can shed his gender and become its opposite—or both or neither of the two. We see it in violence directed towards those who utter unpopular opinions.

Nietzsche’s prescription, however, the Übermensch (the “Over-man”) and der Wille zur Macht (“the will to power”), in the wrong hands, would prove catastrophic. Indeed, it has, as the world’s experience with National Socialism demonstrated for all to see. The Nazi Party and the corporate state he represented are the epitome of putting mankind’s fate in the wrong hands. Nietzsche’s defenders will contend that he did not mean “will to power” as the desire to dominate other people. They insist that he meant it as the fundamental drive of all life, which he saw as the innermost essence of being. Every living thing strives not just to survive, Nietzsche argued, but to expand, express, and increase its feeling of power—to create, grow, overcome resistance, and become more than it is. To be sure, these are admirable traits in a man. At the same time, Nietzsche wanted to recover from pre-Christian cultures their affirmation of life (destruction, sensuality, and suffering) and acceptance of natural aristocracy and rank. He wanted not the reclamation of pagan gods and heroes, but rather the life-affirming values that those gods and heroes personified. He put it this way: “Roman Caesars with Christ’s soul.” (See Nietzsche’s Critique of Christianity and His Impact on Social Theory.)

This solution to our affliction follows from Nietzsche’s diagnosis, but his remedy is wrong. The answer is not a new pagan assertion of passion and strength; rather, the solution lies in the restoration of republican virtue rooted in Protestant ethics. That does not require any of us to become Christian (I won’t convert, so it cannot follow that I think others should, nor does it preclude conversion), but it does require us to preserve, even reclaim, those moral guardrails that once surrounded reason. Weber’s concept of Der entfesselte Prometheus (“Prometheus unchained”), materialized in world-historical conditions, has proved to be an irrational outcome.

Weber writes in his 1905 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage (stahlhartes Gehäuse).

Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history. Today, the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfilment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the fast stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”

Although the textual source of the quote “Und der entfesselte Prometheus ist an die Stelle der alten Götter getreten,” which translates to “the unleashed Prometheus has taken the place of the old gods,” is difficult to pin down, it is commonly attributed to Weber, and it is what he intends by his argument. Readers will likely know Prometheus (Προμηθεύς) is the Titan of Greek mythology who most radically embodies rebellion against divine tyranny and selfless love for humanity. In Aeschylus’s tragedy, Prometheus Bound, Zeus seizes power and plans to destroy the weak human race; Prometheus defies him by stealing fire from heaven and giving it to mortals—bestowing upon them art, science, technology, and civilization itself. For this crime, Zeus chains the Titan to a rock in the Caucasus, where an eagle daily tears out and eats his liver, which regrows each night—an eternal torture meant to break his will. Yet Prometheus refuses to submit, foretelling that Zeus’s own downfall will one day depend on the secret knowledge Prometheus alone possesses.

I'd like to change the world | Peter Weyland TED 2023 https://t.co/DgzUeYPpt8 via @YouTube

— Andrew Austin (@andrewwaustin) November 23, 2025

This story is powerfully retold in Ridley Scott’s 2012 film Prometheus, his much-maligned prequel to his landmark science fiction film Alien (1979). There, the character Peter Weyland (magnificently performed by Guy Pierce), who prefigures the rise and spirit of entrepreneur Elon Musk, uses Aeschylus’s tale in a fictional 2023 TED Talk to condemn those who would limit his ambition with ethical guardrails. I have shared the scene above, but to highlight Weyland’s point:

We wield incredible power—the power to transform, to destroy, and to create again. The question, of course, before us is: What the hell are we supposed to do with this power? Or, more importantly, one should ask: What are we allowed to do with this power? The answer to that, my friends, is nothing. Rules, restrictions, laws, ethical guidelines—all but forbidding us from moving forward. Well, where were the ethics during the Arabian conflicts? Why are rules preventing us from feeding impoverished cultures? How is there a law which states: If we build a man from wires and metal—a man who will never grow old, a man who will never feel the heat of a star or the cold of the moon—how is the creation of such an incredible individual considered unnatural? The answer to all these questions is simple: These rules exist because the people who created them were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t. Well, I am not afraid!

Like Weyland, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1820, Prometheus Unbound, portrays the Titan’s eventual release as the triumph of human progress over tyrannical authority. This is an optimistic reading of the tale. For centuries, Prometheus has stood as the archetypal symbol of the bringer of light (much like Lucifer) who suffers for rebelling against the gods and liberating mankind, the suffering hero whose gift of fire (power, reason, technique) is both humanity’s glory and its potential doom—the exact image Weber had in mind when he described the modern rational-technical order as a once-beneficial force that has now broken its chains and turned against its creators. Percy’s wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, published the pessimistic side of the story two years earlier, in Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In her reading of the myth, Victor Frankenstein, a man who creates a monster, is a new Prometheus. Like the Titan, Victor steals the forbidden fire—the secret of life: electricity—from the gods and gives it to humanity in the form of a grotesque, unnamed creature. Frankenstein is punished horribly for this transgression, just as Prometheus was chained and tortured for his.

Frankenstein is thus the dark counterpart to Prometheus Unbound—the same Promethean act of bringing fire and life, but ending in isolation, vengeance, and mutual destruction.

The horror depicted by Mary Shelley is the likely endpoint of reason without guardrails. We already see its manifestation creeping everywhere. Indeed, this is how we have come to be ruled by technology and its attendant technocratic apparatus. This is why democracy is giving way to administrative rule and stifling bureaucracy. With these developments, we can see the approaching death of democracy and liberty. Atheists should, therefore, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Christians to rebuild the American republic according to its founding vision. That begins with patriotism and the recognition that we face enemies on three fronts, each embodying tyrannical irrationalisms: the sophistication of corporatism and communism, both born of modernity, and the pre-modern barbarism of Islam. This is not a call for atavistic solutions, but for the reclamation of republican virtue. Weber’s pessimistic take that “the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs” is not yet entirely manifest. The spark that animated the Founders has not gone out. Our task as free men is to rekindle their flame and mind it carefully.

One of the persistent assumptions in public discourse, the grand narrative promulgated by those who control the means of intellectual production and the distribution of perceptions, is that the people most vulnerable to indoctrination are the so-called “dumb” or “unsophisticated”—those with little formal education, who hold to traditional or fundamentalist religious beliefs, or who are simply remote from elite institutions and the world of higher learning (i.e., have not endured the full course of indoctrination in progressive ideology). This view, expressed by progressives, treats “common people” as uniquely susceptible to propaganda because they reside outside the intellectual class or are too unintelligent to listen to reason. It is often implied that their commitments—whether to inherited norms, local knowledge, or religion, particularly certain strains of Christianity—are evidence of gullibility or ignorance.

This picture falls apart under sociological scrutiny. Historically, in the West, Christianity is intertwined with the Enlightenment itself; it is not simply a system of manipulation for the masses. Christianity, in particular Protestantism, is the wellspring of individualism and personal liberty. More to the point of this essay (I had to get that out of the way), empirical experience shows that highly educated people—those with multiple degrees, professional credentials, and roles in knowledge-producing institutions—are often among the most thoroughly indoctrinated individuals in society. Their indoctrination is not despite their intelligence but, in some sense, because of it. Elite education does not simply transmit knowledge; it transmits the ideological frameworks and loyalties that legitimate existing institutions.

I have before quoted Karl Marx’s observations in The German Ideology (a mid-nineteenth century text that finally appeared in the early 1930s). His words bear repeating here:

“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.—real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”

One finds this passage in Section A, “Idealism and Materialism.” How does such an upside-down world come to be projected into consciousness? In Section B, “The Illusion of the Epoch,” Marx writes:

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.”

The argument I am making here (and have been making for years) aligns with observations made by Noam Chomsky, who has argued that cultural and political elites must be the most deeply indoctrinated segment of the population, precisely because their function is to reproduce and defend the status quo.

In an interview clip featured in the 1992 documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, Chomsky identifies two different targets for propaganda. The first is “what’s sometimes called the political class. There’s maybe twenty percent of the population which is relatively educated, more or less articulate, plays some kind of role in decision-making. They’re supposed to sort of participate in social life—either as managers, or cultural managers like teachers and writers and so on. They’re supposed to vote, they’re supposed to play some role in the way economic and political and cultural life goes on. Now their consent is crucial. So that’s one group that has to be deeply indoctrinated. Then there’s maybe eighty percent of the population whose main function is to follow orders and not think, and not to pay attention to anything—and they’re the ones who usually pay the costs.”

If the system benefits them—or depends on them—then internalizing its worldview is not merely likely; it is structurally necessary. Recall George Orwell’s quip in his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism” (published in the British magazine Polemic) that “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Orwell points to the same dynamic I’m identifying in this essay: intelligence and education provide the tools for ideological sophistication and rationalization, not immunity from propaganda.

To be sure, as the foregoing implies, susceptibility to indoctrination is universal, but it expresses itself differently across social strata. The working class may inherit a religious or traditional worldview—with all its protective benefits. But the professional-managerial class, steeped in the incentives and norms of elite institutions, in the command of the ruling class, internalizes ideological narratives with far greater depth and rigidity—narratives that in practice cause great harm to persons and society. In this sense, the very people who most confidently diagnose “brainwashing” or stupidity in others may themselves be among the most thoroughly shaped by the ideological apparatus of the corporate state and its attendant professional culture. Intelligence of the sort useful to elites does not inoculate its possessor from propaganda; under certain conditions, it enhances vulnerability to it.

We see this dynamic at play in today’s politics. Those who support Donald Trump (and Trump himself), or who dissented from the authoritarian measures elites deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic, or who reject or express skepticism about the “scientific medical consensus” regarding the concept of gender identity or pharmaceutical products such as vaccines, are routinely portrayed by progressives as “conspiracy theorists,” “mouthbreathers,” or “rubes.” Meanwhile, progressives celebrate obviously shallow and ridiculous figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett, presenting them and others as the future of America. They embrace demonstrably fallacious and hateful ideologies like critical race theory and queer theory, and their attendant concepts: collective punishment, gender identity, intergenerational guilt, white privilege, etc.

Consider the fact that it was the bourgeois elite who developed and promulgated the ideology of cultural and moral relativism. In his 1953 Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss made an argument that is often paraphrased as “if all cultures are equal, then cannibalism is just a matter of taste,” which readers may have seen in a meme shared on social media. Strauss did not say exactly this, but it is an accurate distillation of what he did say. Strauss criticizes cultural and moral relativism by pointing out that if a society’s acceptance of a practice is the only standard for its legitimacy, then cannibalism would be just as valid as that of any civilized society. His point: if we deny any natural or objective standard of right and wrong, then we lose the ability to morally judge even the most extreme practices.

The appearance of this idea is no accident. Cultural and moral relativism is one of the elite intellectual products designed to dispossess those who undergo the course of ideological indoctrination of common sense. We see this today with progressives rationalizing the treatment of gays and women under Islam—and a myriad of other destructive and unjust ideas. For Strauss, cultural and moral relativism leads to nihilism, since all values become mere preferences, lacking any higher justification. Cannibalism is the paradigm that shows why a universal moral standard—natural right—is necessary. The truth is, and any reasonable person who escaped progressive brainwashing sees it, that not all cultures are equal. Some are better than others. Western culture is better than most. But it’s been corrupted by postmodernism and primitive ideas. And this explains the sharp rise in nihilism among today’s youth.

Crime reporting in some parts of the United States is increasingly resembling reporting in European countries. In Europe, concealing facts about crime obscures the consequences of the migrant crisis. Serious crime has been rising in Europe since 2015, when Third Worlders began entering Europe in mass. We are now seeing the practice here in the United States.

The Los Angeles Police Department has declined to release its crime-mapping data. According to LAist, when journalists requested the department’s COMPSTAT data under California’s Public Records Act, the LAPD refused, arguing that releasing the information could lead to “misguided public policy discussions or unjustified public panic.”

In other words, the public might react the wrong way if it knows too much. What would the public know if the LAPD released the data? They would know about the drastic overrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics in serious criminal offending, where that crime was occurring in the city, and the failure of progressive policy to protect the residents of Los Angeles from crime and violence. For many, it would confirm what they already know.

Police departments do not get to decide how much information the public can handle. They do not get to gatekeep data because they fear criticism or policy debates they can’t control. Democracy and public safety demand transparency.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution follows the Information Age. It describes the evolving interplay between technologies such as advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, and genetic engineering and the physical, digital, and biological realms. The term is meant to convey that these technologies—and the domains they touch—are converging, rapidly transforming the world into an era of integrated cybernetics. One area that has been fundamentally changes is the world of scholarly production. In this essay I focus on the revival of an old relationship in a new form: the interaction between those who generate ideas and the methods by which those ideas are realized in tangible media.

What has been lost with the mid-1970s emergence and normalization of word processing and the demotion of secretaries to administrative assistants is that, before the Information Age, intellectual work was rarely a solitary endeavor. In the decades before the computer scholars (as well as executives) depended upon a small army of secretaries and typists who translated thought into text. These individuals occupied a crucial position in the production of knowledge. A professor might draft notes or a manuscript in longhand or dictate thoughts aloud or via Dictaphone recordings, leaving it to the secretary (or amanuensis) to turn those rough ideas into polished, neatly typed manuscripts. The relationship between scholar and secretary was, in many ways, the prototype for our contemporary interaction with digital writing tools.

Typing was a technical art: accuracy, formatting, and legibility required both speed and mastery of a machine that, by the late nineteenth century, had become standard office equipment. The typewriter allowed little room for error. Once a draft was prepared, the scholar would review it by hand—crossing out words, inserting phrases, and marking corrections—before returning it for retyping. This process would usually repeat several times until a clean copy emerged, ready for submission to a journal or publisher for review.

It is crucial to recognize, in recovering our historical memory of this period, that the best secretaries did far more than transcribe. Those who worked in academic or literary environments were skilled interpreters of their employers’ thoughts. Through long familiarity with a scholar’s voice and habits of expression, secretaries developed a sensitivity to author intent, the meaning sought, and tone. They quietly served as copy editors, correcting grammar, clarifying syntax, and smoothing transitions, even strengthening arguments. Secretarial training in the early and mid-twentieth century included rigorous instruction in audience, composition, and grammar, so that by the time they entered universities or research offices, they were not merely typists but literate professionals capable of improving the evolving manuscripts they handled.

Both my parents taught at universities, and I remember fondly my conversations with their secretaries and how impressed I was with their knowledge of the various disciplines of the departments in which they worked (and their patience in entertaining my questions when my parents were busy with other things). I observed on numerous occasions professors handing secretaries rough drafts and notes to translate into typed texts. Secretaries would also moonlight, rendering for graduate students their papers, theses, and dissertations in clean and polished form. By the time I was in graduate school, I had to do all the work myself on a word processor and ask family, friends, and peers to critique my work—if they were so inclined and had time. More often, I would pore over the same draft, feeling as if I would never finish the paper by the deadline.

The collaboration that developed between scholar and secretary was one of synergy; the intellectual content originated with the scholar, but the clarity and polish of expression owed much to the secretary’s linguistic and technical skill. In most cases, these contributions went uncredited. Authorship, both then and now, is defined by conceptual ownership—the creation of ideas—while the labor of refinement remains invisible. Editors, copy editors, and proofreaders occupy a similar position today: they may shape a work profoundly, yet they rarely share in its authorship. Their task is to enhance a voice without adding content or altering its identity. In many ways, their success is measured by their invisibility.

But who can afford copy editors and proofreaders today? This is especially problematic for those working in most public colleges and universities today, where those who fulfilled these roles historically have been demoted or eliminated, and where constrained budgets allow for no functional alternative.

In this light, the recent return of dictation and editing technologies represents not so much a revolution in content generation but the revival of an old relationship. The scholar speaking into a microphone and feeding the result into an AI system like ChatGPT is reenacting a century-old pattern. Voice-to-text applications play the role of the stenographer or typist, producing an initial transcript from speech. The language model then assumes the role once held by the skilled secretary—organizing, clarifying, and copy-editing the raw material into coherent prose. The human author remains the source of ideas, of course; to delegate that task to the system would take the joy out of creative and scholarly pursuits. Moreover, many would regard using AI-generated content as ethically problematic. However, used responsibly, the machine serves as the intermediary that converts thought into a publishable form, just as the secretary did before the word processor.

To be sure, this digital secretary still lacks the intuition and personal familiarity of its human predecessor, but this limitation will soon be overcome as the technology becomes more advanced and personalized. Moreover, and this development has been overlooked, the digital secretary democratizes the production of publishable content. Where only professors or executives once had access to trained assistants, now anyone can summon one with a microphone and a prompt. The workflow—dictation, editing, revision, shaping—remains strikingly like that of the mid-twentieth century, but the economic and social barriers are falling away. Thus, generative AI has revived the practice of spoken composition, making dictation once again a natural mode of authorship. Anyone who has worked with speech-to-text technology has noted the vast increase in productivity that it allows, and with AI’s sophistication, the common errors of translation are increasingly a problem of the past.

The continuity across these technological changes suggests that the fundamental rhythm of intellectual labor has not altered. Human thought still requires translation into tangible form; ideas still depend upon instruments and intermediaries to become legible. What has changed is the nature of the intermediary—from a human presence seated at a typewriter to a silent, algorithmic collaborator on a screen. In both cases, the assistant bridges the gap between mind and text, between the messy spontaneity of speech and the disciplined structure of writing. The days of countless drafts on a word processor, a development that, as noted, has seen the demotion of secretaries to administrative assistants (who may themselves soon become obsolete or at least ever more remote from specific departments to which they were initially assigned as they’re assigned ever larger areas of responsibility, increasingly aided themselves by AI), are increasingly becoming a historical feature of what we can now see as an interregnum—the period between human and artificial assistance. The loss of the human secretary is lamentable, but that role’s replacement by technology was, in hindsight, inevitable.

Thus, the modern writer using voice-to-text and AI editing stands in a long tradition. From the professor dictating to a secretary in 1940 to the scholar speaking into a microphone on a device in 2025, the relationship between intellect and instrument remains one of interdependence. Technology has changed; collaboration has not. What was once the sound of clacking typewriter keys has become the quietness of digital processing—but in both, we hear the same underlying dialogue between human thought and mechanical expression in tangible media. To be sure, that artificial intelligence presents a daunting challenge to the world of work, and in some aspects, imperils the world (which is why regulation of this technology is vital—although, admittedly, I don’t know what that would look like and, frankly, I don’t expect it to occur), mankind must learn not to fear this particular aspect of AI. Some scholars will resist the revival of an old relationship in its new form, but as the technology progresses, fewer will be able to do so. For those who have not yet grasped the reality of the situation—newsflash: the future is here. 

I hasten to add, as I conclude this essay, that this is true not only for scholarly work, but for art and architecture, as well. One could, if he had the means, contract with an artist to represent his idea in a compelling image, or he could convey to an AI program the same idea and have the system render the image in mere seconds without compensation. Like the loss of the human secretary, the loss of the human artist is lamentable, but here as well the production of ideas in artistic form is being democratized. Readers of this blog will have already noted that I use OpenAI’s Sora to generate novel images conveying the theme of the essays in which these images appear. I credit Sora (or sometimes Grok when Sora is stubborn), but I wonder sometimes whether I need to. At any rate, I simply do not have the resources to employ human artists to do this work, and my own skill at artwork has diminished amid the many other commitments that are made—and that I make—upon my time.

I can assure the reader that I will never delegate the bulk of my creative work in music production to AI, although I confess to having relied on AI-generated bass, drum, and synthesizer loops in quickly putting ideas down to tangible media, some of which I have made available to the public. But AI-generated guitar and vocals? Songwriting itself? Those are bridges too far. While a man makes use of technology to convey his ideas to the world, he mustn’t lose his voice to technology.

When I was young, except for an overdrive or wha-wha pedal between me and the amplifier, I refused to use effects pedals in the chain. No choruses, delays, phasers, flangers, or synthesizers. I wanted nothing to come between me and the conveyance of my ideas. When I voiced my purism to the keeper of a music shop on the square of my hometown, he pointed out to me that stretching cat gut across a hollowed out gourd to generate resonating frequencies is an effect. The instrument allows the man to convey his ideas without resorting to his vocal cords. Everything is an effect, he said. It all comes between the artist and the expression of his ideas. He then asked me, What do you hear in your head? More than I can express, I responded. Then use what helps you express your ideas, he said with a smile.

Arielle Scarcella, a lesbian whose Facebook posts deftly deconstruct the claims of the trans lobby, recently reminded me of a cognitive bias I’ve often alluded to but never named explicitly: the illusory truth effect. You’ve likely heard the saying that if a lie is repeated often enough, people will eventually accept it as true. That is precisely the phenomenon. Psychologists—admittedly late to the insight—first identified the effect in the 1970s, and it has since proved remarkably robust. Social science often “discovers” the obvious. The illusory truth effect shapes advertising, political messaging, public discourse, and even personal relationships. The underlying idea was widely recognized long before it acquired the label “big lie.”

A “big lie” is a sweeping distortion or complete falsification of reality, commonly used as a tool of political propaganda. The German phrase große Lüge appeared in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925), where he argued that people could be persuaded to accept an enormous falsehood precisely because they would not expect anyone to have the audacity to invent something so outrageously untrue. Trust in authority is essential to the success of a big lie; conversely, if a person is seen as untrustworthy or illegitimate, even truthful statements may be dismissed as lies. Big lies often function by convincing people that genuine truth-tellers are the deceivers. (See yesterday’s essay, The Fallacies of Appeal to the Authority of Consensus and Expertise.)

We are witnessing a striking example of this dynamic today. Although there is no evidence that Trump engaged in sexual misconduct with minors, millions believe he did. Even exculpatory evidence is interpreted as incriminating (see Epstein, Russia, and Other Hoaxes—and the Pathology that Feeds Their Believability). Paradoxically, many people distrust Democrats and the mass media yet continue to treat them as credible sources of information. This is the credibility or trust paradox—a situation in which individuals claim to distrust an institution but still rely on it, often because its claims align with their worldview or because no alternative appears more reliable. (See What Explains Trump Derangement Syndrome? Ignorance of Background Assumptions in Worldview.)

President Trump has been successfully framed as a liar because progressives dominate the institutions that generate and interpret social meaning. Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ideological hegemony explains this paradox. In his view, a ruling class exercises power not merely by suppressing opposition but by shaping the “common sense” of a society—embedding background assumptions in a social logic that is pressed into the public un/consciousness by repetition. Those who control the narrative exploit humanity’s tendency to believe repeated claims. A long chain of misrepresentations about Trump has, through sheer repetition, hardened into “truths” for millions: “good people on both sides,” “suckers and losers,” “drink fish tank cleaner,” “inject bleach”—all distortions or fabrications. “Trump mocked a disabled journalist.” He did not. “Trump is a fascist.” He is not. “Trump is a pedophile.” No evidence.

Why do repeated statements feel truer simply because they are familiar? Our brains use processing fluency—the ease with which information is absorbed—as a proxy for accuracy. When we encounter a claim repeatedly, it becomes easier to process, and that increased fluency creates a false sense of credibility. As Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” The more familiar modern phrasing—“A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on”—is often attributed to Mark Twain, though no evidence links the quote to him. The misattribution itself is an example of the very effect this essay addresses.

The illusory truth effect operates largely below conscious awareness, and people of all backgrounds and education levels are susceptible to it. Its power is compounded by partisan framing. This is one reason misinformation, rumors, and slogans can become widely accepted: repetition breeds belief. Consider the slogan “Hands up.” Many still believe its original implication despite contradictory evidence. Or take the long-standing urban legend involving actor Richard Gere—a defamatory fiction from the 1980s and 1990s that persists in popular memory despite being debunked.

Big lies are everywhere. They’re used by dominant institutions to justify atrocities and injustices. Consider the slogan “Transwomen are women.” Even though the claim is on its face false, and demonstrably so using basic science, those who hear it often enough will come to believe it and repeat it—especially if trusted institutions tell them to. The lie is popularly reinforced by people committed to an ideological or political worldview.

I distinctly recall the first time I heard the slogan. It was on Facebook several years ago. The person, a former student, stated the slogan as fact because he assumed I didn’t believe it. He was right; however, I had not explicitly stated that it was not true; rather, my argument suggested that I did not work from the same background assumptions that had infected his brain. He needed me to hear it said. He then appeared to wait for me to agree. It felt as if he needed me to affirm the truth of the slogan. When affirmation was not forthcoming, he privately messaged me a few days later to tell me how much I had disappointed him, especially since he had looked up to me as a teacher. He wondered aloud what had happened to me (and expressed hope that I would come home) before unfriending me. He is one of several former students who have reacted in this way when they discover that I hold opinions that do not align with theirs. They had wrongly assumed I was a tribal member because I taught in a social science program. Given that social science has been captured by woke progressive ideology, the assumption is not entirely irrational.

The illusory truth effect is so powerful that it can override what people already know to be true. Repetition does not merely make a statement sound familiar—it gradually reshapes memory and weakens the influence of prior knowledge. When individuals repeatedly encounter the same false claim, the brain begins to prioritize fluency over accuracy, and their knowledge is corrupted. The ease with which the information is processed creates a misleading sense of reliability, and that sense of reliability can eventually outweigh a person’s original understanding. In this way, repetition can erode even well-established facts, leading people to adopt beliefs they once recognized as false. This is why persistent misinformation can be so corrosive: it does not need to be persuasive in any rational sense; it merely needs to be ubiquitous. And this is why ideological capture of dominant institutions is so dangerous.

Recognizing this effect highlights the critical importance of rigorous scrutiny in how we evaluate information. Claims should not be accepted simply because they are familiar, presented with confidence, or widely repeated. Instead, they must be weighed against evidence, cross-checked with credible sources, and analyzed for internal coherence. This requires cultivating intellectual habits that push back against cognitive shortcuts—habits such as asking whether a statement aligns with independently verifiable facts, whether the source has a track record of accuracy, and whether contrary evidence exists. Ultimately, the illusory truth effect reminds us of a foundational epistemic principle: familiarity is not proof, and no claim—no matter how often repeated—deserves belief without sufficient evidence to support it.

“The people with real power are the ones who own the society, which is a pretty narrow group. If the specialized class can come along and say, I can serve your interests, then they’ll be part of the executive group. You’ve got to keep that quiet. That means they have to have instilled in them the beliefs and doctrines that will serve the interests of private power. Unless they can master that skill, they’re not part of the specialized class. So we have one kind of educational system directed to the responsible men, the specialized class. They have to be deeply indoctrinated in the values and interests of private power and the state-corporate nexus that represents it. If they can achieve that, then they can be part of the specialized class. The rest of the bewildered herd basically just have to be distracted. Turn their attention to something else.” — Noam Chomsky (2002)

In this essay, I address the fallacy of appeal to the authority of consensus (as opposed to truth), as well as ideological and political corruption, and pseudoscience in our knowledge-producing and sense-making institutions. One of the most frustrating things about being a scientist today is having to confront ideology, politics, and pseudoscience. This is not because the claims are difficult to debunk, but because one risks career progression, reputational harm, and even threats to his physical safety for exhibiting tenacity in commitment to science. I will pull a few topics from my past writings as examples of the problem. I begin with gender identity doctrine and the corruption of knowledge about sex differentiation, a topic I frequently address in essays on this platform.

Even in cases of intersex conditions—an unfortunate term for a scientific classification properly defined as disorders or differences of sex development (DSDs)—the sex of a mammal can still be definitively identified. Identification of gender has to do with gametes and the genetic sex type. An XY sex type or any variation on that side of the binary cannot produce female gametes. It follows that males cannot be women, the term we use to refer to adult female humans (we use other terms to refer to adult females of other species), any more than toms or gibs can be queens or mollies. DSDs are obviously not choices people make or subjective states of being. However, like any other medical condition, they should be accurately described, not rationalized by changing the meaning of gender for the sake of inclusion or kindness. Even though DSDs and trans-identifying individuals are not the same thing, correctly gendering them is based on the same logic.

To put this another way, a mammal, even one with a so-called intersex condition, is either female or male by definition of its developmental orientation toward one of the two reproductive roles. Humans are mammals. As such, our gender is constrained by the same evolutionary demands. The biological category remains binary; disorders simply represent variations within one of those categories, not a third sex. They are also exclusive categories; there is no in-between. This is not a matter of scientific consensus, but rather a brutal truth. Therefore, the term “intersex” should be jettisoned in educational settings; the reality that there are conditions that alter the outward appearance of individuals should be accepted, not rationalized ideologically or politically, or for the sake of sympathy.

A just society must state this clearly and often: Fairness must never be sacrificed for the sake of kindness or pity. I have in mind here the controversy over the recent Olympic Games, when two male sufferers of DSD were allowed to compete against women in boxing. The claim that the two males had always been regarded as girls and women, true or untrue, does not obviate the fact that they were always both males. Their situation, however unfortunate to ego or goal, cannot demand that women sacrifice the opportunities granted as exclusive to them based on the objective fact of sexual dimorphism. For experts to appeal to a consensus whereby males suffering from DSD are defined as women is therefore a fallacious appeal, since the self-evident truth is that they are not.

I have shown in my writings that the repurposing of the term gender, a synonym for sex for eight centuries, is an ideological-political project. Any individual can discover for themselves the history of these terms and who and what was behind the repurposing. The hijacking of the term was intentional and political. What remains true throughout this history is that it is not a scientifically valid differentiation of terms. It also shows how language can be used to undermine accuracy and precision in defining reality.

Thus, if a biology teacher tells his students something other than the truth of the gender binary, he is teaching pseudoscience. If he teaches the truth, but then says that a mammal may subjectively be something that objectively the mammal cannot be, then the teacher is speaking beyond the subject matter; he is entering the realm of spirituality. This is analogous to a biology teacher teaching about the soul, except that, in the case of gender identity, the claim that a male is a woman is falsifiable, even if the notion of gender identity as a subjective thing is not. Moreover, while there may be an organic basis to subjective claims, such as a schizophrenic claiming to be god, the subjective claim itself is a symptom of an illness, not an indication of a real entity. This is not a matter of consensus but of fact and reason.

To pursue the analogy further, the matter of souls is not altogether disallowed in education. However, teaching about the soul as an actual thing is properly reserved for a philosophy or theology class, where the question of its falsifiability is not an issue in ontological discussion. These are speculative endeavors, and it is no small matter given that billions of people believe in, as Freud would have it, illusions. It is for this reason that it’s possible to talk about the soul in the context of a social science class when studying things that people believe in, just not as actual things, not as scientific facts, apart from faith-belief. Faith-belief is a social fact (and a cognitive problem beyond the practical). The soul or things like it are not facts that exist independently of human thought. As suggested above, clinical psychologists may acknowledge that people have mistaken beliefs about their gender, but to teach that the substance of a mistaken belief can exist as a real thing, and therefore the belief is not mistaken, is an error of judgment. Yet many clinicians and teachers do this. In a clinical setting, it’s malpractice. This goes for the medical industry, as well.

This brings us to the problems of ideology, ignorance, and incompetence. Here, I will draw an example from the teaching of criminal justice. If I know that the evidence does not support a claim of systemic racism in lethal civilian-police encounters, a claim that justified widespread violence during the summer of 2020, but I continue to teach my students that patterns in lethal civilian-police encounters are explained by systemic racism, then I am engaged in academic misconduct—and participating in the valorization of the impetuses for irrational dissent and illegitimate violence. If I don’t know that what I am teaching has been falsified by careful research, then I am ignorant or incompetent, which includes the problem of ideological corruption. If it is the former, then the educator needs to be educated. Once the evidence was clear on the question of systemic racism in civilian-police encounters, I revised my criminal justice lectures to reflect this change in knowledge. Culture and institutions should socialize the importance of self-education. Unfortunately, as I noted at the outset, it too often punishes those whose speech acts are deemed politically incorrect.

In the Soviet Union, the notion of speech acts as politically correct or incorrect referred to strict adherence to the Communist Party line—an expectation that one’s scholarship, scientific work, and teachings align with officially sanctioned ideology. The term was used among party members to signal whether a position was doctrinally acceptable rather than factually accurate. Ideas that were empirically true or rationally derived were condemned if they conflicted with orthodoxy, presented as the consensus view. Political correctness functioned as a tool of ideological discipline, reinforcing conformity and discouraging dissent or independent inquiry. An objection is that political correctness in the Soviet Union was rooted in authoritarian control rather than cultural or social sensitivity. But cultural and social sensitivity rationalize the same thing: the disciplining and punishment of independent minds arriving at judgments inconvenient for the ideological and political goals of the establishment and its functionaries.

The purpose of academic freedom and tenure is to shield knowledge production from ideological and political influence, either from those in power or majority opinion, both of which may be unconcerned with truth or mistaken about facts. At the same time, these principles protect incompetence and ideological corruptions. This problem can be checked by rational dissent from consensus. However, too often, the solution is checked by censorship, external and self-imposed. Left unchecked, political correctness creates environments where entrenched intellectual agendas, methodological laxity, or manipulated, selective, or weak evidence persist because they are insulated from scrutiny. The very structures designed to preserve independence can, in certain circumstances and under certain regimes, inhibit correction and truth-telling, making it difficult for institutions to respond when intellectual independence is eroded by ideological and political influence. The challenge, then, is to safeguard the autonomy necessary for genuine inquiry while developing internal mechanisms capable of addressing complacency and the slow drift from rigorous truth-seeking.

I will leave the question of how to achieve this for another day, since safeguarding can itself increase the pressure on teachers to adhere to standards that are objective but ideologically established, often in conjunction with moneyed power and political pressure (albeit this may be the lesser of evils). This will have to suffice for now: While it is appropriate to “teach the controversy,” ignorantly or knowingly presenting falsehoods as facts or truths is a problem in education. Optimistically, it should be enough to demand that teachers reflect on matters of integrity. Realistically, teachers are human, and like all humans, they are biased and prepared to self-deceive to protect cherished beliefs. It may be an intractable problem. How did Romain Rolland put it? “Pessimisme de l’intelligence, optimisme de la volonté” (“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”) Perhaps that alleviates one’s cynicism.

Of course, appealing to “the consensus” is not an excuse. This raises another problem in education: appeal to the authority of expertise. We saw this during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the opinions of Washington bureaucrat Dr. Anthony Fauci came to be seen as science. The man said himself that Republican lawmakers who criticize him are “criticizing science, because I represent science.” It is hard to imagine someone in authority saying something more damaging to the legitimacy of science than this. Which is why what he said next was so ironic. “If you damage science,” he said, “you are doing something very detrimental to society.”

How is criticizing Fauci’s claims or government policy based on them damaging science? What he really meant to say, I think, is that criticizing his narrative was detrimental to his authority, the basis upon which he staked his claims. But the question of the scientific veracity of a doctor’s claims rests not on his credentials or his position but on the soundness of his conclusions and the validity of the methods he used to arrive at them. Any reasonably intelligent person can independently determine whether Fauci’s claims were sound or valid, and the importance of doing so has become ever more critical in a situation where the knowledge-producing and sense-making institutions of the West have been captured by ideology and the corporate power that lurks beneath.

President Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans in his 1961 farewell address of the dangers of technocratic hijacking of science: “For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present—and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific‑technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system—ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.” 

Ideology is a powerfully corrupting force in curricula and pedagogical practice. Indeed, education is, in certain areas, for the most part, no longer the pursuit of knowledge, but the practice of indoctrination. The results of a Fox News poll bear this out:

Fox News:

"If you have high school or less as your education, you're likely to vote for Donald Trump. But the more educated you are, the more you go over to the Democratic column."

pic.twitter.com/vxm08AjtKL

— Spencer Hakimian (@SpencerHakimian) November 13, 2025

Progressives on X use this poll to portray supporters of President Trump as undereducated rubes, a typical sentiment expressed by those who think they are the betters of others. But a proper understanding of the situation finds the President’s supporters are not ignorant but relatively free from progressive programming. Indoctrination is a powerful force, and the more one is embedded in the process, with all its reinforcers, the more they reflect the programming. Noam Chomsky captures the process well in his 1983 essay “What the World is Really Like: Who Knows It—and Why”:

“There’s a vast difference in the use of force versus other techniques. But the effects are very similar, and the effects extend to the intellectual elite themselves. In fact, my guess is that you would find that the intellectual elite is the most heavily indoctrinated sector, for good reasons. It’s their role as a secular priesthood to really believe the nonsense that they put forth. Other people can repeat it, but it’s not that crucial that they really believe it. But for the intellectual elite themselves, it’s crucial that they believe it because, after all, they are the guardians of the faith. Except for a very rare person who’s an outright liar, it’s hard to be a convincing exponent of the faith unless you’ve internalized it and come to believe it.”

Trained people are products of their training. Their conditioning becomes ever more entrenched when their livelihood depends on it. As Upton Sinclair remarked after his 1934 loss in the California gubernatorial race, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”When knowledge-producing and sense-making institutions are captured by an ideology or politics, then their products—the functionaries serving elite interests—will reflect that ideology. This is not absolute, of course (I escaped it, for example), but it would be an unlikely result of indoctrination in ideologically-captured institutions for the well-trained to vote for candidates or hold positions that those institutions programmed them to reject. So, yes, there are those with advanced academic degrees who vote conservative—but to expect programming would have no effect betrays an ignorance of the force of indoctrination in ideologically-captured systems. Indeed, a deft system of indoctrination would cultivate precisely this sort of ignorance.

America, Democrats are playing you. But it’s not just the Democrats. The corporate state media are playing you. And the Deep State. It’s playing you, too. The Trump-Epstein hoax is the latest moral panic on the menu. The recent release of select emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate has served its purpose: reigniting scrutiny of Donald Trump’s past association with a convicted sex offender. But the disclosures recycle long-known details from court records, depositions, and prior reporting. There’s nothing new here (see (The Epstein Obsession: Conspiracy, Control, and Credibility). If it sounds new, it’s because you’ve already been played. And it’s probably not the first time. Russian collusion, Pussy Hats, COVID, George Floyd, January 6—millions of people have fallen for one or more of the Establishment’s engineered panics.

Not everybody is easily panicked. There are different qualities of mind, and those who are careful, open, patient, and rational are less susceptible to manipulation. Unfortunately, many are victims of a mental quality that predisposes them to panic. Manhattan-based psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert told Fox News on Friday that what is often labeled “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS) resembles a genuine psychological condition he has observed in his practice. According to Alpert, roughly three-quarters of his patients display forms of cognitive or emotional distress tied to their anger, fears, or preoccupation with President Donald Trump.

In an interview on “The Faulkner Focus,” Alpert described patients who arrive overwhelmed by intrusive thoughts about Trump, reporting symptoms such as heightened anxiety, restlessness, and sleeplessness. Some, he said, are “triggered” simply by seeing Trump’s image in the news or on their devices, to the point that it disrupts daily functioning. He emphasized that being so intensely fixated on a single public figure is “simply not healthy.” Indeed. It is the same quality of mind that feeds leftwing politics. It is already present in the afflicted. It is just a matter of the propaganda apparatus selecting the panic and flipping the switch.

Alpert expanded on these observations in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, arguing that the phenomenon aligns with characteristics of anxiety and obsessive disorders. They suffer from intrusive ideations, emotional dysregulation, and impaired functioning. Patients he sees report compulsive news checking, emotional volatility, physical agitation, and an inability to stop thinking about Trump even when attempting to disengage. He describes the pattern as “obsessive political preoccupation”—a form of obsessive-compulsive spectrum behavior in which a political figure becomes the constant focus of intrusive thoughts and compulsive monitoring.

Initially, Alpert believed his patients’ reactions were merely ideological responses to a polarizing political figure. Over time, however, he concluded that many cases had taken on “a more clinical shape,” with fixation replacing ordinary political disagreement. “What once looked like outrage now presents as a distortion in perception that consumes attention,” he wrote.

Democrats work from the understanding that a significant proportion of the American population suffers from TDS, which depends on decades of embedding in mass consciousness inverted background assumptions, which progressives accomplish by control over our knowledge and sense-making institutions (see my August essay What Explains Trump Derangement Syndrome? Ignorance of Background Assumptions in Worldview). More than this, they know that some who glommed onto Trump are Eric Hoffer’s “true believer” types who can be flipped from one extremism to the next (see Understanding Antifa: Eric Hoffer, the True Believer, and the Footsoldiers of the Authoritarian Left). All it took from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee was to unveil three messages on Wednesday of this week—just days after caving on a government funding bill to end the shutdown they had engineered—timing the release of the emails for political diversion. Millions of Americans took the bait hook, line, and sinker. The social media platform X is teaming with lost-faith MAGA.

Why weren’t the records released by the Biden Administration? They had them the whole time. Because the Epistein story wasn’t optimally useful to them then. They thought lawfare would stop the return of Trump to power by sending him to prison for the balance of his natural life. (See The Unprecedented Resort to Lawfare—Is it Desperation or Provocation? Lawfare is Inexcusable. So is Not Understanding Basic Legal Principles and Processes.)

Yet the broader context, including over 20,000 additional pages of documents released by Republicans the same day, reveals no evidence tying Trump to Epstein’s crimes. The Democrat narrative thus hinges on innuendo and Epstein’s own cryptic suggestions of Trump’s awareness of his activities, which are directly contradicted by the testimony of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the “victim” referenced in the emails.

“VICTIM.” That’s how the media redacts Giuffre’s name. Why redact the name of a corpse? Giuffre committed suicide in April 2025. There is no living identity to protect. The redaction is not protective but strategic: to imply that Trump was with a minor at Epstein’s estate. But the email concerned a 2002 meeting between Trump and Giuffre. Giuffre was 19 years old at the time.

The deception Democrats and the corporate state media are weaving depends not only on TDS but also on a type of memory-holing: perception control via the selective forgetting of key parts of an already established narrative prompted by the re-presentation of those elements as novel and revelatory (see Why People Resist Reason: Understanding Belief, Bias, and Self-Deception and embedded links to related essays). There is nothing new learned from the emails. The emails—and the documents released by Republicans—confirm what we already knew. More than this, they further vindicate Trump’s claims of innocence.

Deft propaganda work requires more work to be performed to recover the memory-holed elements of the narrative. This is for the sake of minor cases of TDS. Who has the time to do the research to clarify associations and timelines? Who has the research skills to accomplish such a thing? Told that there is a scandal to pay attention to, citizens turn on CNN to get the latest on it. There and elsewhere, naively assuming these outlets are simply reporting the news, they are spoonfed propaganda. It therefore falls to researchers like me to tell the whole story, and to do so in a digestible way. Therefore, to fully grasp the situation, it’s essential to revisit the timeline of Trump’s ties to Epstein, Giuffre’s recruitment, and Trump and Epstein’s eventual fallout. It is also imperative to show that this is part of a larger program to undermine the Trump presidency and the will of the people who returned him to Washington in a landslide victory in November 2024.

Trump and Epstein, both fixtures in New York’s elite social scene during the 1990s and early 2000s, mingled at parties, flew on Epstein’s private jet multiple times, and shared mutual acquaintances. Trump once described Epstein in a 2002 New York Magazine profile as a “terrific guy” who liked women “on the younger side.” But their relationship soured amid growing suspicions of Epstein’s predatory behavior.

Giuffre’s story provides the pivotal link. A 16-year-old runaway in 2000, she was reunited with her estranged father, Sky Roberts, a maintenance worker at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Roberts secured Giuffre a job there as a spa and locker room attendant.

It was during her brief employment at Mar-a-Lago that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime associate, approached her. Maxwell, who would later be convicted in 2021 and sentenced to 20 years for her role in Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation, lured Giuffre with promises of a better life, pulling her into Epstein’s orbit. By late 2000, Giuffre had become ensnared in the network, enduring years of exploitation by Epstein, Maxwell, and their high-profile associates (a list that includes former President Bill Clinton, a known womanizer) before escaping in 2002 at age 19.

Giuffre repeatedly stated that her interactions with Trump were innocuous and limited. In her 2015 defamation lawsuit against Maxwell and subsequent depositions, Giuffre described encountering Trump only once or twice at Mar-a-Lago and Epstein’s nearby Palm Beach estate, where their 2002 conversation occurred. Giuffre recalled Trump as polite and friendly, with no involvement in misconduct.

“President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing whatsoever and ‘couldn’t have been friendlier’ to her in their limited interactions,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt reiterated in a statement on Thursday. Leavitt is not relying on the President’s recollection of these interactions. These accounts appear in Giuffre’s posthumously published memoir, Nobody’s Girl, released in October 2025, where she details the horrors of her trafficking while explicitly clearing Trump of impropriety. It is beyond the Democrats to acknowledge the testimony of one of Epstein’s victims when obsessively focused on getting Trump. Had Giuffre said the right thing, that would be another matter.

That 2002 exchange marked the beginning of Trump’s deliberate distancing from Epstein. Trump has long maintained that rumors of Epstein’s misconduct—specifically, his aggressive recruitment of young women from Mar-a-Lago—prompted him to act. Epstein had poached other employees for his own operations, as well, which Trump viewed as a breach of trust. Their rift deepened around 2004 over a bidding war for a bankrupt Palm Beach mansion (which Trump won). But the decisive break came in 2007, when Trump banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago entirely. According to reporting from the Miami Herald and Wall Street Journal, the final straw was Epstein’s inappropriate advances toward the teenage daughter of a club member.

Trump confirmed this timeline in public remarks in July 2025, while at his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, stating that Epstein had seduced young women from the spa, including Giuffre. “I said, listen, we don’t want you taking our people,” Trump explained. “And then not too long after that, he did it again.” Trump elaborated that Epstein became “persona non grata” at the club after that. By the time Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor—serving 13 months in a lenient jail arrangement—he and Trump had been estranged for at least a year. 

Did Trump do more than distance himself from Epstein? Did he rat out his former friend? There is a notable passage in journalist Michael Wolff’s 2018 book Fire and Fury, where Epstein allegedly believed Trump had known some of his secrets and might have leaked details to the police. Wolff reiterated this speculation in a July 2025 Instagram video, suggesting Epstein suspected Trump of tipping off authorities.

Indeed, Epstein’s private correspondence, portions of which resurfaced in the 2025 releases, reveals a distinct bitterness over their fallout. In an April 2011 email to Maxwell, Epstein wrote: “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned.” Then, cryptically: “police chief. etc. im 75 % there.” A more pointed January 2019 email from Epstein to Wolff stated: “Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. . of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”

Epstein’s bitterness was also apparent in a report by the Washington Post yesterday. Stacey Plaskett, a Democratic non-voting delegate representing the US Virgin Islands, exchanged text messages with Jeffrey Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing interrogating Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former attorney. WaPo reviewed and analyzed the messages, comparing them with footage of the hearing, and determined that Plaskett was texting Epstein in real time. At the time of the exchange, Epstein had already been convicted on two state prostitution charges and had served 13 months. Only a few months later, he would be charged with sex trafficking minors.

According to the Post’s reporting, it appears that Epstein was watching the hearing. His messages influenced the direction of Plaskett’s questioning of Cohen. In one exchange, Epstein wrote to Plaskett, “Cohen brought up RONA – keeper of the secrets,” referring to—and misspelling the name of—Rhona Graff, Trump’s longtime assistant. Plaskett replied, “RONA??” and followed moments later with, “Quick I’m up next is that an acronym.” Epstein clarified: “Thats his assistant.” At 2:28 p.m., Plaskett began questioning Cohen and asked about Graff and other Trump associates he had mentioned, consistent with the timing of a message Epstein had just sent. After she wrapped up her questions, Epstein texted her again at 2:34 p.m., saying, “Good work,” just one minute after her segment concluded.

As Scott Jennings put it, Epstein was programming Democrats in real-time.

A little Epstein back & forth last night. Still can’t believe Dems are going with Epstein as a surrogate but hey Orange Man Bad, right? pic.twitter.com/t4JE7Hb9BJ

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) November 15, 2025

These email messages, suggestively presented by Democrats, fuel speculation without proof. They clash with Trump’s consistent denials of involvement, and they ignore Giuffre’s insistence that Trump never harmed her. Epstein admits that Trump told Ghislaine to stop recruiting girls from Mar-a-Lago, consistent with Trump’s recollections. Moreover, a third email, from 2015, six months after Trump announced his candidacy for President, shows how Epstein viewed his association with Trump as politically useful in multiple ways. This explains why Epstein would not hesitate to contact Plaskett to assist in interrogating Trump’s attorney before Congress.

At the point of the 2019 email, Epstein was nearing his end. Giuffre’s 2015 suit against Maxwell had unearthed additional files, and the Miami Herald’s 2018 “Perversion of Justice” series prompted federal prosecutors to reopen the case against Epstein. Trump reiterated in July 2019, shortly after Epstein’s federal arrest on sex-trafficking charges, that he hadn’t spoken to Epstein in 15 years and had cut ties “a long time ago” due to the Mar-a-Lago incidents. 

Epstein’s death by suicide in August 2019, two months after his July arrest, halted further revelations on his part. But Giuffre’s public advocacy kept the pressure on officials to determine the full extent of Epstein’s crimes, to go after the prominent figures who had exploited teenage girls. Yet, in her final writings, she underscored Trump’s noninvolvement, undercutting the emails’ implications.

It looks like Giuffre will get her wish. Yesterday, the Justice Department confirmed that it will investigate Epstein’s alleged links to major banks and several prominent Democrats, including former President Clinton. AG Bondi said the department “will pursue this with urgency and integrity.”

Knowing the timeline, seeing progressives so sure that Trump was part of a pedophile ring, while predictable, is troubling not only because it expresses the witch-hunt mentality that marks history’s darkest periods, but also for this reason: it testifies to the power of propaganda and the mass presence of cultivated deep-seated pathologies that make individuals vulnerable to manipulation. Trump derangement is real. 

In truth, the November 2025 dump of information is a re-presentation of already known facts, a rewrapped news package for Debord’s La Société du Spectacle. Democrats spotlight Epstein’s innuendos to imply complicity, while ignoring Giuffre’s exonerations and the absence of any evidence implicating Trump in crimes. The power elite is asking the public to see something that’s not there. And too many of them are.

As suggested at the outset, the Epstein hoax is just part of the ongoing effort to remove Trump from power or at least delegitimize him. No doubt readers have heard the accusation that Trump is going after his “political opponents.” Recent investigations of prominent officials are framed as authoritarian acts of “retribution”—acts that “threaten democracy.” The two most high-profile cases are James Comey, former FBI Director, and John Brennan, former CIA Director, both serving under President Barack Obama during his second term (Comey overlapped with Trump for a few months). I now turn my attention to them and the Russian collusion hoax (see The Russia Fake News Narrative).

Comey and Brennan played central roles in initiating and shaping the investigations into alleged Russian interference and potential Trump ties. In launching Crossfire Hurricane, Comey approved the FBI’s July 2016 full investigation into potential Trump-Russia links. Later, Special Counsel John Durham stated in a report that there was no actual evidence of collusion at the outset, and that the investigation was driven by confirmation bias. That is a charitable way of putting it. Much more than confirmation bias was at work.

Under Comey’s direction, the FBI used the Steele dossier, which contained unverified allegations of Trump-Russia ties, to obtain FISA warrants on Carter Page, a Trump adviser. The Justice Department Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz’s 2019 report found 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in these applications. Durham echoed this in his report, noting the FBI failed to corroborate dossier claims despite warnings that it was disinformation. 

The dossier was an orchestrated disinformation project arranged by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Fusion GPS, a private intelligence firm based in Washington, DC, specializing in opposition research, had commissioned the dossier. Fusion GPS had been hired by the DNC and the Clinton campaign through their third law firm, Perkins Coie, explicitly to conduct opposition research on Trump.

Brennan oversaw the rushed production of the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), which concluded with “high confidence” that Putin aimed to help Trump win. In July 2016, Brennan received CIA intelligence alleging that Clinton approved a plan to tie Trump to Russia as a distraction from her email scandal. He briefed Obama, Biden, Comey, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, and AG Loretta Lynch on August 3, 2016. Durham’s report noted this intel was forwarded to Comey and FBI agent Peter Strzok, but the FBI did not pursue it as a Clinton-led hoax, instead prioritizing Trump links. Durham suggested this reflected bias. Again, charitable interpretation. It reflected the extent of coordination in the Crossfire Hurricane scheme. A 2025 CIA review accused Brennan of lying to Congress about dossier inclusion, leading to a criminal referral by Ratcliffe to the FBI for possible false statements.

It is not that Russia didn’t interfere in the 2016 election. Russian intelligence services interfere in elections, not just in the United States, just as US intelligence services interfere in the domestic politics of other nations. It’s what intelligence services do. The crime here is that the CIA and FBI under Obama attempted to tie Russian interference to the Trump campaign, thereby not merely serving as assets for the Democratic Party, but to prevent the ascension to power of a man whom the Deep State views as antithetical to its transnational goal of establishing a global corporate state. The Democratic Party is the party of globalization. A Hillary Clinton presidency would have allowed the project to continue, overthrowing foreign governments and projecting US military power around the world.

Brennan is at the center of a lot of things. He’s the man, you will recall, who, in 2020, engineered the disinformation campaign to divert attention away from the contents of a laptop owned by then-candidate for President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter (see New York Post Drops a Bombshell on the Biden Campaign; Hunter Biden’s Laptop, the Cult Mentality, and the Spirit of Free Thinking). The contents exposed the Biden international crime syndicate (to cover up the family’s crimes, President Biden would pardon his son and five other family members). This is what the first Trump impeachment was about. Trump was accused of withholding military aid as a means of pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to pursue investigations of the Biden family. The public was asked to ignore (or never know) the fact that the President is the Chief Magistrate of the United States government, and that such actions are well within the scope of authority (see For the Record: The President is the Chief Magistrate).

Brennan, along with several other intelligence officials, penned an open letter assessing the laptop to be a Russian disinformation campaign. It is highly unlikely that Brennan did not know the laptop was real. The FBI became aware of it in October 2019 and took possession of it in December of that same year. Under the information-sharing scheme of the Department of Homeland Security, Brennan, still enjoying the highest levels of security clearance, with all his connections in the intelligence world, would have known this. 

How many Americans know that Comey operationalized the FBI probe, while Brennan shaped the intelligence narrative to derail Trump and those who voted for him? If they did, they would have difficulty swallowing the propaganda that recent 2025 investigations under Trump’s second term amount to retribution. The Trump Administration is holding those accountable who sought to thwart the general will. This is a rule of law matter—and nobody is above the law.

These are the pieces of a successful coup removing Trump from office in 2020. There are many other pieces, including a pandemic and a color revolution. And the coup was followed by a comprehensive project to prevent Trump from returning to office. After he was ousted, Trump was impeached again for insurrection because he objected to a rigged and fraudulent election. This was followed by four years of lawfare. (See The Conspiracy to Overthrow an American President; I Told You Joe Biden is Corrupt and Compromised.)

Of course, this wasn’t the Establishment’s first rodeo. Using different means, the Deep State removed John Kennedy from office and prevented his brother Bobby from ascending to the post by assassination. The move against Trump is more reminiscent of the way the Establishment waged lawfare against Richard Nixon, except that there were two attempts on Trump’s life. In all these cases, the end is the same: removal of a President who defied the National Security State. With Trump, the Establishment is using everything at its disposal. The nickname given to Ronald Reagan during his presidency, the “Teflon President,” is better suited to the current occupant of the White House.

Taken together, Alpert’s observations noted at the outset of this essay suggest that what is often dismissed as mere political hostility is, for many, a deeper psychological vulnerability—one that leaves them unusually responsive to fear, fixation, and manufactured outrage. The pattern he describes reveals not just disagreement with a controversial figure, but a predisposition toward anxiety, distorted perception, and obsession that can be activated and amplified by political narratives. In this sense, the panic surrounding Trump is less a reaction to events than a reflection of an underlying mental quality—one that propaganda readily exploits (see Industrial Strength Gaslighting; The Lies of the Corporate State Are Functional to Its Ends; The Deep State and Cognitive and Emotional Manipulation).

Recognizing this dynamic is essential to understanding why some remain levelheaded while others are swept into emotional frenzy, and why certain segments of the public are so easily manipulated into cycles of alarm and obsession. It falls to the levelheaded among us to be steady hands at the helm of reason amid the maelstrom whipped up by those who endeavor to steal from us our beloved republic.

“When one publishes a book it becomes a public property; the author’s only responsibility to his reading public, if any, is to make it as good a book as he can and he is the final judge of that. But the teacher has further responsibilities. To some extent, students are a captive audience; and to some extent they are dependent upon their teacher, who is something of a model to them. His foremost job is to reveal to them as fully as he can just how a supposedly self-disciplined mind works. The art of teaching is in considerable part the art of thinking out loud but intelligibly. In a book the writer is often trying to persuade others of the result of his thinking; in a classroom the teacher ought to be trying to show others how one man thinks—and at the same time reveal what a fine feeling he gets when he does it well. The teacher ought then, it seems to me, to make very explicit the assumptions, the facts, the methods, the judgments. He ought not to hold back anything, but ought to take it very slowly and at all times repeatedly make clear the full range of moral alternatives before he gives his own choice.” —C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959)

When I teach my course, Freedom and Social Control, I begin with the Enlightenment and the birth of classical liberalism, grounding my students in John Locke’s conception of liberty and the individual. This ties into the second set of lectures, where I cover the sociology of Max Weber and make the observation that Protestantism—especially in its Reformation emphasis on the direct relationship between the individual and God—helped cultivate a cultural shift toward personal conscience, freedom, and responsibility, from centralized religious authority, which later informed classical liberal ideas.

By challenging the authority of the Catholic Church and promoting vernacular scripture, Protestant reformers encouraged literacy, independent moral judgment, and the notion that individuals could interpret truth for themselves. These ideas resonated beyond religion, nurturing an intellectual climate that valued limited government, private property, and individual rights. Thus, Protestant individualism contributed to the philosophical foundations of classical liberalism by reinforcing the moral and social importance of autonomous persons capable of self-governance.

However, before reaching that point, in the first lecture set, I necessarily trace that intellectual lineage forward to the twentieth century to set up the second set, focusing especially on Friedrich Hayek. I contrast this in the same lecture set with exploration with another tradition—the radical democratic ideas that emerge from Karl Marx, developed later through thinkers such as Abraham Maslow and Erich Fromm.

In this way, I frame the course as an extended conversation between two great conceptions of freedom: the negative and the positive. The negative conception of liberty—freedom from coercion—finds its clearest expression in the classical and neoclassical liberal traditions (the latter often perceived as modern conservatism and right-wing thought). The positive conception—freedom to realize one’s potential—finds its voice in the radical humanist and socialist thinkers. My goal has always been to bring these two visions into sharp relief and let students weigh their strengths and weaknesses.

My goal is not to tell them what to think about these competing viewpoints, although following C. Wright Mills’ lead in his 1959 Sociological Imagination, I do let them know what I think. Mills argues that a responsible teacher should present competing viewpoints fairly, avoid indoctrination, and help students understand the range of possible interpretations. But, after doing this, the teacher ought to make clear where he himself stands, rather than pretending to be a neutral observer. Mills believed this transparency strengthened intellectual honesty and encouraged students to think critically rather than defer to covert authority, or what philosopher Sandra Harding critiques as depoliticized thought. Importantly, Mills adds that students should always be free to reach their own conclusions; the teacher’s job is to clarify, not to coerce.

This essay concerns how the point at which I make my standpoint clear has shifted over time and why. Politically, I’ve long considered myself a civil libertarian. I believe deeply in the US Constitution and, above all, the Bill of Rights—especially the First Amendment. This has not changed over the course of my life. On economic questions, though, I’ve historically leaned toward the democratic socialist side, believing that liberty must have a material foundation if it’s to be meaningful for everyone. For twenty-five years, this balance has shaped the way I teach Freedom and Social Control. I have, over time, become increasingly skeptical of democratic socialism.

I want to begin with the flow of the first lecture set and how I have modified it over time to make the materials more accessible to students, and how the addition of materials to accomplish this persuaded me to change my views.

After syllabus day, I introduce students to brief, accessible excerpts of foundational texts. They read concise summaries of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom that I photocopied from a volume of The Great American Bathroom Books, pre-smartphone collections published in the early 1990s that offered a page or two of great works to read while otherwise occupied. These selections distill complex ideas into approachable forms for freshmen and sophomores. Along with this, they read an excerpt from Hayek’s 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty. On the radical democratic side I have them read an Karl Marx’s Preface to an Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy and an excerpt from Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.

A few years ago, to make these ideas even more accessible, on the liberal side, I supplemented these readings with Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” especially effective in illustrating Hayek’s warnings from The Constitution of Liberty. Fiction engages students’ imaginations in ways pure philosophy often cannot. On the other side of the debate—the positive liberty, democratic socialist side—I assign George Orwell’s Animal Farm and summarize in class Nineteen Eighty-Four, although I bring in Orwell after the second lecture set to bring out the implications of Marx and Weber’s observations (the third lecture concerns corporate statism and media and propaganda). Orwell’s novels dramatize how collectivist and illiberal ideals can curdle into authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

If you are familiar with Orwell’s writings, you probably know where this is going. Over time, I noticed something intriguing: Vonnegut and Orwell, both hailing from the tradition of democratic socialism or at least left-liberal, social-democratic humanist, combined with strong anti-authoritarian instincts, critique bureaucratic control and enforced equality characteristics of really-existing socialism. They are criticizing extreme interpretations of egalitarian ideals, forced equality by coercive government, and more broadly, the desire among some humans to create a perfectly engineered society—in short, a utopia.

Thus, as I continued teaching these pairings, something unexpected happened: the course began to change me. Where I once viewed the “negative liberty” tradition with suspicion, I began to see the force of its arguments more clearly. Hayek’s defense of individual freedom and his warnings about centralized control started to resonate more deeply. Orwell, whom I had long regarded as a critic of totalitarianism from the democratic socialist traditions, began to sound more like an ally of liberal skepticism than of socialist idealism. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the additions of these fictional works altered my own political outlook.

While my students only have me for one semester, and I doubt their political views shift as dramatically, the course functions as a laboratory for testing these great ideas against each other, a standard pedagogical practice in the humanities. Freedom and Social Control combines humanist and social science interests (history, political theory, and sociology) in the spirit of the program’s curriculum—founded as a critical historical social science department—draws mostly progressive students, just as such disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields in this area tend to attract progressive professors. While I have identified as a democratic socialist in the tradition of Orwell, I am not a progressive. I have never felt comfortable identifying with progressivism, which strikes me as managerial and technocratic, more concerned with systems than with individuals.

That discomfort first surfaced in another class I teach: Foundations of Social Research. Early in that course, I cover the philosophy of science and introduce students to various logical fallacies—both formal and informal. One fallacy that has always stood out to me is the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” the error of treating an abstraction as if it were a concrete reality. When I began thinking through examples of this fallacy, I realized how often political and social arguments on the left make this mistake. They take the category of “group” and attribute to all individuals within it the average or assumed attributes of the group as a whole. I have critiqued that view in several essays on this platform (as well as critiquing progressivism and the rise of the corporate state and technocratic control).

That insight opened a crack in my earlier convictions. I began to see that certain progressive frameworks—critical race theory and policies that preceded that standpoint (affirmative action) and that conceptually informed subsequent DEI initiatives—often rely on this same fallacy. They reify the group (an abstraction) and, in doing so, obscure the individual (the concrete). Recognizing that was, in retrospect, the beginning of my shift. As I reworked my course readings in Freedom and Social Control, perhaps unconsciously, I found myself highlighting this individual-versus-group tension more sharply. Over time, the cumulative effect of reflecting on all this revealed to me that some of the assumptions I had carried for much of my life were wrong. Teaching this course—designed to clarify my students’ thinking—ended up clarifying my own.

There is another piece to this. Over the years of occasionally teaching Law and Society, I added a text by Michael Tiger, Law and the Rise of Capitalism, published in 1977, which traces the eight hundred years of Western European legal history, showing how law and legal ideology, the trench work by lawyers for the merchant class in feudal courts, helped the bourgeoisie rise to power. When I think about the great argument between capitalism and socialism in the light of that book, I increasingly see capitalism not as a theory invented by anyone and forced on the masses, but as an organic historical process, the results of which Europeans found themselves living in. In Tiger’s interpretation, capitalism begins, perhaps humbly, with disputes over property rights, contract, and debt, which were slowly disentangled from the web of feudal obligation. From those early legal and economic claims grew a body of precedent and practice that began to privilege exchange over status, contract over custom.

By the time we reach what world-systems theorists, in particular Immanuel Wallerstein, who conceptualizes the period of capitalist consolidation as the “long sixteenth century” (roughly 1450 to 1620), capitalism emerges as a world system. The rise of the English Parliament, the expansion of trade, and the first bourgeois revolution in England in the seventeenth century mark crucial turning points. The French Revolution, often cited as the great bourgeois revolution, was dramatic, but the English case was more decisive in institutionalizing bourgeois power. The American Revolution, therefore, is not so much a bourgeois revolution in the same transformative sense, but rather a war of independence fought by colonists who were already capitalists in practice—agrarian in the South, commercial and proto-industrial in the North. They sought not to invent capitalism, but to secure it from imperial interference.

Climbing out of the weeds of digression, all this suggests to me that capitalism’s rise was evolutionary, not revolutionary. It was an organic emergence rather than an ideological project. It did not spring from a single mind or manifesto but from countless adaptations, negotiations, and unintended consequences. In this respect, and here I get to the point, capitalism differs profoundly from Marxist revolutions, which are typically, if you will, idea-first transformations—intentional efforts to reshape society according to a teleological blueprint. This is precisely the danger Orwell and Vonnegut dramatized in their fiction: the attempt to impose a rational plan on human life, assuming people are infinitely malleable and that human nature can be remade by social design. (Weber sees technocratic control as emergent from liberal rationalization, but I will leave his critique to one side for now. I have covered that development on this platform, so you can look for that elsewhere. I note here that I do cover this paradox in the second lecture set in Freedom and Social Control.)

This brings me to a tension within Marx himself. I’ve long wanted to separate Marx’s scientific insights from the political systems that later claimed his authority. Marx, to my mind, occupies in social science the place Darwin occupies in biology: he offers a paradigm, a framework for understanding the objective processes or structural dynamics of change. Unfortunately, where Darwin’s theory was absorbed into science, Marx’s was absorbed into ideology. Because Marx identified as a communist, his ideas became inextricably tied to a political project that distorted his method. For many years, my democratic socialist sympathies caused me to argue that Marx’s politics and his science were inseparable—that to divorce his communism from his analysis was to betray his intent. Now I have my doubts, however convenient that may sound. I am now coming to the posiiton that, not only that they can be separated, but that they should be if we are to extract from Marx’s writings the scientific paradigm he developed to explain his early emphasis on alienation and the estrangement of man from his species-being.

Marx’s materialism gives us a way to analyze historical processes and the deeper social structures that drive them. However, many of his followers’—as well as his critics’—political interpretations often proceed from an “unconstrained” view of human nature, the assumption, as Thomas Sowell put it, that human beings are infinitely perfectible and that the “right” institutions can produce new men. Whatever the voracity of their interpretations, Marx’s critics are correct that this assumption, in practice, has led to tyranny. Marx himself, I continue to insist, was more constrained in his understanding of human nature. He saw history as structured by material forces and class relations, and he accepted the Darwinian view of human evolution.

This view is reinforced in what is considered Marx’s least deterministic work, his 1852 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. There, Marx discusses transformations in the eighteenth century, particularly its revolutions and political, albeit contingent, maneuvering. Yet, his determinism surfaces when he asserts, in so many words, that men make history under circumstances not of their own choosing—a phrase that Christopher Hitchens many years ago invoked to argue that Marxism is non-deterministic. However, to say that “men make history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing” implies a powerful determinism: the material context defines the limits of action. The strength of this formulation is that it considers both human agency and structural forces, but it is hardly a refutation of the thesis that there are constraints on human action. One may argue that it moves the locus of determinism from human nature to social structure, but in the final analysis, it is human beings who make history in an emergent and, for the most part, unintentional way.

So I am left with a paradox. Marx’s scientific method is deterministic in structure, even if his moral hope is not. The tragedy of Marxism is that this determinism, when turned into political doctrine (which it need not be), breeds the illusion that conscious revolutionaries can override human nature and emergent history, that human reason can redesign society from above, through coercion. This is not to say capitalism is not coercive—the exploitation of human labor is certainly a form of coercion, achieved through emergent social relations butressed by law and state—but the reality is that what is organically emergent, however sustained by its attendant superstructure, is very different from what is constituted anew from political imposition. The result of socialism, again and again, has been the substitution of one ruling class for another, justified by a utopian faith in the malleability of man, an faith that is really not found in Marx’s scientific writings.

To put it more simply, the capitalist story, despite its inequalities and moral compromises, has a different character than the really existing socialist regimes established by a revolutionary vanguard. Capitalism emerged without design—at least not an overarching design implemented by a cadre of capitalist theorists appealing to the authority of Adam Smith. Rather, capitalism emerged from the friction of markets, the gradual reform of institutions, and the unplanned coordination of self-interested actors. That process, for all its chaos (to be sure, Marx is right to record in the final chapter of Capital, Volume I, that there was a bloody appropriation of the means of production), has proven more durable than any revolution built on the dream of human perfectibility.

Looking back, I see that Freedom and Social Control has been more than a course title. It has been a description of my own intellectual journey. I began teaching it as a way of staging a great debate for my students. In the process, I discovered that the most liberating act in the life of the mind is the willingness to let evidence, experience, and history revise one’s convictions. Risking being accused of putting on airs, in an age when universities often confuse moral certainty with moral seriousness, this kind of openness is increasingly rare. Here I can express humility: I myself fell into this trap (make of that what you will). Yet I can see that my journey to enlightenment, still ongoing, is the essence of what liberal education was meant to achieve: the emancipation of thought from orthodoxy, whether of the left or the right. If my students take anything from my course, I hope it is this—that freedom, in every sense, begins with the courage to think for oneself.

Afterall, it’s not called the conservative arts or the progressive arts. It’s called the liberal arts. For a reason.

The foundation of this discussion assumes John Locke’s labor theory of value, which may be regarded as a truism. Locke held that while wealth exists in nature, value is something created by human labor. Without labor, the wealth of nature remains untapped. When a person mixes his labor with nature to extract its resources, he gives those resources value, since he renders them possible to meet human needs and wants. From that value, in a market situation, necessary in complex and free social arrangements, he derives an income with which he sustains himself and his family.

Under capitalism, however, part of the value produced by the worker is expropriated by the capitalist. The capitalist exploits labor to claim a share of the value that the worker’s labor creates, just as the worker exploits nature, today augmented by machines and tools provided by capital, to create value. One may, as a Marxist would, argue that it is wrong for capital to exploit labor—but whether or not one accepts that moral claim (and however the Marxist would rationalize it, a moral claim necessarily lies behind the argument), it remains a fact of life in the economic order we inhabit today. There is a reason to embrace this, namely an economic dynamic that drives technological advance and therefore improves the life chances of the species.

Out of the value the worker receives in wages or salary, a portion goes to the government through taxation. The same is true for the capitalist, who also pays a share of his derived value to the government. The government, in turn, uses these revenues to provide for national defense, maintain public order, and secure the general safety of the population—functions are necessary and therefore reasonable. Thus, from the worker’s standpoint, part of the value he produces goes to the capitalist, and another part goes to the state to sustain these essential services.

However, the worker is called upon to fund much more than this. Out of his taxes, he must also contribute to programs that provide food, healthcare, and housing for those who are not working to produce value, or whose work is deemed unnecessary in the productive process. Consequently, the worker not only supports the capitalist and the government’s core functions but also supports others who are not contributing labor. While one might see this as an act of compassion—helping those in need—the worker cannot support everyone indefinitely, nor is it obvious that the government’s proper role is to compel charity (since charity is by definition voluntarily given). Moreover, this development has a deleterious effect: as more people become dependent on such provisions, society begins to move toward a condition resembling socialism, not because capitalists have been abolished, but because the labor burden increasingly resembles that of a communist redistribution scheme.

To be sure, some people genuinely cannot work—the disabled, the elderly—and their support is both humane and justified (the problem of compulsion remains, however). But some healthy individuals do not work, even as they raise children and depend on government assistance. One of the reasons for this lies in the behavior of capitalists themselves. The capitalist, driven by the desire to maximize his share of the value produced by labor, constantly seeks to reduce the cost of that labor. He achieves this by automating production, importing cheaper foreign labor, offshoring jobs, or otherwise finding ways to produce more with fewer resources. This drive to increase productivity through mechanization, globalization, and technological advancement has led to a shrinking demand for labor in advanced economies. As a result, the number of people who are not working—and who therefore must be supported by the taxes of those who do—is steadily growing.

Some might propose that we are approaching a post-scarcity world, in which machines and robots will produce all that we need. In such a world of plenty, human beings would no longer have to work. Yet this would represent a radical break from all of human history—a world in which people obtain the things they desire without any personal effort. It would also undermine the capitalist dynamic that drives technological advance. In that scenario, an overarching government would have to determine the distribution of goods according to need. But this would require a powerful and coercive state apparatus to decide how much each person receives, when they receive it, and for what purposes. It is easy to see how, in such a world, hunger might end—but freedom could end along with it.

We can already observe a smaller version of this dynamic among those who rely on welfare today. Though they may have food, healthcare, and housing, they must still go to the government to obtain them. They depend on handouts, and those handouts come with conditions, as they must, since those who provide them have an interest in making sure those resources are not wasted on unnecessary things. In contrast, the working person, after the capitalist and the government have taken their shares, still retains the freedom to decide how to spend what remains of his earnings. That freedom of choice—over one’s own portion of value—is essential to human dignity. Those who generate value should play a determinative role in how that value is used.

Given this reasoning, the political task of working-class people should not be to demand that the government provide more “free” goods such as food, healthcare, or housing—since nothing is truly free when it comes from the value workers produce. Instead, workers should pursue policies that restrict the ability of corporations to eliminate jobs through excessive automation, the importation of cheap foreign labor, and the offshoring of manufacturing. Trade with other nations may continue, but under terms that generate revenue to support the national interest and the domestic workforce. Rather than sustaining millions of people who are not working, we should create the conditions under which those millions can be productively employed. With a larger base of working, value-producing citizens, society could more easily care for those who truly cannot work—the elderly, the infirm, the disabled—without eroding the freedom and dignity of the working majority.

In this way, the program outlined above preserves the core commitments of liberalism and republican democracy. Liberalism rests upon the right of individuals to enjoy conditions of personal liberty—control over their own labor, the fruits of that labor, and the life they build with it. A political order in which productive citizens retain meaningful authority over the value they create safeguards these liberties by preventing both private concentrations of power and state-administered systems of redistribution from overtaking individual agency. At the same time, a republican form of democracy is maintained, for the people—conceived not as passive recipients of governmental provision but as active contributors to the nation’s material life—collectively determine the legitimate scope and aims of government. This democratic authority is necessarily limited by the natural rights to life, liberty, and property that no majority may override. By ensuring broad participation in productive labor and preventing economic arrangements that erode that participation, society secures both the freedom of individuals and the self-governing character of the polity.