The article’s point is devastating because it explains almost everything wrong with modern governance. COVID policy stopped asking what worked and started asking what aligned with approved morality. DEI stopped asking whether institutions functioned and started demanding symbolic compliance. Net Zero stopped balancing energy, affordability, industry, and security, then crowned itself the highest good. Human-rights language expanded until every preference became a claim on someone else’s liberty. Aristotle would call this madness. Politics is prudence among competing goods, not worship of one abstraction. Liberty, order, prosperity, tradition, innovation, and justice must be balanced in the real world. Reality wins eventually.
I am in the process of writing a long piece on exactly this. Every society is about balancing the tensions between the rights and responsibilities of individuals, groups, and society as a whole. Ask an engineer: take away the framework that holds all that together and everything collapses in a big heap.
The article’s point is devastating because it explains almost everything wrong with modern governance. COVID policy stopped asking what worked and started asking what aligned with approved morality. DEI stopped asking whether institutions functioned and started demanding symbolic compliance. Net Zero stopped balancing energy, affordability, industry, and security, then crowned itself the highest good. Human-rights language expanded until every preference became a claim on someone else’s liberty. Aristotle would call this madness. Politics is prudence among competing goods, not worship of one abstraction. Liberty, order, prosperity, tradition, innovation, and justice must be balanced in the real world. Reality wins eventually.
Thanks for taking the time to read it. And exactly right it’s a balancing act of all the variables concerned
I am in the process of writing a long piece on exactly this. Every society is about balancing the tensions between the rights and responsibilities of individuals, groups, and society as a whole. Ask an engineer: take away the framework that holds all that together and everything collapses in a big heap.
Interesting bit of history well done
We must always balance rights with responsibilities.