More passionate truth

More passionate truth from Jeffrey Tucker:

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The signers of the original Yale letter were hardly the only ones. Academics, think tankers, authors, and major public pundits all over the world changed suddenly. Those who should have opposed lockdowns switched to favor them once every major nation in the world other than Sweden adopted them. This was true even of the scholars and activists who had made names for themselves in favor of human rights and liberties. Even many libertarians, whom you might think of as the last to side with such senseless, destructive governmental policies, were silent, or, even worse, invented rationales for these measures.

Here we are four years later and the deck is still massively shuffled. It is hard to predict these days where any particular public intellectual stands on lockdowns, mandates, and the entire calamity of the response to Covid. Very few have apologized. Most have moved on as if nothing has happened. Some have dug into their own apostasy even more deeply

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Jeffrey then goes into the role of tenure and gets it right, which is rare among “conservative” types. He misses and idealizes the history; in fact universities have ALWAYS been hives of orthodoxy. They were founded to protect Roman orthodoxy, not to encourage heretics. Nothing has changed except the text of the orthodoxy.

There is one recent change in the variance of the texts. Before 2000, each academic subject had its own private orthodoxy, its own required theories and banned theories, which only correlated with partisan politics in the “social” “sciences” like economics and history. Now everything at all levels is crude D vs R, Hillary vs Trump.

Overall, caste explains everything, and Machiavelli wrote everything. Princes determine what happens and command the truth. Courtiers are desperately competing to hold the favor of the prince, and ALWAYS do what the prince seems to want at the current second. Peasants keep their head down and obey when the courtiers are watching, but try to live a normal life when not being watched.

Public intellectuals get to be public because they’re loyal courtiers, keeping up with the second-by-second changes in the desires and whims and sadistic murders of the psychopathic prince.

Libertarians are princes who read Machiavelli carefully and deeply. Persuading peasants that they too can be princes if they work hard enough and “vote” right is the BEST way to keep peasants under total tyrannical control. Ayn Rand simply rewrote Machiavelli in modern jargon. The harshest sponsors of the “virus” tyranny were all Libertarians, including our tech tyrants and the foreign rulers of Peru and Philippines. The foreign rulers who mostly avoided the tyranny were socialists like Sweden, or ex-Soviets who maintained the Soviet tradition.