As politics becomes increasingly shaped by social media, mass messaging, and distant institutions, BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre is questioning whether modern societies have simply grown too large to be human.

And author of “The Master and His Emissary” Dr. Iain McGilchrist has an answer for him.

“More and more, our politics is this disembodied understanding. It is the thing fed to us through social media feeds and communicated through advertisements and headlines and these things. People feel like they know more about the world than they’ve ever known,” MacIntyre says.

“In reality, they know not even their neighbor or the issues that they face politically. And so these things have become completely disconnected. To my mind, the way that this is evolving is that we are basically becoming less human in all of our political interactions, making it very difficult for us to then understand the other as human, to understand the society and the world around us,” he continues.

MacIntyre believes this will precede a “collapse in our political systems” that will bring us back “to more of a city-state model.”

“Do you think that we can continue to see these large, you know, super-states expand and continue to lean on this idea that they have some kind of meaningful input from the individuals involved in their citizens, or do you think that ultimately we will have to contract and once again deal with each other at a much more local level when it comes to political organization?” MacIntyre asks McGilchrist.

“I do think we will need to do that very definitely if we’re to survive,” McGilchrist answers.

“We will have to rediscover the virtues of intermediate size,” he continues, pointing out that it may resemble the “downfall of a civilization.”

“But it might actually enable the regeneration of a much better way of life in which we lived with more modest demands on the earth, closer to the earth, cultivating the earth in common with our own community, sharing our lives with them, helping and supporting one another,” he explains.

“That would be a very different one from the one in which we are alien from one another,” he adds.

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Waiting to exhale? Trump’s EPA just made it possible.

The Trump administration has rescinded the Obama administration’s 2009 Greenhouse Gas Endangerment Finding for gases such as carbon dioxide. You may now exhale without worrying that the carbon dioxide in your breath will contribute to global warming.

After all, with 8.3 billion people on the planet exhaling an average of 2.3 pounds of CO2 per person per day, roughly 9.5 million tons of CO2 are respired into the atmosphere daily. That is a lot of hot air — literally.

If you have been holding your breath while waiting for more sensible environmental regulations that focus on both people and the planet, you may now breathe easier.

Fortunately, plants use the air we exhale. It is part of the life cycle that sustains a healthy biosphere. Add the full carbon cycle — in which carbon is sequestered and released throughout the living and nonliving components of the global ecosystem — and a natural balance is generally maintained.

The serious question has been whether human activity, especially the increasing use of fossil fuels since the late 1800s, has tipped that balance.

The major “consensus science” conclusions tied to the endangerment finding include the confident assertion that modern climate change can be attributed to people burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. According to one professional organization, these human-caused changes “are larger and faster than any humanity is known to have endured over the last 10,000 years.” The same view also holds that many harmful impacts already under way will intensify and outweigh any benefits.

Yet another perspective deserves consideration. One of the greatest forces lifting people out of poverty has been the burning of fossil fuels. The progression from coal to oil to natural gas — along with advances in pollution controls — has helped produce dramatically higher living standards in societies that use their energy resources well.

Arguably, the human-caused improvements in comfort, productivity, and longevity made possible by fossil fuels are also “larger and faster than any humanity is known to have [enjoyed] over the last 10,000 years.”

As for harmful impacts, the rhetorical pattern often looks familiar: find an extraordinary weather event and blame it on anthropogenic global warming. Extreme heat? Human activity. Extreme cold — as the United States recently experienced? Human activity again.

At least most scientists acknowledge that positive effects exist. These include substantial increases in global vegetation and the advantages of warmer temperatures over colder ones for human well-being and development.

Khanchit Khirisutchalual via iStock/Getty Images

Any honest assessment of climate change and its effects on people, infrastructure, and the natural world should weigh both benefits and harms. Complex systems demand that kind of accounting.

The current retraction of the endangerment finding will be a particular breath of fresh air for the auto industry. In essence, the Environmental Protection Agency concluded that it “lacks statutory authority under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act to prescribe standards for [greenhouse gas] emissions” from “new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines.”

According to the EPA:

As a result of these changes, engine and vehicle manufacturers no longer have any future obligations for the measurement, control, and reporting of [greenhouse gas] emissions for any highway engine and vehicle, including model years manufactured prior to this final rule. This final action is only related to [greenhouse gas] emissions and does not affect regulations on any traditional air pollutants. Rather, this action realigns EPA’s regulatory framework with the best reading of the CAA, which does not authorize EPA to regulate [greenhouse gas] emissions from new motor vehicles.

As the agency notes, traditional health-based air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ground-level ozone, particulate matter, lead, and carbon monoxide — not CO2 — are unaffected by this EPA action.

So if you have been holding your breath while waiting for more sensible environmental regulations that focus on both people and the planet, you may now breathe easier.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at American Thinker.

Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘philosophy’ wasn’t deep — it was dirty

Anyone can search the currently available Epstein files and see what turns up. As a professor at Arizona State University, I searched for my own school. I did not expect to find so much ASU-related material.

One reason: ASU employed Lawrence Krauss, paying him a substantial salary to write books arguing that the universe created itself from nothing.

Epstein’s philosophy collapses under its own weight because it begins with a lie about God.

That claim is its own story. You will object, rightly: “But we can’t get something from nothing.” Krauss replies, “By ‘nothing’ I mean quantum foam.” And you respond, “Then the title misleads. You don’t mean nothing. You mean quantum foam.”

Krauss also became close with Jeffrey Epstein. In one exchange, Krauss wrote: “I really do love you deeply as a friend Jeffrey. I don’t think I know anyone else who so honestly cares about me, and I don’t think I can ever truly express how wonderful that feels. Thank you. The cruise was a great reset.” In other messages, they discuss science and religion.

That is what caught my attention. As I read Epstein’s comments about religion — and listened to his interview with Steve Bannon on similar themes — a picture began to form of how Epstein made sense of the world and, more chillingly, of himself.

How a monster sleeps

A question hangs over every moral horror: How does a moral monster live with himself? Even if we limit ourselves to the explicit immorality in the files — without speculating about coded language or hidden networks — how did he sleep at night? What silenced his conscience?

Several pieces fit together.

In the ASU-related material and in interviews, Epstein does what I have often seen among intellectuals: He retreats into abstraction. He speaks about the history of ideas, mathematics, and cutting-edge research in a way that floats above concrete people and particular moral obligations.

That retreat protects a self-image. He can pose as the enlightened patron of science, funding humanity’s progress. That image sits in grotesque contrast with the cruelty he inflicted on actual human beings.

Abstraction as a moral anesthetic

This pattern tracks with Paul Johnson’s thesis in “Intellectuals”: Intellectuals who talk about serving “humanity” often treat individuals in their orbit badly. Grand claims become a shield. The rhetoric of progress becomes moral insulation.

Think of the professor who preaches liberation while using DEI programs to impose racial essentialism and ideological coercion. He can tell himself he is helping “the marginalized” even as he harms colleagues and students in the real world.

Or consider the pop star who repeats slogans like “no one is illegal on stolen land.” The moral performance happens at the level of abstraction. The carelessness happens at the level of reality.

Marco Bello/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Epstein’s ‘unknowable’ God

Epstein goes further by trying to dissolve moral accountability at the metaphysical level.

He argues that physicists once believed reality could be fully captured by mathematics. Now, he claims, we understand reality is irrational. Mathematics can only approximate what he calls “the limit,” but the limit itself remains unknowable. Some call that limit “God.”

But if God is unknowable, then God becomes irrelevant to our calculations about life and moral choice.

At one point, Epstein frames this as a male-female divide. The male mind, he says, runs on logic and mathematics. Reality, however, does not fit that paradigm. Reality is fundamentally irrational and accessed through feminine intuition. Ultimate reality, in his telling, is best understood as the divine female.

Humans, in Epstein’s view, are beasts with frontal lobes sophisticated enough to rationalize their impulses.

He may have believed he was elevating the feminine. The framework reads more like a metaphysical excuse: reason fails, therefore the standard fails.

The tension between reason and intuition is ancient. Epstein narrows “reason” to a single project: reducing the world to material causes through mathematics. When that project does not deliver what he wants, he does not abandon reductionism. He abandons reason.

Francis Schaeffer described this move in godless intellectual life: When autonomous reason cannot sustain itself, the thinker does not repent. He escapes into irrationality. Intuition becomes the alibi. Mystery becomes permission.

Religion as therapy, not truth

In conversation with Krauss, Epstein defends a kind of religion, but not biblical religion.

Krauss, echoing the New Atheists, treats religion as an evolutionary leftover — maybe useful in an earlier age, unnecessary for modern man. After all, modern man allegedly knows universes can create themselves out of nonexistence.

Epstein pushes back, but only to reduce religion to psychological management. Religion concerns the “inner world,” he suggests, while science and mathematics concern the outer world. We cannot ignore the inner world. Its purpose is peace. Anxiety and depression signal inner disorder; religion restores equilibrium. That, for Epstein, becomes religion’s function.

Not worship. Not truth. Not repentance. Peace.

That is New Age self-help with a faux religious vocabulary.

A Nietzschean pattern

Put the pieces together and a Nietzschean outline emerges.

Nietzsche described the dialectic between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian seeks order, reason, structure. Yet it can become sterile and suffocating. The Dionysian seeks raw experience — ecstasy, pleasure, intoxication, release. Dionysian revelry becomes not only indulgence but purgation: a controlled environment where darker impulses can be acted out so a man can return to ordinary life and call himself functional again.

God’s moral law is written on the heart. We are not left with "unknowable limits" as our excuse. We are without excuse.

Humans, on this view, are beasts with frontal lobes sophisticated enough to rationalize their impulses.

That is the worldview of the modern pagan: order and chaos, calculation and intoxication, “science” by day and ritualized transgression by night. Add Epstein’s skepticism about knowable truth and his reduction of religion to inner peace, and the method of self-justification comes into focus.

His reported fascination with longevity technologies and strange diets fits too. Death becomes the great enemy. It must be cheated — through science, mythic elixirs, or Silicon Valley innovation.

cglade via iStock/Getty Images

Temptation is not his alone

The unsettling part: These temptations are not unique to Epstein.

Many people oscillate between cold rationalism and irrational indulgence. Many treat morality as a social construct and religion as therapy. Many use abstractions to excuse what they would never defend in plain language.

That should drive self-examination, not mere disgust. Are we living inside the Apollonian-Dionysian loop, shifting between self-justifying “reason” and self-excusing “release”?

The lie at the center

Epstein’s philosophy collapses under its own weight because it begins with a lie about God.

God has not hidden Himself. Scripture teaches that His eternal power and divine nature are clearly revealed through creation. His moral law is written on the heart. We are not left with “unknowable limits” as our excuse. We are without excuse.

The claim that reality is fundamentally irrational is not a profound insight. It is an evasion. It is a way to suppress what is plain.

That is why Lawrence Krauss’ self-creating universe and Epstein’s divine female belong in the same category: idols. They exchange the truth for something else — something that grants permission.

Romans 1 describes the pattern of Epstein’s life: the darkened mind, the suppression of truth, the exchange of glory for self-justification, and the descent into sexual corruption. The cure is not oscillation between sterile rationalism and ecstatic purgation. The cure is redemption. The cure is communion with God restored.

We need Christ, who alone frees us from the pagan dialectic — ancient and modern — and grants eternal life, “that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3).

Artificial Intelligence In The Classroom Destroys Actual Intelligence In Students

Students should aspire to be more than mere 'prompt writers,' but minds capable of thinking, reasoning, and perseverance.

Don’t be seduced by AI nostalgia — it’s a trap!

I don’t often argue with internet trends. Most of them exhaust themselves before they deserve the attention. But a certain kind of AI-generated nostalgia video has become too pervasive — and too seductive — to ignore.

You’ve seen them. Soft-focus fragments of the 1970s and 1980s. Kids on bikes at dusk. Station wagons. Camaros. Shopping malls glowing gently from within. Fake wood paneling! Cathode ray tubes! Rotary phones! A past rendered as calm, legible, and safe. The message hums beneath the imagery: Wouldn’t it be nice to go back?

Human nostalgia, as opposed to the AI-generated kind, eventually runs aground on grief, embarrassment, and the recognition that the past demanded something from us and took something in return.

Eh ... not really, no. But I understand the appeal because, on certain exhausting days, it works on me too — just enough to make the present feel a little heavier by comparison.

And I don’t like it. Not at all. And not because I’m hostile to memory.

I was there, 3,000 years ago

I was born in 1971. I lived in that world. I remember it pretty well.

How well? One of my earliest, most vivid memories of television is not a cartoon or a sitcom. No, I’m a weirdo. It is the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973, broadcast on PBS in black and white. I was 2 years old.

I didn’t understand the words, but I sort of grasped the tone. The seriousness. The tension. The sense that something grave was unfolding in full view of the world. Even as a toddler, I vaguely understood that it mattered. The adults in ties and horn-rimmed glasses were yelling at each other. Somebody was in trouble. Before I knew anything at all, I knew: This was serious stuff.

A little later, I remember gas lines. Long ones. Cars waiting for hours on an even or odd day while enterprising teenagers sold lemonade. It felt ordinary at the time, probably because I hadn’t the slightest idea what “ordinary” meant. Only later did it reveal itself as an early lesson in scarcity and frustration.

The past did not hum along effortlessly. Sometimes — often — it stalled.

Freedom wasn’t safety

I remember my parents watching election returns in 1976 on network television. I was bored to tears — literally — but I remember my father’s disappointment when Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter. And mind you, Ford was terrible.

This was not some cozy TV ritual. It was a loss of some kind, plainly felt. Big, important institutions did not project confidence. They produced arguments, resentment, and unease. It wasn’t long before people were talking seriously about an “era of limits.” All I knew was Dad and Mom were worried.

I remember a summer birthday party in the early 1980s at a classmate’s house. It was hot, but she had an awesome pool. I also remember my lungs ached. That day, Southern California was under a first-stage smog alert. The air itself was hazardous. The past did not smell like nostalgia. It smelled like exhaust with lead and cigarette smoke.

I don’t miss that. Not even a little bit.

Yes, I remember riding bikes through neighborhoods with friends. I remember disappearing for entire days. I remember my parents calling my name when the streetlights came on. I remember spending long stretches at neighbors’ houses without supervision. I remember watching old movies on Saturdays with my pal Jimmy. I remember Tom Hatten. I remember listening to KISS and Genesis and Black Sabbath. That freedom existed. It mattered. It was fun. But it lived alongside fear, not in its absence.

Innocence collides with reality

I don’t remember the Adam Walsh murder specifically, but I very much remember the network television movie it inspired in 1983. That moment changed American childhood in ways people still underestimate. It sure scared the hell out of me. Innocence didn’t drift into supervision — it collided with horror. Helicopter parenting did not emerge from neurosis. It emerged from bona fide terror.

And before all of that, my first encounter with death arrived without explanation. A cousin of mine died in 1977. She was 16 years old, riding on the back of a motorcycle with a man 11 years her senior. She wasn’t wearing a helmet. The funeral was closed casket. I was too young to know all the details. Almost 50 years on, I don’t want to know. The age difference alone suggests things the adults in my life chose not to discuss.

Silence was how they handled it. Silence was not ignorance — it was restraint.

seamartini via iStock/Getty Images

Memory is not withdrawal

This is what the warm and fuzzy AI nostalgia videos cannot possibly show. They have no room for recklessness that ends in funerals, or for freedom that edges into life-threatening danger, or for adults who withhold truth because telling it would damage rather than protect.

What we often recall as freedom often presented itself as recklessness ... or worse.

None of this negates the goodness of those years. I’m grateful for when I came of age. I don’t resent my childhood at all. It formed me. It taught me how fragile stability is and how much of adulthood consists of absorbing uncertainty without dissolving into it.

That’s precisely why I reject the invitation to go back.

The new AI nostalgia doesn’t ask us to remember. In reality, it wants us to withdraw. It offers a sweet lullaby for the nervous system. It replaces the true cost of living with the comfort of atmosphere and a cool soundtrack. It edits out the smog, the scarcity, the fear, the crime, and the death, leaving only a vibe shaped like memory.

Here’s a gentler hallucination, it says. Stay awhile.

The cost of living, then and now

The problem, then, isn’t sentiment. The problem is abdication.

So the temptation today isn’t to recover what was seemingly lost but rather to anesthetize an uncertain present. Those Instagram Reels don’t draw their power from people who remember that era clearly but from people who feel exhausted, surveilled, indebted, and hemmed in right now — and are looking for proof that life once felt more human.

RELATED: Late California

LPETTET via iStock/Getty Images

And who could blame them? Maybe it was more human. But not in the way people today would like to believe. Human experience has never been especially sweet or gentle.

Human nostalgia, as opposed to the AI-generated kind, eventually runs aground on grief, embarrassment, and the recognition that the past demanded something from us and took something in return. Synthetic nostalgia can never reach that reckoning. It loops endlessly, frictionless and consequence-free.

I don’t want a past without a bill attached. I already paid the thing. Sometimes I think I’m paying it still.

A warning

AI nostalgia videos promise relief without effort, feeling without action, memory without judgment.

That may be comforting, but it isn’t healthy, and it isn’t right.

Truth is, adulthood rightly understood does not consist of finding the softest place to lie down. It means carrying forward what we’ve lived through, even when it complicates our fantasies.

Certain experiences were great the first time, Lord knows, but I don’t want to relive the 1970s or ’80s. I want to live now, alert to danger, capable of gratitude without illusion, willing to bear the weight of memory rather than dissolve into it.

Nostalgia has its place. But don’t be seduced by sedation.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally on Substack.

We built abundance and lost the thing that matters

We have built a world overflowing with noise, convenience, and endless choice, yet something essential has slipped out of reach. You can sense it in the restless mood of the country, the anxiety among young people who cannot explain why they feel empty, in the angry confusion that dominates our politics.

We have more wealth than any nation in history, but the heart of the culture feels strangely malnourished. Before we can debate debt, or elections, we must confront the reality that we created a world of things, but not a world of purpose.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

What we are living through is not just economic or political dysfunction. It is the vacuum that appears when a civilization mistakes abundance for meaning.

Modern life is stuffed with everything except what the human soul actually needs. We built systems to make life faster, easier, more efficient — and then wondered why those systems cannot teach our children who they are, why they matter, or what is worth living for.

We tell the next generation to chase success, influence, and wealth, turning childhood into branding. We ask kids what they want to do, not who they want to be. We build a world wired for dopamine rather than dignity, and then we wonder why so many people feel unmoored.

When everything is curated, optimized, and delivered at the push of a button, the question “what is my life for?” gets lost in the static.

The crisis beneath the headlines

It is not just the young who feel this crisis. Every part of our society is straining under the weight of meaninglessness.

Look at the debt cycle — the mathematical fate no civilization has ever escaped once it crosses a threshold that we seem to have already blown by. While ordinary families feel the pressure, our leaders respond with distraction, with denial, or by rewriting the very history that could have warned us.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

We have entered a cultural moment where the noise is so loud that it drowns out the simplest truths. We are living in a country that no longer knows how to hear itself think.

So people go searching. Some drift toward the false promise of socialism, some toward the empty thrill of rebellion. Some simply check out. When a culture forgets what gives life meaning, it becomes vulnerable to every ideology that offers a quick answer.

The quiet return of meaning

And yet, quietly, something else is happening. Beneath the frustration and cynicism, many Americans are recognizing that meaning does not come from what we own, but from what we honor. It does not rise from success, but from virtue. It does not emerge from noise, but from the small, sacred things that modern life has pushed to the margins — the home, the table, the duty you fulfill, the person you help when no one is watching.

The danger is assuming that this rediscovery happens on its own. It does not.

Reorientation requires intention. It requires rebuilding the habits and virtues that once held us together. It requires telling the truth about our history instead of rewriting it to fit today’s narratives. And it requires acknowledging what has been erased: that meaning is inseparable from God’s presence in a nation’s life.

Denis Novikov via iStock/Getty Images

Where renewal begins

We have built a world without stillness, and then we wondered why no one can hear the questions that matter. Those questions remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not disappear just because we drown them in entertainment or noise. They wait for us, and the longer we ignore them, the more disoriented we become.

Meaning is still available. It is found in rebuilding the smallest, most human spaces — the places that cannot be digitized, globalized, or automated. The home. The family. The community.

These are the daily virtues that do not trend on social media but that hold a civilization upright. If we want to repair this country, we begin there, exactly where every durable civilization has always begun: one virtue at a time, one tradition at a time, one generation at a time.

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Virtue, not power, is the true aim of politics

The great outbreak of evil in these past days stirred a memory of something I used to tell my freshman students on the first day of their introduction to politics class: Politics is about what is good.

We would read together the first sentence of Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”— an unrivaled introduction to politics:

Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and choice, seems to aim at some good, and hence it has been beautifully said that the good is that at which all things aim.

Aristotle goes on quickly to observe in his usual empirical way that many goods exist along with many arts developed to achieve the different goods. The medical art aims at the good of health. The art of shipbuilding aims at building good ships. The military art aims at victory in war. The art of managing the household, which the Greeks called economics, aims at the good of wealth.

Virtue is the end or aim of political life.

Some arts are subordinated to other arts, because the good at which the art aims is subordinate to a larger good, the way the art of the cavalryman is subordinate to the art of the general.

Aristotle then introduces the subject of politics with a great hypothesis: If there exists some good, some end, that we seek for its own sake, and we seek all the rest for the sake of or on account of this one good — if, in other words, we don’t choose everything for the sake of something else, which would make all of our desires empty and pointless — this would be the good itself, in fact the highest good.

He asks: Would not an awareness of this highest good have great weight in a man’s life? Wouldn’t the art of attaining that good be the sovereign or master art encompassing all the ends or goods of the other arts? And isn’t this what we call the art of politics?

The good that the art of politics aims at, he says, is “the human good.” What name do people give to the human good that encompasses all others and lacks nothing? The Greek word, Aristotle says, is eudaimonia, which we usually translate as “happiness” in English. The art of politics is the art of happiness. But it gets even better.

The art of politics is a practical art. It aims not just at knowing what happiness is but at being happy. Thinking happiness through, Aristotle finds that it does not have primarily to do with the body. It is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue — in fact, in accordance with complete virtue. You can’t be a happy man without being a good or virtuous man. And in this sense, virtue is the end or aim of political life.

Aristotle goes on to distinguish between virtues of character and virtues of intellect, or what we usually call moral and intellectual virtues. He argues that the specific virtue or excellence of the statesman — the political man par excellence — is the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom, what he would call “phronesis.” Phronesis is the only intellectual virtue that is inseparable from moral virtue. According to Aristotle, a man cannot possess phronesis without possessing all the moral virtues actively and in their fullness. He is a man in full.

I would tell students that to make progress in their study of politics — this practical art — they would have to make progress in virtue; they would have to make progress toward the human good; they would have to make progress toward happiness. This is what our semester would be about.

Happiness and politics go together?

If I were lucky, at least one hesitatingly confident realist among the students — they were still too young to be cynics — would be brave enough on this first day of class to raise a hand and say deferentially and politely something like: “What! Have you read a newspaper lately?” (They had newspapers back then.) “Every page is filled with violence, crime, corruption, and somebody grasping for power! To call someone a politician is an insult.”

And so the semester would be off and running.

I would admit that though Aristotle in his “Politics” defines man as a “political animal” because man is a “rational animal” — an animal possessing logos, or reason — he makes an empirical observation at the end of his “Ethics” that will be familiar to anyone who has read a newspaper: Rational creatures though they are, men sometimes do not listen to reason and are carried away by their passions.

Aristotle would agree with Alexander Hamilton, or rather Hamilton agreed with Aristotle, when he wrote in Federalist 15:

"Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.” And with James Madison’s even more famous saying, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

In addition, working on our non-angelic human fallibility and culpability, bad education causes us to make mistakes about what is good. For these reasons, Aristotle argues that both education and coercion are central to the art of politics and, alas, that practicing the art of politics is not a leisurely activity. It is the burdensome art of inducing others to do what they ought to do for their own good and happiness, even when they don’t want to.

These days, our children learn in school and online that it is good to shoplift or try to change themselves from a boy to a girl or from a girl to a boy. A shockingly large percentage of them have learned that it is good to kill those who disagree with you.

From his first day in office in 2021, Joe Biden — our then-educator in chief — made it the central point of American politics that being trans was being good and questioning the goodness of being trans was evil. He thrust this bad education into the face of his country — marching trans heroes before the cameras to model the “goodness” that all Americans should admire and publicly praise if they wanted to avoid ostracism, public shaming and canceling, expulsion from school, losing their jobs, being put in jail, or being murdered in cold blood.

Politics requires goodness

Knowing what is good is not easy. A man in ancient Athens with the greatest reputation for wisdom knew only that he did not know what was good. To have what was good, to be good, was so crucial to Socrates — the one thing needful — that it made no sense to do anything else with his life than to try to find out what it was.

Photo by Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images

But we do not need to be philosophers to know that boys cannot become girls, that biological males should not be competing against biological females in sports or sharing their bathrooms, and that killing those who disagree with us is evil. Glenn Ellmers, Salvatori Research Fellow at the Claremont Institute and an old friend, published a short essay on the urgent need, in this increasingly deranged world, to hold on to our common sense.

Machiavelli — the infamous teacher of “realist” politics — seeing unflinchingly what we all could read in the newspaper, taught that in a world where so many are so bad, it is merely common sense that it is necessary for those who would succeed in the art of politics to enter into evil. I would suggest an alternative lesson to students, one that I think is in the spirit of Aristotle: In a world where so many are so bad, it is merely common sense that it is necessary for the good to be great.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

You were built for meaning, not cheap pleasure

For most of human history, scarcity was the enemy. Territory, calories, energy, and land all had to be fought for, hoarded, and rationed. Wars were waged and innovations forged to survive deprivation. But the material hardship that once united societies in common struggle has largely faded in the affluent world.

Now we face a different enemy: artificial abundance.

The future belongs to those who reject the simulacrum and embrace reality.

In the wealthiest nations, human beings are no longer selected for resilience in the face of scarcity. They’re selected for their ability to resist the seductions of abundance — synthetic food, fake relationships, dopamine on demand. The danger isn’t hunger or want, but the numbing comfort of simulated satisfaction.

Loaded with empty calories

Once, entire civilizations rose or fell depending on their ability to produce and preserve food. Famines routinely devastated societies, and most people spent their lives just trying to eat.

Now, calories come cheap and easy. Factory farming, food science, and global logistics mean even the poorest Americans can gorge on processed junk. A trip to McDonald’s or a few bucks at Walmart buys a week’s worth of empty calories.

But artificial flavorings and chemical fillers are no substitute for real food. They simulate nourishment, but slowly poison the body. Calories are now so available that obesity, not hunger, is the largest threat to the well-being of the poor. The need has been met — and subverted.

Sex and glory, sold cheap

The same dynamic has corrupted sexual desire. Historically, sex drove men to build civilizations, conquer enemies, win wealth, and rise in status. Today, that drive is short-circuited. Men can now simulate conquest and fulfillment without risk, pain, or purpose — through pornography and video games.

Why fight for honor or love when you can get the illusion of both from a screen? Instead of greatness, many young men settle for a life of digital masturbation — and that’s how the system likes it. Young men remain trapped in a kind of eternal adolescence: satisfied just enough to avoid rebellion, addicted just enough to stay quiet.

Fake attention, real loneliness

Social media and dating apps have similarly distorted the lives of young women. Women crave connection, validation, and community — roles they once fulfilled in family, faith, and friendship.

Now they chase attention online, deluding themselves into believing that likes and comments are the same as love and loyalty. Social media simulates female community and male desire, but gives neither. Depression rises. Real-life relationships crumble. Women fear male attention in person but crave it online, where they feel in control.

Blaze Media Illustration

What results is a dysfunctional, hypergamous dating market. Men won’t approach. Women hold out for the fantasy of the “perfect man” who never arrives. Both sexes lose.

Lockdowns revealed the lie

COVID-19 lockdowns showed us the true danger of attempting to simulate every aspect of human experience.

During the lockdowns, social interactions from school, church, work, and even bonding with friends over a meal became impossible. School, church, work, friendship — all of it was forcibly digitized.

The results were catastrophic: soaring depression, stalled childhood development, and broken education.

But the worst part? People stayed in their digital cages even after the doors opened. Simulated connection became easier than real interaction. And easier won.

The real thing is harder — and worth it

Reality demands effort. Family, community, faith, and responsibility are hard. They hurt. They risk rejection. But they matter.

Left alone with simulated choices, most people will pick the path of least resistance. That’s why society must rethink what it rewards. Because the simulations aren’t harmless distractions — they’re traps.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called this phenomenon the “simulacrum” — a copy with no original. A cheeseburger that isn’t food. AI “friends” that aren’t human and virtual “communities” that cannot possibly relieve loneliness. A porn star who looks and behaves nothing like a real woman. Online attention that ruins offline romance. Video game violence that replaces true heroism.

An evolutionary filter

We face an evolutionary bottleneck as serious as any in human history. But instead of favoring the strong, smart, or adaptable, survival now depends on who can say no.

Can you say no to simulated sex? Simulated success? Simulated community? Can you hunger for meaning, not just comfort?

Those who make it through this filter will be the ones who choose austerity over ease — who hunger for the real thing. The future belongs to those who reject the simulacrum and embrace reality.

Artificial intelligence will only make these temptations worse. But those who refuse to be pacified will also be the ones who endure.

Choose meaning. Teach your children to do the same. The future depends on it.

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