Photo by Greg Jewett
As America increasingly turns its attention to politics with the midterms looming, there exist inherent dangers to guard ourselves against, the most prominent among them the ideologue who offers simple answers to complex problems, caters to popular sentiment, promises much, ignoring the consequences.
The foremost tragedies of twentieth-century history were wrought by the rise of autocrats—Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—advocates of total government who were intolerant of dissension and bound by the collective dictum that the end justifies the means.
As the late Sir Isaiah Berlin cautioned, “All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.”
Voters today must be discriminating, wary of the “brave new worlders” who would trade the painful, magnificent burden of personal choice for the comfortable chains of an enforced, singular truth.
—RJ
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Brimmings: up from the well 