Editor @CDMag. AI startups, geopolitics, conscience. Ex-UN. Devoted to liberty, pluralism and the disciplined art of disagreement. Formed by Tocqueville, Berlin, Weil, Kołakowski. Baroque counterpoint as civic metaphor.
Breaking with Marx
Ricœur called Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud the "masters of suspicion" and meant it as praise: they made it impossible to take consciousness at face value. When that method hardens into the only way of seeing, the question is no longer what suspicion reveals but whether anything can be affirmed at all.
Cogitations
From Tacitus’s obsequium to Miłosz’s Persian-borrowed ketman and Havel’s greengrocer, political orders endure more by disciplined inattention, less by force. Preference falsification explains how societies sustain consensus no one truly believes.
Freedom
In a world that worships the Hedgehog’s certainty, Berlin’s Fox endures—wary, wounded, and free. His agony is the price of plurality: to see the many truths the Hedgehog denies, and to live among them without surrendering to one.
Polarization & Repair
Amid rising loneliness and moral fragmentation, Tocqueville’s “solitude of the hearts” and Weil’s “uprootedness” expose the deeper crisis beneath polarization: a humanity searching for belonging where its roots have thinned — yet still capable of replanting them in shared meaning and care.
Technology
Alexander Karp’s The Technological Republic calls for a renewal of conviction equal to our power. In an age rich in intelligence but poor in purpose, he argues that freedom, beauty, and belief must once again guide what we build—and why.
Freedom
From Tocqueville in 1835 to Bellah in 1985, the question endures: can liberty survive when the habits of heart and mind that once joined freedom to virtue—through family, faith, and civic life—begin to dissolve into an “unencumbered self”?
Conscience
In closing The Open Society, Popper stripped history of its idols. No destiny guides it, no law redeems it—only the choices of free men and women. He asked us to believe in a harsher hope: that meaning begins where necessity ends.
Music
From a small Polish village to the world’s grandest stage, Chopin’s music continues to summon a fellowship of devotion. The XIX Competition and its winner, Eric Lu, remind us that beauty, like the human heart, is inexhaustible.
Polarization & Repair
In an age when conviction performs louder than truth, The Art of Un-saying asks how we might recover conscience amid the noise. Drawing on Haidt and Solzhenitsyn, it offers six psychological practices to deprogram tribal rage and rediscover moral freedom.
Freedom
Patriotism need not be grievance or bloodline. At its best, it is love and affection for liberty, equality, and justice—an inheritance wide enough to hold a fractured people, and demanding enough to call us beyond tribe toward a shared republic of ideals.
Polarization & Repair
Tolerance may keep conflict at bay, but by itself it leaves us strangers. Free societies endure only when they move beyond the tranquility of indifference to the practice of encounter—where wary coexistence gives way to fraternity, solidarity, and a shared civic life.
Freedom
Forgiveness is no easy grace—it is the hardest freedom, wrested from pain itself. It asks the unimaginable: that hurt might yield to mercy. Yet time and again, from the crucifixion to South Africa’s rebirth, it has made the impossible possible.