Concordia Discors Magazine (Page 6)

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Foreign Affairs

◳ The UN’s Crisis of Knowing: Karl Popper, Epistemology and Authority

◳ The UN’s future will not be decided by new mandates or bigger budgets, but by whether it can still be trusted to know the world better than anyone else. As the United Nations turns 80, the familiar critiques resurface. The Security Council is paralyzed by vetoes; peacekeeping is costly

The Boy Who Cried Dictator: How Political Hyperbole Undermines Democracy

When every rival is branded a tyrant, language corrodes, facts blur, and democracy weakens. Hyperbole thrills the faithful but dulls vigilance. Proportion, not catastrophe-speak, is the true defense of freedom.

Music

◳ The Soul of Poland in Music

Chopin called it żal—a sorrow that smiles through tears. From mazurkas to Paderewski’s anthems, Polish music became a form of sovereignty: beauty transfigured by suffering, melody as the nation’s survival.

Faith and Reason

The Canary in the Coal Mine: Tocqueville and the Forgotten Freedom of Faith

“Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic which they set forth in glowing colors than in the monarchy which they attack; and it is more needed in democratic republics than in any others” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1831). The

Conscience

Alasdair MacIntyre and the Quest for Moral Coherence

MacIntyre argued we live amid the fragments of a broken moral tradition. His remedy is stark: rebuild communities of practice where virtues can endure, even as larger culture drifts into incoherence.

Foreign Affairs

The Importance of Being Expert: The UN, Legitimacy, and the Battle for Knowledge

At 80, the UN faces not just a budget crisis but an epistemic one. Its only path to legitimacy lies in knowledge—rigorous, transparent, indispensable. Either it becomes an analytical superpower or drifts into irrelevance.

Poetry

Norwid's Humble Freedom

How a forgotten Polish exile became John Paul II’s moral compass—and why his austere vision of liberty matters for democracy today

Freedom

Reading Hannah Arendt and the "Digital" Human Condition

Hannah Arendt’s warning from 1958—humanity may conquer the stars yet lose the world beneath its feet—resounds in an era of automation, algorithms, and fragile political action. In 1958, Hannah Arendt published The Human Condition, a meditation written in the long shadow of totalitarianism and at the dawn

Freedom

The Summer Without a Song

What a “brain-rot summer” tells us about shared meaning, pluralism and democracy. In August 2025, Business Insider christened the season “brain-rot summer”: no runaway blockbuster, no dominant fashion note, and—tellingly—no “song of the summer.” Culture felt squishy, individualized, algorithmically sliced. The verdict named a discomfort many felt but

Conscience

The Poet Pope: Karol Wojtyła

How a young Pole—orphan, laborer, actor, priest—armed his conscience with verse and learned to defend human freedom from Nazism, Communism, and our age of noise. In brutal times it is easy to think culture is a luxury. Karol Wojtyła (1920–2005) knew better. Before he became John Paul

Breaking with Marx

Leszek Kołakowski: From Marxist Theorist to Critic of Utopia

From Party prodigy to dissident sage, Kołakowski’s journey shows how the courage to doubt can be freedom’s deepest defense. Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009) lived a life that could be read as the intellectual autobiography of the twentieth century itself: born in the ruins of war, drawn into Marxist

Breaking with Marx

The Transformation of Alasdair MacIntyre: From Marxist Scholar to Catholic Virtue Ethicist

How one of the 20th century’s most radical philosophers abandoned Marxist utopianism for Aristotelian tradition and Thomistic faith. "I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?"

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