Cogitations
Mill warned that freedom dies not by tyrants but by crowds. In On Liberty (1859), he saw consensus as the new despotism and solitude as freedom’s test: the courage to think without applause—no kings, no crowds, only the arduous liberty of the mind.
Cogitations
Moderation is the discipline that turns balance into strength—the art of holding firm between excess and apathy, reason and passion, liberty and order—so that freedom may survive its own fire.
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.
Conscience
Weil called uprootedness the soul’s deepest wound—the loss of connection to truth and community. In our distracted age, her remedy still stands: begin from obligations, not appetites; guard truth as sacred need; attend until seeing itself becomes an act of justice.
Cogitations
For all the laments, polarization offers clarity, identity, even pleasure. Until we confront its seductions, we risk a democracy not overthrown in crisis, but slowly hollowed—eroded by habits that reward division more than deliberation.