The Cult of Fragility: Why Stoicism Beats Modern Victimhood
For The Coddling Movie, Edward Campbell makes the case for Stoicism as an antidote to the fragility and self-defeating pessimism of a victimhood mindset.
The ancient world understood what our pampered age forgets: you cannot build happiness on fragility, nor justice on perpetual grievance. The more we define goodness through pain, the more pain we manufacture. The Stoics sought tranquility through truth; modern fragility seeks safety through control. But control of others is a bottomless pursuit—and truth cannot be negotiated by feelings.
The choice before us is not political but psychological: freedom through mastery of the self, or frustration in the futile struggle to control everyone else.
The Problem of Right-Wing Art
For State of the Arts, FAIR in the Arts Fellow Clifton Duncan argues that the political right’s difficulty producing influential art is largely self-inflicted, not simply the result of progressive dominance in cultural institutions.
Liberals and progressives have zombified the arts. Given their relentless discrimination against non-leftist creatives, they and they alone control America’s cultural institutions, therefore they and they alone must own the stagnation and unpopularity of said institutions. Meaningful change would require their developing a tolerance toward divergent visions, the capacity to see proponents of those visions as human beings, and the humility to consider that perhaps they have some things wrong.
These things will never happen. But there is also no reason to expect a renaissance of “right wing” art, as some might hope.
FAIR in the Arts Fellow Clifton Duncan also recently appeared on The Andrew Klavan Show, to discuss his cancellation from Broadway, the problem of right-wing art, and his new one-man show Becoming Thomas Sowell.
Is Free Speech Maximalism Just for Young Men?
For Brownstone Institute, Gabrielle Bauer explains the concept of free speech maximalism and challenges the notion that it is only embraced by “angry young men.” As a 69-year-old woman and organizer with the Free Speech Union of Canada, she defies that stereotype, but laments that more women do not share her view.
And here’s the thing: when you embrace viewpoint diversity as an ideal, you tend to get less offended about things. You may profoundly disagree with a statement, but it won’t cause you to puff up in outrage…It’s a liberating habit of mind.
And if you do get offended? Big whoop. You’ll survive. During a recent bus trip from Whistler to Vancouver, my seatmate, a doctor, took it upon himself to share his candid opinions about women with me…I survived. I wasn’t traumatized.
Truth be told, I quite enjoyed our conversation. He listened as much as he spoke. I even found a few grains of value in his arguments, and perhaps a couple of my retorts gave him pause. And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Humans of all stripes challenging and learning from each other.
We Don’t Need Everyone To Agree. We Need Everyone To Change How They Disagree.
For We The Black Sheep, Salomé Sibonex suggests that the real problem isn’t disagreement itself but how we react to it. Instead of falling into the evolutionary trap of outrage and tribalism, she calls for approaching opposing views with curiosity and epistemic humility.
We can disagree beautifully about ice cream flavors because our identity isn’t tied up in “chocolate ice cream lover” the way it is in labels like “Christian,” “lesbian,” “Zionist,” or “vegan.” When our self-image is challenged, we might as well be in the Colosseum facing a starving lion. But by depending on our opinions and identity labels to define ourselves, we fail to update our ancient brain’s assumption that disagreement = tribal exclusion = death. The resulting ideological rigidity robs us of the freedom we have today, enslaving us to act out a primitive past where logic, curiosity, and honest disagreement offered more risk than reward.
Why Traditional Psychotherapy Is Failing Today’s Gender-Confused Teens
For Reality’s Last Stand, Dr. Joseph Burgoo critiques the direction of modern psychotherapy, arguing that rigid ideological frameworks are limiting open inquiry and reshaping therapy into a process of affirmation rather than exploration.
Even solo practitioners today find it challenging to practice as we might once have done because the world around us disputes our authority as experts, undermines family structures that have traditionally supported our work, and replaces long-held understandings of human nature with newly minted and unevidenced theories presented as unassailable truth.
Twitter, Tourette’s, and Tribalism
For Proof in Progress, Kirra Watkins weighs in on the recent “BBC BAFTA scandal,” in which John Davidson — Scottish BAFTA nominee and Tourette Syndrome advocate — ticced a racial slur at Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo, who were presenting him the award. She shares her perspective as a black woman with Tourette Syndrome.
My lived experience does give me perspective. However, there’s been a bad habit in the last few years of using purely the identities of various individuals to elevate specific convenient talking points but look “morally pure” while doing so. The actual validity of the takes is then relegated to the back burner. This has created a ladder of identities to climb until one nears a platonic ideal of “wokeness” and is handed a microphone.
Report Card From Hell
For Abstract Truth, the anonymous author writes about how and why the education system in America is failing, and what can be done to save it.
Our educational programs have focused on theory over subject matter expertise and smooshy ideas of social justice, rather than to actually study the philosophers and great thinkers — or even heroic people who tried to achieve it. Today’s teachers seem to have lost sight of the fact that things like brilliance in math, science, reading and writing itself is a form of liberation. Math, far from being racist was the kind of thing that the abolitionists taught to runaway slaves by candlelight.
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