Why I Started This Blog
The following is a letter to the reader laying out what led me to my beliefs, what drove me to begin this blog in the first place, and what I hope to achieve with this platform.
This post was last updated on 8/17/24.
A few years ago while I was in college, I had the misfortune of going through multiple traumatic experiences in the span of a few months that triggered a spiral of depression and anxiety lasting over a year and a half with no clear end in sight. I slept sporadically, napped all too often, and constantly felt drained. I had recurring nightmares and frequently woke up with my heart racing. I feared even leaving my room, opting instead to spend most of my days wasting away on my bed with my eyes glued to my phone. I socially isolated myself, fell behind on coursework, and ate poorly. I had disruptive recurring memories of the aforementioned traumatic experiences. And I had thoughts of “ending it all”—thoughts that, while not particularly desirable, repeatedly surfaced in my mind unhindered by any overriding zest for life.1
Underneath all of that, a chip-on-my-shoulder resentment bubbled within me—resentment towards the people that had wronged me—resentment towards people that I felt were mocking me, even though they were joking in good fun and I was taking myself too seriously to see it—resentment towards many of the people I had thought were my friends for not checking in on me, even though I had similarly failed to reach out to them. I discovered that I had quite the spiteful and vengeful demon within me, and that left to fester, I could drive myself to commit acts of great evil. I truly began to understand what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn meant when he proclaimed that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”2
The wisdom I gained during that dark chapter of my life that is most relevant to the topics I’d like to cover in my blog is this: humans are fallible and corruptible (and clearly I am no exception). That’s not to say that everybody is deeply corrupt and evil—far from it. The point is that humans on average miss the perfect mark. We are limited beings—doomed to die—lacking infinite courage, energy, wisdom, knowledge, and compassion—forever wrestling with forces within that steer us towards vanity, temptation, and wrath. And due to these fundamental human imperfections, I believe it would be wise if we kept people’s coercive powers in check, and gave everyday people the agency and responsibility to chart their own courses in life.
I’m glad that I decided that dragging everybody else down into hell with me was not a path worth going down. I strove to bear the burden of my responsibilities forthrightly (even if incompletely) despite my suffering. I gradually worked on my character, slowly and incrementally constructing a more sophisticated world-view than the one I previously had, which helped me organize a lot of the chaos and confusion I had found myself mired in. And most importantly, within this Pandora’s Box of negative emotions, I discovered some courage within myself that I didn’t know I had—specifically the courage to stand up for myself and tell the truth, tactfully but plainly. It was this act of courage—telling the truth when it needed to be told—that ultimately freed me from my torment.
And it is that same courage that I hope to harness in embarking on this blog.
As a pastime in more recent years, I started learning bits and pieces about economics and policy. I was startled by how little I—and the average American voter—seemed to understand basic economics, despite the impact that policies affecting the economy had on everyday citizens. Hoping to patch some of the gaps in my knowledge, I picked up some books—primarily works by Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman—and leafed through them in my spare time.3
From my readings, I gained the impression that a free market oriented economy with limited government is the best system humanity has come up with for improving the quality of life of as many people as rapidly as possible, and that many of the supposed deficiencies in modern “hyper-capitalist” societies are attributable to a great deal of friction—friction which enables corruption and discourages ambitious risk-taking and innovation—originating from the vast corpus of ostensibly well-meaning regulations doled out and enforced by an even more expansive class of unelected bureaucrats.
On a more fundamental level, this vision I hold is an extension of my aforementioned belief that people are better off determining the course of their own lives, warts and all, short of unreasonably harming others. That said, I also believe that governments are necessary for preventing “unreasonable harm” from coming to others—by dispensing justice and protecting us from foreign invaders. Though it is difficult to determine exactly where the reach of government should end and where people’s freedoms should begin, I believe that the rules and regulations in modern day America, supposedly put in place for our protection and benefit, have in fact gone too far in encroaching upon our right to self-govern, producing counterproductive outcomes, incurring greater costs than benefits, and overall diminishing our quality of life. This overreach is seemingly the culmination of a nearly century long trend of politicians and bureaucrats consolidating power into the halls of Washington—into the hands of supposed moral and intellectual paragons that strive to misconstrue, reinterpret away, and otherwise circumvent the protective checks and balances put in place by our Founding Fathers so that they may impose their own vision for the world upon the rest of us.
I hope to explore these topics—and more—in my blog.
I’d procrastinated on starting a blog for voicing my thoughts for some time now. I’d tinkered with many details: what my brand would be, the tone I would carry myself with, the degree to which I revealed my identity (for now, I wish to remain anonymous for the most part), and the more concrete aims of such a blog. I’d fixated on minutiae, likely because I wanted to delay what may very well be the undertaking of a lifetime, that would demand of me courage, tact, grace, patience, effort, and sacrifice—essentially, more than I thought I could muster at the time from a better version of myself that did not yet exist. In this manner I have erred—I wasn’t supposed to wait for this version of myself to magically manifest—rather, I was supposed to take a few leaps of faith, fall flat on my face a bunch of times, and grow into a better thinker and communicator through repeated trial and error. And that’s what I endeavor to do now.
What is it then that spurred me to begin writing? First, it seems to me that so much political and ideological dialogue nowadays is vitriolic. Many Americans, myself included, hesitate to voice their opinions for fear of being labeled some damning and untrue pejorative.4 With this blog, I hope to extend an olive branch into the figurative no man’s land and show that by having civil discourse, first, we may come to find that we believe more in common than we previously expected to, and second, we may temper bitterness, come to understand (even if we don’t agree with) the viewpoints of those who might otherwise have been our ideological enemies, and find common ground. Perhaps these goals are all too ambitious and naïve, and I understand that some people will remain unreceptive to an approach like this, but in a landscape already filled with abrasive influencers, I see no need to act in a similar fashion.
Second, as I’ve mentioned before, I believe that there are a lot of problems afflicting America today that are a result of the cumulative weight of nearly a century of seemingly compassionate but counterproductive rule and policy-making taking its toll. I want to try my hand at proposing what I believe to be the best tradeoffs in response to these problems. Much of what I have to say isn’t new or revolutionary—we can mimic past generations that have lived out patterns of behaviors which are time-tested and have been shown to lead to greater prosperity. I believe that such dependable frameworks have been supplanted by harmful policies sold as panaceas that have increased feelings of apathy, hopelessness, antagonism, and polarization across our population.
As for my third reason: though I find it hard to believe that my blog will have any major effect on the outcome of history, moral exemplars far more great and wise than myself have individually come to the conclusion that it is the individual, no matter how seemingly insignificant, that bears the responsibility for mending the fabric of society.5 And that fabric does seem frayed to me indeed; a large fraction of the population—afraid to voice their opinions to anyone outside the dinner table for fear of being demonized and ridiculed—have, over the last few decades, relinquished power to a disinterested class of political and bureaucratic elites, allowed the most inflammatory voices to take over public discourse largely unimpeded, lost appreciation for the founding principles of this country that set us apart from any other nation in history, and become pessimistic about obtaining that American dream that was widely accessible to citizens only a few generations ago.
Speaking of demonization, some people harbored so much undue hatred that they lauded the attempted assassination of Donald Trump—with little consideration for whether he deserved to die or what the utterly cataclysmic consequences for this nation would’ve been should the killer have succeeded—and mocked the untimely death of Corey Comperatore, who heroically shielded his family from harm during that same assassination attempt.6 Yes, it was indeed this moment that shook me awake — a stark reminder that, in spite of its founding principles, there was no law of nature preventing America from descending into a figurative hell on earth, either steeped in an intractable civil war, trampled under the heels of (as C.S. Lewis would put it) omnipotent moral busybodies, or coming under fire from foreign powers keen on taking advantage of our tattered state.7 In the face of those dire possibilities, I intend to muster up some courage and help bear a little bit of that aforementioned responsibility—to vouch and speak up for what I believe to be true and good, in hopes of contributing to a more prosperous and harmonious future for America.
I wish to clarify that I am an expert of nothing. I hold no degrees in any of the topics I’ll be covering in this blog. I am not at the top of any field or venture. The gaps in my knowledge are vast. I am not well trained in rigorous academic writing or research methodologies. When it comes to the topics I’ll be discussing, I believe at the moment I really am just a layman. And of course, as you may have noticed, I have my biases and leanings—namely, I believe that the more free a people are, the more prosperous their society ends up being, and as such, I’m a fan of a government that is limited and restricted in its reach and power.
Think of this blog then as just that: a blog—the (hopefully measured) thoughts of a concerned citizen trying to voice what he believes in and to get at something approximating the true and good. I encourage you to not simply take what I say at face value. I do not ask that you agree with everything, or even anything, that I say. Chances are, I’m going to say some things down the line that you strongly disagree with. All told, I am grateful that you have given me as much time as you have so far to hearing me out, and I hope that from here on out, I can provide you, the reader, with some civil dialogue that winds up being stimulating and productive.
Well wishes,
Stumbling Stupidly
A few notes:
I’m grateful for any pity you may feel for me, but thankfully I have no need for that now. I’ll be frank and admit that even then, my life overall was comfortable despite what I was going through mentally. I had a roof over my head, food and water in my belly, internet to access, and a bed to sleep on—things I’m grateful to have today as well. And luckily, I believe I was only grazed by human imperfection, not subject to a constant barrage of spirit-crushing malice, which made getting back on my feet simpler, in spite of my naivete at the time. Plus, I’m doing far better now!
I was never actually formally diagnosed since I’d never sought out professional help—and in hindsight, I should have. I encourage anyone else battling mental illness to reach out to someone or to seek professional help; it is entirely unnecessary to wage the war within entirely without support. I had some of my closest friends to thank for helping me through my troubled times—to them I am eternally grateful.
I am intentionally being vague about what I went through. This is to help conceal my identity for now.
Solzhenitsyn quote: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Abridged Edition, (London: Vintage Classics, 2018), 75.
Full disclosure, Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell seemed to very much be in favor of free markets and individual liberty. For more on their viewpoints, see Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, First Harvest (Harcourt, 1990); Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (Basic Books, 1996).
Cf. “Poll: 62% of Americans Say They Have Political Views They’re Afraid to Share,” Cato Institute, July 22, 2020, https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/poll-62-americans-say-they-have-political-views-theyre-afraid-share.
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in his Nobel lecture said: “The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions .... one word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.” Solzhenitsyn Aleksandr, “Nobel Lecture in Literature 1970,” https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1970/solzhenitsyn/lecture.
After studying many of the atrocities that occurred in the 20th century, Jordan Peterson seems to also have come to the conclusion that the individual was responsible for preventing societal catastrophe. See Jocko Podcast, “Jocko Podcast 98 w/ Jordan Peterson. Breaking Your Wretched Loop. Dangerous but Disciplined,” November 1, 2017, 10:48 to 15:50, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23dArPpXgCM.
Amir Odom has put together clips of people saying that they wished that the assassin had succeeded in killing Donald Trump. See Amir Odom, “How the Trump Assassination Attempt Changes Everything,” July 15, 2024, 12:03 to 14:50, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI59QWL9CHQ; For more such clips, as well as a clip of the streamer Destiny dishonoring Corey Comperatore, see Amir Odom, “Reacting to Liberals Angry That Trump Survived,” July 25, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdTmo3I59NE.
The phrase “omnipotent moral busybodies” was coined by C.S. Lewis: C. S. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” Res Judicatae 6, no. 30 (1954): 228, https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ResJud/1954/30.pdf.