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William Hunter Duncan's avatar

I've been wondering lately about how dour the left has become, how miserable, how the past for them has become nothing but one long story of oppression, while their future requires the near total destruction of everything we have grown accustomed to, in favor of a renewable utopia where we are all trans, there are no borders or boundaries, yet there is no hierarchy because no one is oppressor or oppressed, that otherwise looks somehow like eternal progress, more or less exactly like the consumer lifestyle of the managerial class. Destroying everything on the way to utopia is easy, but that also assures the utopia never comes. The cognitive dissonance is deranging. I don't think we have reached anything like the bottom on liberal madness at this point.

Meanwhile I have never felt so optimistic. It is an incredibly creative time, for those who are open to it.

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L.P. Koch's avatar

A true revelation for me was Collingwood's insight that knowing the past is an imaginative act: we need to try our best to feel, know and experience the history we study from the perspectives of those people in the past. That is, combine knowledge about the past with adopting the belief systems of those who lived in other eras. For that, we need to grow ourselves and understand ourselves in the present. It's a feedback loop that leads to a liberating sense of deep understanding of the human condition, although of course we can never fully achieve perfection. To love the past, and people, in that way, may unlock a brighter future.

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