I was very hesitant from the beginning to interact with social media. It always felt like the doorway to societal collapse so having someone who was inside and can sound the alarms of what we are doing to ourselves is essential. Thank you for being willing to speak.
Thanks for being so loyal to us here. Selfishly, you are a guiding light for me as well as a continual educator. I am glad you stand out in the tech world. Lately, the evil ones get all the attention. Keep your courage.
“It’s the moral courage to defend the democratic republic even when doing so comes at personal cost.”
The above statement reminds me of all the government officials on varying levels that let Trump off the hook.
We go from a transnational criminal that essentially raided banks, took advantage of bankruptcy law, go from business to infiltrating government.
Where does the Musk-Trump relationship go now? Peter Thiel was accepted (adored?) by Trump. Haven’t heard much of what Doge is doing to government departments….
(BTW: I really like the photograph, lantern amid the deep, dark field!!)
Mike, your reflection on underlying patterns and how mythology works without supernatural belief really resonates—there’s so much power in that perspective. It connects with my own search for meaning and how we humans weave stories to orient ourselves in complex times.
I find myself wondering, though—when we take “consciousness emerges from inert matter” as given, what do we risk missing about how consciousness and meaning might be more relational, more foundational? I’d love to hear how you see that tension.
I'm a fan of your work. Re: "someone committed to the constitutional framework that allows free people to govern themselves through representative institutions while protecting minority rights... But on policy within that framework? I’m genuinely democratic."
This is phrased as if it's an easy distinction between policy within and outside that framework. It seems to me that anyone seeking to oppress a demonized minority can claim that they are operating within a liberal framework (e.g., the Swiss banning minarets and burqas). Anything that oppresses a minority can be labeled as "illiberal," even if the mechanism of that oppression is indirect or difficult to understand (e.g., racial injustice in banking).
Have you written previously about how you think about whether specific policies fall within a liberal framework?
Mike, how should we understand your sentence about your defense of the “Constitutional framework that makes democratic self governance possible?”
Do you mean you are specifically wedded to the balancing of powers as done in the US Constitution? Or would you be ok with something like a (unicameral) Parliament and Prime Minister and a Judiciary?
In other words, did you mean any Constitutional framework is fine as long as it leads to a republican form of government or did you mean “Don’t mess with the Three Branches” ?
I would say the key test isn't "Does it look like the U.S. Constitution?" but "Does it prevent the concentration of unchecked power while enabling genuine self-governance?"
Got it, thanks for your reply. I am not a fan of the way the US Constitution is structured. So many of today’s problems are deep in the bones of that document, imo.
I think we should hang it in a museum and write a new one that incorporates all we’ve learned about best practices in writing constitutions in the last 80 years.
Politically I can’t see how we would ever actually manage it, so this is more daydreaming from me than advocacy.
I love Mike Brock's writing. I sometimes criticize some things he says, or his flamboyant choice of words, but in reality, it is more my need to bring extremely valuable concepts down to my level of understanding and palatability.
This said, today's commentary by Mike is one of the most stirring I have read, anywhere. Yet, despite my thinking that I am highly educated and well-read with an advanced vocabulary, I find myself sometimes feeling detoured by what I consider to be Mike's higher-level meanderings. I suppose this is the flamboyancy I mentioned above.
I am going to do something unconventional. I hope it is not offensive, especially to Mike. I will take Mike's commentary today and reduce it to the core issues I understand. My apologies if this falls flat on its face.
We only discover what we believe when belief costs something. Watching the systematic replacement of human choice with algorithmic optimization, dressed up as inevitable progress, led me to conclude that intelligence and wisdom aren’t the same thing. We’ve not just been facing another political crisis, but instead confronted with urgent practical questions about truth, power, and human nature. My goal has been to share stories that help people remain human while engaging with systems designed to eradicate humanity. The distinction between enhancement and replacement had become dangerously blurred.
I may invoke “God” now and then, but in a Spinozian frame—not as a supernatural entity but as the principle of coherence itself, the underlying pattern that allows reality to hold together and consciousness to emerge from matter. Such a perspective doesn’t require supernatural beliefs, but it still provides the emotional resonance and moral orientation that pure rationality alone cannot supply.
I discovered that analytical detachment, however valuable, isn’t where we live. You can’t love an analysis. You can’t be loyal to a theory. At some point, philosophy has to become a lived commitment, or it becomes an academic exercise. We’re facing a crisis not just of institutions but of our moral fiber—the collective ability to recognize ethical action as such. When our behavior, our social interactions, become a principled stance or a partisan performance, democracy loses more than its structures; it loses its soul.
What is crucial for us to attain humanity is mandated in the consecration of truth: phenomenological, moral, and human. We need stories that make democratic virtue visible again. Without this focus on ethical behavior as foundational in any society, we lose even the ability to disagree meaningfully—we don’t recognize what we’re disagreeing about.
Work is required to re-enchant liberalism and patriotism, not as nostalgia but as recognition that these traditions contain essential insights about human dignity and self-governance. If such values are abandoned, our human unity, our humanity, is lost. Liberalism isn’t just a political position—it’s what allows political positions to be possible, and to thrive. It’s fundamentally about how we know things and organize knowledge in societies where all share access to truth, and where truth is not limited to the privileged few.
When I call myself a liberal, I mean someone committed to the constitutional framework that allows free people to govern themselves through representative institutions while protecting minority rights. I’ll fight anyone who threatens the constitutional framework that makes democratic self-governance possible.
Patriotism, properly understood, means commitment to constitutional principles, not loyalty to any person or party. It’s the moral courage to defend the democratic republic even when doing so comes at personal cost. True patriots defend institutions even when those institutions deliver outcomes they dislike. They recognize that constitutional processes matter more than momentary partisan advantage.
Paying attention to patterns rather than predicting specific outcomes. I sensed we were headed toward cultural and political disaster. Trump’s victory felt probable, but even if it hadn’t happened, the underlying dynamics were already in motion—the manipulation of attention, the systematic erosion of shared reality.
The forces threatening human agency weren’t going to stop with any particular election. They’re deeper, more sophisticated, more committed to replacing democratic messiness with technological efficiency. When I barely use TikTok but encounter its perfect algorithmic curation, I see the logical endpoint: reality redesigned to deliver precisely what we think we want, with no friction, no surprise, no space for the accidents that make existence rich.
What gives me hope is knowing that our destiny as humans is something we choose, not something that happens to us through technological inevitability. We can shape our tools rather than being shaped by them. We can insist on a creative and pluralistic society that maximizes human potential rather than surrendering to systems that solve human problems by eliminating the human dimension.
The human choice—to create meaning through relationship rather than receiving it from superior intelligence—keeps asserting itself against all attempts to engineer it away.
We as a people do not benefit from rigid ideology, but through ongoing commitment to the conditions that make choice possible. Can we build frameworks that serve truth rather than obscuring it? Can we create stories that enhance rather than replace critical thinking? Are we going to develop ways of remaining human while engaging consciously with forces that would reshape us?
We’re here to become, to learn, and to evolve. We’re here to see the unity in all of life and how each aspect, being, or thing is interconnected in the oneness of this marvelous creation.
And the most radical act in an age of optimization becomes the insistence on doing our meaning-making—together, creatively, with full awareness of both our limitations and our irreplaceable dignity. The alternative isn’t just political defeat—it’s the surrender of the capacity to choose what kinds of beings we become. And that choice, however difficult, remains ours to make.
The emotionally immature will never grasp the meaning or dimensions of wisdom; it's an epistemic impossibility. They need to recover the path to emotional stability and self-mastery, and that's not a technical issue, it's biological, a function of the soft tissues; not constructible by intent but by surrender to the amazingly innate capacity of our minds to perceive truth, a very early connection of our mirror neurons and the patterning evolving within the midbrain.
I was very hesitant from the beginning to interact with social media. It always felt like the doorway to societal collapse so having someone who was inside and can sound the alarms of what we are doing to ourselves is essential. Thank you for being willing to speak.
Thanks for being so loyal to us here. Selfishly, you are a guiding light for me as well as a continual educator. I am glad you stand out in the tech world. Lately, the evil ones get all the attention. Keep your courage.
“It’s the moral courage to defend the democratic republic even when doing so comes at personal cost.”
The above statement reminds me of all the government officials on varying levels that let Trump off the hook.
We go from a transnational criminal that essentially raided banks, took advantage of bankruptcy law, go from business to infiltrating government.
Where does the Musk-Trump relationship go now? Peter Thiel was accepted (adored?) by Trump. Haven’t heard much of what Doge is doing to government departments….
(BTW: I really like the photograph, lantern amid the deep, dark field!!)
Mike, your reflection on underlying patterns and how mythology works without supernatural belief really resonates—there’s so much power in that perspective. It connects with my own search for meaning and how we humans weave stories to orient ourselves in complex times.
I find myself wondering, though—when we take “consciousness emerges from inert matter” as given, what do we risk missing about how consciousness and meaning might be more relational, more foundational? I’d love to hear how you see that tension.
I'm a fan of your work. Re: "someone committed to the constitutional framework that allows free people to govern themselves through representative institutions while protecting minority rights... But on policy within that framework? I’m genuinely democratic."
This is phrased as if it's an easy distinction between policy within and outside that framework. It seems to me that anyone seeking to oppress a demonized minority can claim that they are operating within a liberal framework (e.g., the Swiss banning minarets and burqas). Anything that oppresses a minority can be labeled as "illiberal," even if the mechanism of that oppression is indirect or difficult to understand (e.g., racial injustice in banking).
Have you written previously about how you think about whether specific policies fall within a liberal framework?
Mike, how should we understand your sentence about your defense of the “Constitutional framework that makes democratic self governance possible?”
Do you mean you are specifically wedded to the balancing of powers as done in the US Constitution? Or would you be ok with something like a (unicameral) Parliament and Prime Minister and a Judiciary?
In other words, did you mean any Constitutional framework is fine as long as it leads to a republican form of government or did you mean “Don’t mess with the Three Branches” ?
I would say the key test isn't "Does it look like the U.S. Constitution?" but "Does it prevent the concentration of unchecked power while enabling genuine self-governance?"
Got it, thanks for your reply. I am not a fan of the way the US Constitution is structured. So many of today’s problems are deep in the bones of that document, imo.
I think we should hang it in a museum and write a new one that incorporates all we’ve learned about best practices in writing constitutions in the last 80 years.
Politically I can’t see how we would ever actually manage it, so this is more daydreaming from me than advocacy.
I love Mike Brock's writing. I sometimes criticize some things he says, or his flamboyant choice of words, but in reality, it is more my need to bring extremely valuable concepts down to my level of understanding and palatability.
This said, today's commentary by Mike is one of the most stirring I have read, anywhere. Yet, despite my thinking that I am highly educated and well-read with an advanced vocabulary, I find myself sometimes feeling detoured by what I consider to be Mike's higher-level meanderings. I suppose this is the flamboyancy I mentioned above.
I am going to do something unconventional. I hope it is not offensive, especially to Mike. I will take Mike's commentary today and reduce it to the core issues I understand. My apologies if this falls flat on its face.
_________________________________________________________________________
We only discover what we believe when belief costs something. Watching the systematic replacement of human choice with algorithmic optimization, dressed up as inevitable progress, led me to conclude that intelligence and wisdom aren’t the same thing. We’ve not just been facing another political crisis, but instead confronted with urgent practical questions about truth, power, and human nature. My goal has been to share stories that help people remain human while engaging with systems designed to eradicate humanity. The distinction between enhancement and replacement had become dangerously blurred.
I may invoke “God” now and then, but in a Spinozian frame—not as a supernatural entity but as the principle of coherence itself, the underlying pattern that allows reality to hold together and consciousness to emerge from matter. Such a perspective doesn’t require supernatural beliefs, but it still provides the emotional resonance and moral orientation that pure rationality alone cannot supply.
I discovered that analytical detachment, however valuable, isn’t where we live. You can’t love an analysis. You can’t be loyal to a theory. At some point, philosophy has to become a lived commitment, or it becomes an academic exercise. We’re facing a crisis not just of institutions but of our moral fiber—the collective ability to recognize ethical action as such. When our behavior, our social interactions, become a principled stance or a partisan performance, democracy loses more than its structures; it loses its soul.
What is crucial for us to attain humanity is mandated in the consecration of truth: phenomenological, moral, and human. We need stories that make democratic virtue visible again. Without this focus on ethical behavior as foundational in any society, we lose even the ability to disagree meaningfully—we don’t recognize what we’re disagreeing about.
Work is required to re-enchant liberalism and patriotism, not as nostalgia but as recognition that these traditions contain essential insights about human dignity and self-governance. If such values are abandoned, our human unity, our humanity, is lost. Liberalism isn’t just a political position—it’s what allows political positions to be possible, and to thrive. It’s fundamentally about how we know things and organize knowledge in societies where all share access to truth, and where truth is not limited to the privileged few.
When I call myself a liberal, I mean someone committed to the constitutional framework that allows free people to govern themselves through representative institutions while protecting minority rights. I’ll fight anyone who threatens the constitutional framework that makes democratic self-governance possible.
Patriotism, properly understood, means commitment to constitutional principles, not loyalty to any person or party. It’s the moral courage to defend the democratic republic even when doing so comes at personal cost. True patriots defend institutions even when those institutions deliver outcomes they dislike. They recognize that constitutional processes matter more than momentary partisan advantage.
Paying attention to patterns rather than predicting specific outcomes. I sensed we were headed toward cultural and political disaster. Trump’s victory felt probable, but even if it hadn’t happened, the underlying dynamics were already in motion—the manipulation of attention, the systematic erosion of shared reality.
The forces threatening human agency weren’t going to stop with any particular election. They’re deeper, more sophisticated, more committed to replacing democratic messiness with technological efficiency. When I barely use TikTok but encounter its perfect algorithmic curation, I see the logical endpoint: reality redesigned to deliver precisely what we think we want, with no friction, no surprise, no space for the accidents that make existence rich.
What gives me hope is knowing that our destiny as humans is something we choose, not something that happens to us through technological inevitability. We can shape our tools rather than being shaped by them. We can insist on a creative and pluralistic society that maximizes human potential rather than surrendering to systems that solve human problems by eliminating the human dimension.
The human choice—to create meaning through relationship rather than receiving it from superior intelligence—keeps asserting itself against all attempts to engineer it away.
We as a people do not benefit from rigid ideology, but through ongoing commitment to the conditions that make choice possible. Can we build frameworks that serve truth rather than obscuring it? Can we create stories that enhance rather than replace critical thinking? Are we going to develop ways of remaining human while engaging consciously with forces that would reshape us?
We’re here to become, to learn, and to evolve. We’re here to see the unity in all of life and how each aspect, being, or thing is interconnected in the oneness of this marvelous creation.
And the most radical act in an age of optimization becomes the insistence on doing our meaning-making—together, creatively, with full awareness of both our limitations and our irreplaceable dignity. The alternative isn’t just political defeat—it’s the surrender of the capacity to choose what kinds of beings we become. And that choice, however difficult, remains ours to make.
Circus concept: Reality show and performance element to the curent political scene makes it so apropos. 🤡
Love it. But can you make individual posts a little bit shorter?
The emotionally immature will never grasp the meaning or dimensions of wisdom; it's an epistemic impossibility. They need to recover the path to emotional stability and self-mastery, and that's not a technical issue, it's biological, a function of the soft tissues; not constructible by intent but by surrender to the amazingly innate capacity of our minds to perceive truth, a very early connection of our mirror neurons and the patterning evolving within the midbrain.