Thread by @ConceptualJames

In the biggest picture, something truly revolutionary and disruptive is happening in the world, and particularly the West. All the tumult we're experiencing is downstream from that.

The Marketplace of Ideas is finally being born.

A Second Enlightenment is upon us.

Many people believe the Marketplace of Ideas was born centuries ago, in the Enlightenment. This is not so. A Magisterium of Ideas gave way to an Aristocracy of Ideas in the process we call "the Enlightenment." That aristocracy has ripened now and gone bad. It's corrupt and dying.

I did an influential podcast about this issue a year and a half ago, articulating that what we're seeing from the Managerial Elite, who are the Information Aristocrats, is a Reaction to this Second Enlightenment. They want to maintain the aristocracy.
newdiscourses.com/2021/10/welcom…

During the Enlightenment, there were three political Reactions and two idea Reactions, not just one of each, as is commonly thought. These are all different and reflected in our present moment.

Politically, the literal aristocracy reacted to maintain itself; the Religious Reaction screamed to go back to a more Magisterial order; and the Romantic Reaction pushed for what would become Communism a century later.

In ideas, there was a Religious and a Romantic Reaction.

The Aristocracy of Ideas, composed of scholars, journalists, and experts, who are credentialed to tell us what's true, is corrupt and ending. The present aristocrats want to maintain their status quo. The Left is right about them but misplaces their wrath.

The Left, being Marxist, misplaces the Aristocracy of Ideas in the "oppressor groups," defined by class, race, sex, gender, sexuality, national origins, etc. They fail to understand the Managerial Elite as a result and are the Information Jacobins of our time.

They don't want a Marketplace of Ideas to emerge. They want a new Aristocracy of Ideas under their control, based on sensuous, Romantic ideals. This is what the Romantic/Communist Reaction to the Enlightenment wanted too, as history repeatedly proved.

In some sense, the Romantic Reaction of today got the jump on the story. They started saying 50+ years ago that the knowing system is corrupt and that there's no true Marketplace of Ideas. They have been dismantling the system and replacing it with their own ever since.

The Managerial Elite recognizes that their time is up, however, and they have weaponized the Romantic Reaction (Woke) to maintain an Aristocracy of Ideas that they'll end up on top of. They're using that Reaction to their benefit, hence State-Corporate Wokeness, which is cynical.

The Religious Reaction of our time is now springing into play, insisting that the whole system that enabled the present Aristocracy of Ideas to flourish needs replacing root and branch with a new, more stable Magisterium of Ideas based on their faiths, which they see as rock.

The Woke vs Classical Liberalism vs National Conservatism is the expression of this fight, all of which oppose the Managerial Elite now, but the Marketplace of Ideas can only emerge if Classical Liberalism prevails and is updated to deal with 21st century technology.

The update to Classical Liberalism is only a *practical* update, though, dealing with the exigencies of new communications technologies: data privacy, digitized property protection, etc. The principles must survive into this new era. Neither Reaction allows this to happen.