The last three and a half years have been times of enormous upheaval. It has affected politics, economics, culture, media, and technology. It’s not just about the spreading of economic, cultural, and demographic decay. Millions and billions of lives have been wrecked, to be sure, but there is also a big impact on the way we see the world around us.

What we once trusted, we now doubt and even disbelieve as a matter of new habit. The simple categories of understanding that we once deployed to make sense of the world have been tested, challenged, and even overthrown. Old forms of ideological commitments have opened their way to new.

If you have not shifted your thinking in some respect over these years, you are either a prophet, asleep, or in denial.

There is no need to change your principles or ideals. What should change in light of evidence is your evaluation of the problems and threats, your outlook on the relative priorities of focus, your perceptions of the functionality of institutional structures, your awareness of issues and concerns about which you had limited prior knowledge, your political and cultural allegiances, and so on.

...observing one’s own tribe collapse into craven careerism and coercion is disorienting. But the problem goes even deeper. The most striking alliance of our time has been to observe the lockstep of the elites in government, media, tech, and academia. The reality blows apart the traditional binary of public vs private that has dominated ideological discussion for centuries.