Your essay made me think of the following quote from Keynes:
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.“
Put another way, there’s no such thing as not “propagating”—only conscious or unconscious, inspired or cynical, generative or manipulative. The conceit of neutrality was a useful illusion for liberals societies for a long time, but now that liberalism itself is being increasingly regarded as just another ideology rather than the shared cultural background, there can no longer be a neutral stance. To not propagate good ideas is to let bad ideas and bad actors, to use Steve Bannon’s phrase, “flood the zone with shit.”
Your essay made me think of the following quote from Keynes:
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.“
Put another way, there’s no such thing as not “propagating”—only conscious or unconscious, inspired or cynical, generative or manipulative. The conceit of neutrality was a useful illusion for liberals societies for a long time, but now that liberalism itself is being increasingly regarded as just another ideology rather than the shared cultural background, there can no longer be a neutral stance. To not propagate good ideas is to let bad ideas and bad actors, to use Steve Bannon’s phrase, “flood the zone with shit.”
Wow I love that so much.