Great letter from a reader, who gives me permission to post it as long as I take his name out:

My name is [deleted], and I’m a young professional living in Boston, who was absolutely blown away by how compelling I found Live Not by Lies. I graduated an Ivy League university a couple years ago and had always assumed I would be a minority given my political/religious affiliations in liberal circles, but the past six or so months have truly astounded me in terms of people I thought were reasonable fully buying into lies as well as the total lack of normality that they support.

I can think of a woman I work with (Evangelical background from [the South]) who I had previously held very frank and honest conversations with, who I can best describe as having been radicalized. She went home for the initial COVID work from home and then returned a completely different person. She has put gender pronouns in every single email, Zoom call and Skype message and joined the Diversity, Inclusion and Equity team with gusto. Now, she only talks about BLM and reducing the number of straight, white men in hiring and has essentially disowned her family and her background. What is bizarre to me is that she’s urged me to join those types of committees as well, assuming that I’ve changed too. I’ve decided to keep my distance and not buy into the series of lies and divisive content that those views propagate.

On a more profound note, one line from your book in particular (from when you spoke to Krizka) has stuck with me, “The secular liberal idea of freedom so popular in the West, and among many in his postcommunist generation is a lie. That is, the concept that real freedom is found by liberating the self from all binding commitments (to God, to marriage, to family), and by increasing worldly comforts–that is a road that leads to hell.”

It made me remember my favorite passage from Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven, condemning

“our obsession with sex, violence, and the pornography of “making it”; our addictive dependence on drugs, “entertainment,” and the evening news; our impatience with anything that limits our sovereign freedom of choice, especially with the constraints of marital and familial ties, our preference for “nonbinding commitments”; our third-rate educational system; our third-rate morality; our refusal to draw a distinction between right and wrong, lest we “impose” our morality on others and thus invite others to “impose” their morality on us; our reluctance to judge and be judged; our indifference to future generations, as evidenced by our willingness to saddle them with a huge national debt, an overgrown arsenal of destruction, and a deteriorating environment; our inhospitable attitude to the newcomers born into our midst; our unstated assumption, which underlies so much of the propaganda for unlimited abortion, that only those children born for success ought to be allowed to be born at all.”

I know you likely won’t be surprised by this (I’m a regular reader of your blog), but I think it’s worth mentioning just how atomized and disconnected from any sense of our culture, history and society the young elite class of our country are. My father always says, “You never learn who people truly are until you hear them speak when they think they’re among their own”. I can tell you firsthand: almost every single top Ivy League grad (working in investment banking, consulting, etc.) prizes nonbinding commitments above all, is obsessed with individualistic morality and sex, and has utter contempt for those with traditional lifestyles and closely-held views of right and wrong. Not that this makes them happy! You would not believe the rates of psychoactive drug prescriptions among this group of people and how deeply unhappy their lifestyles make them. I pray that those among this group who I consider friends eventually see the errors of their ways, but I don’t have much hope. All major societal institutions are telling them they are right and just.

Another reader writes about the “Living With The Body” post from earlier, saying that he teaches in a public high school, and recently led a discussion about a debate between two thinkers:

Virtually all of my students were all in when it came to expressive individualism.  Even when I pressed them on the contradictions of the ideology and how it leads to absurdities, they clung to it.  The word that comes to mind is “stubborn.”  Even the Christian kids–who lead evangelical Christian groups on campus–couldn’t see the absurdity.  Expressive individualism was to them like saying “the sky is blue.”  Reminds me of that viral youtube video a while back where the interviewer got college educated young adults to claim with a straight face that they’d call him a 6 ft5 Chinese woman (the interviewer looked around 5ft 8 or so and was a white dude) if he identified as such.

I think we have our work cut out for us.  I try to do my part, but it feels like holding back a tsunami.