I received this feedback yesterday from a reader who saw an advance copy of Live Not By Lies. I loved these comments, and asked the reader for permission to post them. Here you go:

The protected file could only be downloaded on my iPhone Kindle app, so I can’t transfer my highlights/comments like I’d hoped. Here are the things I bookmarked:

John Gray on Marxism and liberal democrats/positivism/myth of progress. People hear Marxism and think economics, but it’s the positivism and myth of progress that do the real damage

Chinese state making sure people don’t have the “imaginary capacity to fight back,” and the Chinese man  interviewed who said people born in the 80s and after are lost and that they simply don’t have an interest in the information available because of the consumerist atmosphere—even 10 years’ age difference meant living in different worlds.

The point about using data to identify potential future leaders/enemies before they become aware of their potential seems very significant. One thing that worries me is that the U.S. doesn’t seem to be cultivating future leaders at all, which seems a far greater sign of social dysfunction than trying to remove future enemies, despite the ethical problems posed by the latter. The U.S. seems to have grown very averse to the concept of “proteges.”

Political correctness being more than an annoyance—it interferes with dealing with reality.
I agree. I think the problem here cannot be overstated. For this reason, I have a much higher tolerance for Trump than most people. The only way around this seems to be shamelessness—I don’t see another way to fight it, or even get a word in around it. Same goes for the mass media propaganda. The crazy shifting language corruption is the defining totalitarian feature.

The point that consenting the the system’s lies might buy your safety, but at an unbearable cost.
I think about this a lot, and as someone who is not very brave or willing to take risks, it still stuns me how many people are willing to crawl lower and lower beyond a certain point. There is a point at which the quality of life is so low and maddening and that it should be a breaking point. As you say, that doesn’t mean people aren’t going to try and protect themselves, but “If you cannot imagine any situation in which you would act like Havel’s fictional greengrocer…” something is just wrong. I understand some people may always be too afraid and resign themselves to submission, but there’s a difference between that and continuing to defend and recommend total compliance as the responsible choice to those you trust and care about.

Suffering is part of the human condition and has significant value in historical Christianity.
I’m not religious, but I have come to hold this view anyway. I think the universality of human suffering needs to be acknowledged and made the basis for healthier forms of empathy and humility.

What if the answers are in the stories of Christian dissidents?

I think this is right—or that the best way to orient ourselves is by really looking at this and similar cases of dissent in the historical record. What are the values and aspects of human nature that drive people to have seemingly alien (to modern thinking) priorities? When I said that focusing on communism isn’t the best approach, I didn’t mean that literally—I think the case study approach you took is the best way to present such an issue, and the most detailed case study available is definitely 20th century communism. I meant that in the casual discourse, for people who don’t take the time to read books like this, the label makes them look at it as an outside problem. Of course, one of the key points of your book is that we don’t recognize it because it doesn’t take the expected form, so you’re well aware of the issue.

I thought the book was excellent—it was eloquent, direct, and easy to follow, and made all the key points in a fair-minded way. I think it is relevant far beyond the target audience, and that much of the dysfunction we’re seeing is the outcome of this process having already started. That’s why I said we may be closer to the peak than the beginning. It’s crazy how much some of these things have become reality since you finished up the book. If you control people too much, they stop producing value, so you can’t get much out of them, and they require less elaborate control mechanisms. There’s also an issue where the leaders seem to become confused by their own lies over time. And, eventually, the lies don’t work on younger generations, because they don’t have the necessary context to appreciate them, which I think we’re seeing now. I think your diagnosis of the current situation is definitely accurate and very lucid, but I’m not sure what comes next. The book will definitely get people thinking in the right direction, though, which will be a big advantage for anyone who reads it.

While it is (or was, until recently) harder to see on the left, it’s not just conservatives or religious people whose value structure is being undermined. There has to be some sort of coherent structure in which everything is harmonized, and we lost that. People are trying to pick and choose components, but they don’t work outside of the system as a whole, and that is the understanding we have to regain—we’ve been trying too long to have it both ways. As Solzhenitsyn says, you have to decide never to lie—you can’t pick and choose when lying is okay. Lying about fundamentals in one area eventually corrupts the whole system. It requires more and more lies over time to correct for the initial lie, and people become habituated to it, and then lose track of what is a lie, etc. In the long run, everything falls apart.

I think the pathologies of progressivism and of neoliberalism are much more similar than most people realize. It’s not the beliefs themselves, but the way those beliefs have been tethered to a ridiculous narrative of unending progress and a rejection of the idea that there is meaning in suffering or sacrifice. I tend to lump them together under a term like technocracy. From your comments on the utopians in Silicon Valley and other insightful points, I think you are identifying the same patterns.

Believers in these systems lack prudence, as you define it—they confuse reasoning and rationalizing. They’re essentially positivist, or at least justify themselves that way, something you also highlighted: this idea of a universal convergence of values. “End of history” stuff, as “David” said. Most importantly, they are totalizing systems, which only became possible with the power concentration and tech developments of the 20th century. The post-WWI shift in the US was stunning, and I assume similar shifts played a big role in what happened in Russia and Germany. Things accelerated again Post-WWII.

Over the course of the 20th century, it was increasingly possible to impose massive systems (similar in some ways to the shift from decentralized message board culture to massive “platforms”). It was impossible for Marx to try and force a society into practicing communism, had he wanted to do so. It was possible for Lenin to do so. On the American side, the tone of the abolitionist movement is distinctly different from that of the temperance movement. The former didn’t think it could impose values or modify behavior by force. It could persuade or it could conquer militarily and enforce a ban, but it wasn’t going to indoctrinate South Carolina into being Massachusetts. The temperance movement thought it could prompt a change the whole character of people and society, just as communism did, or liberal internationalism does. You point out what globalization has enabled, and how much power big business has —these are just such major changes that our existing political system can’t survive them. Scale matters, and then mix in Woke Capitalism—it is opportunism more than ideology driving a lot of this, but we’re just unmoored from a usable value framework.

The virtues you highlight have a lot of appeal to me from a secular perspective, and historically have always had non-Christian appeal. I agree it’s time to get serious about making hard choices, and I think that, when fully appreciated, these changes are difficult but much less negative than they may seem. There’s a lot of compensation in them for the associated hardships. But for most people, this is a really hard shift, and they can’t even truly process how far we’ve drifted from traditional values, for better or worse. Americans will never decide to reject consumerism any time soon. They won’t choose to lower their expectations willingly and all at once, but I think many will have to do so piece by piece.

You may find the Benedict Option becoming attractive to secular young people. I think such a choice will be made easier by the economic issues that are probably coming, and the defeat of some of the progress narratives. I think the spiritual and the practical concerns will start to become more obviously related and less at odds—it won’t be a choice between worldly success and your soul, because the current version of worldly success isn’t going to be as plausibly achievable. I think this will require more radical cultural shifts in mindset than people in their 60s could ever conceive of, but it won’t be some revolution, just an unplanned reversal to a more historically stable equilibrium.

Much you’ve written over the last few months seems to recognize that there will be a broader shift—we’re too decadent to function. Many people might drift on, but there will be people opting out, and those at the top won’t be competent enough to force their absurdity too much on others. The compliance is borne from, as you said, the fact that so many assume that “social justice” advocates abide by traditional discourse norms, and don’t know how to defend themselves. But younger people don’t have such an assumption, and, better or for worse, will push back.

I don’t know how it will all play out, but I think it will look closer to 19th century than 20th in many ways, since we’re starting at the other end of the trend. It’s easy to fall prey to the myth of progress even while lamenting it, and think a scary trend will continue forever, but history is surprisingly cyclical.

What a great comment. I’m grateful, reader! I hope you will pre-order Live Not By Lies. It will be published on September 29. I’m posting this not only because it’s a great comment, but because it is for this writer a pleasure to finally be able to get some feedback on his book.