Zelex

Sixteen years ago, one man stood alone on a grassy hill at a music festival in Washington State, USA, and started dancing by himself. People glanced over and looked away. Some laughed. His roommate leaned in and warned him people were filming him. He did not stop. Then one stranger got up and joined him. Then another. Then the hillside tipped. Within minutes, hundreds of people were sprinting from across the field to be part of something that, thirty seconds earlier, had been one man being laughed at in a field. Someone filming from higher up the hill said quietly: "See what one man can do. One man can change the world." The clip spread across the internet in 2009. Entrepreneur Derek Sivers played it at a TED conference to explain how movements actually begin. Not with the first person brave enough to start, he argued, but with the first person willing to join them. Collin Wynter, the man dancing alone, later said he had no idea he had done anything special. He was just tired of watching everyone sit still.

If liberalism requires that we treat individuals as fully formed choosers while neglecting the conditions that form them, then I cannot in good conscience support it. Simple.