Jon Troyer

I wish the educational system would just admit that E.D. Hirsch was right and then structure the curriculum accordingly.

2/4) Philosophy's metaphysics, causality, logic, ethics, as well as religion, politics, law, civil customs, are foundational to, and precede discussions of how best to persuade and incentivize particular behaviors that are relevant and sensible in civil society. You can speak of Law as incentive structures, but you cannot do so without undermining and inducing unacknowledged faults and errors that result from your doing so. The Law is there to make clear the boundaries of acceptable behavior, and what intricacies of agreements are acceptable attempts to 'thread the needle', and to make clear what violates those boundaries, and punishments for doing so. It is not only unwise to view that as 'incentive dilemmas', it is importing incompatible perspectives to the consideration, formulation, and application of the Law. "...they get around certain structural, Constitutional and lawful deterrents?" After 40 years of explicit dis-education (preceded by much more), We The People introduced a fatal structural flaw into our system of governance at the transition between the 19th & 20th centuries, in the form of regulatory law (heavily influenced, BTW, by the same 'economic thinking' that Game Theory was spawned from), which has undermined the Rule of Law, and has implicitly, and in many cases explicitly, rendered legal support of our individual rights, without substance, and often actively infringes upon them. The problems we face today, are what resulted from well over a century of misosophy (hatred of wisdom), which guides the dis-education of our people, which promotes a pragmatic [hawks, spits] and utilitarian approach (incentive structures) to what we now consider 'normal' for going through life. That is a huge problem. It is not a problem that can be remedied by a more intensive application of the same thinking that caused the problems to begin with. I get the urgency of "We have to do something!". The urgency doesn't alter the nature of the problem that led to the sense of urgency. The problems are philosophical, constitutional, moral. You're not going to incentivize 'good behavior', when what makes actual good behavior possible, is what you're implicitly ignoring and/or violating.

3/4) There is no legislation that is going to remedy the issues of the regulatory administrative state. There are some measures that can be passed to anesthetize the pain, but the only solution is repealing every aspect of legislation and rulings on it, that permitted the regulatory systems to be imposed upon us. That won't happen before people recognize why using govt to manage our lives, is fundamentally, philosophically, morally, and in the most practical sense, wrong. And that's not going to happen without people learning and understanding what it was that made the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution possible, and why it is that their passage was fortunate enough to occur at the last possible moment in history that it was possible to do so. "... we are talking about three generations of anchored moral realism before we see its fruit..." Yes. And that won't be shortened by engaging in more intensive and 'smart' applications of what the problem is, to fix the problem. I understand that doesn't satisfy the urge to 'do something!'. Almost twenty years ago, my friends in the Tea Party didn't appreciate my telling them that IF we did a sound job of spreading that understanding, and experienced no setbacks in doing so, we might begin to be able to 'fix things' in about fifty years. Instead, they decided to focus on electing the 'right candidates'. They really, really, really, wanted that to work. It still didn't. Reality is like that. But. Despite ourselves, we did manage to begin spreading an interest in that fundamental understanding. When I first started bothering people by pointing this out in the late 90s, few would even politely listen. By about 2007ish people began saying "Huh? Federalist Papers? Natural Law...? Tell me more...", and despite ourselves, in the last ten years, I'm just as likely to hear about those from someone else, as them hearing about it from me. Obviously, that's not due to me, but to the fact that people - thousands and more - that I do not know and never will, have also been doing what I've been doing, and many more people than that are listening. Worthwhile change is not going to happen quickly. Sam Adams began talking about the loss of liberty and the need for independence, in the 1740s, and it took over two decades for that to sink in before the first 'win' of resistance to the Stamp Act, and another decade before the Declaration of Independence. And he started with a much healthier culture than we have to work with today. Sorry, but that's the way it is, it takes time, and it takes even more time if you don't 'do it right' to begin with, or 'do it wrong' to try and speed things up. There's no fix, no application update, that we can quickly download and apply, to short-circuit history through marketing and other incentive structures.

Truth is now considered a right-wing conspiracy. That’s the chilling line from Melanie Phillips that stopped me in my tracks. She explains how we’ve reached a point where simply stating observable reality — whether it’s basic biology defining a woman or pushing back against blanket accusations that all white people are inherently bad — gets you branded as evil. Not wrong. Evil. Therefore you must be silenced, cancelled, or erased. No debate. No evidence allowed. She calls it cultural totalitarianism: a Manichean worldview where one ideology claims a monopoly on goodness, progress, and reason itself. Dissent isn’t argued with — it’s treated as a moral threat that has to be removed. The deepest irony? In an era that smugly ditched religion in the name of superior rationality, we’ve ended up rejecting reason, evidence, and open inquiry altogether. We’re so “rational” we’ve dispensed with the very tools of rationality. It doesn’t add up. Her take has me wondering how we got here — and how quickly disagreement turned into moral excommunication. Anyone else seeing this pattern play out in conversations lately? Where have you felt truth itself become off-limits?

Harvard circa 1700s: "No student shall be admitted unless they can translate Greek and Latin authors such as Tully, Virgil, The New-Testament, & Xenophon." Harvard circa 2026: "We can't assign whole novels anymore."