The Mistaken Cult of Free Thinking
28th September 2025
Read it.
Liberalism forces the immense existential burden of self-invention, a power disclosed at best to the mere handful of Elon Musks in this world, onto the great mass of humanity. To the self-regarding few, Locke’s understanding of the human person as an autonomous individual, a free agent whose identity is chosen rather than inherited, will taste like liberation. To the humble majority, it will be felt as a crippling weight—akin to the kind of choice-oversaturation we are liable to feel at an obscenely varied all-you-can-eat buffet. Except that in this case, the saturation is writ large, applying not only to food but to life’s most fundamental questions.
Such considerations have prompted a notorious right-wing internet meme: “Liberalism but exclusively for 130+ IQ Anglos.” A society that consisted solely of Lockes and Musks, the idea runs, would unquestionably benefit from a liberal ethos in which all were free to think, act, and innovate for themselves, each man doing so in accordance with a self-fashioned conception of the good life. But since no such society has ever existed, the next best option is to make do with the less impressive species we have before us: a human race that naturally organises itself into tribal collectives and craves the security of order and tradition. If only the wary 99% were cut from the same cloth as their intrepid superiors in the 1%, the conservative brakes on liberalism might be relaxed without danger. In the event, prudence dictates that they cannot be.
The rarer move is to doubt whether this celebrated 1% in fact exists. To be sure, intelligence and other forms of natural hierarchy are very real. But, albeit to varying degrees, are we not all prone to tribalism? Is there any man who does not stand in need of the innumerable funds of social knowledge greater than himself?