The Cognitive Pattern that Hacked Liberalism

Hijacking liberal structures to create the anti-liberal steamroller

(This is a breakdown of the "Panic Hack" described earlier).

It's often said politics is the new religion: here, here, here.

But it seems the challenge is to give a detailed breakdown of how politics does this. Has this been done?

A cognitive approach seems helpful. What are the underlying beliefs about reality that make this political religiosity seem reasonable and necessary?

That's what I'm attempting here.

This religiosity seems to radiate most intensely from our big political panics: issues like abortion, racism, climate, misogyny, LGBT-phobia, school shootings. As with religion, they generate outrage, moral shaming, and a clear division of people into good vs evil, decent vs indecent.

It's almost like they function as replacement tests of human decency, in a culture that no longer trusts religion to be the great divider (Believer vs Atheist, Catholic vs Protestant).

So what's going on with these political panics? I believe there's a core cognitive pattern they all share.

The discovery of this pattern by around 1840 creates the "Jurassic Locke" event, where the panic dinosaurs escape Locke's liberal safeguards.

Unitarian pastor Theodore Parker (1810-1860) was an early adopter of the pattern. His political panics seem so modern because we're still trapped in the same pattern.

The Jurassic Seed

All our big political panics seem to have these three beliefs about reality at their core:

1. An intolerable secular atrocity exists, that has a

2. government fix undeniably worth trying, but the fix is politically blocked by

3. villains whose minds must be warped by sin

I call this the "Jurassic Seed" because it's what moves us from liberal Locke, to anti-liberal "Jurassic Locke". It's the mindset that defeats Locke's liberal structures.

Notice how highly anti-liberal the Seed is. Liberalism is open-ended: it values endless free speech and debate. This Seed is closed. It insists the evidence is in, the debate is over, and any decent person must now support the fix. If you dissent, your mind must be warped by sin (hate, racism, bribed by Big Oil, wilfully stupid denial of science). There is no good faith disagreement.

All our big political panics seem to have this Seed at their core: abortion, climate, racism, misogyny, LGBT-phobia, school shootings, etc. Every decent person should see there's an intolerable harm (700,000 babies killed a year, imminent climate apocalypse). Every decent person should support the reasonable government fix (abortion ban, sensible carbon tax).

Note also how the Seed proves liberalism has failed. Our supposedly awesome civil rights framework has failed to prevent this horrific harm. Even worse, majority rule has failed...spectacularly. Every decent person can see we need the super-reasonable government fix, yet it's blocked! If that's not a failure of liberalism, what is?

The Seed says we're in a failure mode of liberalism, a state of exception, a moral emergency. People are dying, but the fix is infuriatingly blocked by sin (moral depravity, hate, racism, wilfully stupid denial of Science). What to do?

The Jurassic Response

If you believe the Jurassic Seed is a correct description of reality, let's say you're a "Seeder".

If you're a Seeder, the atrocity makes it urgent for you to overcome the villains' blockage. How have villains blocked the fix? If you're a Seeder, you will see their blockage in these terms:

• 3(a). Villains muddied the public debate with fake facts and twisted narratives. (By definition they're fake and twisted, because the fix is so reasonable their mind must be warped by sin to oppose it)

• 3(b). Villains engaged in devious/unfair political machinations (dirty campaign ads, billionaries buying influence, gerrymandering, electoral college vs majority vote, vote fraud, voter suppression etc)

Neither of these is legitimate. Neither can be peacefully accepted by a Seeder. Both mean liberalism has failed. Either an outright majority actually wants the fix but they've been cheated (3(b)), or a majority would want the fix, if villains hadn't fouled the public record with misinformation (3(a)).

Notice the Seed is so powerful, it overrides majority legitimacy. Even if a majority currently wants it, they're dead wrong. The old liberal principle of "The people have spoken" brings no civic peace here.

The urgency of the harm and the outrageousness of these blockages put Seeders into the Jurassic state of mind: these intrusions cannot be accepted and we must push back on them however we can, even with anti-liberal means.

Well-behaved Locke would say calm down! Don't go Jurassic. This is just the liberal system working as designed. You both had your free speech: 3(a). You both knew the rules, which were democratically arrived at: 3(b). If anything technically illegal happened in 3(b) you can prosecute it. If you don't like the current 3(b) rules, you can use our democratic procedures to change them. Meanwhile, calm down!

But the Jurassic Seed defeats well-behaved Locke, because on this issue there is no legitimate opposition. This is the rare issue where every decent person agrees, because the harm is so intolerable, and the fix is so undeniably worthwhile, and any dissent is so obviously the product of a warped mind.

This creates an anti-liberal mindset that doesn't respect liberal procedures in spirit because those procedures have failed. They've been gamed and we must counter-game them. Well-behaved Locke failed, we need Jurassic Locke.

The Jurassic Response is in part just a point for point pushback against the villains' perceived instrusions. If you're a Seeder it looks reasonable and totally justified. If you're not, it looks Orwellian and Machiavellian:

• 4(a). Manage public opinion (Orwell). We need a vast effort to reshape the public's thinking on the issue and overcome the sinful mindset (hate, LGBT-phobia, wilful denial of Science). Every platform must be used: news, novels, movies, research studies, standup routines, awareness-raising days and months, ribbons. We can't afford to neutrally tell the truth "warts and all" because villains will just "seize on" the warts. We can come out of this temporary "emergency information management" mode when the atrocity is fixed.

• 4(b). Fight fire with fire in the political trenches (Machiavelli). Villains are exploiting every technicality of the system to the hilt and maybe a bit beyond, so we must roll up our sleeves and do the same. Dirty campaign ads, our own billionaire donations, ballot harvesting, whatever. All this with a good conscience, because the villains started it and it's how the game is played.

A third prong of the Jurassic Response also makes perfect sense to Seeders, and it often takes an Alinsky-ite form:

• 4(c). Confront the villains (Alinsky). At the very least: shame, protest, picket, boycott, disinvite, dissociate, sever relationships. Perhaps also: shout down, dox, pie, sue, fire, deplatform, debank. To Seeders, this is necessary to make the moral stakes clear to everyone: the general public and the villains themselves. Seeders also hope that raising the cost of being a villain will either wake them up or at least daunt them into staying quiet.

Collectively, these three Jurassic prongs are so totalizing and so implacable, that I sometimes think of them as the "steamroller". They're uninterested in genuine discussion because the issue is so open and shut. They generally just keep repeating the three premises of their Seed at you like a hammer, hoping it will eventually break through. "Can't you see the terrible harm, don't you care? Can't you see your side is just like Hitler or slavery?" And because of the 4(a) duty to "manage public opinion", it can feel like this tediously simplistic messaging is hitting you everywhere.

The steamroller is anti-liberal in spirit, and it can generate behaviors that might seem hard to defend: blatant double standards in news reporting, devious political gaming, vicious insults. But if you call a Seeder out on any of this, they immediately go back to the atrocity Seed that's driving them. "But the other side is...!" They're simply responding to the outrageousness in the Seed.

The Seed really seems to be what’s driving them. Once you accept the anti-liberal premises of the Jurassic Seed, you generally support all 3 prongs of the anti-liberal Jurassic Response. The steamroller looks justified.

The Full Jurassic Pattern

Putting all that together, this is the cognitive pattern that hacks liberalism:

1. An intolerable secular atrocity exists, that has a

2. government fix undeniably worth trying, but the fix is politically blocked by

3. villains whose minds must be warped by sin, who

   (a) muddy the public debate with fake facts and twisted narratives, and

   (b) engage in devious/unfair political machinations, which creates a

4. campaign imperative for decent people to push back and:

   (a) manage public opinion (a la Orwell)

   (b) engage in devious political machinations of their own (a la Machiavelli)

   (c) confront the villains (a la Alinsky)

This explains how decent reasonable people end up acting like Orwell and Machiavelli in a liberal democracy. An anti-liberal seed (1 to 3) drives the anti-liberal response (4).

The Jurassic Seed seems far-fetched, so how does it get bootstrapped?

Once the Jurassic Pattern is up and running, it will create vast amounts of spin that will make the Seed seem more and more true. Endless reports of terrible harm ("immigrant children in cages!"), endless reports of villains being villainous, selective suppression of contrary facts, etc.

The question is: how does this anti-liberal view of reality get bootstrapped into existence in the first place? How do citizens in a liberal democracy come to accept the anti-liberal premises of the Seed? Because its premises really do seem rather implausible.

The Jurassic Seed requires us to believe two things that seem pretty far-fetched:

1. An "intolerable secular atrocity" is occurring that should be obvious to every decent person, yet 30% or more of the population is blind to it

The blindness continues year after year despite all the awareness-raising about it, in a liberal country that is not Nazi Germany. Half your neighbors are morally blind. They have failed the decency test.

Is this really true? Well…maybe?! But it seems implausible to me. My assumption would be there is another good faith way of seeing the issue, that is not purely the product of a warped mind.

2. An "undeniably worthwhile government fix" exists that is so super-compelling as a matter of policy, no good faith objections to it are possible

Real-world government policies almost always have significant tradeoffs. Helping one group hurts another. Fixes can have unintended consequences. Fixes can create moral hazard. Models of future behavior are complex and uncertain, and so on. There are usually lots of reasonable concerns that can motivate opponents.

The Jurassic Seed requires a radically simplified take on government action: the harm is so atrocious and the fix is so net reasonable, it simply must be attempted. If the "pro-fix" case had any real holes, it could be opposed in good faith. But the Seed allows no good faith disagreement.

The only reason you could oppose a sensible carbon tax to fix climate change, is you are bribed by Big Oil, or you are a wilfully stupid denier of science.

If you oppose slavery reparations or defund the police or rules about black representation on corporate boards, we immediately say you're driven by racism or maintaining your own privilege. You may give "reasons" bla bla, but we all know what's really going on with you.

If you oppose abortion restrictions, yeah you can point to back alley abortions or women's autonomy over their own bodies or leaving this sin to God to punish, but come on. It's killing babies. There's a basic existential issue here you're not getting. Wake up! Your depravity meter is broken. There is no morally decent rationale for a pro-choice government policy.

The Jurassic Seed converts political issues into litmus tests of human decency.

There seems to be something about the Seed that hacks our brains and makes these litmus tests compelling. But what is that, exactly?

Circular Effects

What I think happens is this. When you start believing a Jurassic Seed a little, certain circular effects kick in that cause you to believe it a lot.

I picture it as a Chinese finger trap. You point an accusing finger in, but you can't pull it back out. You can only push further in.

So what are these circular effects? That's the acid test for this cognitive model of panic I'm proposing.

Here are four circular effects that seem to be operating:

1. The Seed triggers the emotion of anger, which distorts our cognitive processing in specific ways

I have a separate post on this so I won't repeat it here. Briefly, four elements are required to trigger the emotion of anger: Harm, Villain, Action (the government fix), and Certainty: HVAC. Anger distorts our cognitive processing: we become more optimistic about future outcome (the fix will work); we suppress careful systematic processing (like looking for flaws in our own position); and we rely more on heuristic stereotypes (like villains). These anger effects boost Certainty, and greater Certainty boosts anger even higher. Voila: reinforcing loop. I'm not a psychologist, but I looked at some psychological literature on this here.

The Seed accentuates the four anger triggers (HVAC), because anger is essential to keeping our cognitive "panic blinders" on.

Indeed, the Seed is almost purely HVAC. It's so in your face, it screams "I exist to trigger anger!"

It's like a little scrap of RNA designed to trigger anger, as evolutionarily customized to target a Lockean host (that has government fixes and voting).

Sin is so central to the messaging because anger requires a villain. We don't get angry at forces of nature like hurricanes no matter how much harm they cause.

2. The pattern's ad hominem framing cuts two ways

The sense that dissent can only come from a warped mind has a two-pronged effect:

• it gives you a ready-made rationale to reject contrary views (it's just a diseased mind / fake news), and

• it gives you a ready-made fear about dissenting yourself: you'll be considered a villain

The pattern's closed epistemic loop (dissent = warped mind) creates "Emperor's New Clothes" type social pressures. Ad hominem arguments are logically flawed but when you believe them a little, they circularly reinforce.

3. Spinners primarily spin themselves

Say researchers come to believe the Jurassic Seed applies to the issue they study (e.g., gender transitioning, climate). Very reasonably, they will use their journals to create a situation where "All reputable studies" push in the right direction. Which may require some shading and fudging and suppression of negative results.

Circular effect: The fact "All reputable studies" now agree becomes an important talking point in the minds of the researchers themselves. Which makes them even more sure that any negative results are just flukes that should be suppressed. It's like they forget they engineered the unanimity themselves: they give it too much credit.

They do all this with an eye toward spinning villains and undecideds, but here's the thing: villains and undecideds may not read those journals or give them much credence. But the researchers themselves certainly do.

The campaign imperative may sway some some villains and undecideds, but the spin primarily lands on the spinners themselves.

4. Spinners must continually re-trigger their own anger to create the spin

The Jurassic Seed says the issue is really very simple (Certainty):

1. intolerable secular atrocity (Harm)

2. undeniably worthwhile fix (Action)

3. blocked by sinful people (Villain)

If you are trying to create the best spin on the issue, those are the points you will stress in your reporting. You will constantly be scanning the daily news cycle for facts that can be fit into this pattern. But these are exactly the HVAC points that trigger anger in the spinners themselves.

So spinners are constantly re-stimulating their own anger, just to competently carry out the activity of creating spin. The very act of attempting to enlighten others, reinflames the anger that keeps them blinded themselves.

To keep up the Pattern's vast emissions of spin, you need your spinners to remain True Believers. And I think this "enlighten-them"/"anger-me" loop partly explains the circular trap they are in.

They feel they must spin to refute the villains and stop the atrocity, but doing so re-triggers the anger that keeps their own cognition distorted.

…

So those are four Circular Effects that may explain how an implausible Jurassic Seed, once believed a little, becomes more and more believable.

Hijacked Liberal Structures

I said the Seed is like a little scrap of RNA designed to trigger anger, as evolutionarily customized to target a Lockean host (that has government fixes and voting).

I'll expand on that here. The Seed seems to insidiously depend on liberal structures. It's like a cognitive hack of liberalism specifically.

The Pattern is something like a chain of reasoning that says "Because of this liberal structure and that liberal structure we arrive at a situation where you must have this anti-liberal mindset and pursue these anti-liberal actions".

Here again I'll give four examples that seem to be operating:

1. Spreading costs creates the perfect decency test

By spreading costs over everyone, a government fix makes the solution so cheap and easy to each individual there is no excuse for opposing it.

We're not asking you to be a saint who builds Habitat for Humanity homes for black people on the weekend. You just have to have the right mental position on the issue so you vote the right way. Government can then do the heavy lifting.

Socializing costs creates a more perfect decency test. We're not testing for saintliness: that's too hard. By making the "decent thing" so cheap and easy, we're testing purely for whether your mind is warped.

Do you see the "meta" point I'm making? It's not that spread costs are practically helpful to solving the problem. It's that thinking about the spread costs is what makes us so sure the issue is a moral absolute.

You'll notice all these big political tests of your human decency are very easy. They mainly require your making a costless mental choice of one side or another. (Are you pro Trump, or anti Trump?). You'd think a genuine test of decency might be a little harder?

Can you sense how this virus is targeting a host with voting? Voting lets us ascribe a cosmic importance to one's costless mental position.

2. Free speech permits Jurassic treason

For the Jurassic Pattern to work, you have to be able to publicly slam the current power in the most vociferous terms imaginable. You need to claim it is killing thousands of people and for the worst possible reasons: hate, misogyny, wilful denial of science, etc.

For better or worse, most political systems in history have not allowed this kind of "punching up" at the authority in charge: incendiary speeches, pickets, boycotts. It's perceived as destabilizing. It would be swiftly crushed as treason by today's China.

Or by a medieval monarch: "He's saying our gracious King is killing thousands of people because he's a racist sexist homophobe and an incredibly stupider denier of Science? Hang this treasonous cur in the public square!"

Liberal free speech is needed to let the Jurassic Pattern operate. Which is rather ironic, because the Pattern immediately proceeds to create a Good/Evil distinction that justifies suppressing the free speech of the villains.

3. Government fixes create the necessary dividing points

A problem with the Jurassic Pattern is it tends to consume all the lowest-hanging fruit. The most obvious atrocities get fixed (slavery 1865, Hitler 1945), but the Pattern continues on.

As it moves up the tree, the atrocities tend to get more ethereal and harder to pin on specific persons. Forces like "white supremacy" and "patriarchy" are diffuse and pervasive, almost like original sin, but no one admits to them. You can't blame all white people or men, because many are allies "doing the work". If no one is willing to say "I support supremacy!", how do you divide people into Decent vs Indecent? How do you keep the Jurassic spin pumps going?

Government fixes create the necessary dividing points: "Do you support or oppose this fix?" You can propose an increasingly extreme series of fixes with ever greater practical problems: Defund the Police, slavery reparations, etc. Eventually, an opposition will coalesce and declare itself. They'll claim: "I'm not racist, I oppose this fix because it has these problems..."

No matter. Now that a dividing point has been established, the Pattern kicks in ("They only oppose it because they're racist") and the spin pumps turn on ("Defund the Police actually makes total policy sense because..."). A new decency test is up and running.

It's like the more extreme fix has "flushed the racists out of hiding". Their mere opposition to the fix becomes the evidence of their racism.

The insidious thing is the Jurassic Pattern is almost manufacturing the conflict. It's like the Pattern naturally gropes over time toward more extreme and problematic fixes, but the spinners' "panic goggles" make them blind to this deterioration: "Defund the police makes perfect policy sense! Gotta defend it against ridiculous bad faith villain attacks..." Spinners primarily spin themselves.

It's the Chinese finger trap. If spinners could turn off their spin pumps for a moment, they'd see the fix debate is no longer Decency vs Warped Mind. The Jurassic Pattern would then collapse: no more emergency, no more spin pumps, no more comparisons to Hitler and slavery. It’s like a pump directing a huge force of water onto the pump’s own “on” switch. It's self-perpetuating endless conflict.

While it varies from issue to issue, my sense is the Jurassic Pattern rarely has a fixed set of goals. It's more like a fixed thermostat of conflict. When gay marriage was gotten in 2015, there was a sense of switching to trans bathrooms. The ever-growing acronym LGBTQIAA+ is almost like a visual record of this groping toward new atrocities and new fixes.

Again, can you sense how this is a virus that targets a liberal host? Liberal systems let citizens propose whatever government fixes they can think of. This is great, but it can get coopted to create an endless and deliberately provocative series of dividing points that would collapse if it wasn't opposed.

4. A blocked government fix shifts the activity from aid to campaigning

The ability to propose government fixes drives a major sociological shift. As coopted by the Jurassic Pattern, it changes our relationship to private charity, and it changes our relationship to the emotion of anger.

The existence of a possible government fix causes a huge mental shift toward voluntary private efforts. Racism and global warming are such enormous problems we can't possibly depend on the voluntary efforts of private individuals to solve them (voluntarily hiring more black people, voluntarily lowering one's carbon footprint by flying less). It's great if you want to build Habitat for Humanity homes for black people on the weekend but come on! That can't be our country's race policy.

Any real systemic fix must be governmental. We need hiring regulations, and grants, and rules for representation on boards, and slavery reparations, etc.

Unfortunately these real systemic fixes are blocked politically.

This means our efforts are far better spent on campaigning, than on trying to directly help victims ourselves. If we can move public opinion from 48 to 51%, government will send in 100 bulldozers. If we try to aid victims ourselves, we will only move a few buckets of dirt.

The thing is, Jurassic campaigning is a far different activity, from directly helping victims ourselves.

Campaigning in the broad Jurassic sense includes 4(a) managing public opinion and 4(c) confronting villains. This is something that comes naturally to professors and pastors. You can do it mostly from your office with words. You write things clarifying the moral issues. You educate, you admonish, sometimes you shame.

Directly helping victims is a totally different activity, that seems to engage a very different set of moral muscles. Your mental state is more a high of "niceness", as opposed to the troubled and combative mental state of campaigning. And the mental state of helping also seems to require some effort at self-mastery: to do strenuous things, to sacrifice your time and money.

The mental state of campaigning seems less about self-mastery, and more of a "let it rip" catharsis. You can add every insult you can think of to your letter to the editor, if it helps sharpen the point.

And so the Jurassic campaign imperative changes our relationship to anger. Anger was classically considered one of the seven deadly sins, and indeed there's something sinfully tempting about it: cathartically flexing on someone, calling them names, bonding with friends against a shared enemy.

Anger seems to play little role in private charity, but it's central to Jurassic campaigning. Outrage and shaming are key.

The existence of the blocked political fix makes anger a virtue. Our inhibitions against anger are dropped, which is another of these circular cognitive effects. Anger shows your commitment, it engages the passion you need, and the villains totally deserve it.

As an activity, Jurassic campaigning is much less like directly helping victims, and much more like doing what pastors of supernatural religion did—at least the part of their jobs that involved teaching against sin. Pastors try to reshape their congregations and their society to correct sin. Protestant pastors especially had streamlined away most of the supernatural Catholic trappings, so what they did was almost purely Exhort, Educate, Shame. Which is basically what campaigning is.

This made the transition from supernatural religion to secular Jurassic panics so easy for Protestant pastors like Theodore Parker (1810-1860). Pastors being put out of work by Locke's privatization of the supernatural could simply shift their preaching to grand secular harms like slavery and alcohol.

The Puritan worldview was something like:

• an enlightened Elect, surrounded by a

• depraved and fallen humanity, who must be evangelized to accept certain

• easy yet all-important mental positions, like "Do you trust in Christ alone for your personal salvation?"

This is quite close to the Jurassic Pattern, isn't it?

• enlightened Decent people, surrounded by

• warped villain minds (hate, racism, wilful science denial), who must be made to see certain

• easy yet all-important mental positions (on government fixes)

Harvard was founded as a Puritan seminary in 1636, and you might say it’s been continuously in this posture ever since.

Isn't it strange that "blocked government fixes" can get us so close to Puritanism? The mental position is all-important (since voting) yet easy (government spreading of costs).

I'll give Theodore Parker the last word because he so vividly conveys what capture by the Jurassic Pattern can feel like, to one inside it. As he sees it, he is a "minister of absolute religion", far above "mere priest[s]" who are concerned with supernatural bullshit like baptism and communion:

In all this you see how different is the position and function of the minister of absolute religion from that of the mere priest. In Russia the few hold down the many, and the priest says nothing against it. He is there only to appease God, to administer salvation, to communicate Scripture; not to teach morality and piety. In America the many hold down the few,—the twenty millions [free] chain the three [slaves]; and the priest says nothing against it. What does he care? He goes on appeasing the wrath of God, administering salvation, explaining and communicating Scripture, and turns round and says: “This is all just as it should be, a part of the revelation, salvation, and sacraments too; come unto me, and believe, and be baptized with water." But the minister of absolute religion is to hold a different speech. He is to say: “My brethren, hold there! Stop your appeasing of God!—wait till God is angry. Stop your imputing of righteousness! There is no salvation in that. Stop your outcry of 'Believe, believe, believe?' Turn round and put an end to this hateful oppression, and tread it under your feet." (Of the Position and Duties of a Minister, 1852)

But Parker is not a revolutionary bravely fighting the Russian tsar. He's just agitating for political positions from the safety of a liberal system (the America of 1852).

Political campaigning seems so cosmically important to him ("minister of absolute religion") because the government fixes are blocked. Per Jurassic logic, James Carville is exalted above Jonathan Edwards.

I hope again you can sense something like a virus operating here, that targets liberal systems specifically.

Summary

What I've tried to lay out here is a cognitive model of our big political panics: something that could explain the scorched earth Good/Evil religiosity they generate.

I think they trace back to an anti-liberal Jurassic Seed, that says no decent opposition is possible: the atrocity is so clearly intolerable, and the government fix is so undeniably worthwhile, that only villains warped by sin can oppose it.

If you can believe the Seed, it rationally leads you take Orwellian and Machiavellian actions. But the Seed itself seems rather improbable.

I think we are able to believe the Seed because certain Circular Effects kick in, like anger affecting our cognitive processing, and spinners primarily spinning themselves.

Insidiously, these effects create an anti-liberal mindset by exploiting liberalism's own structures: structures like voting, free speech, and government spreading of costs. Almost as if we are dealing with a virus that targets liberal systems specifically.

Relation to Larger Model

This viral Jurassic Pattern plugs into a larger model of modernity I've been working on. It's shown on the lower right of this diagram as the "Panic Hack", where it's downstream of five other core intuitions about reality ("hacks") we had to start believing first:

I call them "hacks" because they're just vague but compelling intuitions that don't stand up to much logical scrutiny.

The model claims modernity gets created by these six core intuitions. Locke shared five of them, and the sixth (the Panic Hack) is a permanent breach of his system.

If you don't like modernity, you need to find a way to negate one of one or more of these core intuitions. They're basically an incoherent ramshackle, but in the absence of a credible supernatural they're the cleanest dirty shirt.

I hesitate to speak for them, but I believe classical liberals like Andrew Sullivan and Michael Shellenberger want to reverse the Panic Hack only, and retain the rest of Locke's intuitions. They want to unwind Jurassic Locke 2.0 and return us to Locke 1.0.

The libertarian in me would love to see that—and it would certainly seem a vast improvement from where we are—but I wonder if it's possible.

Without the supernatural, I'm not sure Locke 1.0 has the resources to stop Jurassic panics from forming. Locke 1.0 sees an endless search for truth that can never finally arrive. How potent is that vision, relative to big secular harms with clear villains? Will Locke's procedural free speech always strike us as niggling fine print, next to something like a giant "Never again" sign at Auschwitz?

For better or worse these Jurassic panics are our apex moral predators now. They burst out of Locke's coolly rational liberal system with its forceless privatized God, and they've been roaring their secular moral absolutes down on us ever since.

Can we put these Jurassic genies back in the Locke 1.0 bottle, or do we need a new bottle?

For now I hope the better we can understand these Jurassic panics for what they are—a sort of viral cognitive hack—the better we can tame and contain them.