Libre mente

Libertad, amor y sabiduría.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

And before Hume, Smith, and Burke, there was Locke – the quiet Englishman who built the foundation everything else rests on.

John Locke’s starting point is simple and revolutionary: every human being arrives in the world with natural rights — to life, liberty, and property — that exist before any government, any king, and any General Will. Government does not grant these rights. It is created specifically to protect them. The moment it fails that function, the contract is broken and the people may dissolve it. This sounds like Rousseau. It is the precise opposite. Rousseau’s revolution tears everything down to rebuild the perfect society from first principles. Locke’s revolution restores what was wrongly taken – it is conservative by nature, backward-looking, anchored in existing rights rather than utopian futures. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was Locke in practice: not the demolition of an order but the correction of a king who exceeded his mandate. The American Revolution of 1776 was Locke in practice again: a list of specific violations, a reluctant separation, and a new government explicitly designed to do less, not more.

The French Revolution had Rousseau. The Anglo-American tradition had Locke. The difference in outcomes was not accidental.
Just compare the faces…

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment – the real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire

The French Enlightenment and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment happened simultaneously, in the same century, reading the same books, arguing about the same questions. They reached completely opposite conclusions. One produced the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. The other produced the guillotine. This is the most important civilizational fork in modern history.

1. The French Enlightenment begins with the assumption that human beings can be improved by reason – that if you strip away the corrupting institutions of Church, tradition, and inherited authority, the natural goodness underneath will organize itself into a just society. This sounds like progress. It is a fantasy with a body count. Every attempt to implement it has required, at some point, a Committee of Public Safety to handle the people who turned out not to be naturally good enough.

2. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment begins with the opposite assumption: human beings are what they are, not what they could be if properly enlightened. Hume grounds morality in human nature as it actually operates – sympathy, habit, sentiment, the slow accumulation of social trust. Smith shows that self-interest, properly channeled, produces collective benefit without a planner. Neither man is building a utopia. Both are building with the actual material available.

3. Burke is the direct refutation, written in real time. He published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 – before the Terror, predicting it precisely – because he understood that institutions are not obstacles to human flourishing, they are its precondition. They contain accumulated wisdom — the knowledge of the dead — that cannot be recovered once destroyed. Pull society apart to improve it and you don’t get the General Will. You get Robespierre.

4. The American founders read Burke, Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu – the Frenchman who looked at England and understood what France was missing. They built a system that takes human nature as given — self-interested, power-hungry, tribal — and constructs institutions to contain those tendencies rather than assume they disappear once the right people are in charge. Checks and balances are not a design flaw. They are what you build when you don’t believe in philosopher-kings.

5. 1776 versus 1789. Same Enlightenment, same century, same vocabulary of liberty and reason. One produces a constitutional republic that has survived two and a half centuries of stress, civil war, and upheaval. The other produces, in sequence: the Terror, Napoleon, 1848, the Commune, and eventually — via Marx, who was a Frenchman in spirit if not in birth — the entire catastrophe of the twentieth century. The difference was not intelligence or intention. It was the starting assumption about human nature. Get that wrong and everything that follows is wrong with it.

6. The guillotine is not the Revolution’s failure. It is its logical conclusion. If man is naturally good and the system is corrupt, then whoever seizes the system in the name of natural goodness is licensed to do anything. The General Will cannot be wrong. Those who resist it are not opponents – they are enemies of nature itself.

7. The real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire was never a better French philosopher. It was a different civilizational tradition – one that builds with human beings as they are; that treats inherited institutions as repositories of wisdom rather than obstacles to progress; that distributes power rather than concentrating it in whoever currently claims to know the General Will. That tradition was built in Edinburgh, London, and Philadelphia. It is currently under sustained assault — from exactly the same ideas, in exactly the same form, with exactly the same confidence — that Burke watched demolish France in 1789. He was right then. He is right now.

[Classic Learning Test @CLT_Exam]

The men who founded the United States were educated on:

— Homer
— Plato
— Aristotle
— Cicero
— Plutarch

Before they built a republic...

They studied the republics that came before.

[Words & Wisdom @WordsnWisdom26]

Have more than you show, speak less than you know

—William Shakespeare,

[TheInnerSage @favourb95981873]

You are not your thoughts. You are the awareness watching them.

[TheInnerSage @favourb95981873]

Meditation is where you meet your mind. Discipline is where you reshape it."

[TheInnerSage @favourb95981873]

@philosway Growth requires release. Just as a tree doesn't cling to dead leaves, we must let go of old habits, regrets, and attachments to make room for new life and new possibilities.

[Philosway @philosway]

"Be like a tree and let the dead leaves drop."

— Rumi

[OpenIDEA @OpenIDEAae]

@philosway Self-knowledge is how you protect yourself from yourself; from your own reflexes, blind spots, and unforced errors. That keeps you from losing. Winning still needs the half Sun Tzu added: knowing the enemy you have to read.

[Natural Philosophy @Naturalphilosy]

“People who have little business are very great talkers. The less one thinks, the more one talks.”

— Montesquieu

[Stephan Baker @a_quill_a]

@OutlawsPoetic “A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe.”
Dylan Thomas

[VAN MUTOKA @vanmutoka1]

« L'humanisme est un cancer. Un être humain ne mérite ni d'être aimé ni d'être respecté du seul fait qu'il est humain ; l'amour et le respect sont des choses qui se méritent. Quant au populisme, cette quête de l'approbation des masses, source de l'ignorance, il n'est rien d'autre que la mort. » Friedrich Nietzsche

[Sudanalytics @sudanalytics_]

💔🇦🇷 DIBU MARTÍNEZ DIJO QUE ANALIZARÁ SI VA A RETIRARSE DE LA SELECCIÓN:

“Soñé con que la ganábamos de vuelta, soñé con traerla a Argentina y hacer historia una vez más.

La verdad, el dolor es difícil de explicar. Queda reflexionar sobre muchas cosas y ver cómo se sigue hacia adelante y SI ES MOMENTO DE DAR UN PASO AL COSTADO.

Lo siento mucho. Realmente intenté dar lo máximo para ayudar a mi país y a mis compañeros”.

Durísimo.

[Libre mente @BethalManfrep]

@Atleti A la calle los argentinos del Atlético

[Jali #STOPokupas @jaliroller]

💥Zapatero delatado. Antonio Naranjo @AntonioRNaranjo "Zapatero ya está retratado para siempre, ya ha caído ese icono falsamente levantado por quienes han querido camuflar, con ese perfume barato, el hedor del vertedero político que han implantado en España" #EnBocaDeTodos

[Carlos Antonio Yee Poa @yee_poa92941]

POLICÍA LLAMA LADRÓN
A UN OFICIAL DE LA MARINA 🎖️

[Vive con Propósito. @PropositoyVida]

Viktor Frankl descubrió algo extraordinario en las peores circunstancias imaginables.

Cuando una persona conserva un propósito...

Todavía conserva una dirección.

Y quien conserva una dirección siempre tiene una razón para dar un paso más.

Incluso cuando todo parece perdido.

[Mujer de libros @mujerdelibros]

La verdad nos hace libres, pero primero exige la valentía de sostenerla aun cuando el mundo decida no entenderla.

[🏛 Filosofía Estoica 🏛 @FilosofiaStoica]

Dos comerciantes cruzaban el mismo desierto.

Uno se quejaba continuamente del calor.

El otro aprovechaba cada parada para estudiar el terreno y aprender el camino.

Cuando ambos regresaron años después, uno solo recordaba el sufrimiento.

El otro había encontrado una ruta que le permitió prosperar.

Las circunstancias eran idénticas.

La mirada nunca lo fue.