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May 5, 2025
** THE TAO OF LIBERTY
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** Is Anyone Home Anymore?
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It’s a Tuesday in Fort Collins, and I’m at one of my favorite tea houses—the kind with exposed brick and tea sommeliers who take their knowledge of green tea, oolong, and other tasty beverages on the menu very seriously.
After a long stretch locked into my computer screen, I glanced up from my notebook and did a slow scan of the room. I counted thirteen patrons—every single one of us staring at a screen, void of any social connection. Not a single pair of eyes meeting across a table. Just each of us sealed inside our own glowing rectangle, physically present but mentally elsewhere.
One couple, clearly on a (maybe Tinder) date, were both scrolling their separate phones in total silence, sitting close enough to hold hands and apparently seeing no reason to. I wanted to walk over, very gently, and ask, Is this going well for you? Because from over here, it looks like you are both attending different funerals. But I refrained because quite frankly, as a raging extrovert, I am working on my boundaries.
But I sat with that image in my head for a long time. What I felt was not judgment but something closer to grief. Because I remember, vividly, viscerally, in my whole body, what it felt like when rooms were alive.
I am here to share with you, with everything I have learned from Lao Tzu to Confucius to thirty-plus years of showing up in rooms and betting on people: What we have traded away in terms of in-person engagement is not a small thing. The genuinely thrilling news, though, is that we are beginning to want it back. And that in itself is a revolutionary act.
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SELF-GOVERNMENT
** Mightier Than Kings: Order Without Thrones or Armies
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Merchants and stateless societies built order without kings, proving cooperation can rival power.
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SOCIALISM
** Mamdani Slapped in the Face with Reality
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Big promises hit hard limits fast, exposing how quickly reality tests political storytelling.
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