The World Isn't More Complicated. Just More Noisy.
Why Most People Don't Actually Want to Be Free
The world’s different now. Or, is it?
Noise is not complexity. It’s the illusion of it.
People love to say: "Sure, maybe that worked back then. Nice ideas. But the world’s different now." Especially in response to natural law, public virtue, and personal sovereignty.
The reflex is to shrug ‘em off. To dodge the uncomfortable truths that reveal the fracture in today’s world.
It’s easier to think that our time is more complicated and that it demands unique—and equally complicated—solutions. And, if we’re being honest, it’s comforting to think that our own confusion stems from complication—from that which is beyond our control.
But the world isn’t more complicated. It’s just more noisy—more layered with systems built to confuse you about what is.
Natural law. Public virtue. Personal sovereignty.
These aren’t relics of a simpler time. They’re anchors in a storm of invented complexity.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said that only ignorant men ask questions that wise men answered thousands of years ago. We’d be wise to understand that.
Natural law is not some arcane philosophy. It’s the moral architecture woven into the very fabric of the universe that makes self-government possible and liberty sustainable. It’s the belief that right and wrong exist independent of popular opinion or political fashion—transcending time, culture, or government decree. That truth is real, and that we can know it—not through credentials, but through reason, conscience, and common sense. Things available to all of us.
Natural law is not elitist or academic. It doesn’t require advanced study. It’s self-evident. It’s accessible to everyone. And it forms the moral foundation for any society that hopes to remain free. From it we derive the concepts of unalienable rights and duties, habeas corpus, no taxation without representation, the right to contract, limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, and many others. Even the idea of sound money stems directly from natural law. It reminds you you’re not God: you didn’t create yourself—and you’re not free to redefine reality without consequence. You can ignore it, but you can’t escape it.
But natural law doesn’t work in a vacuum. It relies on something we now seem deeply uncomfortable talking about: virtue.
Public virtue is civilizational glue. It’s the willingness of individuals to do the right thing—not because they're told to, but because they choose to. It’s choosing duty over indulgence. Responsibility over convenience. Conscience over chaos. In short, it’s what makes self-government work.
John Adams said it plainly: “Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He wasn’t being pious. He was being practical. If we lose virtue, we don’t get freedom—we get bureaucracy. Control. Surveillance. Endless laws trying to compensate for the character we no longer have.
A selfish and corrupt people are incapable of self-government.
You can’t legislate virtue. It has to come from within. And when it doesn’t, the state steps in to fill the void.
Fast forward a few generations and here we are—tangled in a web of laws, regulations, and bureaucratic controls designed to protect us from each other, rather than merely protecting our rights because we’re capable of the rest ourselves.
Let’s be honest: We’ve failed to govern ourselves.
That failure didn’t start with bad policy. It started with the abandonment of principle. What we once called “self-evident truths,” we now treat as controversial. Many can’t even name them—let alone defend them. And if we no longer recognize a transcendent moral order, then we no longer understand where our rights come from. If rights don’t come from a Creator, they come from men. And men can chip away at them. Can take them away.
That’s how you lose a republic.
The world is currently experiencing waves of populism—ordinary people who feel their concerns are disregarded by entrenched power. Populism can win elections. It can even disrupt the tyranny of its moment. But it’s terrible at achieving sovereignty for one simple reason: It requires trust in a leader to represent the populist masses. Oddly enough, that leader is almost always from the very class that they oppose.
Rather than a movement of inner strength and empowerment—a recognition of fundamental, eternal truths—populism is born of a frustration with both perceived and actual weakness and seeks to thrust the burden onto someone deemed capable of “winning” for the people.
It’s the logical result of people who long for a return to what they know in their gut is “right,” but are so far separated from their sovereign nature that they erroneously believe that other men need to either allow or provide for their liberty.
Populism is a symptom—not a solution. Liberty stems from personal sovereignty.
Despite the popular connotation, personal sovereignty isn’t prepper jargon. It’s the refusal to be colonized—by narrative, by algorithm, by fear—because you know you’re made for more. It’s what makes you a participant in truth instead of a subject of power.
Throughout history, those on the side of control have continually sought to separate us from our innate sovereignty for one very simple reason: it works.
We embrace the individual—and defend it from its current lies and inversion—precisely because we’re comfortable with paradox and need not fall prey to it. We understand the paradoxical beauty of the individual as the smallest minority, made in the image of its creator, and endowed with unalienable rights, responsibilities, and opportunities. And finding fulfillment in communion. In sacrificial service—both to humanity and to that which transcends it. Ultimately, to God.
We can reflect on the wisdom that’s come before us and recognize the voluntary embrace of discipline as the path to authentic freedom. Liberty. Personal sovereignty.
Personal sovereignty is, of course, only experienced through that which is good—through doing that which is good. Acquiescing to our own desires is the very definition of slavery.
Timeless principles don’t become obsolete in a world like ours. They become urgent.
Imagine if America’s founders had forgone the timeless truth of natural law and its ensuing fruits. Had dismissed them as outdated. Shrugged them off as “maybe good for the Greeks or the Romans, but our world is more complicated.” Had the arrogance to assert that “things are different now”—as if the world can move beyond the Law of Nature and Nature’s God.
Scale doesn’t require centralization. And complexity doesn’t demand coercion. The size of our problems can never justify elite control—which is why what’s really being discussed is our refusal to trust people with truth and responsibility.
The post-War era has reached the end of the line. The old world—the only one we’ve all lived and operated under in our lifetimes—is collapsing. And so it seems a good time to remind ourselves that there’s no such thing as evolving past timeless truth.
Natural law. Public virtue. Personal sovereignty. These truths are the basis of liberty.
We’ve come to acknowledge tyranny as the opposite of liberty. And if we’re measuring on a philosophical or moral axis, I suppose that’s true. Tyranny is loud. Understandable. Its mere mention the world over as liberty’s opposite triggers moral clarity and rebellion.
But what if instead we measure a different axis: one that’s structural or operational. After all, freedom isn’t only lost under a soldier’s boot or a dictator’s seizing of power. Today’s enemies of tyranny wear a badge of expertise and hide behind procedural code.
In our time, the real opposite of liberty isn’t overt tyranny, it’s far more insidious: the administrative state, aka administrative tyranny. A sprawling, impersonal bureaucracy that manages every detail of life in the name of protection, efficiency, or—my personal favorite—abundance.
This is why, while the current rhetoric across the West is framed in terms of freedom, the real fight is below the surface for control of the administrative state. It’s post-War uniparty vs Silicon Valley-led technocracy.
The uniparty defends the legacy institutions of post-War American hegemony—our global financial systems, military alliances, and elite bureaucracies—while the technocrats build parallel systems rooted in data, automation, and behavioral control. One sells freedom through flags and diplomacy. The other, through frictionless design and convenience. But make no mistake: both demand your submission.
Administrative tyranny is the millions of tiny, embedded, automated judgments, each too small to resist but together inescapable. No one orders your silence. No one bans your movement. Instead, you’re flagged, filtered, rate-limited, and “temporarily restricted.” You haven’t been arrested—simply caught in an endless loop of compliance. One that feels like freedom.
It’s far more effective than brute force because it doesn’t awaken defiance. It induces submission. Comfort.
You aren’t being punished, just . . . processed. Power no longer arrives at the barrel of a gun. It arrives as a software update. A revised policy. Perhaps, a polite email informing you that your account has been reviewed and “does not meet our guidelines.”
And so, unnoticed and unresisted, you wander further down the path of the feudalization of everything, where rights become privileges, and privileges depend on compliance—until the idea of liberty feels naive, quaint, even dangerous.
Liberty, as an offspring of natural law, inevitably results in a government that sits below us, while an administrative state by its very definition must sit above. You cannot pair opposites. And it’s a fool’s errand to try.
Will America—and the West—somehow choose the path of freedom and build what’s next on a foundation of first principles and its people as sovereign individuals? True internal strength.
Or will that strength continue to elude us? Have we become a people that prioritizes comfort and economic gains over liberty? Are we even willing to have that conversation?
These questions raise another: why liberty is such a hard sell these days. And I’d posit it goes back to the idea of complexity.
Today’s complexity is often just engineered dependency. Liberty requires that you bear the weight of decisions, tradeoffs, and uncertainty. That’s terrifying in a world that trains people from birth to outsource authority.
In this age of global pandemics, war anxiety, and financial crises, how often have you heard something akin to: “Better a guiding hand than total chaos.” One quick glance around confirms we’re not en-masse currently a people capable of true self-governance. But rather than look to change that fact, the fear of chaos primes us to accept restrictions as a reasonable sacrifice.
We’ve raised entire generations in managed systems and perverted the definition of community from something voluntary and beautiful into a socialist, submissive collective. Algorithms flatten dissent, while schools train obedience via what to think rather than foster curiosity by teaching how to think.
The result? Most don’t realize they’re not free. Don’t realize the invisible cage they’re in. And it’s hard to long for freedom if you think you’re already free.
Liberty is now countercultural. There are, of course, oft-discussed structural and psychological reasons—the intentional downgrading of education that results in a lack of understanding of negative liberties, the commandeering and inversion of our language (which I discuss extensively in my recent book), cognitive bias, the loss of virtues that liberty depends on, the rise of collective identity and its role as a primary axis, moral argument fatigue, and, of course, globalism with its transnational problem solving emphasis that prioritizes control over subsidiarity and ultimately erodes faith in all things individual and local.
Liberty demands responsibility—and we’ve built a culture that fears it and rejects it outright.
Sovereignty is grounded in purpose. But ours is a culture that elevates identity over telos. Desires over sacrifice. Hence, the ubiquitous meaning crisis. Without an anchoring why, we humans seek belonging, not liberty or fulfillment of our transcendent role as individuals. It’s the reason we join movements, tribes, and systems that offer security—even if those systems enslave us.
Tyranny, after all, wears the mask of care. Coercion and dependency are now sold as compassion. Control is justified in the name of health and safety. This is no accident. When power comes wrapped in moral language, resistance doesn’t just look rebellious, it looks immoral.
Which brings us to why most today aren’t choosing between freedom and tyranny. At least not always consciously. They’re choosing between comfort and consequence. And, not surprisingly, comfort is winning.
We all know the old axiom: A population that’s anxious, fragmented, and demoralized—or, better yet, simply blissfully unaware—is easier to manage. Easier to redirect. Easier to break.
When we can’t reason clearly, read widely, or think deeply, we become easy to manipulate—easy to convince to trade freedom for false promises of safety. We lose the basics: logic, literacy, and civic awareness. And we get a world that feels—and is—upside-down: not only do we struggle to understand it, but we lack the tools—the foundational truths—and the confidence to fix it.
Freedom is metabolically expensive. Thinking for yourself takes energy. So does managing risk, delaying gratification, and exercising restraint. A system that overwhelms you with stimulation, dopamine, and managed narratives is simply conditioning you to crave instant gratification—to fail the marshmallow test. And it’s conditioning you to prefer ease over effort—even at the cost of your autonomy.
This is our panopticon economy, where ubiquitous data collection conditions us to live under constant observation—even in our own homes. Did you know that your phone knows who you are at all times, even if you’ve logged out of everything and opted out of biometrics? So does everything it interacts with. Did you know that it’s mapping how you move via lidar, motion sensors, and ultra-wideband chips? Not just where you move—although that’s done in 3D down to the centimeter, even indoors—but how. Our gait is as unique as our fingerprint. It reveals our height, weight, posture, behavioral, and even psychological rhythms. And it’s being collected constantly. We’re told it powers personalization and convenience. But it’s really powering real-time identity authentication across systems that no longer need our name—or our face. In other words, they no longer need our permission for a world that’s becoming increasingly gated by verified identity.
The idea of living or acting without this oversight? That it’s possible? We’re told that’s naïve. Surely, no serious person would entertain such ideas.
Having similar effect is the pervasive propaganda of inevitability: complex problems require complex solutions. Complex crises demand centralized responses. Decentralization? Well, that’s irresponsible. Naïve.
I suppose all this is to say that liberty is a hard sell because liberty itself is hard.
If we want to be free, we must be capable of being free.
It’s about at this point in the discussion that most look for practical solutions—plans, tactics, systems. And, certainly, a renewed focus on education can’t hurt. Liberty, after all, isn’t possible without knowledge (what James Madison called its “true guardian”), because freedom requires judgment and judgment requires understanding.
But liberty doesn’t begin with blueprints. It begins with the reclamation of the self. It’s about finding the strength to speak truthfully and act with humility and restraint—even when no one is watching. Especially when no one is watching. It’s not glamorous. And it won’t go viral. But it’s how sovereignty is seeded. Without it, no system change—whether governance or technological—will lead to freedom that lasts.
Liberty is a blessing and a burden—something that must be earned through inner reformation, not granted by external permission. It requires vigilance and a readiness to defend that which has been earned, foresight to value what might be lost, linguistic clarity to cut through the noise of inverted meanings, and a willingness to embrace risk in the name of truth.
In a disoriented age, truth isn’t obvious. It has to be sought and acknowledged.
Luckily, truth doesn’t expire. It’s there. Waiting patiently to be lived.