Novac08

@Leo Gura I don’t think anyone expects epistemic perfection, Leo, and I appreciate your acknowledgment that you could model your process better publicly. I can only describe how this has looked from my perspective over the years. When I first discovered Actualized, I was a beginner in many of these subjects. Your videos genuinely helped me with practical psychology, epistemology, self-deception, and philosophy. I never quite put you on a pedestal, but I certainly regarded you as someone who had figured out a great deal. The first cracks in that impression appeared around your political commentary. I’ve lived in four countries, studied politics and political philosophy at university, and maintained a lifelong interest in political systems. If anything, those experiences have made me less certain, more appreciative of conflicting perspectives, and more comfortable sitting with contradictions rather than rushing toward conclusions. So I found it strange to see you sharing The Young Turks and other YouTube political junk on your blog and forum. It felt like a nutrition expert eating at 7-Eleven, not only thinking himself immune to its effects, but somehow thinking it was worth sharing with others. Around that time, you also released a video titled something like “The Deepest Political Analysis You’ll Ever Hear.” It reminded me of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, with chapters like “Why I Am So Wise” and “Why I Write Such Good Books.” I’ve watched your political views evolve over the years, and some of those habits seem to have changed. But the extraordinary confidence has remained remarkably constant, even in areas where I perceive blind spots. That punctured something for me. I don’t particularly object to intellectual grandiosity. I find Nietzsche’s self-descriptions amusing, and sometimes yours too. Perhaps you’ve both understood things that others haven’t. That’s part of why I keep reading. I also recognize that teaching publicly, especially when constantly challenged, may require a certain decisiveness. But this brings me back to the sealed room. In your philosophy post, you emphasize that your own mind can deceive you, that your philosophy is no more immune to bias than anyone else’s, and that recognizing error quickly is essential. That’s a profound commitment to epistemic humility, and one I admire. Yet when disagreement so often seems to confirm that the other person has further to go, it’s difficult to see how that humility informs your engagement with others. I’m not asking you to perform self-doubt publicly, nor do I doubt that you question yourself privately. It’s simply that the certainty and dismissiveness you model seem at odds with the principles you articulate so forcefully. And for me, that inconsistency cheapens the insights rather than strengthening them.

I really like what Leo wrote in his recent philosophy post, but I don’t think he models these principles in his own behavior. What I see instead is a kind of sealed room around his philosophy: agreement confirms his insights, while disagreement confirms that the other person has further to go. This seems to extend beyond his claims about enlightenment to his views on politics, technology, and society more broadly. He models epistemic certainty rather than epistemic humility, and it’s hard to see how genuine criticism or error correction can penetrate a framework in which he always ends up being right. The strange thing is that he continues to produce thoughtful pieces like this, which is why I keep coming back to his blog. But I find it off-putting that he can articulate these principles so well while seemingly exempting himself from the very standards he advocates.

Wasn’t there a video where Leo discussed how all of society was a cult. Perhaps that term has been used a bit too loosely.

@TruthFreedom was there something in particular that you read which catalyzed this? I’m trying to read more from the Bible but have mostly stuck to the Torah for the moment. Any particular New Testament book that helped you more others

What’s most striking in the videos is the contrast — the architecture shows how beautiful Cuba once was, but today it’s crumbling. Nothing new is added, nothing is maintained, and the country seems to survive on the slow decay of its past before communism.

If Cuba’s education system works, why don’t they participate in PISA or other independent assessments.

@Davino In modern medicine, training without access to technology isn’t really training — doctors can’t be “world-class” without labs, imaging, and medicines. On education, Cuba doesn’t join PISA or any independent tests, so all we have are government-reported numbers, which are, err, questionable. And honestly, just listen to Cubans on YouTube — it’s hard to conclude you’re hearing a highly educated society.

I’m happy we agree that conserving identity isn’t the same as asserting raw dominance. I also don’t think any living culture can stay wholly ‘apolitical’; it coasts for a bit, like a car rolling after the gas is cut, but eventually it needs public choices to stay alive. Thanks for the exchange—gave me plenty to chew on.

@Leo Gura I keep circling back to the same snag: if every time a leader grabs all the levers we call it “conservative,” the word ends up meaning nothing but “authoritarian.” Lenin blows up monasteries, Mao melts temple bells, Pol Pot bans the calendar—none of that is conserving an old order; it’s bulldozing it to build a brand-new hierarchy. What drops out of view is the everyday motive to keep fragile inheritances alive. Spend an afternoon in parts of Andalusia, a Mexican pueblo mágico, Kyoto’s old streets, or Istanbul’s historic quarters and you can feel the beauty and wisdom of tradition: not just the buildings, but the recipes, dances, dialects, poems, music, church liturgies—even the traditional understandings of family and gender that knit a place together. When those start disappearing, many people defend them not because they crave domination but because life without them feels thin. You collect old African masks. Even if you can’t trace each one to its exact workshop, you sense they carry something old andmeaningful. If a government plan bulldozed every mask-maker’s stall for a generic food court, I doubt you’d shrug. Maybe that reflex is “conservative,” but it isn’t the same as seizing the radio tower and jailing the opposition. Out of curiosity, can you point to a movement that stayed egalitarian, liberal, and genuinely self-sacrificing all the way through? Scandinavia comes closest to me—yet even there the model rests on deep Lutheran ethics and a tight-knit national story. Now that large-scale immigration is testing those shared habits, the region is wrestling with illiberal currents of its own. That seems to confirm the point: the liberal framework worked while it was anchored in a culture someone first had to conserve. I’m still not convinced that power consolidation automatically equals “conservative,” but I’m open to the example that will change my mind.

@Leo Gura— I like the way you track who’s grabbing for power and why, but when the Nazis get dropped straight into the “conservative” bucket, a lot of texture disappears. They torched Marxist, liberal, and Jewish works—yet Stalin’s censors destroyed “deviationist” Marxists and liberal socialists, and Mao’s Red Guards ripped up “bourgeois” books. Silencing rival ideas isn’t a left-or-right signal; it’s an authoritarian reflex. Hitler didn’t merely polish up the Kaiser’s old order; he blew it up. State-directed industry, mass propaganda, youth re-education, a messianic foreign policy, even animal-rights laws—bits of tradition as costume over a radical, utopian project. Many old-guard conservatives supported him, only to be sidelined or shot once he had power. If Nazis file under “conservative,” where do we shelve the Committee of Public Safety, the Khmer Rouge, or Mao’s China? They weren’t conserving anything, but they were every bit as illiberal. A single liberal-conservative rail can’t carry that load; you need a second axis—authoritarian vs. liberal—to see why Nazi and Stalinist regimes land in the same quadrant despite opposite economic rhetoric. That extra axis also explains the unease some on the right feel about Trump. Think Ross-Douthat–style religious conservatives who warn that allying with him is “Saruman cutting a deal with Sauron,” or Wall-Street donors who worry strong-man politics will trash stable institutions they depend on. They see a Pyrrhic victory: defeating their rivals while adopting tactics that corrode the norms they meant to preserve. So if far-left excesses are illiberal yet not conservative, what do we call them? And if they need a second axis, maybe the Nazi example does too. Curious where you land on this.

That makes sense, which is why you don't see these countries bringing dictatorships back into power. There's order in a police state, but most people aren't willing to take a pay cut, which is why communist and fascist systems are often imposed rather than voted in. It’s not like you see East Germans clamouring to rebuild the wall 😅

Yes, but they’ve voted in the AFD instead of the far left.

@Husseinisdoingfine It's interesting—you do hear this opinion in Argentina and Uruguay as well. It's not a popular or politically correct perspective, but you do hear people on the right say that the streets were clean and safe under fascism, with no graffiti, etc. I've never been to Chile, but I hear Pinochet still has significant support, likely due to his economic reforms that stabilized the country despite his regime's brutal human rights abuses, which makes it telling that he was apprehended outside of Chile.

I'm sorry to say this, as I admire Europe, but I believe Europe is at greater risk of facing significant challenges than the US. An aging workforce, precarious energy security, a lack of military preparedness to safeguard energy supplies, and rising welfare costs will all act as headwinds, keeping Europe behind the U.S. for many years to come. Additionally, there is increasing pressure against one potential solution to some of these issues: immigration. The rise of anti-immigrant parties in Europe suggests that governments are likley to move further away from this option. Even the ECB recently published a report highlighting how European productivity is falling behind the U.S., largely due to slower adoption of digital technologies and a stagnant industrial structure. Europe's lag in the tech sector, in particular, has widened the productivity gap over the years, with the U.S. far outpacing Europe in innovation and economic growth. None of Europe’s problems have easy fixes. For example, building up a military would require taking resources away from healthcare. The US, on the other hand, has significant problems but no energy/food/defense vulnerabilities, and its issues are ones that can be dealt with over time. Finally, while Marxism can be useful for analyzing systemic contradictions (which is why it’s so popular in academia), if you think Varoufakis is going to get us out of this, I’m afraid the likelier scenario is that you’ll need to relearn some hard lessons from the 20th century about what happens when a genuine left takes power. For many Latin Americans in the US, those lessons have left scars that will stay with them for life. Here's the ECB report:https://commission.europa.eu/topics/strengthening-european-competitiveness/eu-competitiveness-looking-ahead_en

After communist revolutions, the genuine believers are often the first to go, as their ideals clash with the new leadership's need for control. (See Stalin's purges, Castro's sidelining of Che, and the Cultural Revolution)