Markets and Communities

We told ourselves that liberal individualism would liberate the soul. But it dissolved the old anchors and offered little in return. It gave us autonomy without telos. Expression without ethic. Identity without obligation. The result isn’t a lack of community—it’s a lack of coherence. We’re surrounded by content, but starving for character.

This is ... See more

Dr. Cardona elaborates:

“We have built a civilization that distrusts spontaneous well-being. In its place, we offer

conditional worth: achievement through effort, pleasure through purchase,

enlightenment through productivity. The ecstatic is unearned, and thus feared.”

The result is a neurocultural paradox: a society addicted to stimulation, but allerg... See more

People feeling alone in their interests has always been true to a certain extent, but the internet has made it much worse. The excess of information allows you to travel down your path of interest with mad velocity. On the internet, Wonderland is recursive, with rabbit holes opening up to yet more rabbit holes; you never stop falling. And the furth... See more

People feeling alone in their interests has always been true to a certain extent, but the internet has made it much worse. The excess of information allows you to travel down your path of interest with mad velocity. On the internet, Wonderland is recursive, with rabbit holes opening up to yet more rabbit holes; you never stop falling. And the furth... See more

we underappreciated people’s attachment to place. We underappreciated the necessity of community. I think now we’re suffering the consequence of that with a lot of communities destroyed—many of them now feeling they don’t have a place in a modern economy, and don’t have a sense of identity.