2025

THOUGH WE’D SOMEHOW…:

Frank Herbert’s Amazing ‘Dune’ Quote: ‘All Governments Suffer a Recurring Problem’ (Jon Miltimore, Mar 20, 2025, The Daily Economy)

Recently, I came across a Frank Herbert quote I hadn’t heard before, one far less known.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

It’s a penetrating thought, and when I first read the words, I wondered if they were too good to be true. Most of us at one time or another have seen a quote online attributed to Morgan Freeman, George Washington, Robin Williams, or some other famous or influential person only to find after a two-minute investigation the quote is pure fiction or falsely attributed.

This is not the case with Herbert’s quote on power. Even though I had never heard it before, it appears in Chapterhouse: Dune (1985), the final book in the series, and one widely considered the weakest of the Dune novels. (This might explain why I didn’t read the book and was unfamiliar with the quote.)

Herbert’s words on power stood out to me for two reasons. First, it somewhat turns on its head Lord Acton’s famous line that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Unlike Acton, Herbert was not saying individuals are corrupted by power, but that power draws corrupt people.

Second, Herbert’s line is deeply Hayekian. In his magnum opus The Road to Serfdom, the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek dedicated an entire chapter to the idea of the worst men in society rising to the top (it’s literally called “Why the Worst Get on Top”).

In that chapter, Hayek describes at length how centralized systems elevate individuals to lead them, and concludes that those possessing the strongest desire to organize economic and social life to their plan tend to have the fewest scruples about exercising power over others.

“To undertake the direction of the economic life of people with widely divergent ideals and values,” Hayek wrote, “the best intentions cannot prevent one from being forced to act in a way which to some of those affected must appear highly immoral.”

…managed to avoid electing psychopaths until Donald.

THE GLOBE IS A NEIGHBORHOOD:

Localism, Immigration, and the Ordo Amoris (Logan Hoffman, March 12, 2025, Front Porch Republic)

I am skeptical, however, of the way this principle has been applied by the current administration to immigration policies. Augustine makes clear the circumstances in which this principle is to be applied: “Suppose that you had plenty of something which had to be given to someone in need of it but could not be given to two people, and you met two people, neither of whom had a greater need or a closer relationship to you than the other: You could do nothing more just than to choose by lot the person to whom you should give what could not be given to both.” One is morally justified, according to Augustine, in honoring one’s commitments to family and community, perhaps to the exclusion of others if resources are limited. If one has resources to give, however, then one should give first to those God has determined, as though by lot, to live closest to you.

If the United States were in a qualitatively similar situation to this example, in which we, societally, did not have plenty, then perhaps we would be justified in denying aid to foreign nations in order to aid those nearest to us. Personally, though, I am inclined to view America (collectively, not individually) as having plenty to give. Our national debt may indeed be increasing at a rather alarming rate, but the primary causes are not profligate generosity to distant people. We spend far too much on our own comfort and in pursuit of our own interests to claim that our purported love must select those nearby. That is, however, a prudential judgment and others may well judge differently.

The real difference between Augustine’s hypothetical and America’s situation, in my view, is that immigrants are already our neighbors. Augustine’s suggestion is that we allow God to direct our finite love by bringing certain people into our orbit. By his providential hand, God has done exactly that; many of our current neighbors and friends, those nearest to us, are those most affected by these shifts in immigration policy. Precisely according to Augustine’s ordo amoris, we are called to act with love toward our immigrant neighbors, not to differentiate who among our neighbors is deserving of our love and aid.

MAYBE JUST BE A DECENT HUMAN BEING?:

Most Men Don’t Want To Be Heroes (And That’s Okay): Despite the self-pity of some, there has never been a better time to be a man (Toby Buckle, 17 Mar 2025, Liberal Currents)

When I was much younger, I saved someone from drowning. They had (possibly while intoxicated) gone into a rough and choppy sea, at night, and were struggling to stay above water. Worse, the tide was pulling them out. I went in after them and, with some effort, brought them back to shore. As we got close, an older man I did not know also came in to help and, between the two of us, we dragged them out. Exhausted and freezing cold, but safe.

It might surprise someone like Arnade to learn that this has not proved an especially important moment in my life. I’m glad I did it. I received profuse thanks from the person in question and general plaudits from my peers (which Arnade imagines all young men need). And then, well… life moves on. Other things happen to you. It’s not something that’s provided any great moral lesson for me. Nor is it important to my sense of identity—this is the first time I’ve mentioned it publicly, not out of humility; I honestly just don’t really think about it.

I’ve also provided support to people in less dramatic, more long-term, more female-coded ways. For instance, assisting a loved one through a disability. Or being, with my family, a carer for a close relative with Alzheimer’s. There is absolutely no doubt the latter have given more meaning to me, developed my character more, and have strengthened my relationships with others in a way more traditional ‘heroics’ couldn’t.

Providing long-term care for someone is an endless series of small decisions to prioritize the other person, most in themselves trivial and quickly forgotten. Rather than one moment in which you have to master yourself, you have to decide to continually live that value. And it improves you. It will teach to be kind, it will teach you how to care about someone in a way that taking a one-time risk won’t. You will feel frustration with people for things that are not their fault and have to move past that. You’ll then feel guilt—often quite profound guilt—for having felt that frustration. You will learn—and you will be forced to learn—how to forgive others and yourself. All of this will be mixed with moments of real joy and real connection. I can’t speak for everyone, but these have been among the most important parts of my life.

On a societal level, if there is a crisis of acts of service not being recognised it is of this latter, female-coded, kind. Despite Arnade’s claim that heroics are now (somehow) looked down on, whenever I’ve done something (even something quite minor) that fits this male-coded frame, I’ve received praise and recognition. In Arnade’s own story—which he takes as an exemplar of his thesis—the ‘hero’ (who retrieved a drunk from a locked bathroom) was bought drinks and made to feel good about his actions. (“he strutted around like the cat’s meow.”) In contrast, looking after a relative in cognitive decline can be very isolating. Despite it being the much more common experience, many carers feel profoundly alone. Finally, as societies age, more and more of us are going to need to fill this role.

There is not the same structural need for an army of men pulling people out of locked bathrooms or choppy seas. That’s not the point, Arnade might say—men need that, and without it we’ll be forlorn, miserable, useless mopes. But will we? For most of us, a true emergency rescue moment might happen once or twice throughout your life. You want to meet the moment, but I think it will be challenging to build a stable identity around.

It’s perfectly normal to want to be the hero of your own story, but imagine how insecure (unmanly) you have to be to demand others pretend you heroic?

HE WAS ONLY SUPPOSED TO HATE MUSLIMS!:

He voted for Trump. Now his wife sits in an ICE detention center. (Lauren Villagran, Mar. 16th, 2025, USA Today)

Bradley Bartell and Camila Muñoz had a familiar small-town love story, before they collided with immigration politics.

They met through mutual friends, had a first date at the local steakhouse, married after two years and were saving to buy a house and have kids. Muñoz was already caring for Bartell’s now 12-year-old son as her own.

But last month, on their way home to Wisconsin after honeymooning in Puerto Rico, an immigration agent pulled Muñoz aside in the airport.

“Are you an American citizen?” asked the agent. She answered no, she wasn’t. She’s from Peru. But she and her husband had taken the legal steps so that one day she might get U.S. citizenship.

Millions of Americans, including Bartell, had voted for President Donald Trump’s promise to crack down on “criminal illegal immigrants.” But eight weeks in, the mass deportation effort has rapidly expanded to include immigrants whose application for legal status in the country is under review.

WHY CONSERVATIVE REGARD FOR COOLIDGE IS MISPLACED:

The dark parallels between 1920s America and today’s political climate (Alex Green, 3/10/25, The Conversation)

Other Americans were concerned about the possible rise of communism in the U.S., as well as the arrival of many immigrants. This led extremists to introduce and implement hate-based policies at the federal and state level that targeted nonwhite immigrants and disabled people.

Among the most significant results of that political moment was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, a restrictive immigration policy that, among other changes, prohibited immigration from Asia.

Another pivotal movement was the Supreme Court’s 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, which affirmed that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize intellectually and developmentally disabled people.

The Johnson-Reed Act prompted a major shift in American immigration policy, based on the fear of something that former President Theodore Roosevelt and others called “race suicide.”

The law introduced rigid restrictions keeping people out of the country who were not from Northern and Western Europe. The immigration quotas that it established would continue to be enforced into the 1960s.

The U.S. politicians who lobbied for this law were successful because they supported their effort by presenting evidence that showed purportedly scientific proof that almost all people in the world were biologically inferior to a group they called the Nordic Race – meaning people from Northern Europe – and their American descendants, who formed a group they called the “American Race.”

By restricting immigration from all other groups, these legislators believed they were counterbalancing a crushing period where war and pandemic had killed off what they saw as the country’s best people.

Different groups preyed on Americans’ grief about the war and pandemic and directed it against minority groups.

From Maine to California, a revived Ku Klux Klan attracted millions of followers with its belief that white people were superior to all others, and that Black people should remain enslaved. At the same time, a group of scientists, doctors and psychologists found enormous success in persuading the public that there were scientific reasons why hatred and discrimination needed to be incorporated into American government.

Their proof was something called eugenics, a pseudoscience which argued that humans had to use advanced technology and medicine to get people with good traits to reproduce while stopping those with bad traits from having the opportunity to do so.

Harry Laughlin, a eugenicist based at a research laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, was one of this movement’s most vocal representatives.

Laughlin worked for several different eugenics research organizations, and this helped him become successful at creating propaganda supporting eugenics that influenced public policy. He then gained a spot as an expert eugenics adviser to Congress in the early 1920s. With his position, Laughlin then provided the pseudoscientific data that gave the supporters of Johnson-Reed the claims they needed to justify passing the measure.

Nazism is just the German version of the science of American Progressives.