2023: Defending Liberty Depends on Personal Growth
Reviewing the year with Viktor Frankl, Vasily Grossman and Sebastian Haffner.
On Monday, Mindset Shifts will kick off the new year with “How to Be Less of a Jerk in 2024,” an essay I hope you find of great value.
The line between personal growth and defending liberty often blurs in my writing. Both themes will continue to be prominent in 2024. I will, too, continue to present lessons from history. Coming early in 2024, watch for a new feature, Mindset Shifts U, a tremendous learning opportunity for readers.
In the meantime, according to Substack statistics, the most popular Mindset Shifts essays of 2023 are presented here. I’ve split the popular posts into Personal Growth and Upholding Liberty.
Note: If this essay is truncated in your email, you can click on "View entire message" and you'll be able to view the entire post in your email app or online.
Personal Growth:
5. Viktor Frankl on How to Make More Meaning in Your Life
In his book Prisoners of Our Thoughts, Alex Pattakos shares Frankl’s admonition, “Each of us has his own inner concentration camp… we must deal with [it] with forgiveness and patience—as full human beings; as we are and what we will become.” Reflecting on Frankl’s insight, we can ask ourselves: Have I become a prisoner of my own despair?
4. Brutal Facts, Faith and the Future of Liberty (Contains more of Frankl’s wisdom)
In his book Bonds That Make Us Free, philosopher C. Terry Warner writes, “To take up a hard, resentful attitude toward others is to have to live in a resented world, a world full of people who oppose and threaten us. How they are in our eyes is reflective of how we are.”
3. Ending Our Resistance to Life, Part 1
“You don't need any mental preparations before changing what you do… When you discover this truth not by just reading about it, but by practicing it, and experiencing it then you discover there is great of freedom in your life.” --David K. Reynolds, Constructive Living for Mental Health
2. Ending Our Resistance to Life, Part 3
There is nothing wrong with you. Everyone faces Resistance. Fear, self-doubt, and anxiety never fully go away. Resistance is always there in full force when we entertain its bad advice. Professionals realize these thoughts will fade away if they turn toward their work.
1. How to Get Over Yourself
“It takes energy and struggle to ignore how much we receive and how little we return to the world."
Defending Liberty:
5. What an Economist Knows About Crony Vaccines--A 2023 Update
It is painful to me that my profession lent legitimacy to vaccine programs. An economist’s training should have cautioned them of the potential danger. I first sounded the alarm in May 2020 in my AIER essay: Why “Operation Warp Speed” Could Be Deadly
4. A Noted Physician Advocates COVID Civil Disobedience
Perhaps Dr. Vinay Prasad, a noted evidence-based physician, didn’t speak out early enough about COVID vaccines. But as the pandemic went on, he became a powerful voice against Big Pharma and their crony regulators. He continues to educate the public about many ineffective drugs and procedures. He is a medical hero.
3. RFK Jr. vs. The Man of System, Part 1
The choice to remain silent, to self-censor, is connected to the erroneous belief that by going along with the majority, our “personal responsibility for our decisions” is diffused, “making it easier to bear mistakes.”
2. Hatred Will Destroy You
When any person harbors hatred, their humanity is destroyed. In Vasily Grossman’s words, “looking at his victim as other than human, he ceases to be human himself. He executes the human being inside his own self; he is his own executioner.”
Destroying the lives of others wreaks consequences. One’s rights are only as strong as one’s defense of the rights of others.
1. Why Ordinary People Enable Totalitarians, Part 1
Observing German people in the 1920s and 1930s, Sebastian Haffner had the insight that those who resisted Nazism could create a meaningful, rich life not dependent on external excitement, while those who had no such strength of spirit became Nazis.
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I supported your work because you have a gift for writing and storytelling in a way that connects with me (and most probably, others). I like your style.
Growth Mindset is the best mindset. It is exposed by individual sports like jiu jitsu or wrestling or tennis. It can also be learned theoretically through reading books like Dweck's MINDSET, or The Genius in All of Us, or Bounce.
This comment is looking forward into 2024: I live in the "banana republic of Colorado" on the western slope near Aspen. I am 75 years old and I hold a BA is sociology from the University of California (1975). In Colorado, if you are the product of the public (government) schools; the concepts of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and "unalienable rights" are not known. And the very thought of; "That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." is illogical and senseless. Especially to the Colorado millennials who have been "dumb-down" to the point of truly incapable of any form of logic and reasoning.
It is my humble opinion our Constitutional Republic is fallen and will never stand again. I politely suggest to all who read this comment, to immediately begin to prepare to defend your homes and families for a hot civil war in 2024-2025.
My only hope for mankind is the Return of Jesus Christ as King of kings.
https://youtu.be/S3bnjiCuzlw?si=N27NhXgaenzFVGoa