Classical Wisdom: The Soul of Liberty

Why Thoughts Rule the World

Please read on to the end of this post for the schedule of the next Mindset Shifts U sessions.

What do you think when you read these words by Ralph Waldo Emerson?

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.

Emerson first shared this insight in a 1867 address, “The Progress of Culture,” delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University. As with many of his addresses, an essay followed.

Emerson had been effectively banned from Harvard for almost thirty years after his 1838 “heretical” Harvard Divinity School Address. In 1866, Harvard awarded Emerson an honorary degree after acknowledging its misunderstandings of his work and his advocacy against slavery.

Emerson’s ideas ruled over Harvard’s.

How many of us believe that power and violence rule the world? Yet, there must be thoughts, beliefs, conditioning, and passions that enable violence.

The enemies of freedom also understood that thoughts rule the world. Stalin said, “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?"

In his essay “History,” Emerson wrote, "Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind." It is this profound, often unseen, power of thought that brings us directly from Emerson to the present moment. Today, among Americans who identify as Democrats, two-thirds have a favorable view of socialism. There is a war of ideas for the future of civilization, and the outcome is in doubt.

Besides Emerson, in our next sessions of Mindset Shifts U, we will be reading Leonard Read, who was heavily influenced by Emerson and F. A. Hayek. In his book Deeper Than You Think, Read writes, "Creation, insofar as man has any hand in it, begins with tiny ideas and perceptions—intellectual and spiritual energies—flowing through the minds of individual men."

Read frequently quoted Emerson’s essay “Compensation:” "Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end pre-exists in the means, the fruit in the seed."

We have recently covered cause and effect in our sessions on David Hume. The causes we choose today will yield effects tomorrow. With the quality of life of our children and grandchildren on the line, it is astonishing to me that we spend so much time distracting ourselves.

Planting peas won’t produce cabbage. At Mindset Shifts U, we don’t waste our time with thinkers who believe in magical thinking—thinking that one’s good intentions will somehow produce good results. That is not the way reality works. An understanding of the inseparable nature of cause and effect is foundational to our work. Again, the causes we choose right now do yield effects.

I have been reading the books of philosopher and computer scientist Bernardo Kastrup. He writes in his latest book that “we are all unique individuals in our own right, and only through our individuality can we allow nature to do through us what it seeks to do.”

While we won’t be reading Kastrup, his insight is quite Emersonian. Individuality is often misunderstood. A superficial reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson can seem to support the mistaken idea that individualism is about isolated individuals doing their own thing. In “Self-Reliance” Emerson wrote:

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

We cannot find our “plot of ground” by listening to the narrator’s voice in the face that stares back at us in a mirror.

In 1832, while retreating to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, not long after his young wife died, Emerson wrote in his journal, “I would think—I would feel. I would be the vehicle of that divine principle that lurks within and of which life has afforded only glimpses enough to assure me of its being.”

Whether you call that inner light a “divine principle” or something else, you have probably had glimpses too. Yet, like Emerson, those glimpses don’t come as often as we would like. If you believe you read something once and get it, reread Emerson’s words. So we continue to study and practice.

Leonard Read was the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education and one of the most influential, yet underappreciated, figures in 20th-century American intellectual history. Read's genius lay not in formulating complex economic theories but in clarifying the essence of freedom through simple, powerful storytelling based on economic and spiritual principles. The latter is mostly absent in the writing of modern classical liberal thinkers, but is in every one of Read’s thirty-four books and hundreds of essays. His most famous, "I, Pencil," published in 1958, remains one of the most influential economic allegories ever written.

For our upcoming sessions, I have selected Who’s Listening, a collection of Read’s work published in 1973. In that volume, among other things, Read advocates for “the perfection of self-understanding as against reforming others—the former possible, the latter futile.” Read continued,

Why futile? Bad ideas cannot be made more sensible by combating those who voice them. We need but recognize that ideas, good or bad, seize hold of the individual; it is not the other way around. I do not possess an idea; it possesses me. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

What if the best way to change the world isn't to look outward, but to look inward? As 19^th-century writer Charles Mackay wrote, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

With the aid of Emerson and Read, we will continue our work of recovering our senses.

Individualism is not about cutting ourselves off from everyone else. Emerson and Read lead us to consider that every person is hard-wired into the very source of wisdom and love that connects all of us. But how do we tap into it? And, how does this personal philosophy scale up? To consider those questions, one of F.A. Hayek’s most important essays, “Individualism: True and False,” will assist us.

Hayek dismantles the biggest myths about individualism. Hayek introduces a concept called true individualism, which is not about a bunch of isolated people doing their own thing. It's a theory of how society flourishes. Hayek’s insight is that incredibly complex things—like language or an entire economy—can emerge from the actions of millions of free and imperfect people, all without any single person or group being in control.

Hayek draws a stark contrast. On the other side, you have what he calls false individualism. This is the kind of arrogant belief that a few brilliant people can sit down and design a perfect society from the top down, assuming everyone will act rationally and happily follow the elite's designs.

We will see that the idea of false individualism has infected some who think they support the idea of freedom.

The works of Read, Emerson, and Hayek are at the very heart of the battle of ideas that will determine the fate of civilization. Preparing yourself for this crucial engagement is a wise investment. These ideas will not only enhance your ability to flourish but also provide a clear lens to recognize precisely the false ideas that are leading us astray today.

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Here is our schedule for our fall Mindset Shifts U sessions on Read, Emerson, and Hayek. Please note that the chapters in Read are very brief; most will take approximately five minutes to read.

Leonard Read: Who’s Listening. PDF version, HTML edition, EPUB edition of all of Read’s books

Emerson: The Over-Soul

Emerson: Self-Reliance

Emerson: Spiritual Laws

Hayek: Individualism: True and False

Early in 2026, we will be offering sessions featuring John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. On Liberty contains perhaps the most stirring defense of free speech ever written. The Screwtape Letters is Lewis’s classic allegory, which exposes, in stunning and actionable detail, how we trick ourselves into justifying our dysfunctional beliefs. Details will be forthcoming later this year.