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In a captivating episode 0f Wired & Watched 101: EdTech, host Missy Carwowski sits down with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist, former teacher, and leading expert on the science of learning. For two decades, Horvath has studied how humans truly learn—focusing on memory, attention, and brain function—and his findings deliver a sobering message: despite billions spent and endless promises, education technology (laptops, tablets, one-to-one devices, and now AI) is not transforming learning for the better.
In many cases, it is actively harming it. Far from making children smarter, the explosion of screens in classrooms is contributing to the first measured cognitive declines in generations, leaving parents and educators searching for answers.Horvath traces the problem to three fundamental ways technology clashes with how the human brain learns.
First, screens destroy focused attention through constant multitasking—something the brain cannot actually do. Students now spend over 2,500 hours a year switching between tabs, messages, and videos, training them to task-switch rather than concentrate. Second, learning relies heavily on empathy—the biological synchrony that happens when humans interact face-to-face—which machines simply cannot provide. Without that human connection, students lack the motivation to push through difficulty and often quit at the first sign of struggle. Third, “transfer” fails: knowledge learned on screens in an easy, narrow context rarely moves to the varied, complex real world, because computers remove the very effort and contextual cues that make learning stick.
The evidence is stark and growing. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are the first generations to show declines in memory, attention, and general intelligence compared to their parents—the reversal of the Flynn effect that had been climbing for a century. Raw scores on international tests like PISA and the SAT have been dropping 15–30 points per decade, hidden only by constant renorming and grade inflation. Meanwhile, handwriting boosts memory through spatial context and forces deeper processing, while typing often produces shallow, verbatim notes that students barely remember. Even binge-watching studies (which helped shape Netflix’s release strategy) show that spaced practice beats massed screen exposure for both understanding and enjoyment.
Horvath dismantles the common defenses of edtech with clarity. Claims of “potential” admit that promised benefits aren’t happening yet—hardly a reason to double down. Arguments that children must master today’s tools to be “work-ready” ignore the fact that K–12 education has always been about teaching adaptable thinking, not specific software that will soon be obsolete. And the excuse that teachers or students are simply “using it wrong” falls flat: real-world use, not inventors’ intentions, determines a tool’s impact. After sixty years of waiting for the edtech revolution, the data remains underwhelming at best and damaging at worst.
So what should classrooms look like? Horvath envisions a return to pre-2000 norms: computer labs used intentionally for specific lessons, not ubiquitous devices in every hand. Teachers and parents should demand true opt-out policies, forcing schools to maintain analog alternatives. When educators must prepare both digital and paper versions of assignments, most quickly discover that analog methods produce deeper understanding with greater flexibility. Above all, Horvath reminds us that learning has always happened best through human relationships—between teachers and students, students and students—not through screens. As cell-phone bans spread across schools, the next frontier is reclaiming classrooms from compulsory edtech, giving children back the focused, empathetic, effortful environment their brains need to thrive.
References for “The Digital Delusion: Why EdTech Is Failing Our Children”
- M forl Academy podcast episode with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath (full transcript basis for the essay):
https://www.mforlacademy.com/ (specific episode featuring Dr. Horvath on education technology – check recent releases or search “Jared Cooney Horvath”) - Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath’s upcoming book:
Horvath, Jared Cooney. The Digital Delusion: How Technology Is Failing Our Children and What We Can Do About It. (Expected release December 7, 2025) - Horvath’s website and research hub:
https://www.lmeglobal.net/ - Jared Cooney Horvath YouTube channel (features breakdowns of learning science and edtech research):
https://www.youtube.com/@JaredCooneyHorvath - OECD PISA reports (raw score declines and renorming examples):
https://www.oecd.org/pisa/ (see technical reports on score equating and trends since 2000) - Flynn effect reversal studies (cognitive declines in Western countries):
Bratsberg, Bernt & Rogeberg, Ole (2018). “Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused.” PNAS. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718793115
Additional meta-analysis: Wongupparaj et al. (2023) on Gen Z/Alpha declines. - Handwriting vs. typing note-taking research (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014 – foundational study):
Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard.” Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581
Critical theory, as articulated by James Lindsay and rooted in the Frankfurt School’s intellectual project, forms the corrosive core of contemporary “woke” ideology. At its heart, it is not a constructive framework for social improvement but a methodological commitment to negation. Its aim is not to diagnose specific problems and propose reforms, but to discredit existing social arrangements by measuring them against an imagined standard of perfection that its own architects say cannot be positively described.
This orientation traces back to Max Horkheimer’s 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory. Traditional theory, he argued—drawing from the natural sciences and classical philosophies—engages with observable reality and grapples with the inevitable trade-offs embedded in human life. Critical theory rejects this approach. It evaluates the real world not against empirical evidence or feasible alternatives, but against a speculative ideal that can never be fully articulated, let alone realized. In 1969, Horkheimer reaffirmed this openly: because the ideal society cannot be conceptualized in existing terms, the only available activity is relentless critique of whatever exists. In effect, the real world is condemned for being real.
This negative idealism weaponizes the gap between the actual and the imaginary. Real societies, by necessity, require trade-offs: freedom of speech permits offensive speech; environmental protection imposes economic and temporal costs; social order requires rules, hierarchies of competence, and constraints on behavior. Critical theory interprets these trade-offs not as inherent features of human life but as intolerable flaws. It provides no functional replacement for what it seeks to dismantle. Instead, it declares that racism, class division, penal systems, borders, gender norms, or any designated “problematic” ought not to exist in the ideal world. Everything short of that unreachable ideal becomes proof of systemic oppression.
By measuring the real against an impossible standard, critical theory does not reform institutions—it erodes their legitimacy. It fosters perpetual grievance while strategically withholding any concrete alternative that could be scrutinized, tested, or judged by the same standards it applies to the world.
James Lindsay identifies three major historical ideologies that employ this same pattern of negative utopianism: communism, fascism, and political Islam. The claim is not that these movements are identical, but that they exhibit the same critical-theoretical structure:
- Communism imagines a stateless, classless society populated by “socialist man,” a type of human being who does not yet exist. Until such a person emerges, every tradition, institution, and authority is condemned as perpetuating exploitation.¹
- Fascism posits a perfectly ordered national or racial hierarchy unified around the mythic volk. Anything cosmopolitan, liberal, or “degenerate” is denounced as a betrayal of that utopian unity.²
- Political Islam (in its revolutionary form) imagines global submission to divine law. The present age is delegitimized as jahiliyyah—ignorance—and therefore unworthy of loyalty until the ideal community is imposed.³
In each case, the ideal is defined primarily by what it negates: capitalism, decadence, unbelief. And in each case, the historical results were catastrophic: gulags, war, genocide, theocratic oppression. The ideal was literally u-topian—“no place.”
Critical theory operates on precisely the same logic. Its power lies in inflaming resentment, undermining trust in existing institutions, and inducing a permanent revolutionary consciousness. It teaches adherents to view every tradition, norm, and hierarchy as illegitimate simply because it exists. It replaces trade-offs with absolutist moral demands, and flaws with indictments. It offers no blueprint for construction—only a sophisticated toolkit for deconstruction.
This is why contemporary “woke” politics behaves as it does. The endless denunciations of “systems,” “structures,” and “hegemonies”; the refusal to offer workable solutions; the moral absolutism; the perpetual expansion of grievance categories; the inability to articulate what a healthy society would look like—all reflect the same methodological negation that Horkheimer enshrined. It is criticism without end, and without responsibility.
Critical theory, in this sense, is not a path to reform but a program of societal disintegration. By demanding the impossible and attacking the real for failing to produce perfection, it generates only dissatisfaction, conflict, and institutional decay. The historical record is unambiguous: no system built on a negative utopia has ever produced anything but rubble.
To embrace critical theory is to wage war on reality under the banner of a perfection that cannot exist. That is why it must be understood clearly—and rejected root and branch.
Citations
Primary Critical Theory Sources
- Max Horkheimer, Traditional and Critical Theory (1937).
- Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1969).
- Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964).
- Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (1968).
- Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966).
Historical Ideology Sources
6. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1846); Critique of the Gotha Program (1875).
7. Benito Mussolini & Giovanni Gentile, The Doctrine of Fascism (1932).
8. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (1964) — foundational for modern political Islam.
9. Ruhollah Khomeini, Islamic Government (1970).
Secondary Sources / Contemporary Analysis
10. James Lindsay, Cynical Theories (with Helen Pluckrose, 2020).
11. James Lindsay, The Marxification of Education (2023).
12. Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands (2015).
13. Paul Gottfried, The Strange Death of Marxism (2005).
14. Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind (2016).
15. John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007).
Glossary of Key Terms
Critical Theory – An ideological project originating with the Frankfurt School that critiques society against an impossible ideal rather than proposing practicable reforms.
Negative Idealism – Measuring reality against a utopia that cannot be articulated or realized.
Utopia – Literally “no place”; an imagined perfect society used as a moral weapon against the real world.
Hegemony – Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural dominance; used by CT to claim that norms and values are tools of oppression.
Structural Oppression – The assertion that unjust outcomes are produced by hidden systems rather than individual actions.
Standpoint Epistemology – The belief that knowledge is tied to identity; “lived experience” is epistemically privileged.
Praxis – Activism embedded into theory; in CT, the idea that theory must produce political action.
Reification – A Marxist term meaning the naturalization of social constructs; used to claim that institutions disguise power.
Signs You Are Encountering Critical Theory in Real Life
Here are the typical markers:
1. The language of systems and structures
Phrases like:
- “systemic oppression”
- “institutional racism”
- “hegemonic norms”
- “structures of privilege”
These shift blame from individuals to invisible systems.
2. Demands for perfect equity, not equality
If disparities alone are treated as dispositive evidence of injustice, CT is operating.
3. Appeals to lived experience as decisive evidence
Personal narrative is elevated above data or argument.
4. Moral asymmetry between groups
Some identities are framed as inherently oppressive; others as inherently oppressed.
5. Critique without end, without alternatives
If someone deconstructs everything but proposes nothing testable or concrete, it’s CT.
6. Rebranding ordinary conflict as oppression
If disagreement is treated as harm, and harm as violence, CT is at work.
7. The “if it exists, it’s oppressive” rule
Traditions, norms, meritocracy, law, biology—all treated as power structures.
How to Deal With Critical Theory in an Argument
Critical Theory arguments do not operate on normal rules of evidence or rational debate. Here’s how to engage effectively, calmly, and persuasively.
1. Reintroduce Trade-Offs
CT denies trade-offs. Bring them back.
“Every policy choice has costs—what trade-offs are you proposing in exchange for your solution?”
This forces concreteness.
2. Ask for Positive Alternatives
CT collapses when it must define what it wants.
“If the current system is oppressive, what specific system would you replace it with? How would it work in practice?”
Make them articulate the utopia in concrete terms. They rarely can.
3. Reject Claims Based Solely on Disparity
Demand causal reasoning.
“A disparity doesn’t automatically indicate discrimination. What evidence shows a causal link?”
This moves the debate from ideology to empiricism.
4. Expose Moral Asymmetry
Ask:
“Why are only some groups moralized? Do individuals still have agency?”
This undermines the oppressor/oppressed binary.
5. Clarify Definitions
CT thrives on shifting definitions.
Ask:
- “What do you mean by racism?”
- “How are you defining harm?”
- “What counts as violence?”
Pinning down definitions prevents concept-hopping.
6. Refuse Standpoint Epistemology
Challenge the epistemic claim:
“Lived experience matters, but it’s not a substitute for evidence. How can we verify your claim?”
This resets the terms of rational inquiry.
7. Separate Compassion From Ideology
Many people adopt CT-infused ideas because they want to be good.
Tell them:
“Your moral concern is admirable. CT is not the only—or even the best—way to address injustice.”
This opens space for alternatives and lowers defensiveness.
See Jonathan Kay’s X thread on the queering of outdoor education.
The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) has introduced a framework termed “Queering Outdoor Education,” which integrates queer theory, drag pedagogy, and decolonial approaches into environmental learning. This curriculum comprises lessons that encourage students to interpret natural phenomena through the lens of fluid identities, anti-normative critique, and social justice. While the framework is promoted as fostering inclusivity and challenging colonial and heteronormative assumptions, it raises substantive concerns regarding developmental appropriateness, educational clarity, and the potential for early ideological enculturation.
Metaphor and Conceptual Instability
The initial lessons employ metaphor as a primary pedagogical tool. Students are encouraged to draw analogies between natural elements—such as clouds, logs, or plants—and human identities, emphasizing fluidity and anti-essentialist perspectives. While metaphor can be valuable in education, these lessons risk overextending conceptual abstraction, replacing concrete environmental observation with ideological instruction. For children, particularly in early or middle childhood, excessive abstraction can hinder cognitive development by conflating empirical phenomena with normative social and political constructs.
Additionally, the curriculum critiques conventional linguistic frames, including metaphors like “birds and the bees,” positioning them as instruments of colonial and heteronormative power. Such framing may introduce complex sociopolitical interpretations into contexts traditionally reserved for foundational biological and ecological learning, potentially overwhelming young learners.
Moralizing Nature and Identity
Subsequent lessons extend these metaphorical frameworks into moral and social instruction. Students are asked to emulate the perceived allyship of natural objects and to conceptualize human identities in terms of ecological hierarchies, categorizing queer identities as “native” and others as “invasive.” While intended to promote reflection on inclusion and belonging, these exercises risk essentializing human worth according to ideologically charged criteria, substituting experiential learning with prescriptive social norms. By conflating ecological systems with social hierarchies, the curriculum may foster confusion rather than ethical understanding, undermining both environmental literacy and social cohesion.
Sexualization and Performative Instruction
The later lessons introduce overtly sexualized and performative elements, including the celebration of non-reproductive animal behaviors and the incorporation of drag-based exercises into outdoor activities. While drag pedagogy emphasizes self-invention and challenges normative binaries, its application to children’s environmental education raises questions of age-appropriateness. Embedding explicit discussions of sexuality and performative gender in contexts intended to cultivate observation, curiosity, and engagement with nature may distract from core learning objectives and impose adult conceptual frameworks onto immature cognitive and moral development.
Implications for Pedagogy
The queering of outdoor education exemplifies a broader pedagogical tension between radical inclusivity and the developmental needs of children. Integrating complex adult theoretical frameworks into early environmental education risks destabilizing students’ conceptual understanding, substituting guided inquiry with ideological instruction. While well-intentioned, such approaches may inadvertently limit children’s capacity for independent exploration, critical reasoning, and unmediated interaction with the natural world. Educational practice promote the idea of equality, not equity, along with the preservation of developmental appropriateness and cognitive accessibility.
Glossary
- Queer Pedagogy: An educational approach that incorporates queer theory to challenge traditional assumptions about gender, sexuality, and identity.
- Drag Pedagogy: A subset of queer pedagogy emphasizing performance, self-invention, and the destabilization of normative social roles.
- Decolonial Education: Curriculum frameworks aimed at addressing and countering the legacies of colonialism, often by centering Indigenous perspectives.
- Anti-Normative Critique: A critical approach that questions conventional social, cultural, or gender norms.
- Cognitive Development: The mental growth and acquisition of knowledge, reasoning, and understanding in children.
- Ideological Enculturation: The process of instilling a particular worldview or set of political beliefs, often through education.
References
- British Columbia Teachers’ Federation. Queering Outdoor Education Newsletter. 2025.
- Lacandona, Gaia. Drag Pedagogy: Performance and Learning. 2018.
- Polukoshko, Jody. Queer and Decolonial Approaches to Outdoor Learning. BCTF publication, 2024.
- Sumara, Dennis. Alternative Pedagogies and Cognitive Development: A Critical Review. 2017.
Suggested Readings Critiquing Queer Pedagogy
- Lindsay, James & McEwen, Bob. Critical Pedagogy and the Limits of Ideological Education. 2021.
- Wood, Peter. The Manipulation of Youth: How Ideology Enters the Classroom. 2019.
- Scholes, Robert. Childhood, Ideology, and the Limits of Social Theory. 2018.
- Davies, Belinda. Rethinking Radical Curricula: Balancing Innovation with Developmental Appropriateness. 2020.
(TL;DR) – Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France warned that abstract ideals, once severed from tradition, devour the civilization that birthed them. Against the arrogance of rationalist utopia, Burke offers a philosophy of gratitude: reform through inheritance, freedom through reverence, and wisdom through time.
Edmund Burke (1729–1797), the Irish-born British statesman and philosopher, published Reflections on the Revolution in France in November 1790 as an open letter to a young Frenchman. Written before the Revolution’s worst excesses, the work is less a history than a prophetic warning against uprooting inherited institutions in the name of abstract rights.
At a time when Enlightenment rationalists sought to rebuild society from first principles, Burke defended the British constitution not as perfect but as the tested fruit of centuries of moral and political experience. Against the revolutionary attempt to remake society on metaphysical blueprints, he argued that true political wisdom rests in “prescription” (inheritance), “prejudice” (habitual virtue), and the moral imagination that clothes authority in reverence and restraint. Reflections thus became the founding text of modern conservatism, grounding politics in humility before the slow wisdom of civilization (Burke 1790, 29–55).
1. The Organic Constitution versus the Mechanical State
Burke likens a healthy commonwealth to a living organism whose parts grow together over time. The British settlement of 1688, which balanced liberty and order, exemplified reform through continuity—“a deliberate election of light and reason,” not a clean slate.
The French revolutionaries, by contrast, treated the state as a machine to be disassembled and reassembled according to geometric principles. They dissolved the nobility, confiscated Church lands, and issued assignats—paper money backed only by revolutionary will. Burke foresaw that such rationalist tinkering would require force to maintain: “The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded.” The predictable end, he warned, would be military dictatorship—the logic of abstraction enforced by bayonets (Burke 1790, 56–92).
2. The Danger of Metaphysical Politics
The Revolution’s fatal error, Burke argued, was to govern by “the rights of man” divorced from the concrete rights of Englishmen, Frenchmen, or any particular people. These universal abstractions ignore circumstance, manners, and the “latent wisdom” embedded in custom.
When the revolutionaries dragged Queen Marie Antoinette from Versailles to Paris in October 1789, Burke saw not merely a political humiliation but a civilizational collapse: “I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.” The queen, for him, symbolized a moral order that elevated society above brute appetite. Once such symbols are desecrated, civilization itself is imperiled (Burke 1790, 93–127).
3. Prescription, Prejudice, and the Moral Imagination
For Burke, rationality in politics is not the isolated reasoning of philosophers but the accumulated judgment of generations. “Prescription” gives legal and moral title to long possession; to overturn it is theft from the dead. “Prejudice,” far from being ignorance, is the pre-reflective moral instinct that makes virtue habitual—“rendering a man’s virtue his habit,” Burke wrote, “and not a series of unconnected acts.”
In his famous image of the “wardrobe of a moral imagination,” Burke insists that society requires splendid illusions—chivalry, ceremony, religion—to clothe power in dignity and soften human passions. Strip away these garments and you are left with naked force and the “swinish multitude.” Culture, in his view, is not ornament but armor for civilization (Burke 1790, 128–171).
4. Prophecy Fulfilled and the Path of Prudence
Events soon vindicated Burke’s warnings: the Reign of Terror, Napoleon’s rise, and the wars that consumed Europe. Yet Reflections is not an “I told you so” but a manual for political health. Burke accepts reform as necessary but insists that it must proceed “for the sake of preservation.” The statesman’s duty is to repair the vessel of society while it still sails, not to smash it in search of utopia.
Reverence for the past and distrust of untried theory are not cowardice but prudence—the recognition that civilization is a fragile inheritance, easily destroyed and seldom rebuilt (Burke 1790, 172–280).
5. Burke’s Enduring Lesson
Burke’s insight extends far beyond the French Revolution. His critique applies wherever abstract moralism seeks to erase inherited forms—whether through revolutionary ideology, technocratic social engineering, or the cultural purism of modern movements that prize purity over continuity. The temptation to rebuild society from scratch persists, but Burke reminds us that order is not manufactured; it is cultivated.
In an age still haunted by ideological utopias, Burke’s prudence is an act of intellectual piety: to love what we have inherited enough to reform it carefully, and to mistrust those who promise perfection by destruction.
References
Burke, Edmund. 1790. Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event. London: J. Dodsley.
Glossary of Key Terms
Assignats – Revolutionary paper currency secured on confiscated Church property; rapid depreciation fueled inflation.
Latent wisdom – Practical knowledge embedded in customs and institutions, inaccessible to abstract reason.
Moral imagination – The faculty that clothes abstract power in elevating symbols and sentiments.
Prejudice – Pre-reflective judgment formed by habit and tradition; for Burke, a source of social cohesion.
Prescription – Legal and moral title acquired through uninterrupted possession over time.
Swinish multitude – Derisive term for the populace once traditional restraints are removed.
When the extremes meet, the center collapses. (TL;DR)
When the Horseshoe Hangs from the Scales explains why the far left and far right increasingly resemble each other—not in ideas, but in methods. Drawing on the metaphors of the scale and the horseshoe, this essay argues that both totalitarian idealism and populist reaction stem from the same metaphysical error: the rejection of objective reality. Only realism—humility before truth—can keep Western society from closing into a circle of coercion.
Political language often obscures more than it reveals. The familiar left–right spectrum suggests linear opposition—progressives facing conservatives across a straight divide. Yet history and experience show something stranger: as ideologies radicalize, their behavior begins to mirror one another. The further the extremes move from reality, the closer they become in method, rhetoric, and moral psychology.
In The Scales of Society (published yesterday), realism anchored the crossbar, and idealism dragged the pans downward into totalitarianism. The horseshoe adds a complementary image. Viewed from above, the scale’s pans curve toward each other like the ends of a bent spectrum. The metaphysical collapse becomes social convergence. Both metaphors describe a single process: when realism breaks, the poles of idealism meet in coercive symmetry.
The Geometry of Political Collapse
The horseshoe theory proposes that the political spectrum bends upon itself, bringing the far left and far right into proximity. Communism and fascism, though ideologically opposed, resemble one another in practice: one abolishes private property, the other subordinates it to the state; both demand absolute obedience. Each claims to redeem humanity through purity—of class or of nation—and each regards dissent as treason.
The scale explains why this happens: both extremes spring from idealism detached from reality. The horseshoe shows how it manifests: through behavioral and institutional mimicry. One describes the metaphysical axis, the other the social. Together they form a complete model of ideological deformation. The vertical collapse of realism generates the horizontal convergence of fanaticism.
From Difference to Sameness
Political polarization masquerades as difference, but when stripped of surface content, the ends often converge in identical impulses:
- Moral totalism. Each side claims moral monopoly—an absolute vision of justice or order that sanctifies any means.
- Friend–enemy logic. Politics becomes warfare. Dialogue is betrayal; neutrality, complicity.
- Collectivist ethics. The individual dissolves into the movement, valuable only as a vehicle for ideological ends.
- Epistemic closure. Truth is no longer discovered but declared; narrative replaces verification.
Arendt observed that totalitarian movements, regardless of ideology, replace empirical reality with “a fictitious world” sustained by propaganda. Popper saw the same pattern: the closed society begins when ideas become sacred and unfalsifiable. Whether draped in red flags or eagles, the architecture is the same.
What begins as opposition ends as resemblance. The revolutionary who abolishes hierarchy and the reactionary who enforces it both deny human limitation. Each demands transformation rather than reform, purity rather than compromise. The further they stray from realism, the more they mirror one another’s methods—purges, censorship, mythmaking, and ritual denunciation.
Convergence in the Contemporary West
The horseshoe is no relic of the twentieth century; its shape defines the present. In the West, the rhetoric of liberation and the rhetoric of restoration increasingly share an authoritarian grammar.
Cultural absolutism. On the progressive extreme, morality is redefined as the enforcement of inclusivity. Dissenting speech becomes “harm,” and linguistic deviation, “violence.” On the reactionary extreme, purity is national or moral rather than social, but the logic is the same: deviation equals corruption. Each side builds orthodoxy around identity.
Information control. The progressive insists on regulating “disinformation,” policing language for moral safety. The populist right responds with its own echo chambers, treating factual correction as conspiracy. Both distrust open discourse, substituting propaganda for persuasion. Truth is no longer common ground but a weapon.
Purity politics. Cancel culture and culture-war purges are functional twins. One excommunicates for heresy against equality, the other for heresy against tradition. Each side frames punishment as virtue, enforcing conformity by shame or exclusion. In both cases, moral capital accrues not from good deeds but from the public destruction of sinners.
The psychological mechanism is identical: belonging through denunciation. The horseshoe’s curve tightens as participants draw moral comfort from collective outrage. When opposing extremisms adopt the same tactics, the distance between them is illusion.
The Horseshoe Meets the Scale
The two metaphors illuminate one another. The scale shows the metaphysical error: idealism’s detachment from realism. The horseshoe shows the social consequence: the return of opposites through behavioral convergence. The result is not diversity of belief but monoculture of method.
Imagine the scales viewed from above: the crossbar of realism forms the straight backbone, but as the pans descend into idealism, they bend toward one another, forming the curve of the horseshoe. The more society abandons truth, the closer its extremes approach in both temperament and technique.
When realism—objective verification, moral humility, and factual accountability—fails, politics becomes a contest of myths. The question is no longer “what is true?” but “whose truth will rule?” In that struggle, the difference between revolutionary and reactionary becomes decorative. Both invoke moral crisis to justify compulsion; both see coercion as salvation.
Why the Center Cannot Hold Without Realism
Critics often lament the “vanishing center,” as if centrism itself could rescue political sanity. But moderation is not a position; it is a discipline—an adherence to external reality over internal fervor. The true counterweight to the horseshoe’s closure is not neutrality but realism.
Realism anchors discourse in verifiable truth: data, evidence, experience, and the acknowledgment of limits. It permits disagreement without dehumanization because it recognizes a shared world beyond ideology. Realism turns enemies into interlocutors by subjecting both to the same facts.
Idealism, by contrast, makes conflict existential. When truth depends on belief, contradiction becomes evil. The desire to perfect the world leads to the compulsion to perfect others, and the moral imagination becomes the tool of tyranny. Only realism—accepting that the world corrects us—keeps the curve of politics open rather than collapsing into a circle of extremism.
The Moral Psychology of the Horseshoe
The convergence of extremes is not merely institutional; it is psychological. Both sides attract personalities drawn to certainty, purity, and moral theater.
The late political theorist Eric Voegelin described this as “gnostic revolt”—the refusal to accept human limitation and the longing to recreate the world in one’s own image. Arendt called it “world alienation.” Each formulation captures the same impulse: the substitution of idea for reality. The horseshoe is the social geometry of that spiritual rebellion.
When entire populations internalize this mindset, societies lose the ability to distinguish moral conviction from metaphysical arrogance. Activists and autocrats alike begin to speak in the same register—of awakening, purity, and necessary sacrifice. The vocabulary of utopia is universal; only its symbols differ.
The Path Back to Reality
Escaping the horseshoe requires reattaching it to the scales—recovering realism as the crossbar that holds political difference in balance. This means restoring institutions that mediate between belief and fact: open science, free inquiry, due process, and honest journalism. It means accepting that error, not heresy, is the normal state of human reason.
Humility, not ideology, is the civic virtue realism demands. The realist admits uncertainty, revises judgment, and learns from failure. Such modesty is not weakness but strength—the discipline that prevents conviction from hardening into cruelty.
Conclusion: The Shape of Sanity
The geometry of political life reflects our metaphysics. When truth stands above us, the scales stay level and the horseshoe remains open. When truth becomes a tool of power, the scales tilt, and the horseshoe closes into a circle—opposites united in coercion.
The West’s present turbulence is not a clash of left and right but a crisis of realism. Both sides, in their extremes, are tempted by the same illusion: that belief can replace being, that will can dictate truth.
If freedom is to endure, it will not be because one ideology triumphs but because reality reasserts itself—quietly, stubbornly, as the only ground capable of bearing the weight of difference.
References
- Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951.
- Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: J. Dodsley, 1790.
- Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Vintage, 2012.
- Lukianoff, Greg & Haidt, Jonathan. The Coddling of the American Mind. New York: Penguin, 2018.
- Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge, 1945.
- Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.
- Ortega y Gasset, José. The Revolt of the Masses. New York: W.W. Norton, 1932.
Why do societies slide toward tyranny when they pursue utopia? (TL;DR)
The Scales of Society argues that the real divide in politics isn’t left versus right, but realism versus idealism. When truth yields to belief, coercion follows. From communism and fascism to modern moral crusades, history warns that abandoning objective reality tips civilization toward totalitarianism. The balance must be restored—anchored in realism, humility, and truth.
In the landscape of political philosophy, metaphors serve as intellectual scaffolding—structures that help us grasp dynamics too intricate for direct depiction. The familiar political compass, with its left–right and liberty–authority axes, sketches ideological positions but fails to reveal the deeper fracture driving modern polarization. A more illuminating image is that of a balance scale. Its crossbar represents philosophical realism—the recognition of an objective reality—while the suspended pans embody the idealist extremes of communism and fascism. This model captures not just polarization but the gravitational descent into totalitarianism that occurs when societies abandon reality for utopia.
The Core Divide: Realism vs. Idealism
Realism begins with the premise that reality exists independently of human will or perception. The wall remains whether one believes in it or not, and collision has consequences indifferent to ideology. This external order imposes limits: progress requires trade-offs, and perfection is impossible. The realist accepts these constraints, submitting theories to verification through evidence, reason, law, and experience. Responsibility and competence—not vision or zeal—earn authority.
Idealism inverts this relationship. It treats reality as a projection of consciousness, imperfect but malleable. If perception shapes the world, then changing minds can remake existence. Truth becomes what society collectively affirms. This impulse, when politicized, leads toward social constructivism and, inevitably, coercion: those who refuse to affirm the “truth” must be re-educated or silenced. A contemporary example can be seen in gender ideology, where subjective identity claims are enforced as social fact through compelled speech and institutional conformity. The point is not about gender per se but about the pattern: belief overriding biology through social pressure rather than persuasion.
The Platonic ideal—perfect, transcendent, and abstract—becomes the new absolute. The imperfect, tangible world must be reshaped until it conforms. Once utopia is imagined as possible, coercion becomes inevitable, for someone must ensure that all comply with the ideal.
The Scale and Its Balance
The realist crossbar allows for movement and balance. One may lean left toward egalitarianism, right toward hierarchy and tradition, or find equilibrium between the two. Disputes are adjudicated by verifiable standards: evidence, empirical data, or, for the religious, revelation interpreted through disciplined exegesis. Justice is blind, authority is earned, and failure prompts responsibility rather than revolution.
From that crossbar hang the chains leading to the pans—communism on the left, fascism on the right. Each represents idealism in a different costume. Descent is gradual, a shimmy downward from realism into partial idealism, then freefall into extremism. The pans have no centers: in a world of pure ideals, moderation cannot hold.
Communism imagines a belief-driven utopia—re-educate humanity into “species-being” beyond property or conflict, and paradise will emerge. Fascism demands obedience to a mythic hierarchy—sacrifice self for the community’s glory, and unity will prevail. Both subjugate reality to ideology: when facts resist, facts are crushed. From the perspective of either pan, the realist crossbar appears as the enemy’s support beam. Each seeks to destroy it, believing that only by breaking the balance can truth be realized.
Polarization and the Descent
As tension mounts, the scale begins to swing. Idealists radicalize when realism resists persuasion—utopia seems attainable but for “obstructionist” constraints. In frustration, anti-fascism justifies communism; anti-communism, fascism. The center thins as factions define themselves by opposition rather than truth. The political becomes existential: the other side must be destroyed, not debated. The mechanisms of verification—law, science, journalism, reasoned discourse—collapse under pressure. Force replaces evidence; propaganda replaces persuasion.
History confirms the pattern. The twentieth century saw communism outlast fascism, not because it was less violent but because it sold coercion through promises of emancipation. Fascism, with its naked appeal to dominance, exhausted itself; communism cloaked tyranny in moral idealism. Both ended in mass graves.
Left and Right: The Limits of Tolerance
The realism–idealism axis cuts deeper than the traditional left–right divide. The left tends toward anti-traditionalism and radical egalitarianism, seeking liberation through the dissolution of hierarchy and norm. The right inclines toward tradition and hierarchy, valuing stability and inherited order. Each contains wisdom and danger.
Tradition carries epistemological weight: customs that survive generations have proven utility—Chesterton’s fence stands until one understands why it was built. Yet tradition can ossify, defending arbitrariness or prejudice. Egalitarianism corrects injustice but becomes destructive when it denies the functional necessity of hierarchy. Even lobsters, as Jordan Peterson once observed, form dominance orders; structure is not oppression but biology. When hierarchy is treated as sin and equality as salvation, society drifts from realism into moral mythology.
The Peril of Idealism
Idealism’s danger is not merely its optimism but its refusal to recognize limits. When imagination detaches from reality, coercion rushes in to bridge the gap. The ideal cannot fail; only people can. Those who resist must be “re-educated” or “deprogrammed.” What begins as moral vision ends as total control.
The cure is humility—a willingness to let facts instruct rather than ideology dictate. Repentance, in the philosophical sense, means returning from illusion to reality, subordinating theory to evidence and loving wisdom without claiming omniscience. Realism requires courage: to see, to accept, and to act within the bounds of what is possible.
Lessons from the Twentieth Century and Beyond
The horrors of the last century—gulags, purges, and genocides—were not aberrations but logical conclusions of idealism unmoored from realism. Communism and fascism both promised transcendence from the human condition; both delivered degradation. Today, similar impulses reappear in moralized movements on left and right that treat disagreement as heresy and consciousness as the final battleground. These are not new phenomena but recycled idealisms—different symbols, same metaphysics.
In an era of manufactured crises and moral crusades, the scales remind us: cling to the crossbar. Only realism—anchored in evidence, bounded by humility, and guided by verifiable truth—permits tolerance, adaptation, and progress. When the crossbar breaks, society plunges into the abyss, and one pan’s triumph becomes delusion for all.
References
- Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951.
- Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: J. Dodsley, 1790.
- Chesterton, G.K. The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic. London: Sheed & Ward, 1929.
- Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man. London: Oxford University Press, 1943.
- Lindsay, James. Left and Right with Society in the Balance. New Discourses Lecture, 2025.
- Peterson, Jordan B. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Toronto: Random House, 2018.
- Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge, 1945.
- Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.
(TL;DR) Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics remains one of the clearest guides to our modern disorder. It teaches that when politics cuts itself off from transcendent truth, ideology fills the void—and history descends into Gnostic fantasy. Voegelin’s remedy is not new revolution but ancient remembrance: the recovery of the soul’s openness to reality.
Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) was an Austrian-American political philosopher who sought to diagnose the spiritual derangements of modernity. In his 1952 classic The New Science of Politics—first delivered as the Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago—Voegelin proposed that politics cannot be understood as a merely empirical or procedural science. Power, institutions, and law arise from a deeper spiritual ground: humanity’s participation in transcendent order. When societies lose awareness of that participation, they fall into ideological dreams that promise salvation through human effort alone. The book is therefore both a critique of modernity and a call to recover the classical and Christian understanding of political reality (Voegelin 1952, 1–26).
1. The Loss of Representational Truth
Every stable society, Voegelin argued, “represents” its members within a larger order of being. In ancient civilizations and medieval Christendom, political authority symbolized this participation through myth, ritual, and law that acknowledged a reality beyond human control. The ruler was not a god but a mediator between the temporal and the eternal.
Beginning in the twelfth century, however, the monk Joachim of Fiore reimagined history as a self-unfolding divine drama in which humanity itself would bring about the final age of perfection. With this shift, Western consciousness began to “immanentize the eschaton”—to relocate ultimate meaning inside history rather than in its transcendent source. Out of this inversion grew the modern ideologies of progress (Comte, Hegel), revolution (Marx), and race (National Socialism), each promising earthly redemption through planning and will (Voegelin 1952, 107–132).
For Voegelin, the loss of representational truth meant that governments no longer reflected humanity’s place in divine order but instead projected utopian images of what they wished reality to be. Politics ceased to be the articulation of truth and became the engineering of salvation.
2. Gnosticism as the Modern Disease
Voegelin identified the inner structure of these movements as Gnostic. Ancient Gnostics sought hidden knowledge that would liberate the soul from an evil world; their modern successors, he said, sought knowledge that would liberate humanity from history itself. “The essence of modernity,” Voegelin wrote, “is the growth of Gnostic speculation” (1952, 166).
He listed six recurrent traits of the Gnostic attitude:
- Dissatisfaction with the world as it is.
- Conviction that its evils are remediable.
- Belief in salvation through human action.
- Assumption that history follows a knowable course.
- Faith in a vanguard who possess the saving knowledge.
- Readiness to use coercion to realize the dream.
From medieval millenarian sects to twentieth-century totalitarian states, these traits form a single continuum of spiritual rebellion: the attempt to perfect existence by abolishing its limits.
3. The Open Soul and the Pathologies of Closure
Against the Gnostic impulse stands the open soul—the philosophical disposition that accepts the “metaxy,” or the in-between nature of human existence. We live neither wholly in transcendence nor wholly in immanence, but within the tension between them. The philosopher’s task is not to resolve that tension through fantasy or reduction but to dwell within it in faith and reason.
Political science, therefore, must be noetic—concerned with insight into the structure of reality—not merely empirical. A society’s symbols, institutions, and laws can be judged by how faithfully they articulate humanity’s participation in divine order. Disorder, Voegelin warned, begins not with bad policy but with pneumopathology—a sickness of the spirit that refuses reality’s truth. “The order of history,” he wrote, “emerges from the history of order in the soul.”
Empirical data can measure economic growth or electoral results, but it cannot measure spiritual health. That requires awareness of being itself.
4. Liberalism’s Vulnerability and the Way of Recovery
Voegelin saw liberal democracies as historically successful yet spiritually precarious. By reducing political order to procedural legitimacy and rights management, liberalism risks drifting into the nihilism it opposes. When public life forgets its transcendent foundation, freedom degenerates into relativism, and pluralism becomes mere fragmentation.
Still, Voegelin’s outlook was not despairing. His proposed remedy was anamnesis—the recollective recovery of forgotten truth. This is not nostalgia but awakening: the rediscovery that human beings are participants in an order they did not create and cannot abolish. The recovery of the classic (Platonic-Aristotelian) and Christian understanding of existence offers the only durable antidote to ideological apocalypse (Voegelin 1952, 165–190).
To “keep open the soul,” as Voegelin put it, is to resist every movement that promises paradise through force or theory. The alternative is the descent into spiritual closure—an ever-recurring temptation of modernity.
5. Contemporary Resonance
Voegelin’s analysis remains uncannily prescient. Today’s ideological battles—whether framed around identity, technology, or climate—often echo the same Gnostic pattern: discontent with the world as it is, belief that perfection lies just one policy or re-education campaign away, and impatience with reality’s resistance. The post-modern conviction that truth is socially constructed continues the old dream of remaking existence through will and language.
Voegelin’s warning cuts through our century as clearly as it did the last: when politics replaces truth with narrative and transcendence with activism, society repeats the ancient heresy in secular form. The cure, as ever, is humility before what is—the recognition that order is discovered, not invented.
References
Voegelin, Eric. 1952. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hughes, Glenn. 2003. Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Sandoz, Ellis. 1981. The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Glossary of Key Terms
Anamnesis – Recollective recovery of forgotten truth about being.
Gnosticism – Revolt against the tension of existence through claims to saving knowledge that masters reality.
Immanentize the eschaton – To locate final meaning and salvation within history rather than beyond it.
Metaxy – The “in-between” condition of human existence, suspended between immanence and transcendence.
Noetic – Pertaining to intellectual or spiritual insight into reality’s order.
Pneumopathology – Spiritual sickness of the soul that closes itself to transcendent reality.
Representation – The symbolic and political articulation of a society’s participation in transcendent order.
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