We explore real-life reformation here in this informed, online community.
Argentina’s flamboyant libertarian president Javier Milei was invited back to the World Economic Forum’s annual confab at Davos. Last year, the confident new president torched Davos and most of its attendees with a blistering and unapologetic condemnation of globalism, socialism, and woke ideology, an unprecedented affront to the global gathering that was met with equal parts dismay and ridicule among attendees and in the legacy media.
But since that time he did something no other world leader has done: He put his economic house in order in stunning fashion, getting Argentina out of the red and into the black for the first time in 123 years. The ruined Argentine economy was fixed by Milei in just a matter of months. From his speech last week:
“The great burden that is the common denominator among the countries and institutions that are failing is the mental virus of woke ideology,” Milei told his squirming audience. “This is the great epidemic of our time that must be cured. This is the cancer we need to get rid of. This ideology has colonized the world’s most important institutions.”
Characterizing wokeism as a “reversal of Western values,” Milei went on to pillory every one of its derivative ideologies, including radical feminism, “sinister radical environmentalism,” the “bloody, murderous abortion agenda” (which, Milei averred, was designed to be a tool for Malthusian population control), the homosexual agenda, transgender ideology (whose proponents he characterized as “pedophiles” for their advocacy of child genital mutilation), the “eternal victimhood narrative,” and the epidemic of mass immigration (which, Milei trenchantly observed, is motivated “not by national interest but by guilt”).
Today marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of fiction author Jane Austen, who examined ordinary, day-to-day, small-town family life within an Overton window-frame which once included Biblical civilization and ethics.
The world of Jane Austen's generation was rapidly pivoting the Overton window to a secular worldview, and so were the cultures of contemporary nations.
Lord David Cecil, a biographer of Miss Austen, noted this comparison between authors:
"If I were in doubt as to the wisdom of one of my actions, I should not consult Flaubert or Dostoyevsky. The opinion of Balzac or Dickens would carry little weight with me: were Stendhal to rebuke me, it would only convince me I had done right: even in the judgment of Tolstoy I should not put complete confidence. But I should be seriously upset, I should worry for weeks and weeks, if I incurred the disapproval of Jane Austen."
"We are smack in the middle of a Fourth Turning, and the turmoil of it all has affected the entire West. Over the last five years, virtually every major institution has disgraced itself. What used to be a high-trust society has been blown to smithereens, and nobody knows what to think anymore. And even when an individual person’s convictions haven’t changed, despite the societal turmoil, it is very difficult to know who to think those convictions with. This implosion of all the trusted institutions and relationships has of course included those of us on the political right.
"...So what am I saying? When being normal is weird, be normal. When being normal is normal, remember why you should be normal, and be prepared to defend it, which cannot be done apart from Christ. And when being normal is weird, don’t be extra weird. Be extra normal. Normal you say? By what standard? To the law and to the testimony. Exactly so."
Doug Wilson
