The Trouble With Finding the Right Way

Growing up in small-town America, I developed a rather intense dislike for football and basketball players.

Not the sports themselves, necessarily. The players.

Or, more accurately, the particular players I grew up around.

They were the popular kids. The hometown heroes. The guys everyone celebrated on Friday nights. And, at least in my experience, some of the most arrogant, insufferable bullies imaginable.

I wanted nothing to do with them.

So naturally, I chose hockey.

Now, you might be wondering why hockey, of all sports, would seem like the obvious refuge from arrogant athletes.

And looking back, I find that question rather hilarious.

But to my younger self, hockey was different.

Hockey was a gentleman’s sport.

It was about discipline, teamwork, sacrifice, and sportsmanship. I idolized players like Joe Sakic and Patrick Roy, whom I imagined as exemplars of everything the football and basketball players around me weren’t.

Yes, Patrick Roy.

I’ll give you a moment to appreciate the irony.

In my mind, hockey existed in a different moral universe. The players were different. The culture was different. The values were different.

I hadn’t merely discovered a sport I enjoyed.

I’d discovered the right sport.

And then, years later, I started playing in hockey leagues around Provo and Salt Lake City.

That’s when I met actual Canadian hockey jocks.

And wouldn’t you know it?

Some of them were every bit as pompous, arrogant, and insufferable as the high school sports heroes I’d spent my childhood despising.

I was devastated.

Not because I suddenly stopped enjoying hockey, but because something I’d believed about the world had been shattered.

I’d found my sanctuary from a particular kind of person, only to discover that the same kind of person existed there, too.

It sounds ridiculous now.

But that experience illustrates a pattern that would follow me through much of my life.

I wasn’t simply looking for things I enjoyed or ideas I believed. I was looking for the right way.

And once I found it, I wanted to believe that everything would finally make sense.

Red Waves, Blue Waves, and the Search for Something Better

The other night, I found myself getting into a political argument.

Not exactly how I’d planned to spend my evening.

The recent elections had produced what people were enthusiastically calling a “Blue Wave,” and several friends I genuinely adore and respect were celebrating.

Two years earlier, I’d experienced something remarkably similar, only the colors were reversed.

The “Red Wave” had brought out the same enthusiasm among another group of people I care about.

And both times, I found myself deeply frustrated.

Now, I want to be careful here.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with celebrating an election result. People vote for all sorts of reasons, and a victory can represent genuine relief, hope, or the prospect of meaningful changes they care about.

Nor am I suggesting that the two political movements are identical.

But something about the atmosphere bothered me.

The certainty. The hero worship. The apparent willingness to overlook troubling ideas or behavior because the person advancing them belonged to the right political camp.

At least, that’s how it looked to me.

And as I sat there growing increasingly irritated, I started asking myself a rather uncomfortable question.

Why does this bother me so much?

Was it simply because I disagreed with the politicians being celebrated?

Was I recognizing genuine patterns of political conformity?

Or was I allowing my own frustration to turn people with complicated beliefs and motivations into caricatures?

After all, I’d spent much of my life criticizing people for treating political movements as though they possessed some special claim to truth.

But hadn’t I once done something remarkably similar?

I had been absolutely convinced that I’d discovered the correct political philosophy.

I had my intellectual heroes.

I had my explanations for why society was broken.

And I had a remarkably tidy answer for how to fix it.

Perhaps I wasn’t as different from the people frustrating me as I wanted to believe.

That realization sent me down a rather extraordinary rabbit hole.

Isaiah Berlin. Walter Eucken. The Mont Pelerin Society. Vilfredo Pareto. Eric Hoffer.

And eventually, back to a question I’d been wrestling with for much of my adult life:

Why do I keep wanting the world to have a right answer?

To explain that, I need to tell you about my relationship with libertarianism.

The Promise of the Perfect System

For much of my adult life, I was a staunch libertarian.

And I still have enormous respect for many libertarian thinkers and their contributions to political and economic philosophy.

But looking back, I can recognize that libertarianism served a purpose in my life that extended well beyond its intellectual arguments.

It gave me hope.

Not just the ordinary hope that particular policies might improve people’s lives.

Something much grander.

It offered the possibility that humanity’s seemingly endless cycles of corruption, oppression, political conflict, and institutional failure weren’t inevitable.

We simply hadn’t adopted the correct system yet.

If we could establish the proper principles, protect individual liberty, respect property rights, and constrain government power, perhaps we could finally escape the mistakes that had plagued civilization for centuries.

There was an answer.

There was a right way.

And once humanity discovered it, things could be different.

I don’t want to caricature libertarianism here. Its philosophical arguments deserve to be evaluated independently of the emotional comfort I found in them.

But I can acknowledge something about myself:

I needed those arguments to be true for reasons that went beyond whether they were actually true.

Libertarianism wasn’t merely a political philosophy.

It was, in some ways, a coping mechanism.

A way of believing humanity wasn’t doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes.

And that made questioning it particularly uncomfortable.

Because if the system wasn’t the answer, what was?

My Brief Career as an Elitist

Here’s where the story gets even more embarrassing.

At various points in my intellectual development, I became fascinated by Plato’s philosopher king.

The idea was seductive.

What if the problem with politics wasn’t government itself, but the people exercising power?

What if we could put genuinely wise, educated, virtuous individuals in charge?

Wouldn’t that be preferable to allowing an uninformed or easily manipulated public to make consequential decisions?

For a while, I even proudly described myself as an elitist.

I had a rather unpleasant phrase:

“Let the wretches be wretches.”

Yes. I actually thought that was clever.

And while I’m not particularly proud of that attitude today, I think it’s important to acknowledge it.

Because beneath the arrogance was the same desire that had attracted me to libertarianism.

I wanted the world to make sense.

I wanted there to be a solution.

Sometimes that solution was the right political system.

Sometimes it was the right people exercising authority.

But in both cases, I was searching for something that could overcome the fundamental messiness of human nature.

Enter Karl Popper

Reading Karl Popper was uncomfortable.

Not because I found him uninteresting.

Quite the opposite.

He challenged assumptions I had become deeply invested in preserving.

One of the most consequential questions I encountered in his political philosophy was the distinction between asking who should rule and asking how we can prevent rulers from doing too much damage.

That’s a rather profound shift.

Instead of trying to identify the wisest or most virtuous people and entrusting them with authority, perhaps we should focus on building institutions that acknowledge human fallibility.

Institutions that allow us to identify mistakes.

Correct them.

Remove leaders peacefully.

And limit the damage caused when people inevitably get things wrong.

That last part was particularly difficult for me.

When people inevitably get things wrong.

Because it challenged the premise that there might be a sufficiently enlightened system, leader, or philosophy capable of escaping the ordinary limitations of humanity.

And it forced me to confront something about myself that I didn’t particularly enjoy.

My commitment to intellectual independence hadn’t protected me from dogmatism.

I could criticize other people’s ideological certainty while remaining remarkably attached to my own.

I could reject religious orthodoxy and still search for political orthodoxy.

I could pride myself on questioning authority while quietly hoping to discover an authority that would never need questioning.

That’s an uncomfortable realization.

But an important one.

Learning to Distrust Certainty Without Abandoning Conviction

Over time, my reading expanded.

Isaiah Berlin challenged me to think about the conflicts between legitimate human values and the limitations of political systems that promise to reconcile everything.

Walter Eucken and the ordoliberal tradition encouraged me to think more carefully about the institutional conditions necessary for markets and competition to function.

The Mont Pelerin Society introduced me to disagreements among thinkers who shared a concern for liberty but differed substantially over how best to preserve it.

And Vilfredo Pareto offered a particularly sobering perspective on the recurring dynamics of power and elites.

The more I read, the harder it became to believe that any single intellectual tradition had discovered the final answer to human society.

But something else became clear.

I didn’t want to respond to the failure of utopian thinking by becoming a cynic.

I didn’t want to replace the belief that humanity could be perfected with the equally sweeping conviction that humanity was hopeless.

That would simply be another absolute.

Another system.

Another way to avoid uncertainty.

And I had spent enough of my life looking for those.

The Mises Problem

I admire Ludwig von Mises.

I find his contributions to economic thought enormously valuable, and I have no desire to pretend otherwise.

But there’s a famous anecdote from a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society in which Mises, frustrated by disagreements with other defenders of market institutions, reportedly accused the participants of being socialists and stormed out.

I laugh whenever I think about it.

Because I recognize the temptation.

When you care deeply about an idea, disagreement can begin to feel like intellectual negligence.

You start wondering how other people can possibly fail to see what seems so obvious to you.

And before long, everyone who disagrees becomes a socialist, a collectivist, an authoritarian, or whatever other label conveniently ends the conversation.

I don’t want to become that person.

Not because I’ve abandoned my convictions.

But because I want those convictions to remain open to examination.

I want to be capable of admiring a thinker without inheriting his blind spots.

And I want to be capable of changing my mind without feeling that I’ve betrayed some essential part of myself.

The Difference Between Disillusionment and Despair

There’s another, more personal dimension to all of this.

I’ve experienced disappointment in relationships, too.

The kind that can make a person question not just an individual, but the very possibility of trust and companionship.

And I have no intention of allowing those experiences to destroy my desire for love.

That would be surrendering far too much.

It would mean allowing one painful chapter to dictate the meaning of every chapter that follows.

The same principle applies to politics, philosophy, and even hockey.

The existence of arrogant hockey players doesn’t mean sportsmanship is an illusion.

The failures of political institutions don’t mean liberty is meaningless.

The shortcomings of admired thinkers don’t invalidate everything they’ve contributed.

And the fact that people sometimes hurt one another doesn’t mean genuine love is impossible.

Disappointment should teach us something about our expectations. It shouldn’t automatically destroy the things we value.

I’m still learning that distinction.

Hope Without Guarantees

I used to think hope required an answer.

A correct philosophy.

A perfect political arrangement.

The right people in charge.

Some set of principles that, if universally adopted, would finally make humanity behave as it ought to behave.

I no longer believe the world owes me that kind of certainty.

Human beings are complicated.

We can be generous and selfish, rational and foolish, compassionate and cruel—sometimes within the same afternoon.

Our institutions reflect those contradictions.

Even well-designed systems can fail.

Even admirable people can disappoint us.

And even our most cherished beliefs can turn out to be incomplete.

But I’ve come to think that acknowledging those realities doesn’t require abandoning hope.

Perhaps hope doesn’t need to rest on the expectation that humanity will someday become perfect.

Perhaps it can rest on something much smaller, more difficult, and ultimately more durable.

The possibility that imperfect people can still do good things.

That flawed institutions can still be improved.

That meaningful progress doesn’t require a final solution.

That love remains worth pursuing even when it carries the possibility of pain.

And that a person can remain committed to principles while accepting that those principles will never eliminate every conflict, mistake, or tragedy.

I don’t need the world to be perfect to find it worth loving.

That’s a lesson I’m still learning.

And perhaps that’s the point.

There isn’t going to be a day when I’ve finally read enough philosophy, questioned enough assumptions, or corrected enough mistakes to declare myself finished.

There will always be another blind spot.

Another uncomfortable argument.

Another reason to reconsider something I thought I understood.

And I hope I never lose the willingness to do that.

Because the goal was never supposed to be finding a philosophy that made questioning unnecessary.

It was supposed to be learning how to think.

And maybe, just maybe, how to live with a little more humility.

Even if it means occasionally admitting that the hockey players weren’t any better than the football players.

Although I still maintain that Joe Sakic was pretty damn cool.