In this podcast, Michael Matheson Miller and I discuss how both violence and entertainment and distraction are tools of state control. We discuss Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, some of the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Julia Alvarez’s novel In the Time of Butterflies about life under the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. We also discuss Victor Frankl, Josef Pieper, Michael O’Brien, Tocqueville’s idea of “soft despotism,” and Neil Postman’s argument in In Amusing Ourselves to Death about Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. I note that these novelists take evil seriously, but are also careful not simply villainize the opposition so as to increase our understanding and self-awareness, and help prevent us from falling into the trap of another ideology.

Ep.54 The Psychology of St. Thomas Aquinas with Cajetan Cuddy O.P – The Moral Imagination
- Ep.54 The Psychology of St. Thomas Aquinas with Cajetan Cuddy O.P
- Ep. 53 Vigen Guroian Tending the Heart of Virtue — Fairy Tales, Classical Learning, and The Moral Imagination
- Ep. 52 Philip Ovadia MD Metabolic Health, Diet, Cholesterol, Heart Disease, and Modern Medicine
- Ep. 51 Titus Techera Dune and Bladerunner Science Fiction, Dystopia and Humanity in American Life
- Ep.50 On Benedict XVI -Reason, Freedom, Beauty, and the Intellectual Sources of Secularism and the New Evangelization