A Blog for Five People

I made my first stab at blogging on Medium four months ago as of this writing. For just over a month, I labored to produce several blog-essays, each bolder and more ambitious than the last.
I freely admit that I had no idea what I was doing.
For my four months-younger self, blogging was a scholarly craft, an extension of the freelance writing work I have been doing for over eight years now. As a result, my entries came to exact a tremendous burden of time and effort.
At the same time, all of that effort was reaching a combined audience of perhaps five or so (hyperbole, but not by much).
This summer has been a busy one for me, with a lot of work and far more traveling than I usually engage in. I took a hiatus from blogging, and it gave me a lot of time to think.
What I’ve come to understand is that blogging is simply the sort of thing I do on Facebook at the slightest provocation: typing out an extended and somewhat rambling comment on some event, article, or comment.
And that’s important to me, because I’ve spent my life fighting against bad and unfounded ideas, which also seem to be some of the ideas people are most emotionally attached to.
Blogging, I now see, can be a powerful tool for promoting a better quality of discourse, for giving good ideas the signal boost they need to rise above the really bad ones. Of all people, I have to give particular credit to philosopher-podcaster extraordinaire Stefan Molyneux, and his tireless dedication to both the cause of freedom and the art of the well-crafted argument, for helping me to understand this.
I’ve spent my adult life absorbing, analyzing, reprocessing, and developing ideas and insights about the world. From the deep past to the political philosophies and forces of contemporary nations, I see the hand of evolution and the quest for power.
There’s a tremendous value in being able to pierce the veil of illusion, to see through the comfortable certainties and conveniently unchallenged beliefs affirmed by polite society. Fundamentally, that’s what this project is going to be about.
This may still be a blog for five people. I accept that as a possibility.
However, I’m willing to gamble I can capture the interest of more of you than that.
