Robin Koerner is a British-born citizen of the USA, who currently serves as Academic Dean of the John Locke Institute. He holds graduate degrees in both Physics and the Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge (U.K.).
Opinion
One of the most interesting aspects of political psychology concerns the gap between the reasons for which people believe they hold their political opinions and the real causes of their holding those opinions. Typically, that gap generates another one – between the content of arguments a person makes for her political
Opinion
Many people who favorably view Donald Trump and politicians like him, talk up his “authenticity” or his “telling it as it is”. Even many of those who profoundly dislike his politics, his manner, or both, grudgingly admit to the appeal of his “what you see is what you get” quality.
News
One of my recent articles, “The Mistake You Make in Every Political Argument” (Mistake) made the claim that most political arguments that seem to turn on a disagreement over moral values actually hinge on a disagreement about empirical facts. Mistake was shared by thousands of people of all political persuasions
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We’ve all been sufficiently frustrated by the gap between the values someone espouses and the policies they support that we’ve gotten into political arguments to help them see their error. Perhaps, if we’re more honest about our own motivation, we just reacted to get rid of that
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Jordan Peterson, the Canadian professor of psychology who in the last year has become North America’s most popular public intellectual, has spent many decades studying tyranny and its antecedents. As a result, he frequently warns his audiences of the unparalleled destructive power of “ideological possession." As someone who
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Margaret Thatcher once said that “politics at its purest is philosophy in action." As someone who gave her name to a political age that represented a very clear break from what came before and fundamentally changed a nation – according to both her admirers and her critics - she may
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They say you always remember your first time. The first time I was sexually assaulted, I was sixteen years old. I had not long started a job working as a kitchen porter at a third-rate pub-restaurant and had been moved from the kitchen to the restaurant floor to wait tables,
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It’s Not What You Believe. It’s How You Believe It George Orwell’s novel 1984 has been selling in large numbers to people scared of a lurch toward authoritarianism in the USA. I recently noted that both that book and Animal Farm were written not as a warning
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Complying with the tax code costs the United States a cool trillion dollars per year. That’s the entire GDP of Mexico, wasted because of the sheer complexity of our tax code, which runs to 74,000 pages or so when taken with the IRS policies and parts of the
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Authoritarians to the Right of Me Trump’s election caused a spike in sales of George Orwell’s famous novel, 1984 – apparently to people who believe that his becoming president may be a harbinger of an Orwellian dystopia across our country. Last year, my first book was published. It concerns
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As an attendee of Freedom Fest this month, I wore a couple of hats. On the one hand (or should that be head?), I was there to promote my new book, “If You Can Keep It." On the other, I was there as a Communications Advisor at the request
News
The hardest part of getting people to adopt a new paradigm concerning anything of any import and complexity is getting them to unlearn their old one. A paradigm comprises all the assumptions and concepts that we subconsciously (or unconsciously) use to perceive the world, and they are not destroyed easily.