The New Human: Rebuilding Civilization From the Inside Out

The Boomer generation—beneficiaries of unprecedented material prosperity and heirs to liberal ideals—have increasingly retreated into a hollow conservative posture.

The Boomers gave us computers, powerful music, and faster cars. But when it came to political thought and a coherent humanistic vision, they failed us—that is, those among them who didn’t remain on the radical New Left of the ’60s, which has since morphed into today’s even more unhinged Democratic Party.

For those conservatives, what may appear as principled restraint was in fact a form of existential dread—a symbol of a curated decline masquerading as tradition. Their conservatism was not a coherent doctrine, but a nostalgic reflex, almost catholic in nature. A fear, adorned in the language of virtue.

They invoked responsibility (within the limits of pleasure?), identity, and heritage—yet these invocations were devoid of vision or philosophical grounding, and their political ramifications were nowhere to be found.

The boomers sought to immortalize the status quo, with no answer to Marxism and no capacity to challenge outdated models of governance unfit for the computational age, they have, at times—perhaps justifiably—become the face of conservatism as a failing ideology in itself.

Like the narrow world of ideas that entraps much of modern conservatism, they too—having severed themselves from the transcendent, dismissed metaphysical inquiry beyond New Age fads or organized religion, reduced utilitarianism to capital, and embraced the infiltration of European ideologies—have, much like those foreign doctrines themselves, lost all sense of what lies beyond the self.

Simultaneously, the self they inhabit is one rendered inert: disciplined, sanitized, compliant. It is the secular self par excellence—socially legible, but existentially vacuous.

This absence of spiritual and philosophical orientation—first described in its American form by the great historian Carroll Quigley, who wrote with the pen of a genius about the disintegration of the communal and honorable American—helps explain the vacuum we now inhabit. Of course, they—like us—lack the technical and philosophical vision required to remake governance. In many ways, they have become the very stagnant mold that Bob Dylan once warned about. And sadly, they did not help us become immune to an even greater threat: Marxism.

The result is a civilization unmoored: amorphous, disenchanted, and aesthetically sterile.

Healing from this condition of Boomerites, means realizing that civilization is not a relic to be preserved under glass. It is a living system—a dynamic experiment in balancing Apollo and Dionysus.

To assume that it can be indefinitely sustained by the same historical light is a delusion. There are moments when the light must be extinguished to create a new setting.

This is where the danger of conservative cowardice strikes closest to home: it does not interpret history—it embalms it. It turns responsibility into neurosis, and tradition into an architecture of stagnation.

The path forward requires not a revival of ideological systems, but the reconstruction of the self. Not the compliant, individuated consumer-self of late modernity, but a generative, curious, morally serious subject.

A political vision of this new self, rooted in classical liberal ideas, has been articulated in the work of Professor Avrum Ehrlich. He envisions a renewed anthropological paradigm: a human being who is spiritually grounded yet intellectually autonomous, anchored in tradition but not enchained by it, and capable of integrating moral consciousness with computational precision—combining formal law and order with emerging communal possibilities.

This is not a call for religiosity, nor for ethnonational restoration. It is something more demanding: the cultivation of inward life alongside technological and civic innovation. It is the attempt to reimagine the human—not as a node in a system, but as a bearer of ontological weight.

The coming transformation will not emerge from centralized ideologies or populist fantasies. It will arise through decentralization, open-source epistemologies, local ownership, civic networks, and a re-sacralization of the human form.

Civilization can be renewed—and the rise of Chinese dominance halted—only if we begin by renewing our paradigms and reimagining the relationship between technology, governance, law, and order. This, in turn, will open up larger questions about the nature of representation, legislation, authority, and even parliamentary protocols—all of which must be reexamined if we are to cultivate a healthy society.

That is the radical task ahead: not to conserve the past, but to regenerate the conditions for human life—again.