public discourse – Northcoast Antiquarian

Language is too often abused in casual conversation, but even more so in the media, where precision ought to be observed with particular care. Former colleagues knew me to be exacting about language in drafts crossing my desk. Those drafts would return marked not for style, but for word choice. Words are not as interchangeable as many assume. They carry moral weight, legal consequence, and cultural implication that may not be immediately apparent. To treat them as fungible is to dull thought itself.

While reading a recent essay in The Economist (“Schumpeter’s Bonfire of the Elites: Jeffrey Epstein’s Ghost Will Not Be Easily Silenced”), that old habit of scrutiny reasserted itself. The impulse to edit was difficult to suppress. Three passages, in particular, illustrate how subtle imprecision can distort moral reality.

I. “Young Women”

The essay opens:

“When he was alive, Jeffrey Epstein relentlessly abused young women.”

Epstein’s first conviction arose from soliciting sex from a fourteen-year-old girl. The investigation that followed involved multiple minors, many of them high school students. The public record is clear: these were children.

To describe such victims as “young women” is misleading. It shifts the moral register. “Young women” suggests agency, maturity, even consent in the reader’s imagination. “Girls,” or “children,” would not. When minors are involved, euphemism functions as diminishment.

Language can wound twice: once in the act, and again in the telling. Accuracy here is not pedantry; it is fidelity—to fact and to victim.

II. “Meritocracy Made Them Powerful”

Later, in discussing the infamous “Epstein class”—the network of elites drawn into his orbit—the author writes:

“Meritocracy made them powerful, global markets made them rich—and now Epstein is making them reviled.”

The claim regarding meritocracy invites pause.

But one example: Public filings, including litigation involving JPMorgan Chase and the U.S. Virgin Islands, reveal not merely talent rewarded in open competition, but networks of privilege, tax incentives exceeding $300 million, waived monitoring requirements, political facilitation, and a dense web of personal relationships. Connections, patronage, regulatory indulgence, and institutional protection appear far more prominently than disinterested merit.

To attribute such power and wealth simply to “meritocracy” is to sanitize a far more complicated—and less flattering—reality. Words such as “network,” “patronage,” “access,” or even “self-dealing” may lack rhetorical elegance, but they better capture the structural features at issue with Epstein and those who fluttered about him.

When language flatters arrangements sustained by proximity and protection, it ceases to describe and begins to launder.

III. Free Markets and Capitalism

A third passage reads:

“The twin ideals of free markets and globalization have received a bad rap since the financial crisis of 2007–2009 (perhaps the only event to end more careers than Epstein).”

The parenthetical may amuse. The larger problem is conceptual.

Free markets and capitalism are not synonyms. A free market describes a system of voluntary exchange governed by price signals and competition. Capitalism, as historically practiced, encompasses a broader architecture: capital accumulation, corporate forms, regulatory frameworks, financial engineering, and—particularly in recent decades—large-scale leverage intertwined with state backstops.

The crisis of 2007–2009 was not the collapse of voluntary exchange. It was the implosion of highly leveraged financial instruments, moral hazard embedded in “too big to fail” institutions, regulatory capture, and risk privatized in gain yet socialized in loss.

To conflate free markets with the excesses of financialized capitalism is rhetorically efficient but analytically imprecise. It encourages rejection of one when the failure lay largely in the other. Surely an author for The Economist knows better even if most readers, especially in America, do not. He should be more careful than to reinforce ignorance and such linguistic collapse.

None of these examples is catastrophic in isolation. Yet taken together, they illustrate how easily moral clarity erodes when vocabulary drifts.

The choice between “girls” and “young women” alters the gravity of a crime.

The choice between “meritocracy” and “networked privilege” reframes responsibility.

The conflation of “free markets” and “capitalism” obscures structural cause.

Language is not decoration. It is architecture. When beams are mislabeled, the structure leans.

Precision is not severity; it is honesty. And honesty, in public writing, remains the first obligation.

By Donald S. Yarab

“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
— Matthew 22:39

“I hate them too. I really do. I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really do believe they hate our country.”
— President Donald J. Trump, July 3, 2025, Iowa State Fair, speaking of Democrats as the internal enemy

It is not the demagogues who bewilder me.
The political class, the oligarchs who sponsor them, and the ambitious mediocrities who ride their coattails—these I understand. Their motives are ancient and ever-recurring: power, wealth, the intoxicating delusion of being above others. History has never lacked for such befouled souls. What confounds me is not their corruption, but the ease with which so many of my fellow citizens—ordinary men and women raised in homes of decency—abandon their values, their civility, and even their reason to follow such selfish and manipulative men.

Reading Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism brings a sense of recognition as much as revelation. Her breadth of learning and depth of judgment are immense, yet her insight feels uncomfortably near. She wrote of loneliness, of the dissolution of shared reality, of the loss of what she would later name “the common world.” These, she warned, are the preconditions of tyranny. Her warning about that loss recalls a time when the common world was still carefully, even tenderly, built in classrooms.

When I taught as an educator at a Catholic junior-high school years ago, I once wrote on the blackboard—in chalk, for those were chalk days—the single word RESPECT. My pupils were told that respect, for oneself and still more for others, was the foundation of our classroom and of the larger world. It need not be earned, but it could be lost. Respect was the first principle of civilization: acknowledgment of another’s humanity, even in disagreement or uncertainty.

In my religion class, that same word deepened through Christ’s commandment: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Respect, I told them, was the beginning of that love—not the sentimental kind that flatters or excuses, but the disciplined recognition that others, too, are made in the image of God. Such love is not mere emotion but moral vision. It binds community, restrains cruelty, and demands humility; for I believed then, as I do now, that if children learned that lesson, the rest would follow—discipline, fairness, empathy, and truth.

Yet today, the nation seems one in which respect has eroded into mockery, disagreement into contempt. Men and women who once prized civic decency now sneer at simple kindness as weakness and mistake public cruelty for laudable candor. Forgotten are the lessons once taught by parents and teachers—forgotten that respect is not submission but recognition, not indulgence but acknowledgment that every person bears the image of something sacred.

Arendt helps to explain part of this descent. She wrote that the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced ideologue but the person “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” In our time, that confusion has been engineered deliberately by those who control mass media, public discourse, and civic conversation. Facts are now optional, reality malleable, and truth a commodity sold to the highest bidder. Noise replaces discernment; pundits and influencers, preachers of grievance and merchants of outrage, fill every silence until the ordinary citizen, weary of discerning, yields to the comfort of belonging. To be part of a movement—any movement—feels safer than standing alone amid uncertainty in an increasingly fragmented civic community.

But belonging comes at a cost. The price is moral collapse. Once fear replaces thought, hatred becomes easy. Once truth becomes relative, cruelty seems justified. Once self-respect erodes, submission feels like relief. It is with great grief that one watches people trade the humility of faith for the arrogance of fanaticism, the rigor of science for the comfort of superstition, the patience of democracy for the immediacy of mob emotion.

Some will say it is economics—that poverty, inequality, and insecurity drive people to such extremes. There is truth in that, but not the whole truth. Others will say it is ignorance, the failure of education. That too plays its part. Yet beneath both lies a deeper malady: spiritual exhaustion, a weariness with freedom itself. To think for oneself, to weigh evidence intelligently, to question authority doggedly—these require effort and courage. Many—perhaps most—prefer the narcotic of certainty. It is easier to be told what is true than to bear the burden of finding out responsibly.

That is why propaganda works—not because people are fools, but because they are tired, frightened, and longing for meaning. The demagogue offers them belonging, moral clarity, and enemies to hate. He tells them their failures are someone else’s fault. He gives them a cause grand enough to drown their doubts. And in surrendering to him, they mistake obedience for faith, vengeance for virtue, and ignorance for authenticity.

Hannah Arendt understood this weariness well. She observed that “mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived, because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.” That insight reaches beyond politics into the realm of spirit. When cynicism becomes habitual, truth itself grows unbelievable; when every statement is assumed false, the liar becomes prophet, and the soul, deprived of trust, welcomes its own deception.

What bewilders most is not the malice of my fellow citizens but their forgetfulness. Gone is the decency of parents, the moral instruction of their faiths, the civics once taught in schools, the respect once owed to fact, reason, and one another. Forgotten is that fear corrodes the soul and that hatred is the cheapest imitation of strength. Forsaken is the understanding that self-government depends not on leaders but on citizens—on the willingness to think, to listen, to doubt, and to care for one another.

Fifty years from now, scholars will no doubt write of these years with the detachment of hindsight. They will trace the algorithms, the demography, the disinformation networks, and the economic despair. They will find causes, correlations, and turning points. Yet they will still struggle to answer the simplest question: how did so many, knowing better, choose worse again and again?

For the manipulators, history has an answer—ambition, greed, vanity. For the manipulated, the explanation is more tragic: surrender not out of evil but out of weariness; not out of ignorance but out of fear; not because the way was lost, but because memory failed.

That is the lesson of our time. Evil will always exist; it requires only opportunity. But tyranny of the spirit—this quiet decay of conscience—thrives only when the many forget that decency is a daily act, not a tribal badge.

This reflection is written not to condemn but to plead—for remembrance. To remember what was taught when we were young: that truth matters, that kindness binds, that facts are not partisan, that faith without humility is idolatry, and that freedom demands thought.

When RESPECT was written on that blackboard years ago, it was in the belief that children were being prepared for a world that valued it. That belief endures—if enough choose to live as if it were true. For if it is forgotten, then no constitution, no scripture, no science can save us. We will have undone ourselves, not by conquest, but by consent.