Is Experience an Impediment to Insight?

Our times require the reexamination of first principles. Clinging to the premises of John Locke, for example, which formed the basis of the oldest democracy, the United States, simply won’t cut it anymore.

Here’s a central Lockean idea, which has been foundational to the Republic, but no longer holds water: “The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.”

Linking the law to freedom was a neat philosophical play, and it’s worked passably well for 300 years. But it rests on assumptions about nature and human nature that are passé at best, destructive at worst. In short, the law is

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