The Airless Age

I’ve noticed something unsettling over the past few years, something I once dismissed as a cultural quirk or a generational shift but which now feels like the central tension of our time. We keep being admonished to build our lives on principles so abstract they could belong to anyone at all—clean lines, smooth edges, nothing tied to place or person—and I’ve always distrusted that kind of airless thinking; it never survives contact with an actual face or an actual hour of the day.

Doesn’t what people believe depend, at least a little, on where they stand?

Yet the loudest voices in our culture insist otherwise. From the progressive clerisy to the managerial “experts,” from transnational NGOs to the suburban moral hall monitors convinced they are saving the world one scolding at a time, the message is the same: trust the abstraction, distrust your own eyes.

I came to this realization slowly, over a career spent in too many rooms where the carpet was always a little too clean and the air too carefully conditioned. The décor varied, but the mindset didn’t. There was always someone explaining why the world would be manageable—if only we could agree to stop thinking like individuals with stories and start thinking like shapeless units inside a system.

In those rooms, the most dangerous sentence you could utter was, “Well, that depends.”
It suggested context.
Nuance.
Particulars.
And particulars are the enemy of planners.

The real decisions—the ones that shaped people’s lives—never happened in those antiseptic chambers of consensus. They happened in the unguarded moments afterward: a raised eyebrow in the hallway, an admission over dinner, someone quietly confessing that the model didn’t quite match reality. Those were the moments with fingerprints. I trusted them.

Then came 2020, and suddenly all these forces—the progressive Left, the global managerial class, the cultural scolds—found the crisis they had been rehearsing for. They moved with astonishing speed, as if the machinery had been sitting there idle, waiting only for the key to turn.

I remember the stillness of those early weeks. I remember the empty highways and the nightly briefings that sounded like sermons delivered in a foreign tongue. I remember the faces at grocery stores—eyes visible above masks, cautious, dutiful, frightened.

But what I remember most clearly is the way abstraction replaced experience almost overnight.

A single model.
A single theory.
A single narrative.
A single acceptable opinion.

It spread across the English-speaking world with the efficiency of a new operating system: from Canberra to Ottawa, from London to Wellington, from Dublin to Los Angeles.

Each government implemented its own variations, but the tune was the same.

Compliance was virtue.
Skepticism was selfishness.
Dissent was pathology.

And the “Karen class”—that peculiar suburban coalition of the anxious and the morally certain—became the volunteer auxiliary to the state, policing neighbors with an enthusiasm they had never before shown for their own freedoms.

What troubled me most wasn’t any single restriction but the ease with which the restrictions arrived. Freedom, once assumed, suddenly felt conditional—something that could be withdrawn not because we had done anything wrong, but because our betters had discovered a taste for managing our lives at scale.

The globalist NGOs provided the moral narrative.
The cultural Marxists provided the ideological rationale.
The progressive Left provided the bureaucratic apparatus.
And the managerial elite—in government, media, and corporate boardrooms—provided the enforcement.

The pandemic didn’t cause this coalition. It revealed it.

It revealed how instinctively certain people reach for authority.
How quickly they mistake preference for principle.
How deeply they fear the messy improvisation of ordinary life.
How little they trust citizens to navigate risk on their own terms.

In Canada, emergency powers became a lifestyle.
In Australia, borders closed as if geography had become a threat.
In New Zealand, the government declared itself the “single source of truth.”
In Scotland and Ireland, speech itself became suspect.
In England, ancient liberties bent with startling speed.

And in America—my own country—the same impulses were gathering strength.
They were not identical, but they rhymed.

What interrupted the trend, or at least stalled it, wasn’t philosophy. It was politics. Elections remain one of the few remaining tools that can crack the smooth surface of managerial certainty. Trump’s victory didn’t eliminate the mindset, but it disrupted its momentum.

And in political life, momentum is often destiny

Over the past few years, I’ve come to understand something I didn’t see before: abstraction is not simply a bad intellectual habit. It is a political strategy.
The more abstract the rule, the easier it is to enforce.
The more universal the instruction, the more authority accrues to those issuing it.

It’s not that modern life is abstract.
It’s that a particular political class benefits from abstraction.

The progressive Left, the globalist networks, the professional-managerial class—none of them want to govern real citizens in real places. Too inconvenient. Too unpredictable. Too human.

They want to govern the idea of citizens.

And ideas don’t talk back.

Ideas don’t resist.
Ideas don’t ask inconvenient questions.
Ideas don’t remember.

But people do.

People remember the business they lost, the family they couldn’t visit, the child who fell behind, the church they saw shuttered, the freedoms that vanished “just for two weeks,” then “just until the vaccine,” then “just until the next announcement.”

People remember the condescending certainty of officials who never missed a paycheck.
People remember the small tyrannies of the newly deputized.
People remember the way dissent was pathologized and discussion forbidden.

But the most dangerous memory is this one:

People remember how quickly it all happened.

That knowledge changes a society.
It changes the terms of citizenship.
It changes the baseline assumptions of trust.

And it leaves us in an unsettling place.

We are told to move on.
We are told the authorities meant well.
We are told it was all very complicated.
We are told the experts did their best.
We are told to be grateful.

But something in us resists.
Rightly.

Because freedom, the real kind, is granular.

It is lived, not theorized.
It is local, not global.
It is messy, not clean.
It has fingerprints.

It is built from the bottom up—
not granted from the top down.

I don’t hate principles. I simply believe they must come from the world as we actually inhabit it, not the world as someone with a PhD or a platform imagines it ought to be.

And that’s the irony I keep coming back to:

The more universal the rule, the less humane its application.
The more abstract the principle, the more brittle the society built upon it.
And the more ambitious the controllers, the more fragile the freedom they promise to preserve.

If the past few years taught us anything, it’s this:

A society that forgets the value of the particular will not long remain a free one.