The philosophy, culture, lifestyle, and attitude of liberalism began with the Greeks. It started rather slowly with Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. But it picked up speed with Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus. And it reached a high and sophisticated level with Aristotle, Epicurus, and Zeno the Stoic. These last taught a fairly formidable version of the epistemology of reason and science, the metaphysics of naturalism and objectivism, the ethics of individualism and self-interest, the esthetics of beauty and heroism, and the spirituality of transcendence and triumph.
Of course, there were opponents of liberalism all along. Thinkers like Parmenides and Zeno the Paradoxist, Protagoras and Gorgias, Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus. They were nihilists who thought reality was unreal, or at least unknowable. They were skeptics of reason, man’s only serious tool and technique for understanding the universe and determining the truth. They claimed using rationality in your thought and life was irrational. At the least, they pretended to believe such nonsense.
Nihilism and skepticism gave rise to two forms of illiberalism, then and now: religious conservatism and collectivist progressivism. Early conservatives were the Eleusinian mystery cultists while early progressives were the Spartan military-dictatorship communists.
Even tho 2600 years have passed since the advent of liberal thought, rational, individualist, freedomist liberals still haven’t won. Irrational, sacrificial, tyrannical religiosos and irrational, sacrificial, tyrannical collectivists still bedevil us.
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