Loyalty To Reality Often Demands Disloyalty To Camp

Long before I arrive at an argument, something in me registers that the moral climate is changing, that language has begun to stiffen, and that curiosity is giving way to ritual. My antenna, easily dismissed as temperament, has become my most reliable guide in a public sphere that often confuses conviction with thoughtful free expression.

People are surprised that I publish across radically different platforms, and that I refuse to anchor on one side of the political divide, but I am unmoved by the demand for consistency as it is commonly understood. Their expectation is that political seriousness requires ideological loyalty. My experience suggests the opposite. Loyalty to reality often demands disloyalty to camps. Now, highly sensitive people who think that way are typically framed as emotional and unreliable.

Sensitivity is detecting shifts in pattern before they crystallize into outcomes. It notices when compassion is being rationed, and when moral language stops describing the world and starts disciplining it. This doesn’t replace reason but precedes it. It alerts reason to moments when it risks becoming instrumental rather than truthful. In contemporary politics, where arguments are increasingly prepackaged and repeated verbatim, this capacity isn’t a weakness but a form of resistance.

In essence, I don’t believe in left and right as meaningful descriptors of moral orientation. They’re remnants of a classificatory impulse inherited from an earlier phase of modernity, when political life was imagined as a system that could be organized and optimized. They still function as shorthand, but that has become destiny. Entire moral universes are collapsed into a single axis. Complexity is flattened. Contradiction is sometimes even treated as hypocrisy. A person becomes legible only once contradiction becomes reduced.

On animal rights, I’m unambiguously left. On freedom of expression, deeply aligned with classical liberal instincts, I’m right. The same goes for the sanctity of the individual conscience, uncompromising, and the moral authority of mass movements, sceptical to the core. These positions don’t contradict each other although the spectrum often makes them appear so.

The largely forgotten philosopher Eugen Fink warned that orientation can become a substitute for understanding. We know where something is located long before we know what it is. The political spectrum offers psychological comfort at the expense of intellectual honesty. This is why I insist on publishing across ideological boundaries, in order to remain in contact with the whole. A society doesn’t fracture only because of disagreement. It fractures when its subcultures stop listening to each other altogether.

Staying within one moral ecosystem creates the illusion of clarity while eroding the capacity for judgment. You begin to anticipate approval rather than truth. You learn which thoughts are rewarded and which are dangerous. Over time, this reshapes not just what you say, but what you are able to think. Social cohesion cannot survive in such conditions. Cohesion requires exposure, friction, and the willingness to be misunderstood. It requires something unfashionable, namely restraint.

However, there are ideals to which I remain loyal, even when they are mocked as naïve or obsolete. Freedom of conscience. Individual dignity. Moral limits on power. These aren’t partisan preferences. They’re civilizational achievements, historically rare and easily lost. Classical liberalism understood this fragility. Its tragedy isn’t that it was wrong, but that it shifted from a living moral philosophy into an administrative posture, weakening the rest of the spectrum as other forces started to dominate. It defended institutions while neglecting the anthropology beneath them.

Liberalism assumed a rational, relatively stable human subject when that subject was being transformed by mass bureaucracy, later by mass media, and now by algorithmic governance. The result is a hollowing out. Freedom survived procedurally, but weakened existentially. Ralf Dahrendorf described liberalism as a tension. Once that tension disappears, liberalism either ossifies or collapses into technocracy on one side and moral panic on the other.

New is the ethical aesthetic of extremism. Coercion now speaks the language of care. Exclusion presents itself as protection. Jacob Taubes observed that modern political radicalism borrows the emotional intensity of religious eschatology without its self-doubt. Redemption is promised, but always deferred, requiring ever greater sacrifices in the present. In such a framework, disagreement becomes heresy. This is how fascistic tendencies emerge wherever moral certainty abolishes restraint.

I care about social cohesion as an ethical discipline. Cohesion means refusing the pleasure of exile. It means staying in relation with those who unsettle us. It means resisting the constant invitation to sort humanity into the worthy and the disposable. This is where sensitivity becomes painful. You feel the social fabric thinning before it tears. You notice when altruism becomes performative, when outrage replaces responsibility, and belonging is offered only in exchange for obedience.

The philosopher Helmuth Plessner emphasized the necessity of distance in human dignity. Recognition requires space. Today that space is collapsing under constant exposure and instant judgment. Cohesion without restraint becomes coercion. These concerns converge in my novel Memos from the Edge and in the philosophical attempts to continue conversations that liberalism prematurely abandoned.

How can freedom survive in a culture of permanent mobilization? How can individual conscience coexist with collective responsibility without dissolving into narcissism on one side, or obedience on the other? How can sensitivity function as a civic virtue rather than a personal liability? As per my book, progress doesn’t come from perfect systems but from imperfect people willing to remain accountable. The largely overlooked philosopher Helmuth Kuhn insisted that moral maturity begins where guarantees end.

To what extent do you feel homeless in the current political debate? To what extent do you feel supported in terms of intellectual hospitality? These reflections are important because a society that cannot tolerate complexity will eventually lose both freedom and humanity. Only by daring to think beyond inherited categories can we still hope to preserve both. We need to because dark forces are running in overdrive.