The Lantern Burns Still
A Call for America’s Civic Renaissance
Prologue: The Lantern in the Fog
There are moments in a nation’s life when it loses sight of itself—not from war or famine or sudden disaster, but from something quieter, sadder, and more dangerous: forgetfulness. America, once the land of bold frontiers…
Somewhere tonight, a young woman is writing code that could save lives…
There are moments in a nation’s life when it loses sight of itself—not from war or famine or sudden disaster, but from something quieter, sadder, and more dangerous: forgetfulness. America, once the land of bold frontiers and infinite invention, now often feels like a tired empire, spinning its wheels in bureaucracy, choking in its own red tape, its people silenced not by guns but by fear of speaking plainly.
Yet—somewhere beneath the surface, beneath the debris of broken promises and rusted institutions—the soul of the Republic still beats. It flickers like a lantern in the fog, waiting to be found by those who remember why it was lit in the first place.
This is the story of how we might find that light again. Not through slogans or rage, not by tearing everything down or pretending nothing is wrong, but by listening—to old voices full of wisdom, to the builders and thinkers of the past, and to our own deepest longings for purpose, beauty, and shared destiny. This is the story of a broken nation with golden roots, and how we might make her whole again.
I. The Fall of the Wise and the Rise of the Hollow
Let us begin with a parable.
Imagine a great oak tree that once stood tall in the middle of a city square. Its roots ran deep; its shade brought peace; its branches held birdsong. It was tended by careful hands, watched by elders, honored by children.
But as time passed, the caretakers left. New men came—men who wore suits and carried titles but had never touched soil. They printed certificates that said “Tree Experts,” but they never looked at the leaves. They built fences, held meetings, and praised each other. Meanwhile, the tree withered. Its bark peeled. It bore no fruit. And when someone finally noticed, they said: “Strange. On paper, the tree is healthy.”
This is the story of our elite institutions.
Peter Thiel, a man who built fortunes not on inheritance but insight, says it plainly: Our elite colleges have become finishing schools for status, not excellence. Once, Harvard meant rigor. Now it too often means conformity. Once, leaders earned their place by proving value. Now, they inherit it through networks and names.
Plato, writing nearly 2,400 years ago, warned of such times. In his Republic, he spoke of philosopher-kings—leaders who loved truth more than power. But he also foresaw what would happen when the wrong men ruled: when rhetoric trumped wisdom, when image replaced substance. He called it the tyranny of the sophist—those who knew how to sound right, but not how to be right.
Today, our “sophists” come in the form of bureaucrats with long résumés and little courage, experts who pontificate on panels but solve nothing, professors who ban debate in the name of progress. They wear robes and receive applause, but they have forgotten the tree. And so, the Republic withers.
But not all is lost. There are still those who ask the real questions: What is true? What is good? What is just? To them we must turn.
II. The Government Machine That Forgot Its Purpose
Now imagine another tale.
A man invents a tool—a simple, elegant tool—that could help the military save lives. He brings it to the generals. They look at it, nod, and say: “We already have a system.” That system, it turns out, is slow, bloated, and doesn’t work. But it was built by friends of the department, costs billions, and—most importantly—has paperwork.
So, the man is told no.
He sues. He wins. It takes ten years.
That man is Peter Thiel. The tool was Palantir. The enemy was not incompetence, but a system designed to stay broken.
This story echoes the warnings of a slender Austrian economist named Friedrich Hayek. Hayek believed that no matter how smart a planner thinks he is, he can never know enough to manage everything from the top. The world is too complex, too alive. Wisdom lives in the people, in local knowledge, in what he called the “spontaneous order” of free individuals solving real problems. Bureaucracies, he said, tend to forget this. They grow like weeds, tangled and thick, until even their own gardeners are lost inside.
And so we see it: a government that cannot build a high-speed train without decades of delay. A city where zoning laws protect empty lots while housing prices soar. Agencies where no one is fired, but nothing is fixed. We see paper-pushers with no skin in the game, rules for their own sake, and good people drowning in process.
But what if we remembered Hayek? What if we let go of the illusion that Washington can micromanage life, and instead trusted builders, thinkers, and citizens? What if government shrank not in compassion, but in complexity—so that it could act quickly, clearly, and well?
A nation reborn would not mean no government—but a government that knows what it’s for: to serve, not to entangle.
III. Of Flying Cars and Stolen Time
There’s an old dream that never quite died. It whispered in the imaginations of children in the 1950s and sparked across the pages of science fiction.
Flying cars. Cities in the sky. Clean energy for all. Medicine that healed, not just treated.
What happened?
Instead of flying cars, we got Twitter. Instead of moon colonies, we got 40-year-old subway repairs. Instead of breakthroughs in energy, we got green slogans and blackouts.
Peter Thiel calls this the great stagnation—the silent decline of “the world of atoms,” where building real things became too slow, too scary, or too tangled in red tape. He contrasts it with “the world of bits,” where software thrived. But even there, we often built apps to distract rather than elevate.
Why?
Partly, we lost courage. Partly, we made rules that punished risk. And partly, we stopped believing that big things could be done.
But history tells another story.
In the heart of the 19th century, in America’s raw young days, a man named Edison turned night into day. A man named Carnegie raised steel spires. They were not always gentle men, but they were bold—and they believed, deeply, that the future was theirs to build.
If they had been told they needed 4,000 pages of permits before touching the earth, they might have gone to sleep instead. But they weren’t. They were trusted. And so they built.
We must become a people who build again. That means embracing the spirit of experimentation. It means letting nuclear reactors be small, smart, and safe—not strangled by regulation from 1975. It means seeing a problem—traffic, disease, energy—and saying not “someone should fix this,” but “I will.”
And it means teaching our children not just to code, but to dream.
IV. The Schools That Teach Us to Forget
A nation’s soul is formed not in marble halls or on battlefields, but in classrooms. There was a time when a child in America could sit beneath a flickering lightbulb, on a wooden chair in a cold schoolhouse, and hear the words of Lincoln, of Jefferson, of Shakespeare—and feel stirred to greatness.
That child might have been poor, might have walked miles in snow to get there, but he left knowing that he belonged to a civilization. Today, our schools are warm and well-equipped. But something colder has entered them. The warmth of purpose has gone. Peter Thiel often speaks of this: a generation saddled with debt, trained for tests, but not formed for life. They emerge from high school knowing how to take exams but not how to stand upright.
They leave college with fashionable ideas but no compass. We give them laptops, but not light. We have taught them to aim high in ambition, but not in meaning. And so they are restless, anxious, and often lost. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this coming. In his travels through young America, he was enchanted by the people’s energy—but he worried. He saw how democracy, if left unchecked, could flatten the soul: people might come to value comfort over truth, popularity over principle. And worse, he warned that people would learn not to speak their hearts, but only what they believed others wanted to hear.
Today’s students are bright. But too often, they sit in classrooms where questioning is punished and conformity is rewarded. They memorize terms, but forget themselves. They are told that history is a tale of shame, not courage. That virtue is relative. That truth is subjective. John Rawls, a man of careful moral reasoning, once imagined a world where justice reigned—not because we agreed on everything, but because we shared a commitment to fairness, to mutual respect, to reason. That vision required education—not indoctrination.
A society where free people debate in good faith, not shout from battlements. A place where disagreement is not war, but the working muscle of democracy. To restore education is not to turn back the clock. It is to rekindle the lamp. We must once again teach poetry, philosophy, science, and citizenship—not for exams, but for life. We must tell young people: You are not just a future employee. You are the bearer of a civilization. And we must help them believe it.
V. Of Tariffs, Trade, and the Price of Dependence
Once, when a boy asked his father, “Where did this come from?”—his father would smile and say, “We made it.” The table. The tractor. The shirt on his back. There was pride in that. A dignity in knowing that your labor meant something real. Today, that same boy might look at his toy or his sneakers and read, “Made in China.” And somewhere, though he cannot name it, something in his spirit droops. Peter Thiel reminds us that our nation once made things. Steel. Cars. Ships. Computers. Now, too often, we click and consume. We let others make, while we borrow. We’ve outsourced our labor, our attention, and increasingly, our power. Trade, when fair, is a gift between nations. But trade without trust—without balance—becomes a rope around the neck. In the early 19th century, Alexander Hamilton knew that a young America needed to stand on its own. He argued for tariffs not as punishment, but as protection—a way to give local industry a chance to grow strong before facing the storms of global competition. He knew that sovereignty was not just about soldiers, but about factories, farms, and foundries. Today, we trade freely with nations that do not share our values. We rely on them for antibiotics, for microchips, for the very things our security depends on. And in doing so, we place ourselves in peril. To renew America, we must rediscover what it means to produce—not just consume. We must rebuild supply chains that start in American soil and end in American hands. We must teach young people not only to code, but to weld, to carve, to build. And if that means paying a little more for a shirt or a solar panel—so be it. The cost of cheap goods made under tyranny is a quiet slavery of the spirit. Let us become again a people who say: We make this.
VI. The Charity That Wears a Mask
There is a man who walks through fire to help his neighbor. And there is another who takes a picture beside the fire and writes a caption: “Look how much I care.” One is virtue. The other is performance. Thiel speaks of the “NGO-industrial complex”—a new empire of charities, foundations, and nonprofits who claim to serve the public good. But too often, their true mission is to look good. The CEO who donates to fashionable causes while his workers struggle. The activist group that raises millions, only to spend it on conferences and consultants. The university that builds a Diversity Office, but ignores the loneliness of its students. This is not to mock those who care. It is to ask that caring be true. Aristotle taught that virtue is not what we feel, but what we do—and do habitually, even when no one is watching. A just man is not the one who speaks of justice, but who acts justly in daily life. A generous man is not the one who shares a hashtag, but who shares his bread. We live in an age of signal, not substance. Of moral grandstanding, rather than quiet service. We must turn again to real virtue. This means holding nonprofits accountable. Asking: Where did the money go? Who was helped? It means giving not to salve guilt, but to change lives. It means looking at the neighbor down the street, before sending aid across the sea. Most of all, it means rediscovering humility. The most virtuous people often say the least about themselves. But they leave behind fruit—a changed life, a healed wound, a stronger neighborhood. Let us measure our virtue not by words, but by the good we leave behind.
VII. When the Silence Breaks
There’s a strange silence in America. Not the silence of peace, but of caution. Of people who sit at dinner tables and whisper, “Don’t bring that up.” Of students who write what the teacher wants to hear, not what they believe. Of workers who nod along, but inside, feel something is deeply wrong. Peter Thiel, drawing on the work of Timur Kuran, calls this preference falsification—a world where no one says what they think, because they think they’re alone. But they are not. They are surrounded by others who feel the same—but also stay silent. And then one day, someone speaks. The silence shatters. The wave begins. Tocqueville warned that in democratic societies, the greatest danger is not from tyrants, but from public opinion that becomes so powerful, no one dares oppose it. And when truth becomes dangerous, society becomes weak. Speech is not just a right—it is a lifeline. It is how we think aloud, how we correct each other, how we search for truth together. When speech is punished, not only do lies spread—souls shrink. We must build again a culture of courage. Where teachers invite real debate. Where neighbors can disagree and still share a barbecue. Where artists can provoke, thinkers can question, and children can ask “why?”—without fear.
Because truth only rises when it is spoken. And it is only when we can say what we mean, that we can become what we are meant to be.
VIII. The Republic Reborn
So here we stand—beside the withering oak, beneath a sky that feels dimmer than it once was. And yet… The roots still run deep. The soil still holds memory. The lamp, though flickering, has not gone out. We are Americans. We are not meant to shuffle papers while the city crumbles. We are not meant to live in fear of ideas, or to borrow what we could make. We are not meant to wallow in guilt or chase illusions. We are meant to build, to speak, to serve, to shine. Peter Thiel does not offer fantasies. He offers hard truths and harder questions. But beneath them is a challenge worth everything: Do we believe that America can be great again—not in slogans, but in substance? If so, then we must begin—not with rage, but with renewal. Not with tearing down, but with planting again. A better school. A fairer law. A cleaner street. A bolder company. A truer word. And as we do, we will remember what Plato taught: that a just society begins with a just soul. What Tocqueville saw: that freedom and virtue must dance together. What Hayek warned: that no planner can replace the wisdom of free hearts. What Rawls hoped: that justice is possible, if we meet each other in good faith. And what America has always whispered, through her darkest nights: That the future is not something we inherit.
It is something we build. Epilogue: The Lantern Burns Still Somewhere tonight, a young woman is writing code that could save lives. Somewhere, a teacher is staying late to help a boy who has no father. Somewhere, a tired mother is praying for her daughter’s future—and wondering if this country still has one. To all of them, I say: Yes. Yes, if we remember who we are.
Yes, if we act with courage.
Yes, if we dare to hope—not in naïve fantasies, but in the quiet, stubborn belief that truth, beauty, and good are worth fighting for. The lantern burns still. Let us carry it forward.