Honest Common Sense

Everyone knows there’s a lot wrong with the world today. In this book, Neil Lock offers some ideas to help us understand these problems, and move towards the future we deserve. He has worked these ideas into a brief, radical Philosophy, starting from first principles and aimed at non-academic people.

 

The Political part of the philosophy builds on the liberal tradition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. At its core lie Four Political Principles: Justice, Equality (moral equality), Rights and Freedom. It suggests Ten Ethical Laws as a basis for the law, a universal code of civil conduct. And it contrasts today’s failed politics with the Civilization to which we must aspire.

 

In the economic part, Franz Oppenheimer’s distinction between the economic means of satisfying needs (work) and the political means (robbery) is central. Business, the free market and true (not crony) capitalism are good. And taxation, deep green environmentalism and politicized welfare are bad. The final division of the philosophy, Honesty, is about being true to our nature.

 

Next, the book puts our situation today into historical context, describes the Honest Common Sense mindset, and outlines a vision of a better future. It concludes by diagnosing the root of today’s problems – that we are in a war of the political means versus the economic, the dishonest versus the honest, the state versus Civilization. And by making some suggestions on how we productive, honest, civil people can win that war.

 

Written in a concise, clear, caustic style with a sprinkling of dry wit and radical aha!s, this book helps us to understand what it means to be human, and how we can make a better world.