Address: To Rule Oneself

Note: The following is adapted from a speech delivered at an event in Beijing on June 21, 2026, on “Growth.”

Hello everyone,

My name is Bradley Blankenship. I am thirty years old, and despite that age—or perhaps because of it—I have accumulated more than a decade of experience in media. In addition to my work, I am also the founder of an NGO, a project that I operate without any budget and in my own free time.

I will not go into great detail regarding that work today. However, I will say that the organization—the Northern Kentucky Truth & Accountability Project—was born out of necessity. I observed a gap, and I sought to fill it. In doing so, I found myself participating in a tradition that is not only deeply American but also consistent with many examples from Europe, where I have also lived, and, perhaps most importantly, with a long philosophical tradition.

I mention this organization because I believe there is a broader lesson hidden within it—a lesson about growth.

Over the years, I have noticed a recurring theme in the statements of successful entrepreneurs, executives, organizational leaders, and high-achieving individuals. They often arrive at a realization that sounds almost absurdly simple: you can actually just do things.

At some point, they look around and realize that the world they inhabit was built by people. Institutions were built by people. Businesses were built by people. Governments, organizations, books, inventions, and technologies were all built by people.

Then comes the next realization: “Wait a minute. I am also a person.”

And from that follows an important conclusion: if people built the world, then I, too, can create something of my own.

Many people become stuck at precisely this point. They inundate themselves with hypothetical scenarios, imagined failures, and endless “what ifs.” They become trapped in a cycle of hesitation. Eventually, they lose focus, abandon the project, and resign themselves to merely talking about what they might have done.

I am sure that all of us know people who are overflowing with good ideas. In fact, ideas themselves are abundant. As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously observed: all good thoughts have already been thought; what remains is to think them again—and, more importantly, to put them into practice.

I can attest to the truth of this observation.

And much as Goethe suggested in that same passage, I believe that if one wishes to rediscover many of these enduring truths, one must return to the Greeks. Fortunately, that task is no longer reserved only for Europeans or Americans. Here in China, too, there is growing interest in the philological and philosophical study of the Greco-Roman world.

Let me explain what I mean through the lens of my own work.

In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates frequently uses the phrase πάλιν ἐξ ἀρχῆς—palin ex arches—which means something like, “Let us begin again from the beginning,” or, more philosophically, “Let us return to first principles.”

Whenever a discussion drifted off course, Socrates would pull his interlocutors back to fundamentals. What are we actually talking about? What is justice? What is virtue? What is courage?

This habit of returning to first principles has profoundly shaped my own thinking. Indeed, I will confess that I have borrowed a great deal of my organizational philosophy from Plato, especially from The Republic. Before attempting to solve a problem, we must first understand its nature.

And that brings me to a principle that I believe can contribute to personal growth: freedom. If Plato, Socrates, or many of the great thinkers of the ancient world were transported into our modern society and told how free we are, I suspect they might laugh.

For us, freedom often means the ability to choose. We can buy what we want. Consume what we want. Eat what we want. Drink what we want. Watch what we want. But for the Greeks, and I will also say, for the Chinese, as seen in Confucian thought, freedom meant something rather different. Freedom meant self-mastery.

It meant what the Greeks called ἐγκράτεια (enkráteia)—the ability to govern oneself. It meant liberation from irrational impulses, destructive desires, and passions that control us against our better judgment.

Plato suggests repeatedly that genuine freedom is found not in doing whatever one wishes, but in recognizing what is good and choosing it freely. In other words, freedom is alignment with truth—or, as they say in ancient China, living in alignment with the Tao.

Consider your own life. How many times have you maintained a habit that you knew was harmful? How many times has a doctor offered advice that you ignored? How many times have you avoided the gym, the library, a difficult conversation, or an important project simply because confronting it required effort?

If this sounds familiar, then by the classical definition, you are not entirely free.

As Seneca wrote: Imperare sibi maximum imperium est—“To rule oneself is the greatest empire.”

That is freedom. Yet so many of us live as slaves—not to kings or governments, but to unhealthy habits, addictions, distractions, impulses, and increasingly to algorithms.

We believe ourselves free because we can choose among countless options. But are those choices genuinely our own? Or were they suggested to us by advertising, social pressure, social media, or habits we never consciously examined?

This is a question worth asking because one of the defining characteristics of our age is that many people can no longer tolerate silence. We reach for our phones at the first moment of boredom. We fill every empty space with noise. We consume endlessly.

At the same time, we are becoming increasingly illiterate in a functional sense. Hand many people a basic novel—let alone a philosophical text written two thousand years ago—and they struggle to follow the argument. People lose the thread. Collaboration becomes more difficult. Competence declines. Meanwhile, the problems facing our societies continue to grow more complex.

And this, I think, is one of the great challenges of our age.

The ancient Greeks understood something that we are in danger of forgetting: civilization is not built by spectators. It is built by participants. Indeed, according to Plutarch, the Athenian lawgiver Solon went so far as to require citizens to take a side during periods of civil strife. To the Greeks, citizenship was not a spectator sport. One had obligations to the polis and was expected to participate in its maintenance and improvement.

People who create are participants. Books, businesses, scientific discoveries, works of art, and even families do not emerge from passive consumption. They are not products to be purchased, but tangible things that are made when ordinary people decide to act.

When I founded my own organization, I did not possess vast resources or institutional backing. What I had was the realization that many people before me had simply begun. They saw a problem, identified a need, and chose to contribute something of their own. The same possibility exists for each one of us.

So I would like to leave you with a simple challenge. This week, put your phone down for an hour. Sit quietly. Read something difficult. Write something. Build something. Learn something. Create something that did not exist before you entered the world.

It does not need to be grand. It does not need to change history. But it should be yours. Because growth begins when we stop merely observing the world and start participating in it. And freedom begins when we realize that we are capable of far more than we have been led to believe.

Thank you.