Biggest cheating/fraud scandals of our time
A starter list from the last quarter-century: Some questions: The initial list of scandals is open-ended, as is the list of questions.
Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.
Philosopher
Latest posts
True-believers across disparate issues
What unites the many who from, say, August 2016 to August 2026, believed the following: The issues range widely — from environmentalism to viruses to law enforcement to sex and gender to economics to Middle Eastern politics to academic sociology. Yet there is an identifiable demographic: Those who believed all of the above propositions, often […]
Democratic Socialism’s usefulness, according to Lenin
“Democracy is a form of bourgeois state championed by all traitors to genuine socialism, who now find themselves at the head of official socialism and who assert that democracy is contrary to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Until the revolution transcended the limits of the bourgeois system, we were for democracy; but as soon as […]
Jason Arday’s prominent supporters at Cambridge University and elsewhere
Two questions: Who hired Jason Arday? Who signed the public letter of support for him when allegations of plagiarism and fabrication began to emerge? Grok: “The members of the Board of Electors (the independent nine-member appointment/hiring panel) that selected Jason Arday as Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge in 2022–2023 were: […]
Thinking tools versus thinking? From television and calculators to A.I.
Before A.I., pretty much every new information tool was feared and opposed as an enemy of human cognitive advance. Television (1985): “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” [1] Calculators: This 1986 protest by teachers against the use of calculators. Kids are “addicted” to them, […]
How good is the USA at generating millionaires?
In 1926, there were about 20,000 millionaires in the USA (measured in 1926 dollars). Currently, the USA has about 500,000 people with a net worth of $18 million or more (measured in 2026 dollars).Due to inflation, $1 million in 1926 dollars is about the same as $18 million in 2026 dollars. Hence, the USA has […]
“In any war, don’t let your enemies take your weapons away from you”
“That was Stephen Hicks’s warning to students at Galt’s Gulch 2026, our annual student conference held this summer in San Diego. A Senior Scholar at The Atlas Society, Hicks has spent decades studying how political language gets weaponized—most notably in his book Nietzsche and the Nazis. At the conference, he walked students through the actual […]
“Fascist!” and “Nazi!”—Hyperbole vs. History
My talk on rhetoric and intellectual self-defense, at the 2026 Galt’s Gulch conference in San Diego: Related: The full audiobook of my Nietzsche and the Nazis:
Slavery reparations: How much does Ghana owe the USA?
We will know that the reparations debate is morally serious when this question is a part of the mix: How much does Ghana owe the USA? Why? “The Ashanti Empire (1701–1901) in modern-day Ghana was a prominent participant in the slave trade. Enslavement was primarily fueled by warfare, where the empire acquired captives from rival […]
Lobbying — short note
If one wants a democracy, then citizens must have a right to petition and attempt to influence the government that is making laws for them. This includes individuals, unions (which also spend hundreds of millions on lobbying), religious groups (ditto), and business corporations. Excluding some individuals or groups of individuals makes them second- or third-class […]
Tennessee Williams on the death penalty, determinism, and logic
Tennessee Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The play Streetcar won him a Pulitzer and the movie version, starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh, won several Oscars. From an article listing 71 things about the playwright Tennessee Williams, in honor of the 71 years of his life. Item […]
Democratic Socialist membership
After decades of Woke Left insistence that pretty much everything is racist, this is irresistible. Democratic Socialists of America membership by race. Let me channel my inner Woke sensibilities … [clears throat] … : THIS IS RACIST!!
America at 250
A decade before the formal end of slavery in the entire USA, Frederick Douglass spoke on “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” on July 5, 1852, to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in New York. “What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not […]
Galt’s Gulch 2026, San Diego
Action shot from my talk at the Galt’s Gulch event in San Diego: More event coverage here:
Car Thief vs. Philosophy Professor
Collected from various online wags: “He got Aristhrottled.” Thief gasps: “I’m dying.” Professor says: “All of us are dying. The question is: Did you ever live?” “If a car thief dies in the woods … “ “I breathe, therefore I am. I can’t breathe, therefore … “
What is the correct amount of US government ownership of the economy?
One side suggests 10%. The other side says 50%. They agree in principle and are merely negotiating degrees of implementation. Related: “Third Way” Politics and Its Fruits, on last generation’s mix of government-business partnerships.
Galt’s Gulch, San Diego, next week
I’ll be giving two talks at next week’s Galt’s Gulch conference in (hopefully) sunny San Diego, California. “Primitivism and Polarization—and the Power of Philosophy”: Deeply divided groups seem to dominate public discussion and generate a rhetorical race to the bottom. What is the evidence for increased polarization? What are the competing explanations for it? And […]
Entrepreneurship and Ethics — new publication
My essay is part of the just-published Springer volume Handbook of the Philosophical Foundations of Business Ethics, edited by professors Christoph Luetge and Marianne Thejls Ziegler. Abstract: Entrepreneurship is a value-laden enterprise that typically demands a character and virtue set, and has implications for some models of business ethics (e.g., corporate social responsibility), for poverty…
Max Planck on individual originality in science
Max Planck, 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics: “New scientific ideas never spring from a communal body, however organised, but rather from the head of an individually inspired researcher who struggles with his problems in lonely thought and unites all his thought on one single point which is his whole world for the moment.” (Source: Max […]
Hatred as a unifying force
A hypothesis about the strange Left-Islamist alliance — both of them marching together to support Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Ayatollahs, and both hostile to USA, Israel, the West more broadly. Drawing upon two perceptive analysts, Friedrich Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill: * Nietzsche in 1887: “the truly great haters in world history have always been […]