MIchael Rectenwald reflects on youth vs. experience and his life's mission

Seeing photos of myself -- on the one hand, I wish that I was younger.  I don't see myself as the camera sees me.  In my mind's eye, I'm still a young man -- forever young and never aged.  I see a young man in my mirror, not a 60-something year-old.  It's why, for example, I expect to beat my very talented thirty-year-old son in tennis, why I overextend myself, why I never expect to be tired.  It's why I catch sly, half glimpses of myself that never betray me or my age, why I think I am still as attractive as I ever was. 

On the other, I am grateful that I am no longer young.  With age comes a seasoning that makes one more or less inured to life's difficulties and inoculated to its many lies.  There is a resting knowledge that cannot be replicated in youth, youth that pines for a future that never comes as expected.  If I were to offer any advice to the young, it would be to seize the day and enjoy the process of making a way for tomorrow, with faith, hope, and charity. 

And then there is the historical reality that I would not want to be young in a world such as ours, when the world is more insane than ever, and bound to get worse.  This is why I pray for my children and my grandson, and why I keep trying, in spite of seemingly insurmountable odds, to make the world more habitable for them, to endow them with liberty and hope, and to enshrine the present by leaving a legacy to them that may be meaningful and serve as a guide for them.  I hope one day that they will read my works and realize that was part of my life's mission.

~ Michael Rectenwald

(This quote was provided by Tom Woods.  Tom writes: "It's very rare to find someone late in his career, and in his 50s, who has a complete philosophical transformation.  But that's what happened with the great Michael Rectenwald, an ex-Marxist formerly of New York University...  Well, the other day he wrote something rather melancholy and introspective -- yet determined and fearless, too, that I thought you might want to see.")

Michael Rectenwald on the Davos confab

The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos is perhaps the world’s most unpopular conference, and the WEF’s founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab, one of the world’s most despised figures. Often compared to “Dr. Evil,” the character Mike Meyers played in the Austin Powers series, and routinely likened to a James Bond supervillain on the internet, Schwab is seen as a messianic megalomaniac leading a nefarious cabal of world leaders and corporate heads into a future dominated by a globalist elite. 

A Twitter poll by TruthBoost asks, “Does the World Economic Forum make the world a better place?” As of this writing, 98.4 percent of respondents said no.

What is it about this confab and its leaders that makes the WEF and its meetings so despised? After all, the WEF is “committed to improving the state of the world,” or so says its slogan. As it turns out, most people don’t like having a group of unelected, self-appointed dictators issuing top-down decrees and recommending policies that restrict their freedom and infringe their rights.

~ Michael Rectenwald, "Davos Man Is at It Again: The 2022 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum," Mises.org, May 31, 2022