Think freely or live as a Serf

Why I am launching "Coddled Children" on Independence day

Tomorrow is July 4th—Independence Day. A day where many Americans celebrate their freedom and independence. I chose tomorrow to release Coddled Children to make a point: that freedom, independence, and independent thinking are exactly what we're losing today!

For thirty years, we've been systematically discouraged from thinking for ourselves. In schools, universities, workplaces, and media. Everywhere we turn, someone else is ready to tell us what to think, how to feel, what to believe.

We're told the issues are too complex for ordinary people to understand or solve. Or worse, problems are deliberately made so complex, that any decisive action becomes impossible and paralysis becomes the default. We're given pre-packaged opinions and moral certainties. We're rewarded for repeating the right phrases and punished for asking inconvenient questions. And so we now live in a Western world that babbles about freedom and democracy, but lacks the independent thought to truly understand what that entails. Because freedom cannot exist without personal responsibility, and it's the latter we transferred so willingly to the systems that rule us today.

Look at the campus protests, the climate hysteria, the Gaza/Israel outrage, the gender debates that consume entire institutions, the manufactured outrage that erupts on schedule. Watch how entire crowds move as one mind, chanting identical slogans about conflicts they've never researched, injustices they've never witnessed, solutions they've never considered.

Ironically, this has nothing to do with organic passions or people mobilizing independently to fight a noble cause. It's mass formation, i.e. the systematic replacement of individual judgment with group consensus. You can recognize the manipulation in how easily these crowds swap causes while staying immune to any perspective that challenges their certainty.

If you look closely, you'll see the pattern

We're being divided by design. Not by our real differences, but by carefully manufactured conflicts that keep us from seeing the bigger picture.

Race, politics, gender, generation, class: every possible line of division is exploited. We're taught to see enemies everywhere—oppressors and oppressed, perpetrators and victims, privileged and marginalized. We inherit guilt for actions we never committed and rage for wrongs we never suffered. But we're never offered context, the other side of the story or any details that would diminish the narrative. We're not meant to look beyond the surface, because when we dive deeper we might start questioning the truths we are spoon-fed every day.

Meanwhile, the systems that claim to protect us grow stronger while we grow weaker. Corporate socialism concentrates power in the hands of tech giants and global corporations. Government imposed socialism promises to save us from corporate control, but delivers the same result: ordinary people stripped of agency, dependent on systems they cannot control.

Both paths lead to the same destination: a world prison without bars where thinking for yourself has become the biggest crime. You only have to look to the UK today and their relentless prosecution of thought crimes and dissent to understand what I mean here.

The price of comfort and safety

Over the years, I've heard so many people tell me: but you want to be safe, don't you? Why are you complaining? Isn't it absolutely grand that the government takes care of everything and you don't have to do all that stuff yourself. I've also noticed many Americans licking their lips about the comfort and safety socialism and equality thinking would bring them. Maybe it would if the price wasn't so high…

What are we losing in this trade?

1. Our ability to set boundaries. When systems make every decision for us, we forget how to say no. We lose the capacity to protect ourselves, to recognize manipulation, to distinguish between genuine care and manufactured concern.

2. Our resilience. When we're told every hardship is systemic oppression, we never learn to overcome obstacles. When someone else is always to blame, we never develop the strength that comes from taking responsibility for our own lives.

3. Our capacity for love. Real love requires seeing people as individuals—with their own struggles, contradictions, and potential for growth. But when we're trained to see demographic categories instead of human beings, genuine connection becomes impossible.

4. Our ability for independent thought. When expressing a different opinion risks social destruction, when questioning the narrative means being labeled dangerous, when independent thought is treated as a threat to safety, we learn to stay silent. We learn to conform. We learn to stop thinking altogether.

Bottom line: we will lose everything that makes us human and betray everything our ancestors built with their blood, sweat, and sacrifice.

Coddled Children

I chose this title to drive home a brutal truth: We in the West are no longer adults. We're spoiled, comforted, complacent, thinking the world will never change or we can control its direction. We've become a society that demands to be protected from every discomfort, shielded from every consequence, insulated from every challenge that might help us grow. We've traded strength for safety, wisdom for comfort, independence for the promise that someone else will handle the hard decisions.

We forgot what real hardship looks like, so we focus on microaggressions to give our pampered lives meaning. And we're losing badly. While we squander our wealth on feelings and safety, the rest of the world has moved on. They're building, creating, competing and they want nothing to do with our expensive products, outdated solutions, or the comfortable prison we've built for ourselves.

So what will it be? Keep sleepwalking toward irrelevance, or wake up and see where this road really leads? Read Coddled Children and find out!

The Choice

Coddled Children is still fiction but also an important mirror.

We're already living in a world where algorithms curate our thoughts, where social pressure replaces personal conscience, where the mob decides truth. We've created systems that promise to solve every problem except the one that matters most: our willingness to think for ourselves.

July 4th celebrates the radical idea that individuals should be free to determine their own destiny. That people can govern themselves. That freedom - with all its risks and responsibilities - is worth the price.

Coddled Children is my contribution to that fight. Not with ideology or politics, but with a story that reminds us what we're in danger of losing and what's still worth saving. Because in the end, when all systems fail and all certainties crumble, what remains is our capacity to think for ourselves. To see each other as human beings rather than categories. To choose love over fear, connection over control, truth over comfort.

To be truly independent and free, all of us together, that’s what I am striving for.

Some cages have no bars. Some freedoms cost everything. Never forget to fight.

The button below leads you to Amazon.com where you can purchase the book. It’s worldwide available, so don’t forget to check your local Amazon store!

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