Hedonism Is Ruining Our Country

Rules and norms are essential for structuring our lives and creating something meaningful.

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About the Authors

Julian Adorney is a columnist at Reality's Last Stand and the founder of Heal the West, a substack movement dedicated to preserving liberalism. He’s also a writer for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). Find him on X: @Julian_Liberty.

Mark Johnson is a trusted advisor and executive coach at Pioneering Leadership and a facilitator and spiritual men's coach at The Undaunted Man, an organization that helps men embody healthy masculine energy and cultivate path-agnostic spiritual growth. He has over 25 years of experience optimizing people and companies—he writes at The Undaunted Man’s Substack and Universal Principles.

Geoff is a Relationship Architect/Coach, multiple-International Best-Selling Author, Speaker, and Workshop Leader. He has spent the last twenty-eight years coaching people world-wide, with a particular passion for supporting those in relationship, and helping men from all walks of life step up to their true potential. Along with Mark, he is a co-founder of The Undaunted Man.

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In “Against unconstrained individualism,” Grayson Slover makes a powerful case that the Founding Fathers, when fighting for our right to liberty, did not envision the absolute hedonism of doing whatever we please. They rejected the modern notion of “unconstrained individualism,” a mindset where “all restrictions on the individual are presumed unjust from the outset.” Instead, they supported a form of individualism moderated by civic life—institutions and social norms that curb our most atomistic impulses and facilitate coexistence within large-scale communities. Slover approvingly quotes Harvard anthropologist Joseph Heinrich, who notes in The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous that “human societies…are stitched together by culturally transmitted social norms that cluster into institutions.”

Slover argues that the pursuit of hedonism is fundamentally destructive, tearing our country apart by eroding norms like patriotism and (reasonable) selflessness that once unified us. In contrast, the constrained individualism envisioned by the Founding Fathers is not only part and parcel of American life, it’s an essential part of what made America great. We think he’s right.

One reason it can be difficult to distinguish hedonism from constrained individualism, and why the former is taking over our society (often under the guise of true freedom), is that both are responses to the same societal dilemma.