Authenticity as a Public Good

Performances of self-sacrifice don't really help anybody

Reading some elegies about the recently-dead Queen, one common theme that jumped out at me was praise for her restraint. I’m going to pull a paragraph from conservative writer Andrew Sullivan’s retrospective as an example of this:

Part of the hard-to-explain grief I feel today is related to how staggeringly rare that level of self-restraint is today. Nar…