I found this little piece by Tibor Machan. I thought it had a good message, so I felt like sharing it. It’s titled “Being Among the Few Who are Right”:

When she was about 16, my older daughter and I were sitting in my small house in Auburn, AL, and she turned to me to ask, “How do you deal with the fact that so many people think you are wrong?” She knew. They did, and still do.

Just yesterday I took part on a panel discussion at Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley’s School of Law, organized by the branch of the Federalist Society there, a group with a largely conservative membership in the legal profession. Of the three of us on the panel, I was clearly the most radical—or if you will, outrageous. The topic was “Is America Post-Democratic?” That meant, as I gathered, whether the United States of America is still something of a democracy or has this changed, if it ever was.

Machan was up against a a leftist polisci professor and a leftist Greenie. They gave the standard leftist talking points while he gave his libertarian/classical liberal point of view.

As expected, no one on the panel and the audience appeared to agree with any of this, although to my surprise several law students did come up to me afterwards to ask me very friendly questions about my position. The unpopularity of my views might put me in a funk, you could speculate, but I have had a pretty long history of similar responses from colleagues and people in general for over 40 years of thinking as I do…

So, what did I answer my daughter who, incidentally, shares most of my convictions on political matters? My response went along the lines of, “Well, sweetie, I like being popular, I like having friendly colleagues, but I must say I like truth even more.” Later I learned that this is a bit like what Newton scribbled in his Cambridge notebooks: “Amicus Plato, amicus Aristotles; magis amica Veritas” (Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but truth is a better friend).

Here’s to Truth.