COVID and liberty: understanding the basic principles of the republic and Western civilization
It seems self-evident that without an understanding of and commitment to our own basic principles, the underpinnings of both our government and our institutions are undermined. At some point – and we can argue about exactly when it happened – in the last century (maybe with its beginning even earlier), the right stopped paying attention as the left took over the institutions ordinarily tasked with performing the transmission of such things to the next generation. This includes, in particular, education, popular entertainment, the church, and the press.
The right may have thought these things were on automatic, and that not much attention needed to be paid. Little by little, as they were undermined, it either was not noticed, or thought localized or trivial.
Then all at once it became very very apparent. But by then it was either way too late, or at least so late that the scope of the effort required to undo the harm seemed (and still seems) enormous and perhaps impossible. The institutions and shared beliefs that had once seemed so solid remained only as facades and hollowed-out shells, if that.
It’s only in the last decade or so (accelerating during the Trump years, on watching the self-styled “Resistance”) that it’s become clear that the philosophy of “the ends justifies the means” has become acceptable operating procedure not just to far left activists (who always believed that), but to most rank and file Democrats. It’s also become clear that way too many Republican legislators lack either the will or the guts or the ability to fight it, and that there are powerful other forces working for it behind the scenes – the administrative state and all the agencies, as well as foreign interests such as China.
Commenter “PA Cat” draws our attention to this Tablet article that focuses on COVID and China, but it’s a good example of what I’m talking about:
Lockdowns, the mass quarantine of both sick and healthy people, have never before been used for disease mitigation in the modern Western world. Previously, the strategy had been systematically ruled out by the pandemic plans of the World Health Organization (WHO) and by health experts of every developed nation. So how did we get here?
Indeed; good question. We have plunged into something unprecedented in the West, and which was sold to us as highly temporary. Remember that? It’s hard to overestimate the changes that have been wrought by these lockdowns, not just in patterns of societal interaction and assembly that have lasted for hundreds if not thousands of years, but in people’s thinking about how acceptable or unacceptable such things are.
More:
Mass lockdowns of entire countries as a technique for fighting disease sprung into the world’s consciousness on the order of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who fomented a global propaganda offensive targeting Western governments and media.
China didn’t just give us the disease; it gave us the template on how to fight it. We only implemented these lockdown measures in a half-hearted way compared to China, but it was enough to send shock waves through our society and economy.
One after another, world leaders tipped over like dominoes, their national bureaucracies falling in line to cease all social and economic activity for the first time in history. In March 2020, the Dutch government commissioned a cost-benefit analysis concluding that the health damage from lockdown would be six times greater than the benefit. The government then ignored it, claiming “society would not accept” the optics of an elderly person unable to get an ICU bed.
I don’t think we would have accepted lockdowns seventy-five years ago or even twenty years ago, no matter where they came from. It was understood that risk was always part of life and that there was no avoiding it, and that the cost of trying to do so would represent a “cure” that was worse than the disease. What preceded our acquiescing to lockdowns (or more than just that 2 weeks to “flatten the curve”) was fear and the desire to control all negative outcomes, plus the idea that we had the knowledge to do so.
I suppose you could call it a kind of hubris. At any rate, we have lost a great deal, much of it psychological and philosophical. And by “we,” I mean the developed Western world. It didn’t take much, either; this virus was nowhere near as bad as the storm we weathered in 1918 without destroying ourselves.
The article goes on to say that we believed fraudulent news that China had controlled the virus through lockdowns. I had once assumed that reports of Chinese success in that endeavor was most likely a lie by China, but at some point I decided that we really don’t know. It might even be true that China controlled it by Draconian measures.
But so what? Does that mean that it would be worth it for us to do the same in order to fight a virus of some lethality but not so very out of the ordinary? In other words, what price liberty? After all, “Hitler made the trains run on time” and all that. We have long known that tyrannies are better at some things than messy republics are. We have to decide whether giving up our liberty is worth it to us.
If our children haven’t been taught to value liberty, it’s very easy for them to surrender it. And that’s what’s been happening. From the start of the COVID mess I noticed huge generational gaps – at least, for the people I know – which followed a seemingly counter-intuitive pattern. It was older people like me who were somewhat more cavalier about the virus: less likely to support lockdowns and more likely to assert that in a pandemic losses are inevitable. It was our children who were much more lockdown-friendly. That breakdown may not be universally true, but my own observations (and those of friends) led me to believe that the attitude was in line with a greater concern for absolute and total safety that I’ve noticed recently in a lot of young people.
More from the article:
Journalists have flailed about to construct reality in a way that pleases the CCP and their investors while being at least remotely plausible to their middle class readers. To date, this is the best they’ve come up with: A supervirus emerged that was so deadly only Chinese totalitarianism could stop it; it caused spontaneous death in Wuhan (but nowhere else) until Xi’s two-month lockdown of Wuhan eliminated it from all of China (but nowhere else), while a steady stream of “variants” now demands indefinite lockdown measures.
Journalists’ downplaying and suppressing any information that contradicts this science-fiction narrative has left those that trust them confused and scared, faced with a seemingly unbeatable virus with inexplicable characteristics and a crisis that makes no logical sense. “The science” changes constantly, sometimes overnight…
…[There] is a widespread government and media-inspired terror of the virus that is wildly out of proportion to the relatively moderate health risks it poses…
For the public to be so egregiously misinformed about their actual risk from COVID-19 renders democratic accountability for lockdown measures impossible. Even more so because, as a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary factor by which citizens judge the threat of COVID-19 is their own government’s decision to employ drastic lockdown measures. “We found that people judge the severity of the COVID-19 threat based on the fact the government imposed a lockdown—in other words, they thought, ‘it must be bad if government’s taking such drastic measures.’ We also found that the more they judged the risk in this way, the more they supported lockdown.”
A feedback loop creating a cycle of lockdowns.
This is the ending of the essay, and I have bolded the part that is directly related to the point I’m making in this post:
From journalists and judges to politicians and common professionals, the public has granted health officials one exception after another to their most fundamental rights, and they’ve been misled every step of the way. Whether out of gullibility, face-saving incompetence, or something worse, they’ve brought the world to a frightening place.
For political watchers, it’s been baffling to watch leaders muddle through the most inexplicable geopolitical debacle since the Thirty Years’ War. It is equally terrifying to know that a policy catastrophe of this scale is possible in the 21st century. But judging by his regime’s activities and the story of how all this began, at least one world leader was well aware of this potential.
For Xi Jinping, lockdown was never about a virus. It was about sending a message: that stripped of all disguise, the illusion of virtue, competence, and commitment to human rights among the Western political class is nothing more than conformity with easily subvertible norms and institutions passed down by prior generations. As lockdown policies grind on into their 18th month, it’s increasingly difficult to disagree with him.
Those “norms and institutions” were passed down more recently without inculcating the reasons behind them: why they are important, how they function to protect us, and what the dangers are in subverting them in what is perceived as a crisis. Without knowledge of those things, adherence to those “norms and institutions” is hollow. It is so weak it can be knocked over and destroyed by a threat as relatively minor as COVID, which although destructive is nothing like as bad as what many past generations weathered. This destruction would not have occurred had the ground not been fully prepared.
Turns out the John Birch Society was a visionary organization after all. They knew what the left was doing and all the got for it was to be demonized by Left and Right.
Hmmm…why does that sound familar?
I don’t know that the right ignored it. Almost all politicians did, but there were many writers who saw it coming, ranging from Hayek to Kirk, among many. But they were often dismissed as “theorists”. Hell, G K Chesterton saw a lot of this coming over a century ago.
I don’t really buy the “the right did nothing” line. Writers wrote; that’s their job. The weak link was the politicians, college administrators, and the like.
Eeyore:
“The right” doesn’t mean every single person on the right, of course. For example, even I noticed it many years ago. However, I’m speaking of many pundits, most politicians, and many regular folk just going about their lives and minding their own business. Virtually nothing effective was done to change things, even back when at least theoretically they might have been changed.
I’ve recommended it before, but the book that’s had the most explanatory power to me is Christopher Caldwell’s _The Age of Entitlement_. He posits that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in fact birthed a second constitution, towards which American culture in all its branches has effectively turned. And it unwrites the first one.
I too thank “PA Cat” for steering me to the “Masked Ball of Cowardice.”
But it’s not just cowardice: it’s pretty obvious that to “build back better” the oligarchy *wants* to sink us. Whether Covid was a plot or just an opportunity, there seems to be no better explanation for their actions:
https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/the-revolt-of-the-elites
I feel like I’m sounding paranoid and extremist, but I really think we are only just awakening to the enormity of all of this.
“It was our children who were much more lockdown-friendly. That breakdown may not be universally true, but my own observations (and those of friends) led me to believe that the attitude was in line with a greater concern for absolute and total safety that I’ve noticed recently in a lot of young people.” neo
A concern for absolute and total safety is a formula for the loss of it. Most likely, reality will facilitate that loss through the Chinese Communist Party. The West’s leftist supporting elites and an increasing amount of the West’s young people are in for the rudest of awakenings.
The irony is literally biblical, the only thing in the West protecting the unhinged left from the barbarians is those on the right willing to defend a society that leftists hate and that liberals are ashamed of being a member.
In the vast wasteland of Hollywood, occasionally the truth slips out;
“Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Whose gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? … You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.”
When they remove their rough and ready men, a people without honor cannot remain free. Freedom is not something we ‘deserve’, freedoom must be earned.
While I won’t go so far as to call Biden a Chinese puppet, I think a lot of movers and shakers are bought and paid for, through investments where not outright bribery and subornation.
Italy, remember, was friendly to the Belt & Road Initiative (I can only think because they were grasping at straws to stabilize their economy). The MSM are all subsidiaries of giant conglomerates with huge exposure to the Chinese economy. Universities rely on full-tuition Chinese students. And so forth.
The correct course of action would be to decouple, but that would have to be done by the same people who rely on not decoupling. Oh well. Maybe China is about to collapse in a heap of overextension and bad loans and won’t be able to keep up on the payments. We’ll see.
> “Lockdowns, the mass quarantine of both sick and healthy people, …. So how did we get here?”
Socialized medicine means that if somebody else is footing the bill for your medical care then they reserve the right to dictate how you will live. Where is your regular daily exercise peasant?!
}}} After all, “Hitler made the trains run on time” and all that.
Ummmm… Mussolini. 😉
}}} While I won’t go so far as to call Biden a Chinese puppet,
Why in God’s name not? What’s the Mandarin for “Dance you fool, dance!!”?
Xi is singing those words every day.
Geoffrey Britain,
A Few Good Men
Director Rob Reiner
Writer Aaron Sorkin (play)
A great film and a great script. But here we go again. Neither of those two men have publicly stated that they are members of the Communist Party USA, but wow; they are very far left. Sorkin I think is very smart. Reiner is a good director but no genius I suspect. Why don’t we have new Hemingways or John Fords?
His [Aaron’s] sister, Deborah Sorkin, is a Navy Judge Advocate General, who worked with David Iglesias. She told Aaron about a real-life case she had worked on with David, which became the basis of A Few Good Men (1992). The character played by Demi Moore was based on his sister. David Iglesias was a Republican, who would later gain fame as one of the U.S. Attorneys fired by the George W. Bush administration.
I’ll shut up about Marxist and left-wing artists now.
@Bryan Lovely at 1738-
You won’t call Biden a Chinese puppet.
Fine.
My observation is that whenever he has had a chance to decide between Chinese (or other non-American) and American interests, he has come down in favor of the Chinese side.
I don’t think he’s a puppet either. To the extent that he has agency, he is on their side. To be fair, I don’t think his agency is anywhere near intact, but I don’t get any sense that his decisions and actions that favor the other side are taken with any degree of reluctance.
Whether he is a puppet or an active participant, the result of our President’s activity is not distinguishable from that of a traitor.
LOL. How do you propose to teach a cow to value freedom? How do you coinvince a dog of the value of a fiddle? How do you teach someone whose deepest cultural impulse is to laugh at honor, honor?
I have had it to the point where I am no longer even angry. It has become funny.
Here is the point: If you have to be taught to value liberty, you are not fit to enjoy it, or to live among people who are. All that can be done with you who need to be taught, is for those who do value their freedom more than the validation that you serfs imagine comes with mutual ass sniffing, is for those who are fit to live as free men and women, to hammer it into your head that you are going to have to be free whether you like it or not; whether it makes you feel valued and affirmed or not; whether it makes you feel “safe” or not.
The moment they stop coercing you to be free, you dear 56%, is the moment they lose their own freedom: sacrificed on the altar of your innate incompetence and fears.
Effen goddamned peasants. What were the parents teaching these little darlings?? Oh yeah, the same thing they had been taught at home and 6 generations back when they were serfs in Germany or Ireland or wherever the hell these subservient grazing herd animal excuses for human beings came from.
It will be a good day when some Islamist blows up the Statue of Liberty and sends that virus Emma Lazarus headlong into the “dustbin” of history.
Donald Trump is a well known germophobe. I think Fauci and Birx and others thought that Pres. Trump could be rolled on these issues and they were correct.
I don’t disagree with the article or Neo’s take, though I’m not sure the Chinese planned on converting the West into a police state. Rather they wanted to see what would happen. Probing our defenses and inadequacies.
In fairness to the West and our elites, the outbreaks in Italy and NYC were spectacularly bad. The response in NYC was also spectacularly bad, though much of the problem was the very high population density. Maybe I’m just speculating, but the northern Italy outbreak was more proximate in time to the Wuhan outbreak and seemed more suspect in terms of nefarious China actions. Remember the Chinese guy in a mask hugging the passersby in Italy?
_____
Those “norms and institutions” were passed down more recently without inculcating the reasons behind them: why they are important, how they function to protect us, and what the dangers are in subverting them in what is perceived as a crisis.
As I told a Democrat friend of mine recently, somebody made the decision to remove civics classes from our grade schools where I learned about the structure of our government in third grade. I wished I had elaborated, but the teacher’s colleges and unions are the ones that want to wreck, and have wrecked, the good stuff that we once had.
I guess I have a stricter definition of “puppet” than others here.
• I don’t believe Xi picks up the phone and tells Biden what to do.
• I don’t believe Xi has an understanding that if he says something in public Biden will do what he wants.
• I don’t even believe Xi has an understanding that if Biden does what he wants then Hunter will get more money-laundering deals.
• I think Xi knows that Biden is an idiot who is always wrong on foreign policy issues, so he can assume that Biden won’t choose the best course and he’ll be able to take advantage.
• I think Biden is ill-advised by people who want jobs in the media or thinktankery, or want to write a book after they quit or retire, or want to go into business with K Street, or want to get a professorship.
Those people are probably being told, “Don’t say or write anything anti-China, or we won’t be able to hire your or pay you a fat book advance. Because if you did and then we did, China would freeze us out of their market/not funnel donations to us/stop sending us full-tuition students.” And most likely they don’t even have to say it, because everyone knows what the game is already.
DNW:
Rant over?
I think you said the other day that you valued Zaphod because he made you look kind-hearted in comparison, or something like that. Well, you certainly have upped the ante here.
I hope you never went into any educational field, because you don’t seem to get how what we teach our children really really matters. You seem to think the love of liberty is innate in certain ethnic groups and not innate in others, such as the Irish, who cannot be taught to value it? Or the descendants of Germans? Or people whose ancestors were peasants? That would certainly leave out a huge chunk of Americans who – wait for it – actually value liberty. I have seen people from all walks of life and all ethnic groups who value liberty highly, and those who do not.
Sometimes it is indeed true that some people seem to be born with an innate love of liberty and some who seem born without it. But people are neither cows nor dogs, and they can be taught (a) the value of liberty (b) even more importantly, the value of preserving the liberty of others and not just for oneself.
That latter thing – liberty for others – is less likely to be valued in some innate way, and usually has to be pointed out and taught as a value. That’s what Civics classes used to do. Perhaps you, DNW, didn’t need Civics class, but many people who learned as kids in the old-fashioned way what our government and our Constitution are about, and how they protect them and their loved ones, did indeed learn to value liberty.
Reagan wasn’t perfect, and so perhaps you hate him, too. I really don’t know what your opinion is. But he understood that the value of liberty needed to be taught or it might be lost:
I guess I have a stricter definition of “puppet” than others here.
Bryan Lovely:
I share a similar resistance to over-broad assertions of Biden as Chinese puppet. Well said.
Vis-à-vis Reagan, I ran across this the other day, looking for anything online that discussed how G. H. W. Bush actually fired most of the Reaganites when he took office (something well known in Washington, and within my personal knowledge). It wasn’t discussed much then or since, because it didn’t fit either sides’ “narrative.”
Anyhow, Reagan on Biden:
https://spectator.org/reagan-on-biden-smooth-but-pure-demagogue/
A fascinating talk despite being from early in the year. Yes, a lot of water over the dam since then but consider listening up to about 10:00 to hear a story of prescribing HCQ (the patient got better, the doctor eventually got fired)
Dr Simone Gold
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-dr-simone-gold-truth-about-covid-19-vaccine/5738794
DNW:
Uh, yeah. Pretty much.
I think that you can impart information to almost anyone. And that teaching someone about about the inner-workings of say, a gasoline powered internal combustion is probably the only way they will ever truly understand it.
But now let me ask you: Do you think that people can be taught traits? What did your psychology professors tell you about that? I know what mine told me.
Which of these do you suspect is the result of “education”?
Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism.
I think that a disposition toward liberty is not distributed evenly in any human population and lineage. I also think that cultural “traits” both reflect and reinforce characteristics or personality traits found in some preponderant proportion (or possibly some mere plurality) of the lineages making up a distinct population however it is parsed.
Now with regard to the Germans and the Irish. It is indisputable, an historical fact, that the Irish were the first substantial population of immigrants to fail to seek the frontier. One may speculate on the reasons for that, and I am sure they were various. But historians – and these include Irish-American social critics – have consistently noted the collectivist mindset of the Irish, and their tendency to cluster in cities. The most sympathetic interpreters, suggest that this was the result of the complete destitution of the immigrants, the lack of even adequate farming skills among the males, and … that culturally expressed disposition; which can even be seen, I would argue, in the ancient laws of Ireland which were full of extra-legal type concerns that, for example, persons not be humiliated or excluded.
In the case of the German ’48ers, no argument is necessary. Those who seem to have had any ideology had a socialist ideology, and they maintained it into the 20th century as their German language newspapers and various cultural institutions demonstrated.
There was no doubt about this at the time of the Civil War.
Sure. The distribution of traits in a population is not uniform.
With regard to your first point: I’d like to see how you are going to teach someone to develop an appetite for that for which they do not hunger.
Secondly, the construction seems to me to be a bit vague. Unless you mean that it has a redounding and reinforcing effect, and are arguing a natural law position, I don’t really grasp the line of thought.
A value for who? And to what specific end?
Well, so you say. I’d like to hear from someone whose classroom exposure to the concept of dual federalism, or the separation of powers, kindled an appreciation for autonomy where only a concern with appetite satisfactions and social acceptance had existed before.
Although Reagan is denying that freedom is passed along in the bloodstream, what he is actually addressing is not a taste for liberty, but the inter-generational perpetuation of the regime of liberty. That, given the forces arrayed against it, is not automatic. Reagan is saying that one has to train to preserve it; not train to appreciate it.
A taste for liberty is not like a taste for Scotch whiskey.
One thing that I might mention here, as, if not a concession, another angle of attack or perspective, is the outstanding essay someone linked to the other day from Michael Anton.
In it he explores the reasons who the preservation of the constitutional procedures which are intended distributively extend rights and liberties, mean so little to left-wing elites.
The answer is, that they simply buy their way out of chaos, and into privilege. And, that as a means of preserving their self-esteem, which is based on their purchase of privilege, it is necessary for them to have some system of virtual peonage in place.
He does not use those terms or descriptions exactly, but that seemed to me to be the thrust of his essay … at least the first 2/3rds of it.
I’ll probably take another look at it now.
Thanks to whoever originally linked it.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/california-plague-blue-locusts/
Neo: “I don’t think we would have accepted lockdowns seventy-five years ago or even twenty years ago, no matter where they came from. It was understood that risk was always part of life and that there was no avoiding it, and that the cost of trying to do so would represent a “cure” that was worse than the disease. What preceded our acquiescing to lockdowns (or more than just that 2 weeks to “flatten the curve”) was fear and the desire to control all negative outcomes, plus the idea that we had the knowledge to do so.”
Agree with all; and I’ll add another. For a lot of people in the first world, the “office” people that is, lockdown simply meant working from home. They still kept their jobs and therefore, their income. If anything it meant more family time, less time commuting, saving money by not spending it on dry cleaning and commuting costs. So, for many lockdown wasn’t that much of a challenge. They could even order their groceries online or other items from Amazon.
For these people (and I am one of them) lockdown didn’t hurt them financially. The managers at our company, when the lockdown first started, held weekly meetings for everyone to “check in” so we could discuss how we were doing.
Almost everyone told the “difficulties” of working from home such as: being with your kids all day was to make one say that teachers aren’t paid enough, sharing the dining room table with a spouse who also had zoom calls was a challenge, ordering stuff online was an exercise in patience as you had to wait for delivery, etc.
When I chimed in that I felt lucky as I was still working, keeping my job and my pay, unlike so many businesses that are now closed forever and those people are out of work with little to no income the manager replied that it was true we would have to get used to our favorite store, restaurant, etc. being gone. Really? THAT was his take-away from what I said? People were force out of work with an economy being shut down and his response was yea, I’ll miss my favorite store?!
Such narrow-mindedness, self-centered, elites are another one of the reasons for the lockdowns to continue. It didn’t hurt them so the lockdowns weren’t all bad.
https://youtu.be/kPQE3GfkrOo
The problem with ‘Democracies’ is that they feed on External Enemies in the Hegelian Dialectical Manger. From Athens and Sparta to the War of 1812 to the Spanish Heist of 98 and ever onwards and upwards.
Every swallow they take, they become a little of what they just munched on. Unless they’re put of of their misery and get their Long Walls knocked down and a visit from Uncle Philip.
So why does it surprise you that your ‘Elites’ are doing a Shoddy Chinese Knockoff of, well, Chinese Methods now that they’ve decided (on a dime — seem to remember a different rhetoric just a few years ago) that China is Out To Get Them and Very Very Very Bad?
The irony of course is that it’s the Western Product that’s shoddy this time around. I mean why lockdown when you’re so incompetent you couldn’t find a thigh bone in a charnel house even if you paid Accenture half your GNP in finders fees?
The Panda is nobody’s friend and can and will act as an amoral Machiavellian Great Power. The question to be asked is what kind of in-bred morons running the various bits of the Western Empire are incapable of grasping that this is default normal? You might as well legislate against the tides.
I have visions of Chinese Think Tankers and Pooh and his Courtiers sitting around asking themselves “Do these People really *believe* the mystical %$^& they’re constantly spouting about Principles and Blacks and Women and Trannies and stuff while they’re simultaneously getting richer than Chinky Croesus by strip mining their own ordinary people’s livelihoods?” .. and some guy who’s done a postdoc at one of the Ivies saying ‘Yes’ and being laughed out of the room.
DNW:
You’re calling attention to the Anton piece?
Are you aware that I wrote an entire post on it today, with many lengthy quotes? Here is my post, which you can find directly below this one.
DNW on September 15, 2021 at 9:06 pm said:
“In it he explores the reasons who …”
No. It is “why”
“In it he explores the reasons why …”
No. Instead , ” … which are intended to distributively extend rights and liberties,
@DNW:
I’ll say the taste for Liberty isn’t evenly distributed. No other human trait except (broadly) what goes under rubric of ‘The Vices’ is.
I wonder if instead of wondering and pondering ‘How it All Went Wrong?’ — not a bad thing to do, but not the only thing — some of the readership here might do better to go take a cold shower in the Italian School of Elite Theory (Pareto, Mosca, Michels), and top that off with some Machiavelli, Carlyle, and Burnham.
There’s too much taking the Box Contents at face value in these parts. Too much looking at how things are *said* to work as opposed to empirical first principles study of how things really work. And by ‘things’ I mean Power.
Power is Everything, O Boomers of the Book (pick yer book). They didn’t teach that in Mrs Rickenbacker’s Civics Class back at Jefferson Elementary, I get that. But it’s never too late to realise that You’ve Been Had. You don’t have Power. Your Enemies do have Power and will only modify their ways when you have Power. Fine talk of Principles is the *Rhetoric* of Power and the *Salve* and *Cope-ium* of Downtrodden Losers.
You’re going to have to rediscover the Will to Power. Pity you’ve all been Pavlovian Conditioned to poop in your cages at the very turn of phrase :P.
And *adjusting Walmart Tricorn Hat fresh from the production line in Urumqi Uighur No. 44 Holiday Camp* “That’s not Who We Are Harumph! Boom, boom.”
So.. there’s a Problem right there.
neo on September 15, 2021 at 9:36 pm said:
No, I was not. I followed a link which was the latter of two links placed next to each other in someone’s comment; probably, yesterday.
I have been using a hand held device … alternating it with a desktop.
Discover [and embrace it] it to what end? To survive? Or to master?
Two different questions.
The will to power problem eventually reduces to what to do with those whom you are forced by accepting the paradigm, to have power over.
There is no pleasure in it. It is not worth anything as a way of life. Who wants to be king of the shitheads and the ugly?
So, you can kill them all; or embrace fascism and become a slave master; which for anyone who wants to be free, is a form of slavery itself.
DNW:
Your attempt to restate what you wrote here doesn’t really do the trick.
You have no idea how a “a disposition toward liberty” is transmitted, and in particular whether it is some genetically inherited trait (the theory you appear to espouse) or whether it is some nature/nurture combination (innate propensity plus teaching) or whether it is mostly or entirely taught and/or culturally transmitted. You offer no evidence either.
Nor has anyone said that the valuing of liberty is evenly distributed among ethnic groups. If it is like just about every other trait or characteristic or propensity on earth, it is either innately different in each individual, and/or different in the way each individual is taught or learns or experiences it culturally and/or different in terms of individual experience through life, and of course different in different populations in terms of how strong it is or how common it is. No one ever said otherwise. But that does not tell us whether it is totally learned, partly learned, or – as you seem to somehow think, for whatever idiosyncratic reason of your own – utterly inherited.
I’ve already explained that people certainly used to teach the value of liberty. I certainly learned it early on. It was certainly taught, and the people around me taught it to different degrees – some more, some less. The entire culture at the time transmitted that value. I have watched as the educational system has stopped valuing it or teaching it, and I am quite convinced that this has had an effect on the younger generation and even on the older generation to a certain extent.
You are more than free to think otherwise, but I find your arguments utterly unconvincing and far more emotional than logical.
As far as Reagan and liberty goes, you write “Reagan is saying that one has to train to preserve it; not train to appreciate it.” Actually he is saying both, and both are true. I quote (emphasis added):
So Reagan is saying that freedom is not genetic. It must be defended and the next generation must be taught how to protect it. Obviously, if they must be taught this, that includes being taught about its value. You don’t fight for something or protect it without valuing it, and if you already somehow innately value it then you don’t have to be taught you must protect it. You protect what you value. The two cannot be separated.
@DNW:
The Human Condition, the Study of All of Us, the History of All of Us boils down to Power and the Use/Misuse Of. Or looking in the funhouse mirror a Cynic might say “Losing Gracefully or Disgracefully whilst wallowing in self-congratulation about the certain morality of one’s miserable loser state” in certain Edge Cases, only one of which involves Leprechauns, Green Beer, and maudlin laments…
‘Conservatives’ and much of what passes for the Right are all about being too pure to reach for the Ring. I mean it’s corrupting and warping and you might come out the other end on top but looking like George Soros, err scrub that, Gollum!
So all that classical literature from the Bhagavad Gita onwards about having to make a play for it even when you don’t want to do it but must do it in order to avert more terrible fates because someone else is going to do it regardless because you’re too much of a Goody Two Shoes to act is all bad because Muh Nazis or something?
And yes of course, won’t be pretty and won’t work out well usually for whoever does what has to be done. Fortunately there’s a whole Loeb’s Classical Library to map it out for Innocents — Everything has happened before(*). Everything. Except perhaps the Kardashians — Still there was Elagabalus —> Perhaps Bruce Jenner will be your next President?
Western Civilization will die if passivity and not even half-measures are the order of the day. I just need to find a Magical Negro to explain this to folks, I guess.
(*) Chinese know this and know their history. And they ran themselves through the wringer multiple times during C20 before deciding enough was enough. They’re fortunate in that they only have the CCP Propaganda guys to tell them who was right and who was wrong… At least they’re all Chinese. Whitey abdicated the right to censor and arbitrate his own history to Others.
Significant heritability in the Big Five Personality Traits:
Heritability estimates of the Big Five personality traits based on common genetic variants
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26171985/
Let me guess… Ornery Contumacious Cantankerous People hate freedom? Yup! Can I have my Ford Foundation Fellowship now, pretty please?
Blind Freddy could figure out that stuff like being ‘Freedom-Loving’ or an NPC have significant heritable components. The airy rhetoric of Saint Ronald the Absent Father Wot Slayed the Bear in a long-gone age is neither here nor there except that what you need to make certain of every new generational pudding is a good solid dose of Indoctrination (yes.. Indoctrination — that’s what Saint Ronald done meant when he spoke with golden tongue. ‘Education’ my Posterior!) every generation to shore it up around the edges. Nothing wrong with some Indoctrination…absolutely necessary to prime the head contents of the NPCs, but depends a hell of a lot on who is doing it.
NPC == Non-Playable Character for those who don’t keep up to date with memes. Basically most of the populace who get their received ideas from Elsewhere and never think much for themselves. Once you grasp that most of humanity are NPCs you quickly lose all this nonsense about Socratic Dialog and Muh Public Square where politics is concerned. Just ask Mister Bernays.
Zaphod:
You are free to welcome your insect overlords. We’re not interested in welcoming ours. Nor are we interested in becoming them.
A person can fight something without becoming it.
Just because you say it doesn’t make it so. It is my opinion that you know a great deal less than you think you know. You love the colorful phrase – “You’re going to have to rediscover the Will to Power. Pity you’ve all been Pavlovian Conditioned to poop in your cages at the very turn of phrase.” Yeah, right, I’m just pooping in my cage here. Do you think that saying it that way makes it more convincing? You substitute what you consider shock value for persuasion or reason, and you make assumptions that not only are not true, but that have little or no evidence.
You are not an American. Some people, no matter where they live and even if they never come here, understand America and are simpatico with Americans and America in their souls. Some people do not and are not, and you are one of those people. Some people in this country, even those born here, also utterly lack and fail to understand the spirit of America. It happens.
Zaphod:
You’re an interesting guy with a fun flashy writing style I enjoy and a well-stocked memory I respect. But you’re still just this … guy. Like I am … just another guy.
You’re not God or Nietzsche nor even Spengler or Toynbee.
Half the time you are apparently not addressing us, but America’s Ruling Class. However, this is a peculiar venue for such a project.
I’ve been around my share of bright, fast-talking fellows and I’ve read my share of people like Paul Ehrlich and Bill Ayers, who were quite certain about what is wrong and what must be done.
I just don’t get rolled that way anymore.
Of course, maybe you’re the guy who has it right this time and I’m too stupid to realize it.
If you were interested in persuading me, it would work better to speak more slowly and respectfully and with less code. But that’s your choice. It’s perfectly fine with me for you to continue as you have.
So, you say:
“I certainly learned it early on. It was certainly taught, and the people around me taught it to different degrees – some more, some less. The entire culture at the time transmitted that value.”
This is an extraordinary premise.
You were taught the value of liberty, you say.
But you do not say what value liberty supposedly had. I guess we are to presume an instrumental one. Or, maybe not.
Now, I can think of one argument that valorizes liberty, in a form not directly as an entitlement [i.e., an implied immunity against legitimate deprivation, derived from from natural law]
But as you have not specified this “value” over the course of several comments, I am hesitant to provide it myself.
So, try and recollect how you – or better one of your typical 14 year old female friends – was taught to value political liberty.
Are you going to make a reciprocal respect argument? “Good for me and good for you”? If so that presumes a preexisting appetite for liberty on the part of the one being presented with the lesson. It also assumes that they accept that the relationship with “the other” is, and is of a right, reciprocal.
So the student is not really being taught to value liberty, as much as respect, under proposed penalty of some retaliation, of losing their own.
Now, since I have alluded to it, I will state the “value” of liberty argument often seen in the 1970’s and 80s. It is cloaked natural law argument, adjusted to a presumed individual human good: maximal self-realization. Liberty was supposedly saleable to the individual as the condition under which maximum self-actualization could be realized.
But of course, the problem with this argument is revealed when you have a population of native Marxists who see “nature” as unfair, advert to a ” tyranny of biology”, and speak of “positive liberty” as the true liberty: i.e. a smorgasbord of choices which it is your duty to provide to others, so that they too may maximize their own supposed potentialities.
So that “Value the regime of liberty because of ‘fulfillment’ ” argument doesn’t really fly.
You wind up with Rawls, or Rorty.
Zaphod:
Did you actually read the abstract to which you linked? Here’s a quote:
Whatever they found has no clear connection to valuing of liberty, which is what concerns us here. And in fact there is only a certain percentage of heritability found in the study, the percentage is only estimated, only Europeans were studied, and only two traits – neuroticism and openness – were found to have such heritability.
Weak sauce with no particular relevance to what we’re discussing.
Not a whole lot of information about the details of the research design, either.
By the way, do you know what a heritability estimate is?:
An estimate of .50 means it is estimated that half is nature and half nurture. In the study to which you linked, the estimates (and remember, these are only estimates) are much much lower than that. I repeat – very very weak sauce indeed, and not necessarily related to the topic at hand.
Zaphod:
By the way, I have to say that it surprises me that you think research such as that to which you linked has much value. As a person with graduate level training in the field of social science research, and having worked for a year or two in the field as well, I can assure you that most of it is utter garbage. I take it all with a grain or more of salt.
“The human condition” That phrase mystifies me. What human condition is that?
For a guy who sees differences clearly enough, you sure seem to persist in following that “one humanity” implied line of argument.
Your will to power argument seems always and every time to:
1, take humankind as a rough moral or at least psychic unity
2. and despite your insistence that human beings are not fungible – a point I made many times in the past myself is a slightly different context – you seem to believe that even in mono-ethnic polity, the same dystopian impulses will inevitably well up in say the republic of Old Piedmont Virginie, as would in Bolivia.
This suggests, against so much of your other commentary, that populations are more or less all the same everywhere even if it only extends to negatively evaluated traits.
If not, then why would even the most tepid form of Falangism be your recommended order of political organization.
From your link:
That statement does not seem to make sense.
“Variation” from what? Within what, specifically? Do they mean variation relative to the intensities of the individual instantiations of the disorder within a sampled population?
Do they purport to mean that in each and every particular case the etiology is distributively the same in a sampled population? Half genetic causation half social or life environment?
Do they mean that half the depressives will have a genetic basis and half an environmental basis or some varied mix which “averages out to …”
I think that I am going to have to seek another explanation stated another way.
But not today.
I’m signing out for now.
DNW:
It’s just a way for researchers to define what they mean by heritability estimates – it just means that it is estimated that half the variance in a population is due to genetics. They don’t know which half, they don’t know which individuals, they really don’t know much. It usually is used to mean the mix of the trait in general, NOT that 50% of the individuals have all inherited the trait and 50% have taken it in culturally.
I put it in there because Zaphod had linked to some research that used the term, and that is the definition of the term – not because it’s my definition or because I especially value that kind of research.
DNW:
I really am surprised you’re not aware of how the value of liberty was transmitted to school kids of the 50s and 60s. Nor do I know why you chose the age of 14, because it was actually an ongoing thing from an early age right through to the end of school, in ever-increasing complexity, and with many elements.
When young it was mainly transmitted through stories of the Founders and memorization of portions of speeches and the like, and early history lessons in the Revolution – why it happened, what they were fighting, why the lack of liberty made them angry, etc. etc.. Then there was popular culture – the books we read that extolled it, the movies we watched, the discussions we heard from our parents and their friends. Being born not all that long after the end of WWII, I certainly heard a lot about that conflict and what evils dictatorships perpetrate on populations and on innocent people,and how it was necessary to fight it.
Later there was the study of documents such as the Declaration and the Constitution. Liberty was one of the inalienable rights endowed by the Creator, incredibly precious and important – so important you even protected the right to liberty (speech,etc.) of someone with whom you disagreed. Lots of emphasis on the Bill of Rights.
Later on, history of the world and also ancient history, Greeks and Romans, and stuff about tyrants there. The lessons really were everywhere. Plays we saw, movies we watched, speeches that were given, all to emphasize liberty’s importance.
Later on, courses in college – mostly electives, for example for me courses on different forms of government, and one I’ve spoken of here before called Russian Intellectual History that taught about 19th and 20th century Russia. I read a great many Russian novels including lots by Dostoevsky, and that went into it as well.
There was also what we did not learn. We did not receive the sort of anti-liberty messages kids today receive. We were not told we were so fragile we couldn’t survive mean speech. We were told it couldn’t hurt us, and that we needed to be strong, and to fight speech with other speech. We were told that words were not the same as violence. We saw the ACLU stick up for free speech rather than oppose it.
There was much more, but I’ll just stop there.
I second Neo’s comment on growing up then as I did too and experienced the same water to swim in. That’s what has changed, the water of liberty has been polluted with a poison introduced by what we refer to as “the Left.”
So, try and recollect how you – or better one of your typical 14 year old female friends – was taught to value political liberty.
Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, and buying products from giant international conglomerates to “stick it to the Man.”
Neo’s memory of how the value of liberty was taught in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s precisely echoes mine.
No evidence that any lockdown saved even a single life. Flatten the curve doesn’t change the area under the curve. Read that again.
Lockdowns killed many. That was obvious at the time. Even more obvious now. And the lost economic wealth can never be recovered. Those trillions would have made an enormous difference in the health, wealth and standards of living of the poor and working class for years to come.
Lockdowns were the worst public policy measure in history.
Neo,
In response to your perplexed rejoinders to my question regarding your early teen friends, compared to my schooldays.
As for myself, I was taught in school neither anything resembling an ntelligent patriotism nor anything about liberty as a virtue.
Early on as a grade schooler, I was taught Dewyism – democracy as social identification – as I think were most of my contemporaries. I actually remember a 5th grade teacher having copies of his works, or works about him, on a shelf in the classroom. Hey look, “John Dewey, Prophet of Democracy”, it says. We are a democracy aren’t we? Gosh he must be a really great guy like Grandpa or Walt Disney or something.
So that lasted until it was replaced during Jr High by a more strident form of anti-establushment skepticism, and rmoral relativism. Not all or even most teachers were blatantly ideological. It was just the default position, assumed as normal.
I mentioned the attitudes of 14 year old girls with regard to you as a paradigm case, because I was imagining you and your friends as preteens and young teens hysterically screaming at Beatles concerts.
Not so many years after that would have ostensibly taken place, my own hot on their heels cohort was populated by precocious 12 year old females whose only interests in life were trying to get away with wearing , lipstick, fishnet stockings and mimiskirts like the older girls.
Within relatively short order however that old regime was overthrown, and to the “To Sir With Love for children” look, was surprisingly if temporarily replaced by something more normal, as the replacement torn bell bottoms and tank top look had not yet penetrated downward into the backwaters of the yet further out suburban high-schools to which I had moved.
But that had no effect on the curriculum or its presentation. Our teacher pool was populated with draft dodging males and union activists and the most salient points of what we learned with regard to civics was that revolutions could be ignited and won by a determined 4%, and that our racist parents were selfish for not prefering higher taxes and cities redesigened with communal spaces, to private vacation properties.
The hirelings had not yet become the Masters. But they were flexing their muscles, and on the road to it.
We had arrived by that time at a point where it was just assumed by all supposedly intelligent people, that constitutional forms were just the superstructural impedimentia of a system of social oppression.
I assumed, given what I had been exposed to, and the smirky Maoist attitudes of those doing the exposing, that by the time I was in my early to mid twenties we ( my side) would be shooting it out with leftists in the streets in a Gotterdammerung style free for all to the knife. Then, somehow, Reagan was elected.
I have to say, this has been quite a fascinating read. I agree with Neo’s insights into how liberty is fostered and transmitted. It accords with what I have observed with the young people at work.
DNW:
You are obviously considerably younger than I am. I was speaking very specifically of my era and earlier. I am well aware that it changed later on; that was actually my point.
I grew up in NYC. Where did you grow up? Regions had different rates of change, as well. What you say about your own upbringing is interesting.
And my teachers were mostly quite old. Some of them probably started teaching in the NYC public school system in the 1920s or perhaps even earlier.
It’s almost amusing that you see me as part of some pack of 14-year-olds screaming at the Beatles. I was never really part of a pack like that at all (in fact, I don’t even remember packs like that where I grew up) – nor was I 14 when the Beatles got popular. I was a mite older.
neo on September 16, 2021 at 3:19 pm said:
My formative memories of childhood (neighborhood play, etc.) and grade school were in the lake shore suburbs north east of Detroit.
At about 11, we moved about 6 miles further north, into a new subdivision built on disused farmland. You know the type; curving streets, larger lots, populated with “ranch colonials”, tri-levels, and extended ranch houses, all of brick, all with attached garages. Typical late mid sixties to early seventies stuff. As I have mentioned before, if your parents were adventurous types, you got a tri-level with all the latest like a central vacuum system with wall outlets, an intercom system with radio broadcasting, cool perforated bronze cone shaped directional lighting and a host of other things like mirrored sliding closet doors, modern rather than traditional looking fireplaces, and huge cylindrical pendant light fixtures made of cracked mulit-colored glass like they might have had on Star Trek – in place of brass colonial chandeliers in the dining room.
Otherwise your dad spent the money on oak floors, copper plumbing, plaster walls, fixture upgrades and boring, invisible stuff like that LOL
But, here is the thing. All that distributed prosperity didn’t seem to have the effect you would have assumed. Rather than being a piece of America remote from strife, Michigan at the time was in constant ferment.
Jerry Cavanagh styled as a possible heir to Jack Kennedy had just a few years earlier gotten himself elected by essentially inventing the politics of race-conflict alignment; and, riding that horse for all it was worth into the mayor’s office, he floundered around till it all blew up in his face, ended his career, and probably helped to kill him prematurely. “Nice work Jerome. How’d that plan work out for you?”
Of course, the nation’s Democrats are still campaigning on that model today.
So, one of the nation’s biggest urban riots had just taken place in the city proper; ambitious Irish pols were leveraging their Irishness and their progressivism into political offices on the basis of their last names, and the region was simultaneously [research has revealed] the ideological cockpit if not the spawning ground post Vatican II Catholic progressivism.
You would think that down to earth commercial cities, with good paying jobs which provided the working classes with returns that allowed them to meld seamlessly into solidly middle class life styles – at least materially – would be reservoirs of relative social tranquility.
But that never seems to have been the case in Detroit; certainly not since the mechanization of formerly stoop labor, and “the Great Postwar Migration” from the cotton field shacks of Alabama to the subsidized housing projects of Detroit.
Detroit, for all its prosperity, was just made for fervent activists; secular or religious, labor or race, ideologically driven or just corrupt opportunists.
I think that that is why you have had so many Lakes States commenters on your site, even from relatively early days, who saw where this was all inevitably going. They had lived that conflict since early childhood.
Aren’t you in this scene?
@ TommyJay > “As I told a Democrat friend of mine recently, somebody made the decision to remove civics classes from our grade schools where I learned about the structure of our government in third grade. I wished I had elaborated, but the teacher’s colleges and unions are the ones that want to wreck, and have wrecked, the good stuff that we once had.”
My experience is much closer to Neo’s than to DNW’s but his seems to be the transition period where most of the wrecking became institutionalized.
My mother was teaching 7th grade in a small Texas town from about 1970-1990 and witnessed the decline, which finally convinced her to stop working for the school system (she claimed that she would have been fine with continuing to teach).
As one of the faculty assigned to evaluate textbooks available from the State, and sometimes to make recommendations to state committees, she said that it was clear the texts were being corrupted, but there were not enough people like her on the committees to keep it from happening.
I never heard her cuss, but she came close when talking about the NEA and other teacher unions, and the education system in general.