Clarification

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s come to my attention that some people misunderstood what I was getting at in this post, so I want to make it crystal clear if I can—knowing, of course, that Karl Popper was correct when he said it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.

But I’ll try to do a little better.

No, I do not believe that the majority of Americans sat down prior to the 2012 election, studied socialism and/or the left, and made a rational, well-thought-out decision that it was the best approach possible, and that Obama was the one to implement it in the here and now.

I wrote:

…I can only conclude that, for an ever-growing segment of the population, it wasn’t that they had to ignore and/or make excuses for these things [leftist “tells” from Obama]. It’s that they approved of these things. The oft-repeated statement that this is a center-right country doesn’t seem to be the case any more, however many people may describe themselves as “conservative” on polls.

A fuller statement of what I was trying to say begins with the idea that American values and culture used to be conveyed by a host of institutions creating a certain atmosphere and ethos, especially that Big Three we’ve discussed many times before here: media, entertainment, education. I would add to that list families and churches. Included prominently in this cultural transmission were the ideas of assimilation for immigrants and of American exceptionalism, but others were personal initiative, distrust of the federal government versus state governments (“government is best that governs least“), private charity, and the importance of marriage for raising children.

Now those same Big Three convey a very different message, one that is far more amenable to the values of the left. That is no accident, of course.

We are now reaping the dubious rewards of that change, a possible tipping point where the majority of Americans do not hear alarm bells when leftist sentiments and goals are voiced. It has everything to do with cultural and media brainwashing, a sort of desensitization to the idea of those things, things which used to (and not so very long ago, either) make people very uneasy. They no longer do, at least for very many people (as we saw here).

I’m not at all sure that most people even recognize these things as being part of a leftist agenda (to them, they’re not “tells”), or are even aware of what that agenda might be. They know they sound pretty good though—and also have the side benefit of sticking it to the rich, those greedy bastards.

Leftism has triumphed in many places because its promoters count on its sounding good at a gut level to the people they used to call “the masses.” The right, on the other hand, has to work harder to counter that message and to explain why its policies would be better in the long run, even though they might sound harsh in the short run. When the right is supported by media, entertainment, schools, families, and churches, it has a more than fighting chance. When it isn’t, the road it must walk goes steeply uphill.

We’ve been sliding down that hill for a long time, and the public no longer recognizes the danger. In fact, it’s beginning to embrace it.

Sisters of the surgeon’s knife: entering the uncanny valley

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night I came across a TV reality show that held a certain ghastly fascination and sucked me into watching it for a while. I won’t reveal which one it was (too ashamed of myself), but let’s just say it featured a bunch of forty-something women who run in rich and powerful circles in which the females have to maintain a certain glossy look, usually with the help of multiple plastic surgeries and procedures.

There was a scene in which about five or six women friends were seated around a table shooting the breeze (as Holden Caulfield would say), and it struck me that they all looked closely related, even though they weren’t. Did they all have the same surgeon? Or did their surgeons all have the same training? Or had the women merely had the same procedures done?

It was uncanny—as in, “they’ve entered the uncanny valley”—how much they resembled each other, and how oddly inhuman they looked. Barbie dolls appear less plastic than they.

If you’re not familiar with the term “uncanny valley,” it’s a useful one:

Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori stated in 1970 that the more human a robot acted or looked, the more endearing it would be to a human being. For example, most lovable Robot Buddies look humanoid, but keep quirky and artistically mechanical affectations. However, at some point, the likeness would seem too strong, and it would just come across as a very strange human being. At this point, the acceptance drops suddenly, changing to a powerful negative reaction.

“That’s a human, but there’s something really wrong with them.”

My sentiments exactly last night—and these women really were humans, not computer animations.

I think.

Obama: “I won’t compromise on taxes”

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama says:

If we’re serious about reducing our deficit while still investing in things like education and research that are important to growing our economy – and if we’re serious about protecting middle-class families – then we’re also going to have to ask the wealthiest Americans to pay higher tax rates. That’s one principle I won’t compromise on.

I’m curious: are there any important principles he is willing to compromise on?

Boehner:

There are a lot of things that are possible to put the revenues that the president seeks on the table. But none of it’s going to be possible [if] the president insists on his position, insists on ‘my way or the highway.

I’m no expert on previous negotiations between presidents and Congress, but I’m curious whether any of you can answer this question: is it usual for presidents dealing with a House controlled by the opposing party to take such an uncompromisingly hard line? Or does “compromise” usually mean, you know, compromise?

Of course, earlier presidents were constrained by the fact that if they took unreasonably inelastic positions they would be blamed if the consequences of non-agreement were dire. Obama has no such fear; he knows the blame will fall on the Republicans, especially if the MSM has anything to say about it (and it will, it will).

The first comment to the Yahoo article is of interest:

I would like to see these “meetings” televised on national tv so we can find out who is lying and who is not. Why cannot this be done? That would be much more worth watching that the crap that is on tv now! Don’t we have the right to know the truth?

A cri de coeur that I predict will remain unanswered. Then again, if the negotiations were to be televised, how many people would actually pay attention?

Ever heard of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755?

The New Neo Posted on by

The topics of the 1918 flu pandemic and the Lisbon earthquake came up yesterday in this discussion thread, which sparked a train of thought for me.

The very first time I read about the flu epidemic was when I was a child of about ten, but I didn’t know that’s what I was reading about. Bored one weekend and rooting around in my parents’ bookshelf, I’d come across the Katherine Ann Porter long story “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” and opened it in curiosity. The tale gripped me from the start and I read it right to its conclusion, even though I didn’t understand it at all and hadn’t a clue what the mysterious illness it described might be.

It was Porter’s vivid, poetic language (here is a passage from the story’s beginning, describing a dream the heroine Miranda is having) that cast its spell:

The stranger swung into his saddle beside her, leaned far towards her and regarded her without meaning, the blank still stare of mindless malice that makes no threats and can bide its time. She drew Graylie around sharply, urged him to run. He leaped the low rose hedge and the narrow ditch beyond, and the dust of the lane flew heavily under his beating hoofs. The stranger rode beside her, easily, lightly, his reins loose in his half-closed hand, straight and elegant in dark shabby garments that flapped upon his bones; his pale face smiled in an evil trance, he did not glance at her. Ah, I have seen this fellow before, I know this man if I could place him. He is no stranger to me.

She pulled Graylie up, rose in her stirrups and shouted, I’m not going with you this time—ride on! Without pausing or turning his head the stranger rode on. Graylie’s ribs heaved under her, her own ribs rose and fell, Oh, why am I so tired, I must wake up. “But let me get a fine yawn first, ” she said, opening her eyes and stretching, “A slap of cold water in my face, for I’ve been talking in my sleep again, I heard myself, but what was I saying?”

Slowly, unwillingly, Miranda drew herself up inch by inch out of the pit of sleep, waited in a daze for life to begin again. A single word stuck in her mind, a gong of warning, reminding her for the day long what she forgot happily in sleep, and only in sleep. The war, said the gong, and she shook her head.

Well, excerpts are excerpts, and they don’t really convey the power of the story, but I suggest you read the whole thing. Pronto. The Porter story was published in 1939, but it referred back to 1918, when Porter herself contracted the flu and nearly died. She is speaking from very personal experience; the story is semi-autobiographical, and probably quite a bit more than “semi.”

Then there’s the Lisbon earthquake. This time I first heard about that was from a different book: one of the volumes from Will and Ariel Durant’s humungous Story of Civilization series, which I came across under similar bored circumstances during a protracted stay at my in-laws’ house while I was helping my husband recover from knee surgery. Until then I’d never even heard of the Lisbon earthquake, although I was in my mid-twenties.

Like WWI and the flu epidemic, it was a cataclysmic event—not just because it killed a lot of people, but because of what it meant to those who survived. It was a case of that overused word: the narrative. If WWI precipitated a loss of faith in human progress, the Lisbon earthquake precipitated a loss of faith in faith itself. As I wrote here:

How many remember anything about the great Lisbon Earthquake, fire, and tsunami of 1755, which struck at 9 AM on All Saints’ Day and virtually destroyed a city that was one of the major capitals of the world at the time, collapsing churches filled with worshippers and filling Europe with horror? The earthquake struck not only at the city and its inhabitants, but at the attitude of optimism that had characterized the first half of that century, and caused many to question their previously unshakeable faith in divine providence, advancing the Enlightenment and the science of seismology.

There have been many disasters that have killed more people; the entire death toll from the earthquake and its attendant sequela (tsunami and fire) was probably “only” about 100,000. But its psychological effects were much greater than the numbers would dictate, because of the time and place:

In the morning of November 1, 1755, a large earthquake struck Lisbon – a great city legendary for its wealth, prosperity and sophistication. It was Sunday and the religious holiday of All Saints. Most of Lisbon’s population of 250,000 were praying in six magnificent cathedrals, including the great Basilica de Sao Vincente de Fora. Within minutes, this great thriving city-port of Lisbon, capital of Portugal and of the vast Portuguese empire and seat of learning in Europe, was reduced to rubble by the two major shocks of this great earthquake and the waves of the subsequent catastrophic tsunami. A huge fire completed the destruction of the great city…

The destruction caused by the earthquake was beyond description. Lisbon’s great cathedrals, Basilica de Santa Maria, Sao Vincente de Fora, Sao Paulo, Santa Catarina, the Misericordia – all full of worshipers – collapsed, killing thousands. Lisbon’s whole quay and the marble-built Cais De Pedra along the Tagus disappeared into the river, burying with it hundreds of people who had sought refuge.

The psychological and philosophical effects were profound:

The earthquake had wide-ranging effects on the lives of the populace and intelligentsia. The earthquake had struck on an important church holiday and had destroyed almost every important church in the city, causing anxiety and confusion amongst the citizens of a staunch and devout Roman Catholic city and country, which had been a major patron of the Church. Theologians would focus and speculate on the religious cause and message, seeing the earthquake as a manifestation of divine judgement. Most philosophers rejected that on the grounds that the Alfama, Lisbon’s red-light district, suffered only minor damage.

There are natural events that particularly resonate with the ethos of an age and help to shatter it. The flu and the war, and the Lisbon earthquake before it, had that effect. They are the quintessential Black Swans, the unforeseeable and uncontrollable events that help determine human destiny. And curiously, they are often forgotten (or nearly so) by posterity.

[NOTE: In this post I speculated on the reasons for what I call “the forgetting.”]

Obama’s leftism: a feature, not a bug

The New Neo Posted on by

One thing has become more clear since the 2012 election: why the charges about Obama’s leftism failed to gain traction in 2008.

When Obama was running for president the first time, it seemed as though there were so many things for which the American people would turn on him and realize that this was no moderate. Ayers, Soros, Alinsky, “spread the wealth,” electricity rates “skyrocketing,” bankrupting the coal companies. But strangely, none of them appeared to matter all that much, and Obama was elected with a hefty margin.

By 2012 things seemed even more clear. He’d failed to revive the economy or reduce the deficit. He’d championed a new, expensive, potentially intrusive, entitlement with mysterious and threatening details that kept emerging as time went on. He seemed hostile to business, both big and small (except for cronies, and big industry in swing states like Ohio whose votes he needed to court). His class warfare rhetoric was strongly divisive.

And yet he won, although by a lesser margin than before. I can only conclude that, for an ever-growing segment of the population, it wasn’t that they had to ignore and/or make excuses for these things. It’s that they approved of these things. The oft-repeated statement that this is a center-right country doesn’t seem to be the case any more, however many people may describe themselves as “conservative” on polls.

One of the most important lessons of the 2012 election for the right just may be that these changes in the perspective of much of the American public have been fundamental and need to be combated on a deeper level than previously thought. Perhaps that’s the biggest (and only?) plus in Romney’s loss: it lets us know what we’re dealing with.

We have never recovered from World War I

The New Neo Posted on by

And I fear we never shall.

When I was in school, World War I was hardly touched on in my history classes, so eager were the teachers to get to World War II before the year was over. It was only though reading a review of the Paul Fussell book The Great War and Modern Memory when it first came out in 1975, and then being intrigued enough to read the book, that I first learned what a cataclysmic event the First World War was, both in terms of death rates and in its psychological and even spiritual, as well as cultural, effects.

The first hint was this quote by Henry James, from a letter he wrote to a friend the day after Britain entered the war:

The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness… is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.

If you hack through James’ typically convoluted syntax, you’ll see a perfect encapsulation of the effect of the war: blood and darkness, giving the lie to what people of that age thought “civilization” had meant. The war caused people to look back at all the years of seeming progress and regard them as a cruel, tantalizing, misleading illusion, a sort of trick played on naive people who now looked back at the history they themselves had lived through, tearing off their previous rose-colored glasses and now seeing a stark and terrible vision.

We have been stuck with that vision ever since. Whether people are aware of the details of the events of WWI or not, they are part of a culture of profound cynicism that took hold of the Western world afterward and has been part of the reason for its decline. Simply put, the West lost a great deal of its boundless confidence in itself.

This article that appeared in American Heritage goes over much the same territory:

This almost unimaginable destruction of human life, to no purpose whatsoever, struck at the very vitals of Western society. For this reason alone, among the casualties of the First World War were not only the millions of soldiers who had died for nothing, most of the royalty of Europe, and treasure beyond reckoning but nearly all the fundamental philosophical and cultural assumptions of the civilization that had suffered this self-induced catastrophe.

For there was one thing that was immediately clear to all about the Great War””as the generation who fought it called it””and that was that this awful tragedy was a human and wholly local phenomenon. There was no volcano, no wrathful God, no horde of barbarians out of the East. Western culture had done this to itself. Because of the war, it seemed to many a matter of inescapable logic that Western culture must be deeply, inherently flawed.

The pre-WWI ethos was quite different. The American Heritage article uses author Edith Wharton’s world as an example, but Henry James would have done just as nicely:

Because of this fantastic record of progress, the people of Edith Wharton’s world believed in the inevitability of further progress and the certainty that science would triumph. They believed in the ever-widening spread of democracy and the rule of law. They believed in the adequacy of the present and the bright promise of the future. To be sure, they fought ferociously over the details of how to proceed, but they had no doubt whatever that the basic principles that guided their society were correct.

Then, all at once, the shots rang out in Sarajevo, the politicians bungled, the armies marched, the poppies began to blow between the crosses row on row. The faith of the Western world in the soundness of its civilization died in the trenches of the western front.

Seventy-five years later, richer, more powerful, more learned than ever, the West still struggles to pick up the psychological pieces, to regain its poise, to find again the self-confidence that in the nineteenth century it took entirely for granted.

Subsequent events played a part, as well. World War II was a very different war fought for very different reasons; unlike its predecessor, the lines of good vs. evil were crystal clear. But that didn’t make the carnage and the profoundly wearying nature of the war any less disillusioning, it’s just that it was disillusioning in a different way, this time about the human race’s propensity for cruelty and hatred and violence. And of course there’s been the long Gramsician march of the left through the West’s basic institutions such as the church, education, and the media, working constantly to undermine the West from the inside. What we see now are the results of all of this. It’s a miracle there’s any vigor left at all.

Twas ever thus

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Geoffrey Britain” offered some quotes in a recent comment that were so excellent I thought I’d highlight them here:

There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” ”“ Daniel Webster

The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. ”“ Robert A. Heinlein

“Men by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties:

1. Those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes.
2. Those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them, cherish and consider them as the most honest and safe, although not the most wise depository of the public interests.

In every country these two parties exist, and in every one where they are free to think, speak, and write, they will declare themselves.” ”“Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, 1824

One of the most interesting things about the last quote—the one from Jefferson—is I would bet that the majority of Obama voters today, and almost certainly the majority of Americans, would say that he’s describing conservatives in definition #1 and liberals in definition #2. But a great many conservatives (myself included) and perhaps a few others would say that it’s quite the opposite.

One interesting achievement of the Democratic Party (and a success of one of their Big Lies) is to convince the public that conservatives are #1 and liberals #2. In this endeavor the Republican Party has been an accomplice, however. That was one of the extremely negative consequences of Romney’s “47%” statement, and of his persona in general as a Very Rich White Guy.

But it’s not just Romney. And that’s one of the reasons many conservatives today are almost as much at war with the Republican Party as they are with the Democratic Party.

Those who believe in smaller and more local government, and in limiting the power of the central government as much as possible, clearly fall under Jefferson’s description #2, and those people are mostly conservatives (although certain social conservatives—not all by any means—would like more central control over people’s sexual behavior, and in many cases liberals would like less central government spending on defense). Conservatives have traditionally trusted “the people” and had confidence in them in that way.

But the sentiment described in the part of the Jefferson quote under #2 that goes “although not the most wise depository of the public interests” has grown stronger on the part of conservatives since the election of 2012. “The people” can make some mighty poor decisions that go against their own long-term liberty, and that’s why the Founders put certain elements of government in place (federalism and separation of powers, to name two) in an attempt to protect against what they called an “overbearing majority.”

Madison wrote:

”¦[M]easures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority”¦By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community”¦

But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society”¦It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm”¦

Yes.

Buy Amazon through neo-neocon—although I’m wondering about these gifts

The New Neo Posted on by

The holidays are edging—or maybe rushing—ever closer. If you’re starting to panic, don’t! There’s always trusty Amazon, just a click away on neo-neocon.

I’m happy and grateful for everything you buy through clicking on one of my Amazon widgets, or through this link. It may seem like a small thing, but it all adds up.

But here’s a question for you: has anyone ever actually used one of these contraptions? I remember way back when I was married in [year redacted] they were all the rage. I got some as wedding presents. Never used.

And now I see they’re back. Are people actually making fondue now? At home? Or is the gift the same kind of “sounds like a good idea but really isn’t” thing it was back then? Or maybe I was the only one who didn’t jump on the fondue bandwagon back in the 70s. Did you or anyone you know ever actually cook fondue at home?

Which brings us to: bonsai, another blast from the gifting past. I once received a thoughtful, expensive, gift-that-should-have-kept-on-giving of a year of bonsai, one a month. Reading the instructions engendered a mild panic in me: these things were going to die in my house. So I canceled the order; I didn’t want twelve bonsai corpses on my conscience.

Now that I’ve told you what I wouldn’t get (your mileage may differ), what would I get? Besides, that is, all the fabulous things listed at my widgets on the right sidebar, and all the books I’ve ever recommended?

Well, there’s this: a fabulous live Dire straits album from the 80s. I’m a big big BIG fan; have probably listened to this a thousand times so far, and I’m just getting warmed up.

And then, if either you or someone you know and love has the problem I have of using a heavy hand when packing luggage, edging your/her/his bags perilously close to the 50 pound danger mark, these doohickeys are a good idea. And some of them actually work; I have one that does, but unfortunately I can’t locate it right now so I can’t tell you what brand it is. Drat. Try to be more organized than I am—or than she is:

Do you keep your sleep companion (see how PC I am?) up at night because you like to listen to the TV turned up very LOUD? Or perhaps not just at bedtime, but all the time, annoying everyone in the house, including the dog? Has this even perhaps caused a battle or two? Well—this gadget works pretty well to avoid the whole problem.

And I’m not even sure I get any money if you order that one, because it doesn’t come directly from Amazon. But I’m trying to save your marriage, so I’ll sacrifice (and maybe I do get a commission from the order; I don’t really know all the details of how it works).

That’s it for recommendations for the moment.

Diabetes and bypass surgery: for some, a sort-of cure?

The New Neo Posted on by

This Discover article lays out a fascinating state of affairs: for many diabetes patients, gastric bypass surgery offers what was once thought a pipe dream—a cure.

When I first saw this, I figured it was because they lost weight. False. The results occur almost immediately, before any weight loss. It’s thought that it has something to do with the bypass mechanism, which avoids the upper part of the small intestine:

Three days after surgery, one-third of his diabetic bypass patients leave the hospital needing no insulin, or on lower doses, before ever losing a pound…

Bypass surgery may be so good at curing diabetes because malfunctions in the duodenum, the first part of the small intestine, cause the disease. That still-controversial hypothesis comes from another pioneer of diabetes surgery, Francesco Rubino, chief of gastrointestinal metabolic surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. When exposed to nutrients en route from the stomach, chemical secretions from the duodenum block insulin production or cause insulin resistance, he believes. Either way, bypass surgery that circumvents the duodenum may prevent this malfunction.

Fascinating stuff.

But here’s a caution from a different study:

For two thirds of the participants in the study, their diabetes initially disappeared after gastric surgery – however, symptoms returned within five years among one third of them. They added the proportion of patients whose diabetes never went away after surgery, and found that 56% had no long-lasting diabetes remission.

That’s still an awful lot of patients benefiting, considering how devastating a disease diabetes can be in terms of its complications, and how difficult to control with conventional treatment.

One thing that’s clear to me is that the human body and its functions are amazingly complex, and that we’ve barely scratched the surface of understanding them. I’ve long thought that the reality of weight maintenance, gain, and loss is quite different from the simple idea that fat people are greedy and just can’t control themselves. That’s not been my observation at all, although I suppose some obese people (including those featured on some of those reality TV shows) fit that description. Some thin people do, too.

From the Discover article:

“There are over 200 hormones in the GI tract,” Teixeira explains as we chat in his office at St. Luke’s. All of those hormones are vying to control your eating behavior. Ghrelin drives the urge to eat. Stretch receptors in the stomach signal when to stop. This hardwired system worked well for our hunter-gatherer ancestors constantly struggling to find enough food for survival. In the modern world””where cheap, high-calorie food is available all around””taste, smell, emotion, learning, memory, and food addiction tend to override our biological cues and entice us to eat even when there is no need. “We are living in a time of overabundance, and we are engineered to hold on to these calories. It’s like a trap,” Teixeira says.

A wonderful, delicious, almost irresistible trap. Especially during the holiday season. Who would want to do away with that abundance? Certainly not me. But going to the grocery store these days can sometimes feel like an exercise in saying “no, no, no, no, no, and no” to the wondrous goodies around us.

Madison: seeing into the future?

The New Neo Posted on by

A comment by NeoConScum in which he quoted Madison’s Federalist Paper #55 was so compelling that I went to the source for more. There I found the following gems [emphases mine]:

I am unable to conceive that the people of America, in their present temper, or under any circumstances which can speedily happen, will choose, and every second year repeat the choice of, sixty-five or a hundred men who would be disposed to form and pursue a scheme of tyranny or treachery. I am unable to conceive that the State legislatures, which must feel so many motives to watch, and which possess so many means of counteracting, the federal legislature, would fail either to detect or to defeat a conspiracy of the latter against the liberties of their common constituents. I am equally unable to conceive that there are at this time, or can be in any short time, in the United States, any sixty-five or a hundred men capable of recommending themselves to the choice of the people at large, who would either desire or dare, within the short space of two years, to betray the solemn trust committed to them. What change of circumstances, time, and a fuller population of our country may produce, requires a prophetic spirit to declare, which makes no part of my pretensions. But judging from the circumstances now before us, and from the probable state of them within a moderate period of time, I must pronounce that the liberties of America cannot be unsafe in the number of hands proposed by the federal Constitution.

The genius of Madison included the fact that he knew the risks to liberty were likely to increase with time and the growth of the country. He didn’t foresee every detail (who could?), but he was awfully cautious to only project his statements into the near future.

And this is the quote from the same Federalist Paper, offered earlier by NeoConScum:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.

Are we at the tipping point, where “sufficient virtue” does not exist?