Libertarians, libertines, liberals -- and false liberty in being stimulated by Sirens:
We see problems in trying to police pleasure habits of long conditioned adults. So, must society sacrifice each succeeding generation to the unfolding pleasure whims of the previous? Insofar as science cannot find will or reason to justify moral limits, should spiritual insight or vision?
Should a culture encourage gay partners to adopt children? If the test were only whether specific children would be better off, it becomes easier to pass, especially once society has produced slums of pleasure addicts, many of whom see children as materials and fixes. As moral slums define deviancy down, should there come to be no lines? Who should say, from what authority? Is there authority, beyond small gods of material fairness and immediate gratification?
A culture without constraints in modesty that discovers pleasures (hormones, sex, drugs, sweets, adrenalin, power, or collective delusion) will indulge until depleted or satiated. The culture will rewire and rationalize itself, to “justify” assimilating increasing amounts of pleasure sources. But if pleasure is the justification, why should reasoning be needed? Even so, power will pass to the most passionate about the rightness of their pleasures.
As the needs of gland-driven denizens increase, more pleasure sources become needed to sustain increasing addictions. Inhabitants, looking to their most defining desires, will lose self control and sense of value or proportion as rewiring leads them to trade responsibility and freedom in exchange for every gland based pleasure. What moral assimilation can remain? What lines can stand sacred? What center of decency can hold to sustain or defend the next generation?
It makes no moral sense for libertine leaders to prescribe mainly as pleasure addicts prefer -- especially insofar as culture becomes comprised mainly of children in body or spirit, looking for approval from blinkered adults.
Absent respect for a higher and decent source of values, every culture of differently-wired adults will find little hope of sustainable happiness or meaningful purpose. There is no nice or rational cure for pleasure worship.
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A body without constraints, modesty, or decency that discovers a source of pleasure (sex, drugs, sweets, power, or collective delusion) will continue to indulge until the source is depleted or the pleasure is satiated. In doing so, the body and its brain, if unconstrained, will tend to become rewired so as to tolerate and support ingestion of increasing amounts of the pleasure source. As the body’s tolerance and need increase, more and more of the pleasure source may become needed to sustain an ever increasing addiction. Such a body, if looking only to its own desires, will lose its self control as its rewiring leads it to levels of consumption beyond all sense of decency or proportion.
It makes no moral sense to prescribe to such a body that it “should” indulge as it deems best -- especially if the body is a child, looking to moral guidance from so-called adults. Similar reasoning applies to a collective culture of mis-wired, immodest, indecent adults. Absent respect for a higher and decent source of values, such bodies and culture have little hope to find sustainable happiness or meaningful purpose. The Gazans are addicted to a vicious mind parasite that cannot be satisfied short of suicide bombing. That mind parasite cannot be reasoned with. It must be recognized for the vicious cancer it is, so that it can be quarantined, depleted, replaced, and defeated. Otherwise, it spreads ... and spreads, and spreads, and spreads. There is no cure for cancer that does not entail collective replacement of its cells.
Is there any principle by which to distinguish Obama from a Muslim Marxist? In the real world, in what principled way would a Marxist Commune differ from a Sharia Umma? Is it mainly just the difference between vodka and opium? Bowing five tmes a day towards an icon of Big Bro versus a mosque of Allah? How is a know-it-all Progressive different from an authoritarian Taliban? Don't they both in actual practice abuse women, just in different ways? Are Obama's dictates any wiser than those of a Mullah?
That the Internet is wireless does not mean that it does not rewire us. Some Internet sites promote habits, which promote addictions, which become hard wired in brains of both adults and children. Rewiring affects and sometimes even changes personalities. As addictions increase, that which may have been resistable often becomes irresistable, making "free will" a mockery. As children are put on a downhill slide that beomes a cliff, "choice" making ability becomes non-existent -- unless an intervention succeeds in restoring self control.
A representative republic is based on an electorate that retains self control for moral choice making. A society may lose such self control or free will. Its members may become misled, as by delusions of superior will for resisting temptations, or by habits that begin innocently and become addictions, or by state inculcation of false notions of entitlement.
Except within parameters respected by a decent and moral electorate, a representative republic has little chance. Once an electorate trips beyond sustainable parameters, how shall it get back? Can mere law and regulation serve as a kind of crutch, to try to bring civilization back to its senses, to such a point that the crutch can eventually be discarded, to be replaced with sustainable mores and character? But what of all manner of pimps who profit by unleashing new and improved means for rapidly pushing otherwise decent people beyond their limits? How can society protect itself from such pimps and restore their prey to decent civilization?
I don't know. I do know that denigrating every higher value serves a mean, immoral abyss. For adults to claim that children should be "free" to do their own thing and to be preyed upon -- with no parental supervision, no backbone-building moral instruction, and no opportunity for character-building within a protected zone among peers -- is beyond stupidity. It is worship of insanity.
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