Platonic Virtues of States and Ctizens:
If even God were uncertain of ultimate teleology or purpose, would not God, so far as we can reasonably relate, share some of our platonic, day to day purposes, i.e., to pursue happiness, as by inculcating opportunities to learn courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice?
Think categorically and consider: What if every thing, every event, every person, and every State were courageous, wise, temperate, and just? Then, unless perfect and without propensity to forget or backslide, how would anyone experience reminders, absent occasional testing and sharpening against the cowardly, foolish, intemperate, and evil? So long as pursuits of art, science, and novelty remain unobtained, how shall such pursuits otherwise be sharpened?
WHAT BELIEVERS IN "PROGRESS" SEEM OFTEN NOT TO APPREHEND:
That it is good for one citizen to work full time as a potter does not make it good that all persons should be potters;
That it is good that one person of skill is richly rewarded does not make it good that all persons should be richly rewarded;
That it is good that a skilled person should be richly rewarded does not make it good that he should, by means of his riches, rule most others as serfs;
That a person is skilled at investing in stocks does not make it good that he should be allowed to manipulate stocks so as to acquire influence to rule others as serfs;
That trade across national borders can enrich all does not make it good that trade should be so incorporated as to empower those who rule the corporation then to corrupt, replace, and rule the cultures of all states;
That a person believes neither God nor the State are as qualified as he or his notions to avail the ground of being and of citizenship does not make it good that other persons should tolerate, humor, or facilitate his belief.
Rather, I suspect that which qualifies any person to deny authority to any other to feign intercessionary authority as spokesperson or avatar for God is such person's direct intuition and empathy as a perspective of conscious free will.
To believe otherwise is to open wide the way for those who would canibalize entire communities, cultures, and states.
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Why do economic "scientists" seem always to offer up cargo cult math, while refusing to devote even a footnote's worth of consideration to the most important of values, i.e., the values that are beyond quantitative measure, like those of freedom and dignity, protected under a nation that is founded to preserve for its citizens such values above all others?
Why does the free trade mantra so often seem fitted to freezing minds to the "justice" of rule of nations under corporate oligarchs, as if the mores and traditions of all cultures pale in value when compared to the justness of being ruled by our oligarchic betters, as if all that cannot be folded into a dollar calculaton were mere humbug, for which millions have died, for no purpose of worth?
How long before the mask slips from the most vociferous of free traders, to reveal the hirelings of just one more cohort of Progs? Does the mask slip only after the nation is ka-put?
As one considers the models and math of Krugman, Obama, and Soros, as if the same were intended to facilitate jobs and prosperity for a free and independent America, at some point, seeing the models and math make no sense, should one reassess one's premises? What if the goal has little to do with jobs and prosperity for a free and independent America? What if the goal of Krugman and Obama is to reduce America in order to facilitate some kind of worldwide, economic kum ba yah? What if the goal of Soros is to front the cohort that is to feed from the economic open society? What if Krugman and Obama are deluded about the capacity for mankind to live in worldwide harmony, while Soros is deluded about his capacity to lead Americans and mankind into worldwide villeinage?
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9 comments:
From A.T. -- @K.W. said, "Contrary to what many people think it is not about security, it is about control."
Yup. Its about control over a three sided poker table, Dino at one side, Rino at the other, and John Q. Public (JQP) lining up to leave his deposits (er, bets). The main thing being produced is flux in who rigs the table. Dino controls the government chips, Rino controls the corporate chips. They compete to take the chips of JQP. No matter which way the table tilts, it's always rigged to tilt away from JQP. Lined up behind JQP to be swindled in their own turns are an infinity of clone immortals and dupes. Dino and Rino want to help JQP by helping him right out of his shirt. JQP would do better casting LOTs were he to play more with Tea Partying Lovers Of Truth. Lovers Of Truth would do better by assimilating to enhance their understanding, to leverage their influence in order to break the table. To do that, one of the first things they need to learn is how to mark characters in order to reduce the votaries of incorrigible marks, shills, deadbeats, and swindlers tenured by the soul sucking table. The alternative to a new world order of cons, derelicts, and fanatics is to ring in a conservative republic of truth seekers, producers, and country artists. Stop the NWO game.
So who's primarily been fighting the present war about social issues? Who're the folks trying to apply taxpayer funding to promote social behavior goals? Who's bringing the lawsuits to force religion into as tight a corner as possible? Who's appointing glisten folk to promote education of our children? What's so wrong about returning the abortion issue to the States? Why can't we have confirmations of citizenship status and rights to vote? I don't want to spend time or money on these issues. But what to do when they are stuck in our faces by those who do? Nowadays, who's sticking these issues in our faces? It's one thing to say these issues should be decided outside the fed government. OK. But what do we do when radicals are the ones who are making these issues into issues for the federal government? Give up? The existential crisis we face is not just in government. It's also in the family, as the fundamental unit of decent civilization. Lose that and America is already lost.
I'm finally getting around to Plato's Republic. I see Socrates talking about the kind of leaders who learn how best to feed a beast and then come in conceit to believe they can actually control it. Exactly the wrong kind of quality a republic needs in its leaders, but more and more it becomes obvious that is what Americans are getting. I think there is a just god (or field of consciousness), and I think there is a higher value in promoting civilization that avails decent fellowship. I think the better leaders will tend in the long run to apprehend that, and they will further apprehend how much more their power is leveraged as they find one another.
However, there is a race on, and it is against those who lack the insight to see as much, who think this world is all there is, who value getting while the getting's good. There is also a race on against those who think the last messenger or Imam of god will come only as enough infidels are slaughtered. Until that day comes, which is never, they will never stop finding infidels to slaughter -- even if it means splitting into cults to call one another infidels. IOW, leaders will either come together to promote a field of decent and empathetic consciousness, or they will promote a beastly existence of excess and slaughter.
Atheists can wish to sit fence all they want, but no one gets to opt out of the play. Problem is: Trending leaders want to force Americans, in the name of diversity, to tolerate all that is most beastly. To that end, they are whoring the law. Put me in the column that is unimpressed with whore lawyering in the service of "plutogarchs" (oligarchic plutocrats) who seek to reduce us to mindless servitude for a beast.
I doubt Santa Claus has left the left, because the left is just too stupid, too jealous, and too non-virtuous. Santa has just grown Viking horns. One either prizes some idea of virtue or one prizes jealousy and getting while the getting's good. Sort of like tearing down the magnificent Roman aqueducts to build hovels. Simply put, most people are ruled by baser desires.
America arose out of an electorate that was restricted. If you were not a fairly well educated land owner, your vote probably did not carry much weight. We changed all that and gave the vote to virtually everyone. Next, we will likely enfranchise illegals, felons, and dead people. Many of these people are like Boris: content so long as they don't have to endure seeing that Ivan has a goat. So long as their demagogues can point to the greedy rich monopolizing the wealth, there will remain plenty of animosity to stir up among the Progs. Especially as hedge artists like Soros see opportunities in such instability. We have educated and conditioned too many naifs to believe they can skillfully feed and control the beast of baser desires of the low electorate. I fear the ilk of Soros have opened a box of misery.
Giving the vote to everyone was a bad idea. The vote should have been reserved to decent, law abiding people who were at least literate enough to pass a G.E.D. examination. Thereafter, it should have been forfeited upon various kinds of criminal convictions. Once the right to vote became uncoupled from any notion of higher virtue and became only a ringside belle for brawlers among competing jealousies, any notion of a decent republic was put to grave risk. Trends are worsening and the tempest is rising. We may well fall to a worldwide cycle of economic depression and barbaric redistribution, then to cycle once again to despotism, oligarchy, aristocracy, then back to tyranny of the jealous and ravenous majority. Whether this world will ever again see a nation rise in respect of virtuous rule of enlightened representatives seems shaky. Finding ourselves blessed with a virtuous republic, had we meant to keep it, we should have established means to disenfranchise those who prove to be non-virtuous. We failed, so now we struggle to close the flood gates, even as San Francisco degenerates push back.
From A.T. --
Re: "We already have a party that thinks abortion and homosexuality are more important than national defense, tax policy, education and everything else. They're called the GOP"
I am a social conservative and I do NOT think abortion and homosexuality are more important than national defense, etc. Regardless, for the past 22 years, the GOP has been nearly as socially progressive as the Dinos. Open borders, no child left behind. Hello! I agree about putting the abortion issue, etc., on the back burner. What the fiscal realists neglect, however, is that Progs are comprised of Rinos and Dinos who have no intention of putting social issues on the back burner! They will continue -- by elections, lawsuits, mis-education, indoctrination -- to push and push and push. They feed the beast. Whatever the beast wants, they find and feed its clientele. They have no shame, no boundaries, and no idea of virtue. You can stop fighting them, but that does not mean they will stop fighting you. Indeed, libertines mean to bury you, since they have nothing else to give their lives meaning.
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The only thing that restrains us from treating one another as means to our own ends is the innate, natural empathy that feeds back between us. To deny that, and then to extol as “virtuous” that everyone should be allowed and encouraged to vote purely on his base, animal, material interests, is to raise the beast, to encourage us to grow skilled in trying to tame or divert the motives of a beast to our separate, special, selfish interests. The result becomes continual simmering conflict, with little hope of assimilation in respect of any higher ideals – especially when the prevailing idea is that there are no real referents to which any higher ideals are addressed.
So then, why not, when the economy in such a system inevitably falls apart, simply reduce the country to bands of roving sons of anarchy? It is a lie that everyone “should” vote. If you have no moral philosophy, if you believe in nothing except hedging and promoting anarchy and instability, if you don’t even know the candidates or the issues, then your civic duty is to not vote. Why do we put “R” or “D” next to candidates’ names on ballots? If people wanted to run as criminals or traitors to virtue, would we allow them to have “C” or “T” put next to their names?
We are being pushed into dissimilation by a prevailing, morally bankrupt philosophy. This is occurring because we do little to ensure the voting franchise is limited to legal and qualified voters. We find ourselves being pushed to enfranchise felons, to open borders to reward and enfranchise illegals, and we fail to dis-enfranchise known social anarchists. Why, after three of more DWI or drug busts, do we not dis-enfranchise these lowest among the low? We wonder why we elect so many representatives of the quality we see in California. If California is 1/9 of our economy, it is also ½ of our problems. Trading for this quality of leadership is insane.
At some point, the nation will be gone. The last to notice will be the ones who for some insane reason believed in the civic responsibility of the morally corrupt to vote.
Re: "there is (sadly) a lack of disciplined thought"
Moreover, I suspect there is a lack of belief in virtue, so that there is less concern for disciplined thought than for feeding the beast. Scratch a fiscal conservative and generally one finds someone who thinks free trade that enriches China and Saudi Arabia at the expense of ordinary Americans is just fine, so long as it also enriches corporatists. What this has to do with being “conservative” in the promotion of American values is not readily apparent.
Values and virtues are not found in trade, laws, or forms. If one believes in higher values, they are found in higher minded people. If one does not believe in higher values to begin with, the manipulation of trade, laws, and forms is mainly in the service of base and selfish interests, raised to an Orwellian philosophy of goodness, whereby selfishness becomes unselfishness.
Virtuous people do communicate commitment to ideas by making changes in laws and forms. Among such people, it would communicate a concern for public virtue: to establish cultural think tanks, to amend the Constitution to eliminate the income tax, to restrict federal power to interfere with concerns that should be left to States, and to restore to state legislators the power to select federal senators. However, those changes and forms are not virtuous in themselves, nor would they be guarantors of virtue. Rather, nothing will guarantee virtue in a society whose members have generally lost faith or belief that any such a character exists. A fiscal conservative who believes higher values are a fraud is himself a not to be trusted fraud. Unsurprisingly, a society that ridicules its institutions for promoting faith in higher values will not get very far in promoting institutions meant to awaken higher values.
Well, we cannot very well enjoy local governance under participation by a wise electorate once the wise electorate has been blow dried away. We now have an electorate under which too many people wander about under delusion that it possible to promote a purposeful or moral world view without on any level respecting any view or intuition about morality. They think it possible to facilitate worldwide political and economic decency and meaningfulness simply by facilitating the barter and exchange of all manner of diversified cravings (aka “free trade”). Thus, that which survives or is most profitable as it is exposed to the unprotected ravages of the most vociferously depraved is named the fittest and morally best … at least, for the moment. What a proof!
Thus, circular logic is escaped by placing logic under a blanket and placing base cravings in a self justified zone that is beyond reach in bivalent logic, multi-valent logic, or even in higher intuition. Sadly, vision is lost, the world madly pitches, no one escapes, and the masses are reduced to corruption under sociopathic eaters of entrails. Spreading the equality of misery is conflated as “freedom.” Talk about a hell of a 40 year trek in the desert! Brave New Slogan: “The randomly diverse upshots of nature know best about morality.” Alternatively stated: “While if floats, it must be cream.”
News alert: America, indeed, the world, is without a decent and assimilating moral philosophy; plutocrats still lead Congress around by its nose; fiscal conservatives remain blind to the need for social conservatism. Good luck to us all.
Re: "Why should a parasitic class have the right to vote"
Obviously, it should not. Obviously, we stumbled early on when we allowed this. Now that we are overbalanced, how can we possibly toss the flotsam and jetsam from the voting franchise? Well, so long as we continue to allow education to be monopolized by those who have no clue about what is entailed in civic responsibility, we cannot. I wish more of civics had been taught while I was in high school. I wish Plato's Republic were strongly encouraged for discussion among every honors class of 12th graders. No doubt it can be read on many levels in many contexts. A significant aspect I recently took away consists in this: a notion that citizens, to be responsible to a republic, ought first to learn how to be philosopher kings over the domain of their own minds. IOW, become conscious of what is entailed in the preservation of a decent and happy republic, and then govern yourself in that respect. This is closer to JFK's injunction than it is to the current ethos, i.e., "Ask what you are entitled to expect from those who have become successful as a result of acting white."
If you don't have visible means of support, can't read and write English, don't have a G.E.D., and if you have several convictions indicative of an addict, then you ought not be voting. Shame on the faux educators who urge derelicts to "perform their civic duty."
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