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Because that’s how the dialectic works. Truth and right should always compromise and accommodate the insane.

Looks like you are just here to promote your blog.

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/by:manwolf64/index?tab=articles

Any thoughts on that?

This may sound bad.

Noses were made for breaking.

People have drunken themselves into a stupor with the bloated "rights-talk" of the "Enlightenment," which gives pride of place to personal willfulness while short-selling knowledge of the truth (and conformity thereto). Many of these folks limit their civic participation to occasional vociferous assertions of "their rights" and when they get going they can be real windbags about political theory, Monty-Python style.

Problem is, this makes it impossible to make genuine social progress through the formal vehicles of "representative democracy." The level of social consensus has been trending downward for centuries, largely because truth-seeking and truth-conformity have been shunned in favor of "my rights" -- not only in theory but in the everyday sense. So naturally there isn't much left to public life besides the machinations of advantage-seeking opportunists. How is it possible to achieve greater social consensus (the internal combustion engine of "representative democracy!") in such conditions?

There is the temptation to look at the age-old social capital still standing around us (and of course, the newer, physical capital -- fancy machines, skyscrapers, etc.) and to think we must be a magnificent people. But we are merely the inheritors of those things. Ours is the age of mass-man, propaganda, secularism, weak-kneed relativism, and the effective stalemating of genuine personal rights by very large loosely-coupled bureaucracies that span the public and private sectors.

As long as people cower before the aggressive, overblown "rights talk" of the more-liberal-than-thou, everything our forebears held to be true will be subjected to the "consensus building" of the ignorant pleasure-seeking multitudes who take their marching orders from the same liberal elite, and (surprise!) we will find that none of the old norms are left standing.

We have to write off the present age and its attenuated symbols of "greatness". We're better off if we both "think" and "act locally" in an old-fashioned way about building a better society for generations not yet born, while we accept that many things are just out of our control. The Medievals had it just about right. Anyway, the pompous Rationalist windbaggery about "rights", "progress", etc. cannot last much longer.