Posted on 01/18/2019 2:23:08 AM PST by RoosterRedux
I picked up the telephone and dialed a small shop in a little town on the other side of the continent. After a friendly conversation, I gave the fellow my credit card number. A few days later, a package arrived with the item I had ordered. Isn't that extraordinary?
At the time, I really didn't think the event was unusual. I had engaged in transactions like that many times before. The web makes it easy to find things. But this really was extraordinary. There are few places in the world where such a transaction is possible. In the Western Hemisphere, this can happen only in the U.S. and Canada.
Actually, I did not realize the significance of that transaction until Jordan Peterson, in one of his lectures, pointed it out. My experience was possible only in a culture of trust. Trust is maybe the most distinguishing feature of liberal Western culture. (I use liberal in the libertarian sense of the paramount importance of individual sovereignty and freedom. I don't mean to imply that political liberals are necessarily liberal in this classical sense.)
Peterson's view of trust enlightened my thinking. It told me what is really wrong with socialism. I now know why all forms of socialism inevitably become the home of terror. Koestler's Darkness at Noon had informed me of communist insanity, as did 1984. Until Peterson, I hadn't realized that trust is impossible under any form of socialism.
As time passed, I became friends with a number of refugees from the Soviet Union and from its satellite empire. They confirmed every negative thing I had heard about communism. Distilling what they told me, there was no trust in the communist world.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
BTW, what planet are you from?
Is that the best you can do?
All those hierarchies forget conversion. From Plato to Jesus, you need conversion. “we” have known this for a long time.
It’s not about conversion. It’s about what motivates people.
The purpose is to know what carrot to be dangled and when to keep people interested in producing.
Noted. How about management education, psychologists, and foreign policy makers instead of ‘we’?
And the left.
It was from everybody, well, except you. I first learned it in a course at York University in Canada called Organizational Change and Development. I don’t recall them being leftist.
Why would I trust people I have nothing in common with?
It’s trite, like a perpetual motion on the violin, but a useful textbook filler. Nowadays, DNA is the real mother lode for money makers and imperial supervisors. But hey, some cornflakes along the way to divinization, perge modo!
Sure it’s trite. So is the movie Citizen Kane, because it broke ground on so many movie-making conventions that we take for granted today. It’s a ho-hum flick now, but that’s because we’re used to seeing what was new back then.
Ah, like evolution! Just love it. No wonder Descrates exclaimed of the ancients “je quitte entierement”!
What does that mean?
The French? Descartes said about the ancients, “I’m done with ‘em.”
Okay, thanks. My French stops at “voulez vous coucher avec moi?”
About that transcendence: universals have been considered at least in two ways. And this concerns the two sources of those universals.
First, there are those who subscribe to universals from a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man. This already holds the stage with Aeschylus and Sophocles, before Plato engaged the debate in the person of Socrates.
Then, there are those who subscribe to universals (after Occam, if you will) as a part and parcel of "common reason." This takes the stage after the denial or loss of a source of truth higher than, and independent of man. This is the enterprise of common reason via Descartes and Kant and culminating in Hegel. more here
Let me guess, if one should say Maslow or Kant is atheist, one would immediately counter, that Kant was Protestant and Maslow was, among other things, devout to his science "as a God."
How many gods are there, after all? Well, it makes all the difference in the world if you want a "common good." That's what trust is for, right?
I confess to having lost the gist of this thread.
You lost me at ‘what planet are you from.’
If it helps cut to the chase, I am a conservative leaning libertarian existentialist.
I think some busy politicians recognize this, so they've endorsed religion, like Merkel and Putin have, for socio-political purposes. That's fantasy when it's not totalitarian.
W&L
any functional country...
Has functional borders with a rational immigration policy
Has a justice system fully subordinate to the rule of law
Has a tax system capable of funding adequate infrastructure
Has a Dept of Defense dedicated to preserving the border and facilitating productive international trade
Has a moral philosophy of subordination of the state to the natural rights of the person
That country can issue debt that will be paid back, that anyone else in the world will want to hold
That country wlll be permitted business anywhere it chooses
That country will be able to pick and choose selectively from whom its “friends, associates and business partners” around the world will be
It will not be socialist; nor will be it be the current socialist-corporate/fascist mishmash into which we have allowed ourselves to evolve
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