Posted on 12/12/2006 10:04:17 PM PST by Swordmaker
Doesn't it seem odd that the kids who started the 60s anti-establishment protest riots on college campuses with the Free Speech Movement (Berkeley, 1964) are the college professors or politicians today who most vehemently suppress free speech among their students or constituents in the name of political correctness?
How can this be? How can worshipping at the shrines of Diversity, Tolerance, and Multiculturalism result in trials and expulsions for students, or jail for citizens, who express ideas with which the worshippers are not in agreement?
The answer is the intimate connection between Subjectivism and Fascism.
The core metaphysical assertion of liberals is that there are no absolute truths, factually or morally. What's true for you may not be true for me, it's all a matter of perspective, who are you to say what is right or wrong, true or false.
Truth is a matter of subjective opinion, it is relative to the values of different people. This belief, which lies at the very center of the liberal view of the world, is known as Subjectivism or Relativism.
It's opposite, Objectivism, the assertion that there are in fact absolute truths, both moral and factual about the nature of reality regardless of anyone's opinion or desires, horrifies liberals. They think such an assertion leads straight to tyranny and fascism.
Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), the founder of Fascism as a political movement (after the Latin fasces, the bundle of rods used by Rome to symbolize strength through unity) vehemently disagreed.
In his 1921 essay Diuturna (The Lasting, that which endures), Mussolini made it clear that moral relativism was his rationale for Fascism:
If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.
Liberals follow Mussolini's conclusion to the letter. Preaching tolerance, they have no tolerance for anyone's opinions but their own. Anyone they disagree with they call 'racist' or 'sexist' or 'homophobic' or some other denigration.
Liberal intolerance, of course, goes way beyond mere disagreement and name-calling. They want to criminalize the beliefs and actions of those with whom they disagree.
They succeeded this week in California. On Tuesday (August 29), Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law (SB 1441 sponsored by a lesbian actress turned state senator, Sheila Kuehl) specifically requiring "any program or activity that...receives any financial assistance from the state" to support transsexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality or lose state funding.
The Democrat-run California Legislature is passing an entire raft of such fascist laws. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez made it bluntly clear: "Our purpose is to outlaw traditional perspectives on marriage and family in the state school system."
He and his fellow Democrats have the Orwellian nerve to call their legislative fascism "tolerance education."
Liberal "tolerance" is forcing people at the point of a gun to believe and act as liberals demand. You don't get more fascist than that.
California's Attorney General, Bill Lockyer, is, however, trying. He is actually trying to criminalize disagreement on "global warming."
In his lawsuit against such prominent scientists as MIT Professor of Meteorology Richard Lindzen and Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, Lockyer accuses them of being "climate skeptics," who are playing "a major role in spreading disinformation about global warming."
Until recently, Lockyer was positioning himself to run for California governor, challenging Schwarzenegger. They could have had a debate as to which one is more fascist than the other. (No one should be shocked by Schwarzenegger, by the way. He married a Kennedy!)
The only way to combat liberal lunacy like that on exhibit in California is to attack it at its source: liberal subjectivism leading directly to fascism.
It will do no good for liberals to bleat about religious absolutists, be they Christian or Moslem, who believe they have a right to force people into behaving as they want because that's what the Bible or the Koran says.
That's a red herring. Don't let liberals switch the issue. The issue here is the fundamental contradiction in their world-view, not anyone else's. Liberals cannot argue for relativism in morality and claim there are no moral truths, then claim their moral values magically have more validity than anyone else's.
When you argue there are no objective moral truths, the only way to settle a moral disagreement is at the point of a gun. Mussolini understood this, and he had the intellectual honesty to admit it.
Liberals understand it too, but they don't want to admit it, least of all to themselves. It still makes them fascists, nonetheless.
Demonstrating how and why liberals are fascists is their Achilles' Heel. Name-calling is a liberal specialty, and they are fond of calling their opponents "fascists." But using reason and logic to expose how they are demonstrably in fact fascists can be effective.
Combat liberalism by publicly exposing it as fascism. California would be a good place to start.
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Palamino!
Great column!
"Orwellian" - that's it in a nutshell
Doublespeak, saying one thing to mean its opposite
That's what the Left has been doing for a generation, so that people are now so confused, they've given up trying to make sense of things. They are at the mercy of whoever has the microphone.
Great column!
"Orwellian" - that's it in a nutshell
Doublespeak, saying one thing to mean its opposite
That's what the Left has been doing for a generation, so that people are now so confused, they've given up trying to make sense of things. They are at the mercy of whoever has the microphone.
________________
Just like Clinton would use phrases that communists use, like "As we all know"
This is the tact Al Gore and others are taking with global warming. "As we all know" "It's pretty much accepted" "It's safe to say we're all in agreement" "There really is no debate", etc.,etc,etc, ad infinitum.
George Orwell would be very proud, I mean very disturbed by the breakdown in language and discourse in the US.
Political Correctness and the deconstruction of the English Language will be the eventual death of us all. Islamic terrorists are all too adept at using these new "speech codes" against us.
Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame, no liberal he, made an unintended conservative masterpiece with the movie Brazil. If you haven't seen it watch it, then watch it again, then watch it again and again, you get different things from it every time.
Another unintentionally brilliant conservative movie (if you choose to watch it this way) is The Matrix, made by lunatic leftist brothers.
The Matrix is the unreality of mainstream thought, you create terrorists by fighting terrorists,etc. This is free republic, where most of us are sane, I don't need to give you people a thousand more analogous examples.
Outside of the Matrix is reality, where we live and think and want to escape to, a rational society where Hillary Clinton is about a laughably plausible American Presidential Candidate as Adolf Hitler.
Bookmark
Thank You
Thank God he didn't win the war; we'd have no idea what meat tastes like.
________
Doing my best Brando from Apocalypse Now.
The horror.....the hor...ror
In case you don't know, that is the ONLY way of changing a liberal's opinion (or, at dead minimum, getting the stupid SOB to shut up).
Merry Christmas to you (if not necessarily to the alleged human, your 'family member')
Not my affair, certainly, but I must ask WHY you haven't punched this particular family member's lights out LONG since.
In case you don't know, that is the ONLY way of changing a liberal's opinion (or, at dead minimum, getting the stupid SOB to shut up).
Merry Christmas to you (if not necessarily to the alleged human, your 'family member')
__________
Can we at least pass a law that if you wear a Che' Guevara shirt that I can punch you in the face?
I always look them in the eye and if they look back at me I say "idiot", I haven't been confronted once.
Wow, this is exactly what I have been saying about the liberal moral relativity, revisionist history, and unionist control of the public school system.
The only way that I can see to end the battle is to withdraw your children from the public schools, state your opposition to homosexual marriage and stop the back and forth over the subject. No special rights, and no argument, hate the sin, love the sinner. Let it go, it's not the main front of the war. It's only a distraction, to demean all religious moral absolutes. The left thinks that religion is for the dumb, the uneducated and that it is the antithesis of moral relativity. The fight against gay marriage is just the easiest front on which the left can fight the moral absolutes of Christianity and Judaism.
Our real war is against moral relativity. One man's terrorist is not another man's freedom fighter.
The other part of this, that is not mentioned is the hegemonic influence of Western culture and capitalism is not a bad thing. The left thinks that it is an unsettling force in the world and needs to be destroyed.
"Our purpose is to outlaw traditional perspectives on marriage and family in the state school system."
I don't believe that he said that. Source?
bump
It looks as if you might be right. Here is a more direct source:
Perhaps that's why this week in one of the boldest moves yet by a sitting liberal, Democrat California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez proclaimed, in effect, that the real purpose of SB 1437 is to outlaw traditional perspectives on marriage and family in the state school system.He said, "The way you correct a wrong (perspective) is by outlawing. 'Cause if you don't outlaw it, then people's biases tend to take over and dominate the perspective and the point of view."
Nunez's solution to the people he disagrees with is to outlaw their ability to disagree with him. Source.
It seems that the above article mis-attributes the reasonable journalistic interpretation of Nunez's position in the first paragraph with Nunez's actual statement in the second paragraph.
Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles), who floor-managed SB 1437, said in his floor statement that the bill was about the "safety" of "sexual minority kids." He said that the schools had an obligation to prohibit anything that, as the bill puts it, "reflects adversely" on homosexuality. "The way that you correct a wrong is by outlawing. 'Cause if you don't outlaw it, then people's biases tend to take over and dominate the perspective and the point of view," Nunez said. Source.
However, what Nunez is saying is that traditional, Biblical perspectives on homosexuality is "wrong"... a value opinion of his own... and does indeed advocate outlawing opposiiton to his view.
And here I was thinking that florida was the only ridiculous state. Silly me!
"The way you correct a wrong (perspective) is by outlawing. 'Cause if you don't outlaw it, then people's biases tend to take over and dominate the perspective and the point of view."
Hmmm - so now he speaks with parentheses? How does that work?
Look - if a writer wants to alter a quote they should use brackets [like this] so it is clear that's what they are doing - removing the parentheses gets us -- "The way you correct a wrong perspective is by outlawing. 'Cause if you don't outlaw it, then people's biases tend to take over and dominate the perspective and the point of view."
Now - if Nunez said it, then he said it. But he didn't.
Rather, he said, "The way you correct a wrong is by outlawing. 'Cause if you don't outlaw it, then people's biases tend to take over and dominate the perspective and the point of view"
Obviously quite different.
So, Swordmaker - where did the addition of "perspective" come from, and why? Seems that an argument against the bill could be made quite easily without resorting to misquoting someone.
FWIW - The Nazi movement in Germany was called "The National Socialist Party". The left in America are trending down the same path.
Three Nazi SS divisions were made up entirely of Muslims and were assigned to the Balkins to handle the "Final Solution" concerning Jews.
If you go to http://www.tellthechildrenthetruth.com
You can read more about this topic.
bump
It is their 'holy grail.'
It is no coincidence Islamic pagans hate Israel, Jews, Christians and Western Civilization. The entire basis of Western Civilization is Mosaic Law, something both the Neo-Pagan Left and the pagan Islamic thugs cannot abide and wish to destroy.
The very idea that human beings have individual rights not subject to the whims of an earthly monarch, but subject to the laws of Yahweh, is directly from Moses.
Historically, this is proven over and over again with the successive conflicts between the forces of paganism and the Judaic culture. (This includes the idolatry of cultural Marxist paganism.)
A greater number of "atheists" and "pagans" adopt the same hackneyed tenets of a faux Judaic-Christian ideal (golden calf). They also subscribe to the Judaic fetishism of "sin," but will fight to their death in denial of it. Most of them are so wrapped up in their own polemics that they have become nothing more than pathetic anti-Christians with the same false hypocritical philosophy. They just slap a new label on it hoping nobody will notice - - they replace the idea of "avoiding sin" with "morals."
Morality and all of its associated ideals are rooted entirely in the presupposition some higher power defines what is correct in human behavior. Today, "morals" are a religious pagan philosophy of esoteric hobgoblins. Transfiguration is a pantheon of fantasies as the medium of infinitization. Others get derision for having an unwavering Judaic belief in Yahweh or Yeshua, although their critics and enemies will evangelize insertion of phantasmagoric fetishisms into secular law.
Mosaic Law (of which the Ten Commandments is just a part) is the foundation of Western Civilization. Genesis is the primary focus of the Declaration of Independence, from where our Constitutional rights are derived. The Ten Commandments are the foundation of our judicial system.
Moses wrote Genesis. This is why such people will jump up and down screaming when the Ten Commandments are displayed or the Creationist idea of monogamy from the book of Genesis is introduced.
The latter (Genesis) also ruins the illogical and non-biological arguments of homosexual monogamy. In a secular sense, homosexuality is an idolatry of perversion. It is in no way an anatomical function of the human organism, but a phantasmagoric creation from within the mentally disturbed human mind, a social psychosis, naked and on full exhibitionist display.
This is the whole crux (pun intended) of their attack on creationism - - they are really frustrated by Genesis, but cannot destroy the axiomatic state of procreant human biology, it does not fit their religious agenda.
Homosexual monogamy advocates seek ceremonious sanctification of their anatomical perversions and esoteric absolution for their guilt-ridden, impoverished egos. Neither of those will satisfy their universal dissatisfaction with mortality or connect them to something eternal. With pantheons of fantasies as their medium of infinitization, they still have nothing in them of reality, any more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream.
Homosexual deviancy is really a pagan practice (and a self-induced social psychosis) at war with the Judaic culture over what is written in the book of Genesis (1:27, 2:18).
This is exactly what the National Socialists were at war with... so, when someone uses the term "Gaystapo," they might not realize how close to the truth they really are, especially if you consider their eugenic breeding programs.
Many will seek ceremonious sanctification and esoteric absolution in some type of marriage rite, but that still fails to give them a connection to the eternal in both a religious and temporal, procreant sense - - the union does not produce offspring.
Dissatisfaction with inevitable mortality only feeds the impoverishment of the ego further. Homosexuals really hate human life; their whole desire is rooted in the destruction of it.
Abortion is akin to slavery... life to be bought and sold...
Contemplate the religious fervor associated with the pro-abortion advocacy. The societal practice of abortion is ritual mass murder upon the altars of conceit dedicated to idolatrous vanities, a collective human sacrifice before pagan idols.
It has a similitude to the Teutonic paganism of Adolph Hitler (whose idolatry was the idea of a "master race," among other things). In effect, these genocides are a mass human sacrifice to those pagan idols. The abortionists, like the National Socialists, incinerate the remains of their victims.
Aleister Crowley, who openly supported the National Socialists, was affiliated with Ordo Templi Orientis, Golden Dawn, A.A. (Order of the Silver Star) and other such occult lodges all across Germany. Crowley engaged in all manner of deviancy, homoeroticism, sadomasochism and murder. Much of the occultism in National Socialism is derived directly from there.
Crowley envisioned himself as the Great Beast (To Mega Therion), just as der Fuhrer made himself in that image. Hitler's life as a struggling, inept artist was where that association blossomed.
Crowley's creed, "Do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the Law," (which is actually from Francois Rabelais) and used by Neo-Pagan nutcases without attribution for obvious politically correct reasons, is with certainty no different than the National Socialist "will to power," or their ubermensch mentality.
It is also no accident Nietzsche's "over-man" and nihilist philosophy and resulting insanity from venereal disease closely mirrors the insanity of der Fuhrer. These occult orders, sex and drug cults still survive today, as do the Neo-pagan, Neo-Nazi groups, black supremacist Rastafarian potheads, prison gangs and other related filth.
Crowley occultism is also from where L. Ron Hubbard emerges with Scientology. Note the NAZI symbolism of that kooky cult of weirdoes and their deviant adherents. Hollywood Cultural Marxists love Scientology.
Ah, Hollywood, the fountain of fantastical images, perverts and hypocrisies! It is by no accident the Cultural Marxists of Hollywood are flaming haters of America, Israel and Christendom, and who advocate the most bizarre and psychotic.
Germany cracked down hard on the Scientologists for that reason and because they are using similar mind control techniques...
you must have missed the lewrockwell stuff posted back around 9/11.
The Secret to the Suicidal Liberal Mind
NewsMax ^ | 21 January 2002 | Jack Wheeler
Posted on 01/21/2002 1:16:50 PM PST by 45Auto
What do Harvard president Larry Summers, Taliban John Walker, Delta Airlines officials and the editors of the New York Times have in common with Yanomamo tribeswomen in the Amazon jungle? To answer this question is to understand the root cause of liberal "white guilt." Lakes of ink have been splashed on newspaper, magazine and journal pages ruminating and anguishing over the bottomless guilt that pervades the liberal soul. Paul Craig Roberts, economist and columnist, writes eloquently about the anti-white racism endemic in American universities that demonizes white males as the font of all evil. Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institute explained in the Wall Street Journal recently how white guilt empowers racist frauds such as Cornel West.
The self-loathing of the white American liberal is as well-established and documented as Einstein's Special Relativity theorems. A typical example is writer Susan Sontag's denouncement of the white race as "the cancer of human history." A racist hatred of one's own race – auto-racism – has become a defining characteristic of the liberal mind. Yet the source of such suicidal guilt remains a mystery. Clearly understanding what disables liberals from wanting to defend their culture is today a mortal necessity – an absolute requirement if America is to be preserved and protected from Moslem terrorists and other folk desirous of her demise.
Exploitation and Black Magic
For such understanding, we need to travel to the Amazon. Among the Yanomamo and other tribes deep in the Amazon rain forests still adhering to the ancient hunting-gathering lifestyle practiced by our Paleolithic ancestors, it is an accepted practice that when a woman gives birth, she tearfully proclaims her child to be ugly. In a loud, mortified lament that the entire tribe can hear, she asks why the gods have cursed her with such a pathetically repulsive infant. She does this in order to ward off the envious black magic of the Evil Eye, the Mal Ojo, that would be directed at her by her fellow tribespeople if they knew how happy she was with her beautiful baby.
Anthropologists observe that for most primitive and traditional cultures, "every individual lives in constant fear of the magical aggression of others ... there is only one explanation for unforeseen events: the envious black magic of another villager." Reflect for a moment on the extent to which tribespeople in a tribal, "primitive" culture suffuse their lives with superstition, witchcraft, sorcery, voodoo, "black magic," the "evil eye." The world for them is teeming with demons, spirits, ghosts and gods, all of whom are malicious and dangerous -- in a word, envious. A great many, if not the majority, of tribal or traditional cultures, whether in the Amazon, Africa or the Pacific, have no concept of natural death. Death is always murder.
For the Shuara Jivaro of the eastern Amazon, the first tribe I ever stayed with, there are three ways to die: actual murder (such as a spear through your stomach); demon-murder (accidental death, such as being killed by a falling tree in a storm or by snakebite, which the Jivaros see as perpetrated by a demon); or witchcraft murder (death by illness or unexplained causes, perpetrated by an envious sorcerer). The Jivaro, just like the Tiv in Nigeria, the Aritama in Colombia, the Dobua in Micronesia, the Navaho in the Southwest U.S. and the tribal mind in general, attribute any illness or misfortune to the envious black magic of a personal enemy.
Envy is the source of tribal and traditional cultures' belief in Black Magic, the fear of the envious Evil Eye.
The fundamental reason why certain cultures remain static and never evolve (e.g., present-day villages in Egypt and India that have stayed pretty much the same for millennia) is the overwhelming extent to which the lives of the people within them are dominated by envy and envy avoidance: as anthropologists call it, the envy barrier.
For the Mambwe in Zambia, for example, "successful men are regarded as sinister, supernatural and dangerous." In Mexican villages, "fear of other people's envy determines every detail of life, every proposed action." Members of a Hispanic "ghetto" in a community in Colorado "equate success with betrayal of the group; whoever works his way up socially and economically is regarded as a 'man who has sold himself to the Anglos,' someone 'who climbs on the backs of his own people.' "
It is an ultimate irony of modern times that left-wing Marxist-type intellectuals consider themselves to be in the progressive vanguard of sophisticated contemporary thought -- when in reality their thinking is nothing but an atavism, a regression to a primitive tribal mentality. What the Left calls "exploitation" is what anthropologists call "black magic." As sociologist Helmut Schoeck summarizes in his seminal work, "Envy: A Theory of Human Behavior" (and who collected the above anthropologists' observations):
A self-pitying inclination to contemplate another's superiority or advantages, combined with a vague belief in his being the cause of one's own deprivation, is also to be found among educated members of our modern societies who really ought to know better. The primitive people's belief in black magic differs little from modern ideas. Whereas the socialist believes himself robbed by the employer, just as the politician in a developing country believes himself robbed by the industrial countries, so primitive man believes himself robbed by his neighbor, the latter having succeeded by black magic in spiriting away to his own fields part of the former's harvest.
The primitive atavism of left-wing bromides like "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is best illustrated by arguing that one can be healthy only at the expense of others. That in order to be in superior health, bursting with energy and vitality, one has to make someone else sick or in poor health -- just as in order to be rich you have to make others poor. The healthy are healthy because they unjustly exploited and ripped off the sick, spiriting away the sick's fair share of health with black magic. In fact, the sick are sick because the healthy are healthy. If this is absurd, then claiming the poor are poor because they have been exploited by the rich is equally absurd.
Fear of Being Envied
Pandering to the envious, and intimidating those who are afraid of them, has been the path to power of all modern demagogues, from Lenin and Hitler to Yassir Arafat and Osama bin Laden. The three great political pathologies of the 20th century are all religions of envy: Nazism, preaching race envy toward "rich, exploitative Jews"; Communism, preaching class envy toward the "rich, exploitative bourgeoisie"; and Moslem terrorism, preaching culture envy toward the "rich, exploitative West." Envy-mongering has always been and continues to be the underlying strategy of all variants of the political Left, such as the Democratic Party. What a Yanomamo woman calls "black magic" and a Marxist professor at Harvard calls "exploitation," Tom Daschle calls "tax break for the rich."
So here we discover the secret fear at the source of the suicidal liberal mind. It is envy that makes a Nazi, a Communist or a terrorist. It is the fear of being envied that makes a liberal and is the source of "liberal guilt." This is most easily seen in the children of wealthy parents. Successful businessmen, for example, who have made it on their own normally have a respect for the effort and the economic system that makes success possible.
Their children, who have not had to work for it, are easier targets for guilt-mongering by the envious. So they assume a posture of liberal compassion as an envy-deflection device: "Please don't envy me for my father's money -- look at all the liberal causes and government social programs I advocate!"
Teddy Kennedy is the archetype of this phenomenon.
This is also why Hollywood is so liberal. The vast amounts of money movie stars make is so grossly disproportionate to the effort it took them to make it that they feel it is unearned. So they apologize for it. The liberal's strategy is to apologize for his success in order to appease the envious. Liberalism is thus not a political ideology or set of beliefs. It is an envy-deflection device, a psychological strategy to avoid being envied.
Then there are those who are terrified of envy even though they have earned success themselves. Many Jews are liberals because such lethal envy has been directed at Jews for so many centuries that it is little wonder they consider avoiding envy to be a necessity of life. One definitive characteristic of both envy and the fear of it is masochism. Envy is not simply hatred of someone for having something you don't -- it is the willingness to masochistically give up any chance of ever having that something yourself as long as the person you are envious of doesn't get to have it either. Similarly, the more one fears being envied, the more one is driven to masochistic self-humiliation in attempts at envy appeasement.
The Masochism of Liberals
It is possible to perceive the passions of the Left as frenzies of masochism. What could be more idiotic and masochistic than to oppose missile defense? This opposition cannot be understood unless one dispenses with its rhetoric and rationales and realizes that these folks at their emotional core do not want their country defended. The lunacy of the "global warming" hoax cannot be comprehended other than that its masochistic advocates do not want their civilization to prosper. The culture-destroying immigration policies that Pat Buchanan warns are causing "The Death of the West" were put in place by those who do not want their culture to survive.
The lethality of liberal envy appeasement is that personally felt guilt is projected onto the various social or tribal collectives to which the liberal belongs and are a part of his self-identity. Self-loathing is transformed into a loathing of one's society or race.
White male liberals become auto-racist and auto-sexist: racist toward their own race, sexist toward their own sex. Dime-store demagogues like eco-fascist environmentalists, feminazis, animal and homosexual rights types, race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton all get their strength from the liberals' fear of their Evil Eyes. As the Amazon tribeswoman who says her baby is ugly, so the white male liberal says his gender, his race, his country, his civilization and even his entire species is ugly.
I began to realize how liberal envy appeasement is the root of the problem when I was speaking at colleges back in the 1980s about anti-Soviet resistance movements in Soviet colonies such as Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique and Afghanistan. Students would invariably turn a discussion of Soviet imperialism into an assertion of moral equivalence between the USA and the USSR: "How can you criticize the Soviets when we're just as bad? What about what we did to the Indians?" I would be asked.
"I haven't done anything to the Indians," I replied. "What have you done to them?"
"But we stole their land!"
"OK -- let's give it back. And let's start with your property. To what tribe do you want your family's home to go? What tribe gets your stereo?"
Once I couldn't stand being heckled by a particularly loud and petulant student leftist any longer. I lost my temper and said to him: "Look, man, if you're into masochism, find some chick with long black hair who's into whips and chains and have her beat the hell out of you. Just don't take it out on your country."
Rejecting Envy
The future of our economy, our culture and our civilization depends on an antidote to the corrosive social poisons of envy and envy appeasement. That antidote was first provided by Aristotle in the 4th century bc.
The antidote to envy is emulation.
In the "Rhetoric" (ca. 350 bc), Aristotle distinguishes the two: "Zelos, emulation, is a good thing and characteristic of good people, while phthonos, envy, is bad and characteristic of the bad; for the former, through emulation, are making an effort to attain good things for themselves, while the latter, through envy, try to prevent their neighbors from having them." ("Rhetoric," 2.10.1)
Aristotle invokes the ancient wisdom of his 8th century (bc) predecessor Hesiod:
There is not one kind of Eris (Strife), but all over the earth there are two. One fosters evil war and battle, being cruel. The other is the elder daughter of dark Night, and she is far kinder to men. She stirs up even the shiftless to toil. For a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbor, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order. Thus neighbor vies with neighbor to hurry after wealth. This Strife is wholesome for men. ("Works and Days," 11-24)
Aristotle concludes that "Whereas phthonos, envy, is censured because it seeks to harm another, zelos, emulation, is praised because it encourages a person to attain excellence on his own merits." ("Rhetoric," 2.11.1) Fear of envy is very deep-seated in the human psyche. It can prevent a culture from progressing for thousands of years. Only a youthful culture full of vigor and confidence can shrug it off, enabling that culture to flourish. The road to cultural ruin lies in the fear of envy reasserting itself from the primordial depths.
America once had that youth, vigor and confidence, culminating in history's single greatest achievement, putting a man on the moon. After the triply debilitating debacles of Vietnam, Watergate and Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan resurrected America's self-confidence, with America's resultant victory in the Cold War. Yet America lost her way once more, indulging in a cultural debauch epitomized by the Clintons. America's response to the atrocity of Sept. 11 provided overwhelming evidence that her reserves of vitality and self-assurance remain abundant.
Those reserves are nonetheless depleted. America's most elite universities have degenerated into fascist cesspools of envy appeasement. They survive only on the inertia of their prestige. Delta and other airlines compromise passenger security by harassing people at random rather than racially profiling Arab and other Moslem men.
Indeed, the entire phenomenon of political correctness -- perhaps best exemplified by the New York Times editorial page -- is nothing but a massive exercise in envy appeasement. One of the most positive results of Sept. 11 is that it has made the American people mad enough to reject envy. They now could care less if Moslems or the French or whomever are envious of them. That rejection must now be applied to the envy panderers and envy appeasers within America herself. Rejecting envy is the key to preventing "The Death of the West," the key for America to continue to prosper. I suggest that this rejection begin with you.
Fear of the Evil Eye is the only thing that gives the Evil Eye any power. Without fear of it, the Evil Eye is impotent. So, the next time Evil Eyes are directed at you and demand you apologize for your existence, you might suggest that they indulge in S&M by themselves and leave you out of it.
This is a perfect article for National Crybaby Day.
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