Posted on 06/23/2019 3:09:22 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
When the struggle to sustain existence in a world of scarcity is replaced by affluence so absolute that even the incompetents, the ill and the lazy are all able to survive thanks to handouts from government and private sources, the results are far from the paradise imagined by materialists.
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It is no longer economically necessary to work in order to eat or morally necessary to marry in order to breed. The cravings of the mind for luxury and for approval of experimental lifestyling have replaced the demands of the body for sustenance and protection from the cold. The preeminent example of the moral shift from scarcity to plenty is the debate about ubiquitous lifestyle abortion. In lifestyle abortion neither poverty nor maternal health is at issue. The life is terminated because of potential impact on parental lifestyles.
The definitive documents of religious and secular law in America – the Bible, especially the Old Testament, and the Constitution -- were given by God and Godful men in divine presence to bring compassion and justice to the seemingly eternal struggle for existence. These documents are not purposed to guide people through adventures in identity and lifestyles. The Bible and Constitution have had to be abused and broken to extract excuses for such perversions as the right to lifestyle abortion and sexual expression posing as the touchstones of freedom.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
What profiteth a man if he gains the world but loses his soul.
Affluence has removed the hard edge--the struggle--for survival that previously defined reality and made sense of our world. In a world of plenty, reality itself is nothing more than a drug-induced high. There is no meaning or purpose. We are like animals in the zoo, but the zoo has no bars except those we erect ourselves.
We are all Paris Hilton trust fund babies...drinking, drugging, and partying ourselves into a permanent state of dissipation.
“When the struggle to sustain existence in a world of scarcity is replaced by affluence so absolute that even the incompetents, the ill and the lazy are all able to survive thanks to handouts from government and private sources, the results are far from the paradise imagined by materialists.”
I’ve been saying for a while now that what ails us is a very bad case of “affluenza”.
But as Kipling observed a while back, this sickness won’t last long, but the ending won’t be pretty...
“And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return! “
With age, sometimes comes wisdom. I don't know about you, but I can't party like a 60-year old any more.
What is seen in society now is a catastrophic failure of primary Virtues,
Gratitude, Humility, Prudence, Fortitude, Courage, Justice, Honor
Temperance, Chastity, Charity, Patience, Kindness...
Replaced by the false gods of “Values” and “Money”
I want what I want when I want it...
When any Buddhist would tell you that
The root cause of all suffering is our desires
I also believe that in a society of surfeit, we tend to invent “causes” simply because we need adversity. Remember how Alexander wept when there were no worlds left to conquer.
Bttt
100 year old verse that captures the same observations as Me Tyler. Have we come full circle?
Reminds one of that saying by G. Michael Hopf:
“Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men. And,
weak men create hard times.”
The liberal moral compass is “feelings”. Follow your heart, do what feels right, you know what to do by looking inside, what feels good is good. This has a number of outcomes.
One is that you can ignore the rules and law because your feelings are considered more moral. The manipulative will fake outrage and offense to get others to ban it or attack the target; that’s the basis of fake hate crimes. It also leads to “performativeness”, the literal screaming and tantruming in public because it justifies you ripping up signs or hitting people.
The liberal bully may use aggressive (shoving, shouting) tactics or passive aggressive (not letting you in, casually bumping you ten times). Respond with a shout or shove, and they retreat to “don’t hurt me! you’re hurting me” to get immediate response from peers and moral high ground. This is the cry-bully tactic.
Another horrible end result is enabling the insane. Biology and science are irrelevant, if you feel like a woman/6 year old/alien, we can’t deny you. In fact, we have to accommodate you because your feelings are more important than facts. Those who are a little uncomfortable or logically countermand your delusion are evil oppressors, hurting you, because your feelings determine morality.
Ditto the accommodation of the paranoid. I’m afraid of X, everyone has to ban X because I’m so afraid of X. Whether it is guns or white people, we have to give in to the irrational and the liberal bullies who weaponize empathy of others to get what they want. It is emotional abuse as a political tactic.
There are real causes, but they’re too abstract for most people. For example, antibiotic resistance is a looming threat.
Diseases brought by illegal aliens (TB, chagas disease, the leprosy clinic in LA) are a threat, but liberal politics says you can’t talk about that. Ditto for Islamic terrorism. Every act is a crazy lone wolf, can’t talk about it unless you blame poverty and try to solve it with more money. That’s not the root cause, but they want to blame all of society and broad causes solved by totalitarian government to justify said totalitarian government.
Ending the Myth of the Poor Terrorist
The jihadists who carried out the Easter massacre in Sri Lanka were educated members of their country’s elite, a background that’s closer to the terrorist norm than the exception
By Claude Berrebi and Owen Engel
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/283963/myth-of-the-poor-terrorist
It’s not the creation of surplus that is favoring hedonism and laziness. It is the adoption of ruling class playboy jet set values of conspicuous consumption by the working class brought to you by an artificially created cultural appetite for fad, fashion, titillation, narcissism, etc. The ruling class aesthetic of ornament, bling, insatiable wealth accumulation, much of it generated by the goofball, air head “New Age” movement in which self-attention via the old money fascination with spa culture, leisure time pleasure seeking, eccentric spiritual practices, etc. that is at fault here.
What might be an alternative? Simple. An aesthetic of form follows function, the beauty of design that has one purpose - to act efficiently, to observe the laws of utility and direct application. Imagine a nation using military gear, shopping at military surplus stores for...everything only with more color choices than olive drab or camo. THAT’s a working class aesthetic - stuff built to last and cost less.
The ruling class, not surplus production made us style crazy.
There are a lot of fake ones too. For example, the homo/trans "problem." Seriously? If homos want to bugger each other, no one's stopping them. But they set out to remake society in their deviant mold, and present themselves as moral crusaders. They're not. They're just perverts who are energized by believing they're fighting for something noble.
Same with climate change. None of the horrors predicted by its high priests have come to pass, but we're constantly barraged by hysterical tales of impending doom. Once again, a fake event that's supposed to bring us all together to solve it. Instead, it just drives a deeper wedge.
Women's rights. Racial strife. "Social justice." All invented claptrap with no real substance. And all to give meaning to lives that are empty without some kind of enemy to defeat.
When you define feeling good as morally good, it is a sin, evil and harmful (akin to assault) to say you disagree and disapprove of someone else’s decisions.
This is why liberal bullies think it is right to threaten and force others to “agree” and “endorse” their choices. That you’re “hurting” them by saying you don’t think their choices are right.
And that's a pretty odd thing, because fundamentally these are collectivists, uninterested in individual achievement at all except insofar as it reflects the class of which the individual is a member. This is one of those "internal contradictions" they're always accusing capitalism of possessing. Self-actualization must await that classless society they're always touting, again without a shred of historical evidence because it just doesn't work like that.
What actually represents the incredible wealth of current societies, not all of them Western, is not the omnipresence of fat "poor" people toting electronic gadgets, but the fact that for the first time in human history we're past one bad harvest leading to famine. That is not necessarily a permanent condition. Even a society with a seemingly permanent surplus will starve if it does not possess the necessary social structures to weather the storm - a broken Rome would have done so after the fall, had not the Church stepped in with structure and discipline to replace the old imperial ones. That is unlikely to happen in a broken America.
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