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To: KDD
Libertarianism, Like Marxism, assumes that everyone will voluntarily obey the civil standards the Utopians envision.

Unfortunately sane, rational people realize that NO society has ever managed to function by allowing the petulant, the self absorbed and the dysfunctional to follow their emotional whimsies to the detriment of society as a whole.

We, as a body of civilized law abiding citizens, have the right and the duty, to organize our society to “in order to form a more perfect union” the Libertines want to simply pick and choose which parts of that society they will use while demanding freedom of each and ever responsibility imposed on them as part of that society.

What is called Libertarianism is actually Libertineism. A selfish demand that those who have profited from our civic society can simply opt out of having to help in their turn pay the costs of maintaining that society.

16 posted on 11/10/2007 8:08:55 AM PST by MNJohnnie (Pacifism is not moral. True morality requires evil be opposed, not appeased)
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To: MNJohnnie
Thus it is that what we are attempting to do in this rapid survey of the historical progress of certain ideas, is to trace the genesis of an attitude of mind, a set of terms in which now practically everyone thinks of the State; and then to consider the conclusions towards which this psychical phenomenon unmistakably points.
Instead of recognizing the State as “the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men,” the run of mankind, with rare exceptions, regards it not only as a final and indispensable entity, but also as, in the main, beneficent.

The mass-man, ignorant of its history, regards its character and intentions as social rather than anti-social; and in that faith he is willing to put at its disposal an indefinite credit of knavery, mendacity and chicane, upon which its administrators may draw at will. Instead of looking upon the State’s progressive absorption of social power with the repugnance and resentment that he would naturally feel towards the activities of a professional-criminal organization, he tends rather to encourage and glorify it, in the belief that he is somehow identified with the State, and that therefore, in consenting to its indefinite aggrandizement, he consents to something in which he has a share - he is, pro tanto, aggrandizing himself.

Professor Ortega y Gasset analyzes this state of mind extremely well. The mass-man, he says, confronting the phenomenon of the State,

“sees it, admires it, knows that there it is. . . . Furthermore, the mass-man sees in the State an anonymous power, and feeling himself, like it, anonymous, he believes that the State is something of his own. Suppose that in the public life of a country some difficulty, conflict, or problem, presents itself, the mass-man will tend to demand that the State intervene immediately and undertake a solution directly with its immense and unassailable resources. . . . When the mass suffers any ill-fortune, or simply feels some strong appetite, its great temptation is that permanent sure possibility of obtaining everything, without effort, struggle, doubt, or risk, merely by touching a button and setting the mighty machine in motion.”

It is the genesis of this attitude, this state of mind, and the conclusions which inexorably follow from its predominance, that we are attempting to get at through our present survey. These conclusions may perhaps be briefly forecast here, in order that the reader who is for any reason indisposed to entertain them may take warning of them at this point, and close the book.

The unquestioning, determined, even truculent maintenance of the attitude which Professor Ortega y Gasset so admirably describes, is obviously the life and strength of the State; and obviously too, it is now so inveterate and so widespread - one may freely call it universal - that no direct effort could overcome its inveteracy or modify it, and least of all hope to enlighten it.

This attitude can only be sapped and mined by uncountable generations of experience, in a course marked by recurrent calamity of a most appalling character. When once the predominance of this attitude in any given civilization has become inveterate, as so plainly it has become in the civilization of America, all that can be done is to leave it to work its own way out to its appointed end. The philosophic historian may content himself with pointing out and clearly elucidating its consequences, as Professor Ortega y Gasset has done, aware that after this there is no more that one can do.

“The result of this tendency,” he says, “will be fatal. Spontaneous social action will be broken up over and over again by State intervention; no new seed will be able to fructify. Society will have to live for the State, man for the governmental machine. And as after all it is only a machine, whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it, the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism. Such was the lamentable fate of ancient civilization.”

Our Enemy, The State
by Albert J. Nock - 1935

I do not hold out hope that those such as you will see the fallacies behind their authoritarian mindset. The desire to control others acts as a powerful drug to those who desire to mold society into their narrow framework of acceptability. The rejection of such a flawed philosophy usually is quite bloody.

19 posted on 11/10/2007 8:29:34 AM PST by KDD (A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse)
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