useful idiots can always be found who will do the bidding and then be removed
“Now things are coming together.”
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
— Yeats
This lady seriously thinks Ayn Rand would see the current big-government PC nanny state as the triumph of her principles?
This author lost me right here! My neurons are exploding. Maybe her’s have.
As she points out, it wasn’t just a one-person movement - Alinsky could never have gotten a foothold without the steady undermining effect of the atheistic philosophers of the 20th century having prepared the way for him. I think one of the crucial things, however, was the collapse of the Catholic Church after Vatican II, because it left many very simple people completely without any intellectual defenses. That us, the average Catholic certainly didn’t spend time pondering the great truths of life and morality on his own, but he knew what they were because he had absorbed them through his upbringing.
But the Church had been undermined by these same atheists; it’s well known that the communists had a plan to infiltrate seminaries and that they in fact did. So when discipline broke down and tradition was rejected at Vatican II, they just hatched out and took over.
Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Chavez, Castro, Mussolini, Kim Il Sung, Saddam Hussein, Mao.... It's a long list. I'm now convinced that it's all too easy for humanity to be fooled. Bombast, telling bold lies, faked sincerity, appealing to people's jealousies..... There's a formula that works, and it has worked over and over in the course of human history. Combine narcissism, grandiosity, and a willingness to say or do anything to promote oneself and ones ideology and you have the ingredients for a dictator. They are not hard to come by, unfortunately.
As college freshman in 1968, the year left-wing radicalism went mainstream on college campuses, I discovered Ayn Rand.
Having only a year earlier declared myself a committed atheist, Rand’s writings appealed greatly to me on an intellectual level. I read every word she ever wrote in the next few years, and read Atlas Shrugged cover-to-cover at least twice, although “inhaled” would probably be a more accurate term than “read.”
The next year, I became editor-in-chief of my college newspaper, and remained so for the next three years. I am proud to say that during my tenure, my college had the only non-Marxist student newspaper in the country — at least that was my impression from attending the annual United States Student Press Association (USSPA) conference every year.
Under my editorship, we constantly espoused liberty and free-market economics, and derived great pleasure from consistently inventing new ways to give the leftwing radicals and SDS members on the faculty and in the student government a deliciously frustrating time — publicly opposing them and organizing against them at every possible turn.
After I left college, I never lost my passion for liberty and free markets, although I moved way beyond Ayn Rand as I discovered Henry Hazlitt, Adam Smith, FA Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and so many great conservative writers and organizations such as the Foundation for Economic Education and other conservative think-tanks.
In my 30s and early 40s, after reading books for laymen about modern physics (such as The Universe & Doctor Einstein), and undergoing many personal transformations, I renounced my Atheism and remain to this day a firm believer in God’s existence.
I am so grateful to Ayn Rand for initially raising my consciousness (when I first got to college, I was petitioning door to door for Eugene McCarthy like all my other young liberal skull full of mush peers).
I don’t understand why so many religious conservatives are so hostile to Ayn Rand. And I consider the fact that she developed a non-theistic justification for limited government and free markets to be a real contribution — especially in this day-and-age when so many potential converts to liberty are instantly turned off by any mention of God.
Everyone has their own spiritual path. It took my 20 years to come to God as an adult. I would rather live any day in a country comprised of traditional religion-based conservatives and Ayn Rand Objectivists than one in which the other side is composed of leftwing totalitarians, which is the case today.
As far as I’m concerned, I may have parted ways with her intellectually in many respects, but GOD BLESS AYN RAND! I wish more young people would be exposed to her these days.
Hence: Ignorance is bliss.
Or as I would put it: Socialism is a fools paradise.
Thanks for posting.
To put it somewhat more succinctly:
Culture is more important than politics, because politics grows out of culture.
We have lost the cultural war, so we are inevitably paying the price for it, the loss of the political contest.
The only way in the long run to alter this equation is to counter-attack and retake the culture.
Unfortunately, I don’t really have any idea how to do it.
Theodore Dalrymple on The Dystopian Imagination.
Key passages:
“This passage reminds me of the advertising slogan of a credit card launched in Britain about 30 years ago: it “takes the waiting out of wanting.” The advertisement showed no recognition that immediate gratification usually presents a bill, with extortionate interest.
Huxley surmised that life lived as the satisfaction of one desire after another would result in shallow and egotistical people. True, he had a poor opinion of mankind to start with: “About 99.5% of the entire population of the planet are as stupid,” he once wrote, “as the great masses of the English.” But after gratifying their desires instantly throughout their lives, people would cease to carry the divine spark that distinguished man from the rest of creation. They would seek entertainment unto death: at Brave New World’s Park Lane Hospital for the Dying, “at the foot of every bed, confronting its moribund occupant, was a television box.” I think of my own hospital, where the dying usually depart this world to the sight and sound of driveling television soap operas.
Those who live lives of immediate gratification, Huxley thought, would not be able to bear solitude of any kind. As Mustapha Mond explains, “people are never alone now. We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them to ever have it.” A life devoted to instant gratification produces permanent infantilization: “at sixty-four . . . tastes are what they were at seventeen.” In our society, the telescoping of the generations is already happening: the knowledge, tastes, and social accomplishments of 13-year-olds are often the same as those of 28-year-olds. Adolescents are precociously adult; adults are permanently adolescent.”
Re: “It takes the waiting out of wanting.” A perfect description of Obama, symbolic of the credit card immediate gratification mentality - the quintessential man of the times for the times - a man who never had a productive job in his entire life, cossetted and feted by a virtual army of sickening sycophants. The guy who along with his wife amassed $120,000 debt in student loans and took over twenty years to pay it back
( http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/27/its-personal-obamas-carried-120000-student-loan-debt-for-decades/ ). You’d think that two people with Harvard Law degrees could have had productive jobs and paid off that debt earlier.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_oh_to_be.html
God is in my heart and mind, and there he will remain for all time even as the hands that control our commutation work to suppress and oppressed his follows and good words.
We must not falter in our faith toward him our father. We must remember that even in roman times when Christians were persecuted we stood strong and outlasted & out preformed theses hedonistic evils.
Time will deal with those who fall victim to theses self-destructive hedonistic ways. We must simply focus our efforts to see to it that we ourselfs do not become their victims or fall victim to this evil ourselfs. In the end should we remain true to God we shall survive & outlast this evil.
Rand’s ideas are like medicine — they can, in proper doses, serve as a cure for those who have fallen into the sickness of idolatry the state or the collective, but in large doses are poisonous, and even in small doses can be poisonous to the already healthy, tending to cause the malady of idolatry of self.
The problem is Rand’s objectivism is the same as the problem with virtually all atheistic philosophies: without a transcendent source of morality, there is no “objective” morality. One cannot reason from premises in the indicative to conclusions in the imperative. Rand’s “objective” source for morality is ultimately cribbed from the Christian understanding of the human person — starting with “come let Us make Man in Our image and likeness” and ending with the full conception of personhood forged in the christological controversies to say correctly who Jesus is — which she refuses to acknowledge.
The problem is, without its Christian underpinnings, the transcendent worth of the human person is easy to brush aside, leaving only a morality of power, the strong preying on the weak. Every society in the world was a slave society until Christians, centuries after Our Lord’s earthly ministry and Saving Death finally, gradually, finally decided that the fact Christ died for each of us was sufficient reason to abolish both serfdom and slavery — all within a generation, slavery was abolished in America and in Romania (where Gypsies were kept as chattel slaves), serfdom abolished in Russia, pressure from Britain and France pushed the Ottomans to abolish both formal dhimmitude and slavery, and the Royal Navy suppressed the slave trade and slavery in the Muslim world. What was “rational” “scientific” Communism in practice, but the restoration of slavery? What are our secular elites pushing toward but functional slavery of the masses to an omnicompetent regulatory state?