« MonkeyFan sees "The Plan!" | Main | The Danger of Human Rights Proliferation »

July 24, 2013

Comment In Search of a Cornerstone

Reader's comment on The Left's New Boy-Toy

People have talked about a coming "singularity", where afterwards everything is different.

There's a group of people riding the accelerating high-tech wave towards the future. But if that's you and you fall behind, it's ever-harder to catch back up. An ever-smaller cohort of high-productivity people are being forced (?) to carry along with them an ever-growing collection of dependents for whom an aspirational attitude and determination are useless. The cultures are in some sense separating, witness VDH's c&C of the affluent Left Coast, with the falling backwards Central Valley.

I do not know if the singularity means the connection between the two becomes permanently broken, with the technies leaving behind the dependos. Or the singularity will enable the dependos to get back into independent, aspirational, productive lives.

I do not like this emerging nostalgie de la boue born of hopelessness. It stretches the connection between us all to the breaking point. Some seek to hasten and to profit from it, there are always little men who scheme to be kings of their own ragtag dominions.

There is a puzzle before us. We are at the beginning. What are the steps to re-instill an aspirational and moral culture to all our people? What pieces, and in what order? And how do we keep the vandals from ever-scrambling our efforts? We must not fall into civil conflict, but perhaps we will have to teeter at the abyss before there can be an American Awakening.

An American Awakening. A rejection of the addiction of dependency. An embrace that all your neighbors and countrymen are at Liberty to pursue their own happiness without your interference. Shared civic virtues that a civil society cannot be made unless each of us does what we can to make it better. Opportunity is available, for those willing to work for it. Putting off gratification today, that our children will inherit a better world from us.

Is there one tiny cornerstone piece that we can agree upon today? Is there one new idea, or old idea made new, that can seize us all, to build upon? Aspiration seems a good start, but for what? we have generations that have not known the blessings of Liberty, only the soma of dependency. The banishment of envy as policy. The source of all meaning and value is what each person does with what they are given. It is not what you have or have not, but what you do with it. And we will secure for all of us the Liberty to decide for ourselves.

We must begin a forced rejection of the crack dealers of dependency. Trust not in men, but trust in God to provide the Blessings of Liberty.

-- John A. Fleming at July 16, 2013 9:28 PM

Posted by gerardvanderleun at July 24, 2013 10:41 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.

Your Say

Post a comment




Remember Me?

(you may use HTML tags for style)