[MD] A Place for the Principled Person

[Gene M]

>
> Our Founding Fathers had a far better sense of history and what it takes
> to
> sustain a free nation than today's college-educated citizen.  The idea
> that
> we can "liberate" ourselves from the responsibilities that Platt has
> enumerated as "hard work, personal responsibility, self-discipline,
> individual initiative, craftsmanship, commitment to excellence, thrift,
> delayed gratification, honor of achievement, optimism, life long pursuit
> of
> knowledge" -- to which I would add the shift from individualism to
> collectivism -- has eroded our standards in virtually every aspect of
> society.
>
> Whatever your political ideology, unless this trend is reversed, America
> is
> on its way to becoming a third-rate nation with reasonable probability of
> being surpassed by China, India or Japan as early as the next century.
>
> --Ham
>

It's kind of funny. I agree almost entirely with this post! I believe that
the loss of those principles is essentially killing society. The difference
is that I blame individualism, as opposed to collectivism.

The way I see it, back in the day everyone was forced to think collectively
in a way. Things too so long to get done, that they had little choice.
Building a castle, or the pyramids, or colonizing a new land, for example.
These were all tasks that could not be completed in any single person's
lifetime generally. So they collective got together and did it, for the sake
of the collective. No individual benefitted, really.

Nowadays I feel like everything has been shifted by our society towards the
individual. Individual pleasures, individual results, individual lives. We
no longer think ahead to the greater impact of our actions, only how they
affect us right now. We've stopped thinking of the harm we're doing to the
group, because of the pleasure we're bringing to ourselves.

In my eyes, it is the shift off of the whole, to the individual that is
killing Society. I mean, think about it. individualism is essentially the
opposite of Society, so of Course the more shrift the idea gets, the more
Society suffers for it.

We need to move back towards the collective. To what is good for the whole.
I agree that those principles are important, but they are Social principles.
They are taken for the good of the whole, not for ourselves.

You guys always enumerate the great values all individuals should strive
for. But I think we should remember the terrible aspect of individualism
that tends to come with it.
Greed, selfishness, short sitghtedness, laziness. Once we all start thinking
we're all vastly important, we become prideful, expect others to do our
share.

No no, I think the shift is quite the opposite of what you would say.

-Gene