[MD] A Place for the Principled Person

[Ham Priday]

Gene and Case (HELP Platt!) --


> [Case]
> I think your point about the consequences of ME ME ME thinking is well
> taken. I would add a further irony: in our system of economics a
corporation
> has the status of personhood. So when a collective starts in with I, Me,
> Mine the results are paradoxical at best. Kind of the dark under belly of
> the Randian mindset.

> [Gene]
> 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.

I'm flabbergasted that anyone could think we are trending in the direction
of individualism.  I guess this just goes to prove that, given sufficient
indoctrination, people can believe almost anything.  Not since Barry
Goldwater's "Conscience of the Conservative" and Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"
have I seen anyone of prominence promoting the virtues of individualism.
Quite the contrary -- except for a handful of radio talk show hosts -- 
ministers, CEOs, educators, social engineers, politicians, philosophers,
artists, journalists, and celebrities have all renounced individualism as
self-serving, greedy, even "undemocratic".

When I started what used to be called "grammer" school in 1938, my uncle
gave me a book called "Little People who became Great" which simply told the
story of humble people like Abe Lincoln, Tom Edison, and G. W. Carver who
rose to prominence by their personal achievements.  A year later America
entered WWII with its citizens showing their support by purchasing war
bonds, collecting foil and fat, and contending with food rationing.  Some
time after our victorious soldiers returned home in the years following
1949, we began to lose our patriotism and the value of our individuality.

American industry, which had risen to the challenge of defeating an overseas
enemy for six years, now had to confront "organized labor" at home.  We
began to hear of the tyranny of capitalist power from socialists like Norman
Thomas.  Other political contenders were preaching "One Worldism", an
ideology fostered by Woodrow Wilson who had been influenced by a Marxist
adviser in the 1920s.  At the same time we were facing a new threat from a
communist dictator who had many U.S. sympathizers.  America's resolve was
weakening under the spread of collectivism.

The noted economist Friedrich Hayek, a member of the Chicago School that
included Milton Friedman, warned of the perils of collectivist "planned
economies" in his "Road to Serfdom" back in 1944:

"We are rapidly abandoning not the viewsa of Cobden and Bright, of Adam
Smith and Hume, or even of Locke and Milton, but one of the salient
characteristics of Western civilization as it has grown from the foundations
laid by Christianity and the Greeks and Romans.  Not merely nineteenth- and
eighteenth-century liberalism, but the basic individualism inherited by us
from Erasmus and Montigue, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides,
is progressively relinquished.

"...Individualism has a bad name today, and the term has come to be
connnected with egotism and selfishness.  But the individualism of which we
speak in contrast to socialism and all other forms of collectivism has no
necessary connection with these.  ...But the essential features of that
individualism which, from elements provided by Christianity and the
philosophy of classical antiquity, was first fully developed during the
Renaissance, and has since grown and spread into what we  know as Western
civilization -- are the respect for the individual man _qua_ man, that is,
the recognition of his own views and tastes as supreme in his own sphere,
however narrowly that may be circumscribed, and the belief that it is
desirable that men shouild develop their woen gifts and bents. ...

"Individual freedom cannot be reconciled with the supremacy of one single
purpose to which the whole of society is permanently subordinated. To a
limited extent we ourselves experience this fact in wartime, when
subordination of almost everything to the immediate and pressing need is the
price at which we preserve our freedom in the long run.  The fashionable
phrases about doing for the purposes of peace what we have learned.to do for
the purposes of war are completely misleading, for it is sensible
temporarily to sacrifice freedom in order to make it more secure in the
future, but it is quite a different thing to sacrifice liberty permanently
in the interests of a planned economy. .

"To those who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at close
quarters, the connection between the two systems is obvious.  The
realization of the socialist program means the destruction of freedom.
Democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is
simply not achievable."
                        --[F.A. Hayek: "Road to Serfdom"]

What is good for the self is good for the whole.  Moving back to the
collective, as we're now doing, is the subordination of the individual which
leads to social tyranny.

Regards,
Ham