[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[John Carl]

Hi Platt


> Hi John,
> I hope an "over-attachment to the mechanisms of the ego" doesn't represent
> an
> criticism of individualism. If we deny the sanctity of individual life, we
> revert to social level values where group solidarity crushes contrarians
> like
> Pirsig, and humanity stagnates in a swamp of certainties, like it did in
> the
> Dark Ages.
>
>
John:

I share your concerns Platt.  For there is that tendency of the pendulum to
swing, and we've had decades of a strident and arrogant individualism which
is sure to cause a reactionary collectivism, as when the feces impacts the
turbojet and all hell breaks loose.

We've discussed before how individuals created with no sense of community
connection or duty, stimulated by programming to unrealistic desires, have
ironically formed a vast collective of selfish individuals who all share a
positive view of themselves with no actual moral foundation at all - how
this is likely to have very, very negative consequences as they look for
scapegoats in the form of big corporate entities.  Confiscatory taxes are
one thing,  a dramatically  French  mob, casting about for a suitable Marie
Antoinette is another.



>
> [P]
> I've great respect for Allan Bloom, author of "Closing of the American
> Mind,"
> who takes the academy to task for caving into 60's radicals. I'm not
> familiar
> with his critique of German "underpinnings," but if he is talking about the
> premises that led the Weimar Republic to utter disaster, the parallels with
> our
> current situation are undeniable.
>
>

What stuck most in my mind ( it has been a long time and I lost the book a
while ago) was his explanation of how the Nihilistic philosophies of
Nietchze and Schopenhaur were combined with a newly formed idea of
pragmatism, to create a mood in the Volk which had a natural expression in
Hitler.

We love our scapegoats!  It's all Hitler, Hitler, Hitler.  But Hitler didn't
arise in a vaccuum.  It was Blooms particular genius to point to the
underlying philosophical developments that produced Hitler, and pointed that
many of them were identically adopted in America, after the war, as the
conqueror assimilates all the most "pragmatically useful" ideas from the
conquered enemy, and takes unto itself the seeds of it's eventual, and
inevitable, undoing.

Also his comparison of the wild, swinging and decadent  Berlin of the 20's
stemmed in part from this overthrow of Values and Morality.

Take care,

John