[MD] Margaret Thatcher?

[david buchanan]

Adrie said:
Have to agree with Dr. McWatt. Thatcher was a psychopath they really should fill her grave with concrete, to avoid any ressurection.


Marsha said:
Whoa...  What kind of self does the MoQ attribute to Ms. Thatcher?  Does she have an evil homunculus that behind the scenes called the shots for devastating Great Britain?


dmb says:
What? Thatcher's lack of empathy can't be criticized because she was not a Cartesian homunculus? Are you on acid right now, or what? That's the weakest, lamest defense I ever heard. It's not even relevant and think what would happen if we applied your "reasoning" to every political actor. 

It's about the age-old complaint against the rich and powerful. You don't have to take my word for it, just ask Charles Dickens. Or Robert Pirsig...


"...the conservatives who keep trumpeting about the virtues of free enterprise are normally just supporting their own self-interest. They are just doing the usual cover-up for the rich in their age-oldexploitation of the poor."

In the MOQ, 20th century political conflict is portrayed as a conflict between social and intellectual values - with the right-left clash being more severe in Europe than in the USA. 


"The gigantic power of socialism and fascism, which have overwhelmed this century, is explained by a conflict of levels of evolution.  This conflict explains the driving force behind Hitler not as an insane search for power but as an all-consuming glorification of social authority and hatred of intellectualism.  His anti-Semitism was fueled by anti-intellectualism. His hatred of communists was fueled by anti-intellectualism.  His exaltation of the German volk was fueled by it.  His fanatic persecution of any kind of intellectual freedom was driven by it. In the United States the economic and social upheaval was not so great as in Europe, but Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, nevertheless, became the center of a lesser storm between social and intellectual forces."



Thatcher and Reagan both represent a rightward turn against "big government", as Reagan called it. This was aimed against the whole tradition of New Deal liberalism. (It's a bit confusing but this neo-Victorian reaction is known as free-market conservatism or right-wing libertarianism while in England it's known as neo-liberalism.) In both cases, the dismantling of "the welfare state" entailed not only drastic financial cuts to the poor but also a rather cruel demonization of the recipients. Way back in 1980 when Reagan first ran for President, they campaigned against the so-called "Welfare Queens," the mythical figure who lived in luxury from her welfare checks and in the most recent Presidential election the Republican candidate was still campaigning against these same mythical "takers".

Psychopathy is a broad range of mental disorders wherein the "afflicted" lacks empathy. This lack ranges from mild narcissism to full-blown serial killers. The only place with a higher rate of psychopathy than politics and big business is prison. It could be literally true that Maggie was somewhere along that psychopathic continuum but I think that's not really the point. It's just a way to criticize her willingness to inflict suffering on the citizens of the UK. The statistic show the actual effects of these market policies, which have been operable for about three decades now. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the middle class got smaller. Only one nation in the West has more of its children living in poverty. Heckofajob, Ronny. Thanks, Maggie. 

"...the conservatives who keep trumpeting about the virtues of free enterprise are normally just supporting their own self-interest. They are just doing the usual cover-up for the rich in their age-oldexploitation of the poor."


"That’s what neither the socialists nor the capitalists ever got figured out. From a static point of view, socialism is more moral than capitalism. It’s a higher form of evolution. It is an intellectually guided society, not just a society that is guided by mindless traditions. That’s what gives socialism its drive. But what the socialists left out and what has all but killed their whole undertaking is an absence of a concept of indefinite Dynamic Quality. You go to any socialist city and it’s always a dull placebecause there’s little Dynamic Quality.
On the other hand the conservatives who keep trumpeting about the virtues of free enterprise are normally just supporting their own self-interest. They are just doing the usual cover-up for the rich in their age-old exploitation of the poor. Some of them seem to sense there is also something mysteriously virtuous in a free enterprise system and you can see them struggling to put it into words but they don’t have the metaphysical vocabulary for it any more than the socialists do.
The metaphysics of Quality provides the vocabulary. A free market is a Dynamic institution. What people buy and what people sell, in other words what people value, can never be contained by any intellectual formula. What makes the marketplace work is Dynamic Quality. The market is alwayschanging and the direction of that change can never be predetermined. The Metaphysics of Quality says the free market makes everybody richer by preventing static economic patterns for setting in and stagnating economic growth. That is the reason major capitalist economies of the world have done so much better since World War II that the major socialist economies.
It is not that Victorian social economic patterns are more moral than socialist intellectual economic patterns. Quite the opposite. They are less moral as static patterns go. What makes the free-enterprise system superior is that the socialists, reasoning intelligently and objectively, haveinadvertently closed the door to Dynamic Quality in the buying and selling of things. They closed it because the metaphysical structure of their objectivity never told them Dynamic Quality exists." (Lila, chapter 17)