Everyone gets a Trabant, comrade!
Posted on 06/22/2012 8:30:21 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica
In "Democracy and Social Ethics", Jane Addams wrote the following: (page 275)
The power to distinguish between the genuine effort and the adventitious mistakes is perhaps the most difficult test which comes to our fallible intelligence. In the range of individual morals, we have learned to distrust him who would reach spirituality by simply renouncing the world, or by merely speculating upon its evils. The result, as well as the process of virtues attained by repression, has become distasteful to us. When the entire moral energy of an individual goes into the cultivation of personal integrity, we all know how unlovely the result may become; the character is upright, of course, but too coated over with the result of its own endeavor to be attractive. In this effort toward a higher morality in our social relations, we must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection with the activity of the many.
So first off, all of you who reach higher to be better people, you're ugly.
Second, individuals must surrender to the collective - "the activity of the many".
This is pure poison. But it's a consistent refrain from those who believe in progressive ideals, that the individual doesn't matter. Only the group matters.
Those STD strings can’t be cut. They’ll get ‘em eventually. Anyone who is looking for “sex without strings” is already a leftist anyhow.
Everyone gets a Trabant, comrade!
There, fixed it.
“Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness—pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.”
President Ronald Reagan
March 8, 1983
The historic Evil Empire speech to the National Association of Evangelicals
Nice to see that Junior Scholastic is still poisoning kids' minds with progressive crap.
And look - another Nobel Peace Prize winner!
After reading that, I don’t know if she would appreciate the fact that a section of Interstate-90 is named after her, rather than the local collective in the Rockford area (where she went to college).
She represents a nasty kind of Republican that cannot diappear fast enough. Christine Todd Whitman is her spiritual heiress.
A question asked by the Germans in the 80s:
Do you know how to treble a Trabby’s value?
Fill the gas tank!
Thank you for that awesome quote!
First, a caveat - this was penned in 1902, when Fabian socialism was the Next Big Thing and before the emphasis on the collective produced its inevitable result in Communist Russia and Nazi Germany. When you're tossing around undefined abstractions nearly anything becomes possible, glib, and convincing. When you have to explain the tragic outcome, it turns out to be a good thing that responsibility, like virtue, is comfortably distributed among the collective.
A full refutation of this philosophical approach is not particularly difficult but likely to be a bit beyond the scope of this forum. Basically it works like this: ethical responsibility is an individual characteristic because the actions it purports to measure are undertaken by individuals. A collective doesn't shoot somebody, an individual does. Dispersing ethical responsibility or virtue into the collective, turns out to be no different from denying it altogether.
If, however, it is one's intention to affect individual behavior by invoking a responsibility that devolves from group membership - to manipulate, in other words - collective responsibility and collective virtue are wonderfully useful tools. You can make someone change his behavior or at least feel bad over something he or she had nothing to do with by appealing to a class signifier - white skin, American nationality, Western culture. That, and not a drive to a brave new egalatarian workd, is what collectivism promises: a means to manipulate.
...and this is why bachelor baboons 'are content' to act as lion bait troop lookouts while, for the good of the troop, the lead male has to endure the onerous duty of breeding all the females.
I am reading Dembsky’s INTELLIGENT DESIGN right now and In the second chapter he talks about Modernist and Post-Modernist and how they reject the notion that God intervenes in the material world. Starting with Spinosa there has been a continuing progression toward a strong rejection of miraculous events. This may not seem to be connected but if you are a “pre-modernist’ then you can accept that everything is colored and effected by an original cause which is still involved with the natural world. But the moderns and the post moderns reject any possibility of God’s involvement with the natural world. These progressives enjoy sidetracking us traditionalists into all this nonsense about collectivism. It is absurd! In order to have a sensible discussion or disagreement with them we need to find something upon which we agree, because all argument starts with an accepted statement: such as, All men want to be happy, or Nothing cannot turn itself in to everything. (with appologies to G K Chesterton)
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