Posted on 05/11/2009 10:05:13 AM PDT by Conservative Coulter Fan
On the Ideals and Dangers of Liberalism:
Any government with the power to mother its citizens also has the power to dominate them and steal from them: to overtax them, confiscate their property and override their binding agreements. For this reason, the legally enforceable institutions of society must be very limited, lest the government charged with protecting the people against tyranny and theft becomes itself the most dangerous tyrant and thief.
Under the creed of modern liberalism, the individual citizen is not called to maturity but is instead invited to begin a second childhood. Like the child at play, he is given, or at least promised, ultimate economic, social and political security without having to assume responsibility for himself. The liberal agenda requires him to remain in an artificial environment--the daycare program of the grandiose state--where he need not become an adult, take responsibility for his own welfare, nor cooperate with others to achieve what the state will give him for nothing.
The architecture of responsible liberty is sacrificed in modern liberalism’s determination to conscript all persons into a grand socialist collective, a great corps of mutual servants, subjects and surrogate parents under the rule of liberal government.
This book has argued that with good enough childrearing in a culture committed to ordered liberty, the natural thrust of human development produces an individual who is at once autonomous and mutual, a self-reliant source of initiative and voluntary collaboration in the activities of everyday life. This book has also argued that the modern liberal agenda’s collective causes have undermined the rights of the individual and his growth to adult competence; undermined the integrity of the family as the primary civilizing and socializing entity in society; and undermined the proper function of a modern society, that of providing an overarching social structure for lives to be lived in peace and freedom. Modern liberalism has achieved these destructive results through relentless rhetorical, legislative and judicial attacks on the autonomy and sovereignty of the individual; on the natural human tendencies toward cooperation, mutuality and altruism; and on the principles of moral realism distilled over centuries of western civilization. The liberal agenda has fostered government dependency instead of self-reliance; government direction instead of self-determination; moral indulgence and relativism instead of moral rectitude; coercive collectivism instead of cooperative individualism; indentured servitude instead of genuine altruism. In favor of various collective causes, modern liberalism has succeeded in displacing the individual from his rightful position as the primary economic, social and political unit of society. It has undermined the sanctity of marriage and the cohesiveness of the family. It has undermined the natural harmony that exists between individual, family and community. It has weakened the obligations of promises, contracts, ownership and property rights. It has disconnected rewards from merit and desert. It has corrupted the moral and ethical basis for civilized living. It has polarized the population into warring classes with false claims of victimization and villainy and contrived needs for political rescue. With enormous growth beyond the definition of government and its functions set forth in the U.S. Constitution, modern American liberalism has created the idealized parental and administrative state and endowed it with vast managerial, caretaking and regulatory powers. History records the inevitable result of such expansions of government power: individual liberty and the peaceful coordination of human action are severely compromised or lost altogether.
The liberal agenda is the liberal neurosis made manifest. It is not a rational program for the organization of human action. It is instead an irrational conglomeration of neurotic defenses which the modern liberal uses for his mental and emotional equilibrium. By attacking the sovereignty of the individual and the institutions essential to ordered liberty, the agenda attacks the very foundations of a free society. In fact, modern liberalism does not seek authentic freedom, despite its historical association with that ideal, nor does it foster the individual’s growth to competence. It does not promote the virtues of individual liberty: not self-reliance, responsibility, dependability or accountability; not cooperation by consent or initiative or industry; not high moral standards or caring or altruism. It does not seek a society of sovereign citizens, but fosters instead a society of allegedly victimized dependents under the custodial care of the state. In keeping with its origins in early childhood, the liberal agenda endorses self-indulgence through short-term hedonism and primitive impulse gratification. In keeping with its ethic of injustice collecting, the agenda seeks ever increasing government regulation to defeat alleged villains, and ever increasing levels of unearned compensation, reparation and restitution to compensate alleged victims. In keeping with its secular tradition, modern liberalism attacks the legitimacy of formal religion, dismisses its historical importance and denies its critical role in maintaining the nation’s moral integrity.
The rise to power of the liberal agenda has resulted from a particular meaning that government has come to have for people in western societies, namely, that the state is a proper source from which to gratify the longings of the people for various forms of parental care.
The modern state has taken on the role of an apparently benign, generous, omnipotent and god-like parent, who serves as custodian, manager, provider and caretaker, all to the detriment of the people. We have, in effect, parentified our governments in the belief that we will be better off if they take care of us than if we take care of ourselves. We have shifted our assumptions about the human condition from an ethical and religious conception that we must earn a good life through individual and cooperative hard work and responsibility, to a secular and collectivist conception of life as a manipulative competition for the bounty of the state. Rather than praying to a higher power to strengthen and guide us in our personal labors to serve others as we serve ourselves, we plead to our legislators for a place at the public trough and hope that they will do unto us at least as generously as they do unto others. Big government revenue has become in effect the income of a very large family whose many children vie for indulgence, while ready at any moment to protest in the name of egalitarianism if one sibling seems to be getting more than another.
These longings to be taken care of, to be relieved of the responsibilities of adult life, have their origins in infancy. They are properly satisfied in the dependent attachments of children to their parents. They are not properly satisfied in the dependent attachment of adults to the state. Instead, the gradual replacement of the dependency longings of the child with mature capacities for competent self-reliance and cooperation with others, as opposed to parasitism on the state, is a critical developmental goal. Whether or not that goal is achieved has profound implications for the nature and extent of government in a given society
On the Seduction of the Liberal Agenda:
The liberal agenda’s favors seduce the people a little at a time, always playing on their regressive longings to be indulged. Favor by favor, accompanied by the constant drumbeat of entitlement propaganda, the otherwise intelligent citizen is led to an increasingly erroneous conception of the proper role of government in a free society. Like a child molester, the liberal politician grooms his constituents until their natural cautions against yielding power in exchange for favors dissolves in reassurance.
Under the creed of modern liberalism the individual citizen is not called to maturity but is instead invited to begin a second childhood. Like the child at play, he is given, or at least promised, ultimate economic, social and political security without having to assume responsibility for himself. The liberal agenda requires him to remain in an artificial environment--the daycare program of the grandiose state--where he need not become an adult, take responsibility for his own welfare, nor cooperate with others to achieve what the state will give him for nothing.
On the Ideals of a Ordered Liberty:
Thus, a society’s values and expectations about what is right or just influence the citizen’s moral choices in economic, social and political arenas at any moment. If society honors the principles of rational individualism, the citizen’s choices will be influenced by ideals of individual liberty, self-reliance, personal responsibility, voluntary cooperation, moral realism, and respect for the rights and sovereignty of others. If, on the other hand, society honors the liberal agenda’s principles of coercive collectivism, then the citizen’s choices will be influenced by ideals of entitlement, welfare dependency, state regulation, moral relativism, and the socialization of major categories of human action.
Competent human beings understand that they must respect facts and think logically about people and things. They understand that actions have consequences, that certain actions make their lives better or worse, and that certain rules must govern the behaviors of persons in order to allow for individual freedoms and the preservation of social order.
The ideal of personal autonomy, as evidenced in the capacity to act independently through responsible self-direction, and the ideal of social cooperation, as evidenced in the ability to work with others in pursuit of shared goals for mutual benefit, are threshold developmental achievements in the child’s growth to competence. In a society committed to individual liberty, individual responsibility and individual assumption of risk, and in the interest of minimizing actions that encroach on the persons and property of others, social order requires that children be raised with at least minimal capacities for self-direction and collaborative effort. Expectations that the mature citizen will take care of himself and not coerce others into that duty are consistent with a principle basic to freedom: that in a free society, no one is born into the world with a legally enforceable obligation to take care of persons other than his own children, especially persons whom he has never met. Citizenship in a free society should not entail a legal duty of care to strangers: that is, a statutory mandate that you adopt one or more persons deemed deserving by government officials.
Thus the goals of psychotherapy and the goals of child rearing share the western ideal of individuated man: the autonomous, self-directed and freely choosing but ethical and moral individual, an agent both sovereign and social, who cooperates with others by mutual consent, not by coercion, in a society ruled by law. Here, in language more behavioral than philosophical, is the psycho-biologically based ideal of individualism. The critical question to be asked, then, is whether and to what extent the arrangements for living in a given society are consistent with that ideal. More particularly, we ask whether and to what extent the liberal agenda is consistent with that ideal.
To qualify as a validating environment for the citizen who has achieved adult competence, a society must establish a basic set of rules that permit freedom; it must establish the infrastructure of moral values and legal protections that allow economic, social and political processes to be conducted by mutual agreement.
The competent individual remains the primary economic, social and political unit of the free society, the competent family continues to be the primary socializing and civilizing institution, and the competent society itself provides the overarching structure of ordered liberty.
This is the most complete and accurate description of modern liberalism that I’ve ever read.
If every adult in the country read this, our country would return to our founding principles of government over night.
What a find. I’ve never seen the mental illness of liberalism described in such detail, and with such eloquence.
To extrapolate from the good doctor’s observations (about collectivism, liberalism, and the nanny-state model of civilization), it all winds up in a great ash heap in the end.
Witness all of the failed Socialist states of the 20th century. Eventually, you run out of other people’s money to support the house of cards, and it all comes tumbling down.
One can only conclude that the hardest of the hard-core liberal element understand this completely, but are so evil that they simply do not care that their “change” will destroy an entire civilization for their own temporary gain.
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