[Brian Brady asks for advice. This ain’t it. I wrote a book in 1988 about human civilization, a condition I believe human beings can but so far have not attained. I’m thinking of revisiting the topic, if only because I fear those kinds of ideas might have to transcend a dark age. I wrote the following essay seven years ago, and, of course, by now everything it addresses is just that much worse. Tyranny is an avoidable fate — but not if you don’t know how to recognize it. –GSS]
My son is a Cub Scout. A few weekends ago he had his yearly ScoutORama, a sort of Scout convention and trade fair. The theme of this year’s event was ‘American Heroes,’ and it turns out that American Heroes, for the most part, build small catapults and cook in Dutch ovens. One Cub pack took the theme rather more to heart, with a huge display called ‘Freedom In Unity’.
To an attending Cub Scout I said, “Is it conceivable to you that unity and freedom might conflict?”
After a moment’s thought, he said: “Huh?”
As a father of an eleven-year-old, I fully expected this retort. Undismayed, I pressed on: “Isn’t it reasonable to suppose that the quality best represented by the word ‘freedom’ is freedom from other people?”
“HUH?!
And my wife pulled me away, arguing, quite correctly, that it is unfair to expect children to regurgitate, much less competently defend, the horseshit they are force-fed by adults.
They do so eventually, of course, and thus become the adults who do the force-feeding of the next generation of helpless victims — unminded before they can be fully mindful, starved and stuffed at the same time, gorged forevermore on horseshit.
But: It’s not the what, it’s the where, the who, the how. And most especially: The why.
When the French, to pick an odorous example, rail against Individualism, we know what we’re hearing. When radical feminists — or radical environmentalists, or radical vegans — heap scorn upon Liberty, it doesn’t take much acuity to see right through them.
But to listen carefully — and I am cursed with the skill of listening Read more