A Thought Before the Conference

When did the split occur? When did it become ideologically indefensible for a man to take his own life, and the lives of his family, into his own hands? When did some external arbiter obtain a greater sway over his life, and said adjuncts? What again, is the purpose of our government?

I have, and have had, relatives from Connecticut to Missouri, a great-uncle who died on Island Number Ten. Family in Oklahoma, Kansas, Idaho, Minnesota and Oregon. None of those relatives came to this country for guaranteed access to health care, the food bank, or this new form of social justice.

I don't think that this was the outcome that Herbert Spencer would have predicted.

The Battle For Survival is twin-faced; one side offers reliance upon self, the other relies upon the other. This is the tranch offered by Sartre. In a neo-realist world, there is either the intended société ordinaire, or something else. What occurred, from franchists to atheists, was a stone upon which the language of a new metaphysics could be mounted. The lever is being applied now; what is held as "normal" is currently not working. The utility of our political process is being devalued, from Tea Party Patriots, to Wall Street Idiots. When you listen to the Wall Street guys, one of the inflections one should perceive, is a total denial, if not repudiation, of the status quo.

There is a real difference between the English School and the European School. (Who advised us to avoid "foreign entanglements" exactly?)

The confusion is our fault.

America, and Americanism, is the result of a successful revolution against a tyrant, and, the successful advocacy of values. There hadn't been, before the United States, a single country in the world that put the liberty of the individual as the highest goal of a society's incorporation. Even post-World War Two countries, set up after our domination and control of their political structures, have slipped away from our native dynamic.

Gaining acceptance of others has become a by-word of modern life.

One hundred and sixty years later, modern American intellectuals have come to embrace the spoiled intellectualism of Europe. This explains most of what passes for thought in the current intellectual mileu. The French Revolution wasn't about upholding the values of the American Revolution. It was significantly different. The harbinger of liberté, égalité, fraternité was not the writing of folks like Hume, Descartes and Smith. One of the "names" Leftists call conservatives is "reactionary." The French Revolution was a reaction of the, what was then, a modern bourgeoisie. What today, perhaps, we would call Wall Street.

I bring this up as an antidote to the question of, "who is complaining about what?"

Aka, the OWS. Does the Occupy Wall Street movement represent the values of Hume, Descartes and Smith? I'd offer, no.

The Left offers us a menu of lost causes. Why would we attempt to adopt that menu for America?

As I said, short. The intertube conference is going on now.