Wednesday, November 4, 2015

"Enlightened Idiocy"

Liberty in and of itself it not the highest good. Virtue - which literally means "the powers of man" - comes first. Think the Four Cardinal Virtues - Justice, Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance. If you have those, liberty works. If you don't have those, liberty turns into libertinism - someone who is bereft of most moral restraints. Libertarianism, as it stands now, is nuts and will never work.

This is from Enlightened Idiocy.


Liberty is not the base virtue. It is the crowning flower that appears when virtue is possessed. The drive to the possession of virtue over generations within Western Civilisation resulted in increasing liberty.

The freedom to do as one chooses — liberty — is only eucivic when one has internalised the principles that impose atrocity as and where necessary.

Then someone got enlightened and crowned liberty as a virtue itself. Idiot. Through this idiocy the drive to virtue resulting in liberty was replaced with a drive for exercise of liberty, regardless of virtue — egalitarianism.

As the drive for virtue faded, we persisted virtuously, but upon the momentum built up in our culture and our people. That virtue wasn’t being generated was largely invisible, although men like Carlyle noticed. In his day it evidenced itself as a prevailing lack of realness, of sham echoes of things real.

Imposing liberty upon those who had not the virtue for it led to increasingly dyscivic action. The institutions that supported the growth of liberty were hollowed out from within, as those institutions required atrocity to function, and men without the self-control necessary for it were given liberty. Liberty and atrocity require greatness for proximity. And thus the required atrocity faded.

As it faded, the pervading culture of true virtue was lost.

And so today we are left with this rancid mess we call modernity. Virtue is despised, and must be hidden to grow. Liberty is forced every lower, to people less and less capable of wielding it to the benefit of others, at ever increasing cost to society.

And in this environment, virtue is being reborn. Remarkable.

3 comments:

MGTOW'd Out said...

"Liberty is not the base virtue. It is the crowning flower that appears when virtue is possessed. The drive to the possession of virtue over generations within Western Civilisation resulted in increasing liberty."

The link's entire premise lies upon a false premise. Liberty and virtue are actually fundamental concepts, equal in stature, that complement one another. A free people, with increased likelihood to engage in vice, requires guidance by internal mechanisms as a counter for one's lack of external restraint. Virtue does not originate from within unless people have the freedom to choose it. In a civil society, where people mutually agree on what is and what is not virtue, liberty is derived. The principles of justice and equality were borne out of this liberty-virtue pretense.

How one defines virtue and liberty, of course, with competing metrics by their rabid toadies, is at the crux of today's issues.

kurt9 said...

Well. Heinlein once said that liberty and ignorance did not mix well.

Unknown said...

"The link's entire premise lies upon a false premise"

"The poor are always with us" and they will abuse liberty and try to drag others down to their level.

This country was founded on Christianity, contrary to those whose understanding of history is close to nil. In other words, it was founded on virtue.

Think of the French Revolution, which was founded on the hatred of religion.