Saturday, April 30, 2016

Faith, Family, Community and Meaningful Work

What win I, if I gain the thing I seek?
A dream, a breath, the froth of fleeting joy
Who buys a minute's mirth to wail a week?
Who seeks eternity to get a toy?
For one sweet grape, who will the vine destroy?
- The Rape of Lucrece

I've said for years the most important things in life are meaning, importance and community. Later I realized gratitude - thankfulness - is an immensely important one (again, as Meister Eckhardt wrote, "If the only prayer you say is 'thank you,' it will be enough").

Even Freud, who was a nut, said "work and love" were the two most important things in life.

Arthur C. Brooks, in his book, The Conservative Heart, wrote it should be "faith, family, community, and meaningful work."

Money is important, but once you have enough, there is no added happiness to getting more. Is Carlos Slim the happiest man in the world? Bill Gates? Donald Trump? George Soros?

Politics is the art of preventing preventable evils. In the U.S. it was supposed to let us pursue happiness (which is a pretty bad translation of the Greek eudamonia, which means well-being, or flourishing, which comes about through arete or excellence).

Our government pretty much stopped doing that during the '60s, and a lot of it can be blamed on LBJ with his attempts to spend us into the Great Society - which had the opposite effect.

Things have gotten so bad, with the destruction of the middle-class (which is the government's fault) that people en masse have supported Trump and Sanders. And what is the Republican party doing? Looking in the mirror and wondering what they have done to create this? Of course not. They're doing everything that can to overturn the will of the people, stop Trump and try to elect stumblebums like Cruz and Kasich (which means handing the election to the Hildebeast).

The government has been trying to destroy families, faith, communities and meaningful work. And what is supposed to replace those things? Why, the god of the State!

Which is more like worshiping Satan than anything else. Remember the Three Temptations of Jesus? One of them was having power over the kingdoms of the world - and he declined.

Leftism is based on envy and hate. And again I'll point out that it's been noticed for thousands of years (and it's probably the theme of every "fairy tale" that has ever existed) you can feel gratitude or else envy, but you can't feel both at the same time.

Politics cannot fix problems. That's not its purpose. But it can fix things to the extent that most people can pursue faith and family and community and meaningful work. And have gratitude for having those things.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"Even Freud, who was a nut, said "work and love" were the two most important things in life."

For what it's worth, I've read critics who claim that Freud sounds marginally less loony in the original German- apparently, translators have traditionally done a poor job rendering his work in English, which makes him sound even crazier than he really was. I barely read any German, so I have no idea if that's true or not.