Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

476 Rome, 2008 Washington D.C.

Rate this topic


Capitalism Forever

Recommended Posts

Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

Farewell America, till we meet again.

I'll miss you... :(

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the link, although I meant the question more like, "Did he say anything interesting?" The reason I didn't watch it is also the reason I'm not going to read it. :( I was just curious of what his general theme was--did he quote Reverend Wright a lot, or did he focus more on how the seas had stopped rising since he was sworn in?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the link, although I meant the question more like, "Did he say anything interesting?" The reason I didn't watch it is also the reason I'm not going to read it. :( I was just curious of what his general theme was--did he quote Reverend Wright a lot, or did he focus more on how the seas had stopped rising since he was sworn in?

Ohh, gotcha. "Did he say anything interesting?" Nope.

It was a more grandiose version of the whole "we need to help one another if we want to prosper" garbage that he's been shitting out for his entire political career.

Edited by Ordr
Link to comment
Share on other sites

...or did he focus more on how the seas had stopped rising since he was sworn in?

The stock market went into the tank for another 300+ point bath today, finishing below 8,000. The seas still appear to be rising....

Nevertheless, anything bad that happens over the next four years is Bush's fault. The Messiah's record can remain unblemished for as long as we make reality whatever we want it to be. :(

Link to comment
Share on other sites

"Did he say anything interesting?" I was just curious of what his general theme was

It was more of the same dishonest concept stealing. He brings up the ideals of the Founding Fathers but inverts/obfuscates their meaning to sell his anti-American agenda. Part of the change is a new interpretation of concepts and history.

Edited by ~Sophia~
Link to comment
Share on other sites

That is EXACTLY the problem. People graduating from school now have had it hammered into their heads for 12-16 years that the environment must be "saved", the US was founded by a bunch of evil white men who screwed over the Native Americans (or First Nations, but whatever you do don't call them "Indians") and African Americans (don't call them "Black"s and OBTW the label may or may not apply to more recent immigrants from Africa). They have also had it hammered into their head that politics consists of deciding which interest group gets what from the government, and that our government is here to provide for the general welfare (the fact that said government was founded by those evil white guys and that therefore there is a contradiction, doesn't matter). Where does the government get it? Blank out, or worse actually, those rich bastards who either did nothing to earn it or were just born with the tendency to become rich.

That anyone under the age of 30 becomes an Objectivist in spite of this indoctrination seems to me a great testament to those people's independence.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's not like changing history is new, though. Look at our kids' textbooks. B)

My 11 year old's fifth grade "social studies" texbook, in the section covering the Revolutionary period, had one (1) sentance mentioning Geo. Washington, one (1) paragraph mentioning Thomas Jefferson, and the rest of the section was devoted to women, Indians and Blacks.

Of course, I teach him what really['i] happended, since the school seems incapable.

Edited by Maximus
Link to comment
Share on other sites

My 11 year old's fifth grade "social studies" texbook, in the section covering the Revolutionary period, had one (1) sentance mentioning Geo. Washington, one (1) paragraph mentioning Thomas Jefferson, and the rest of the section was devoted to women, Indians and Blacks.

...seriously? Hell, I went to public elementary and middle schools (in ever-so-liberal New Jersey no less), and I don't remember anything that absurd.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 months later...
  • 8 months later...

476 Rome, 2008 Washington D.C.

On the Dead End America Reached in Politics, and How the Way Out Has to Begin in Metaphysics

One of the many reasons why Ancient Greece was and remains the greatest among history's great nations is the fact that Greek civilization never collapsed. It never died the kind of ugly death that Rome died during the 5th century, or the United States has been dying in our days. The Greeks fell in battle: they were defeated by the Macedonians, and later the Romans. Their culture, which was respected and admired by their conquerors, lived on as part of the Macedonian and Roman empires, and took centuries to gradually fade away. The name of Greece continues to ring clean and honorable in our ears because the Greeks never chose their own destruction. They never surrendered their greatness out of their own will.

If one looks at American culture as a whole, it is evident that the United States no longer has a chance to earn such an honor. Thanks to our military strength, there has never been the remotest possibility of our being conquered by a nation like China or the United Arab Emirates--nations that, like Macedon and Rome of old, admire the material fruits of our culture and seek to imitate some of its concrete aspects, but lack the fundamental spirit that made it possible--and more importantly, American culture, taken as a whole, has been rejecting that fundamental spirit.

The collapse of a civilization is a drawn-out process that does not happen within one day, nor even one year. Rome had been declining for centuries before Odoacer--the first Barbarian king--took it over in 476, and that particular year brought little visible change into the lives of the inhabitants of the empire, who continued to refer to themselves as Romans. Similarly, the United States has been adopting Socialist policies ever since the passage of the first "anti-trust" act in 1890; the 2008 election is just another step down a road we have been traveling on since before Ayn Rand was born. Assigning a date to the collapse of a civilization is an exercise in abstraction: one has to choose the date of an event that symbolizes the whole centuries-long process; an event that summarizes the essence of what brought about the downfall; an event that marks a point of no return.

Dr. Peikoff recenty called Obama "the first anti-American candidate." Indeed, while there have been many un-American candidates and Presidents in the past (in fact, most of the Presidents in the 20th century can be called un-American), none of them has been as avowedly anti-American as Obama. None of them kept hearing "God damn America!" as the gospel of God during their regular Sunday visits to the institution most responsible for shaping their sense of life, their ideas of morality, and their whole implicit philosophy. None of them had the likes of Bill Ayers as their closest associates. If we give them the benefit of the doubt, we might still say about all past Presidents that they were fundamentally well-meaning individuals who honestly wanted to secure a bright future for America, but were awfully handicapped as a result of the betrayal of the nation by its nihilist intellectual establishment. Obama's choice of his friends and mentors makes it clear that securing a bright future for America is definitely not his goal.

A nation cannot elect one of its enemies as its chief executive and survive for long. If we want to find a date symbolic of America's descent into statism, I cannot think of any event in the past, nor do I think there will be any event in the future, that captures it better than the election that turned the first anti-American candidate into the first anti-American president and gave him the full support of the House as well as the Senate. November 4, 2008, is the date history ought to record as the day the first American Republic fell.

Like all ideas, such historical symbolism has far more significance than most people realize. When told of an event that took place in the city of Rome in 450 A.D., most people will automatically consider it to have been an event in the Roman Empire. The more historically savvy among them might note that it was very late in the history of that empire, i.e. in its declining stage, but they will still be naturally inclined to think of it as a part of Rome's history and as a product of Rome's culture. Because 476 A.D. is the widely accepted year of the fall of Rome, very few would think of it as a medieval event. On the other hand, when told of an event in the year 500, everyone will easily recognize it as one that happened in the early medieval times, and one that had nothing to do with the original Roman culture.

Thus, like all abstractions, assigning a date to the fall of the original United States is much more than just an idle academic exercise. Until it becomes widely accepted that we have not been able to keep the constitutional Republic the Founders gave us, everything that happens in America will continue to be seen as an American event, and as a product of American culture, i.e. of capitalism. Only when people become aware that Washington has been taken over by an element foreign to the nation's founding spirit will they stop identifying Washington's actions with that of a capitalist government; only then will they naturally think of it as having nothing to do with the original American culture.

Many patriotic Americans will say that it is premature at this point to declare the end of the Republic. Shouldn't I at least wait to see what policies Obama actually implements (given that he has yet to fully disclose the exact nature and extent of the changes he has in store for us) before pronouncing him the Odoacer of America? But I think, if anything, one has to wonder whether November 4 of this year is too late a date to name: the United States has been much closer to a democracy than a republic for several decades now. This was not the first election in which a candidate tried to gain the support of 51 per cent of the voters by promising them a little money, to be taken from the remaining 49 per cent--and did not even find it necessary to try and explain how his plan was to be reconciled with the inalienable rights Jefferson had written about. However, it was the first election in which the candidate flatly said into the face of a member of the victimized 49 per cent that his intention was to spread their wealth around, and that he knew this will make them vote against him, but it was the other 51 per cent whose vote he was counting on.

But have we really passed a point of no return? Many are hoping to see a repeat of the 1994 elections in 2010 that will give Obama a Republican Congress, making him as impotent to do too much harm as Bill Clinton was. One has to realize, though, that the Republican Party is in a very different situation today than it was sixteen years ago. Back then, the more patriotic half of America's population still had confidence in them as the representatives of their principles and ideals. The elder George Bush was seen as a bad apple among them, and his four years of pseudo-capitalism as an aberration. Today, after having witnessed how the Republicans rose to full power in all branches of the Federal Government and how they used that power to deliver the nation into the hands of its enemies, it is much more difficult not to notice that all the apples are rotten. A defeated, demoralized, and discredited party cannot mount an effective opposition to a determined gang of ruthless power-lusters they have just surrendered to without a fight.

Restrictions on free speech, such as the Campaign Finance "Reform," which was personally gift-wrapped for the Democrats by Senator McCain and autographed for them by President Bush, and the "Fairness" Doctrine whose hideous ghost has risen from the grave to haunt us, will make it even more difficult for any opponent to challenge the Democrats' power.

A genuinely pro-American idealist in the Republican Party who is a good communicator, and also happens to have a lot of his own funds, might yet bring about a second Reagan Revolution. But such people are very rare--and you have to realize that this very period, the last couple of lame-duck months of the Bush administration, is nothing other than the final petering out of the Reagan presidency's afterglow in the Republican Party's fortunes. A second such Republican resurgence would bring a very welcome break from the onmarch of nihilism, but the nature of the Republican Party precludes it from being anything more than a temporary respite, after which the nihilist destroyers are bound to continue marching on. The rare revolutionary is inevitably going to be succeeded by compromisers, "compassionates," "mavericks," and collaborators like the ones who have succeeded Reagan and handed power back to the Democrats. He may delay them by a couple of decades, but he will not bring about a restoration of the Republic.

It is time to make it official: Washington, D.C. has fallen to the Barbarians.

America, however, consists of more than the District of Columbia. American culture consists of more than the nation's intellectual establishment. As the heroic spirit of Greece lived on within the empires that conquered it, the true American sense of life has continued to persist under the rule of the nihilist intelligentsia. The antagonism between these two elements is so sharp and irreconcilable that it is a mistake to "look at American culture as a whole." It would be an injustice to many freedom-loving, independent-souled individuals to accuse them of having chosen their own destruction, or willfully surrendered their own greatness. What has in truth happened to them is that they have become a minority in a what is now a democracy. The ancient Greeks were conquered on the battlefield; the modern Americans, the ones who truly deserve the name, have been outgunned in the cold civil war of a democracy's voting booths.

They will continue to be outgunned until they are armed with and have learned the use of the only weapon that can allow them to defeat the Barbarians and successfully establish a new Republic of freedom and justice: a rational philosophy. That weapon has been manufactured and is ready to be delivered--but it has yet to be ordered in the first place. Most Americans have not yet realized that their current guns are and will forever remain useless against the Barbarians and will rarely allow them to achieve anything but to shoot themselves in the foot. And most of them are genuinely at a loss to understand how a philosophy--the abstractest of all the abstract ideas, the most "academic" of all "academic exercises"--is going to help defend them from the very concrete machine guns of Obama's agents. In this respect, too many Americans are still with Stalin: "How many divisions does the Pope have?"

In the Iliad, it was not until the death of Patroclos that Achilles decided to rejoin the fight against the Trojans, armed with a brilliant new shield made for him by Hephaistos and delivered by Thetis. The role of Antilochos--who brought Achilles the news of his friend's death--now falls upon us: we have to awaken people to the fact that the Republic that was born in 1788 is no longer alive; that conservative political activism has failed to conserve it, and will be equally unable to bring it back to life.

The second part of our task has more to do with metaphysics than with politics: We have to get Americans to recognize that there is something that can give them back their country. We have to shed light on the fact that philosophy, far from being an idle ivory-tower pastime, has a momentuous influence on a nation's life (as it has on life in general). We have to explain them why it is crucial for their survival to know the truth not only as far as concretes are concerned, but also to form the right abstractions. We have to make them see why they cannot afford to rely on faith in any area of life. In a nutshell: we have to clear up the confusion surrounding the relationship of consciousness and existence--we have to explain why ideas matter.

Agree completely with the analogy, though I see one crucial difference.

Renaissance followed the fall with the lag of 700 yrs. 2nd Renaissance seems to have started immediately afterwards.

Reference here is to the rising sales of Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand's increasing clout in Academia....

What do you guys think?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Agree completely with the analogy, though I see one crucial difference.

Renaissance followed the fall with the lag of 700 yrs. 2nd Renaissance seems to have started immediately afterwards.

Reference here is to the rising sales of Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand's increasing clout in Academia....

What do you guys think?

Yup, there is definitely an intellectual revolution going on that, if it succeeds, will be the making of the Second Renaissance. But we cannot take success for granted yet; it is up to us to make this work.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yup, there is definitely an intellectual revolution going on that, if it succeeds, will be the making of the Second Renaissance. But we cannot take success for granted yet; it is up to us to make this work.

Here's the problem. The hierarchy of influence with the ideological 'opposition' is: Fox News/Drudge -> bloggers -> online periodicals (NRO, Breitbart, etc.)

At the far end of the chain, the only organization that seems to be influencial and 'close' intellectually to what this country needs is Reason.com. This, of course, is an organization founded upon disagreement with Ayn Rand. It's 'celebrations' of the 'resurgance of Rand' have been universally critical and marginally truthful.

So I don't think any Rand resurgance will ever lead to better society before the vultures come and lead people back down the path they came. I think Objectivism needs two things to succeed in the future: a more basic approach that also remains consistent with the philosophy, and some real-life 'heroes' to act as public examples. Consider John Rockefeller - he was a great industrialist, but an awful altruist, and his children were vertiable James Taggarts, you could almost be thankful the gov broke S.Oil up. You have some guys like JJHill that are great, but not today.

People en masse won't accept proper Objectivist principles in their lives until these two things are available to them. Until then, Objectivists have to hide at the margins.

Though, part of the problem is that our society is childish. I mean that in the most literal sense. 'Community Service' is a punishment for crime - ironically makes sense - but here's the point: for people today, walking around doing soft labor for a few hours is an 'unbearable' punishment. People freak out if their diet foods don't taste delicious. You know what I mean. So conceivably, once there's a real crash, once the violence subsides, IF we can regain control from the street gangs (I assume some areas we will, some we will not), then people will wholeheartedly accept Rand. The people that rebuild, push back the gangs, and so forth, they will be ready to accept Rand. The biggest impediment today is the attitude, "But if I fail in life, is Rand saying no one might be there to bail me out? I cannot accept that, it's not right." That will change.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yup, there is definitely an intellectual revolution going on that, if it succeeds, will be the making of the Second Renaissance. But we cannot take success for granted yet; it is up to us to make this work.

Important insights into the issue by Harry Binswanger.

http://arc-tv.com/ayn-rand-and-todays-culture/

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am working on the same topic and would like to share some excerpt with people. It is not that these politicians have plotted to do this -- generally the politicians are plain ordinary, but they are sort of automatically moving along a set channel which is taking the US down one step at a time. That channel is described in the following excerpt: (My formatting is fully gone, even table is gone, pls bear with that.)

4. Comments on Quotes about Democracy – And – The “Collapse Clause” of Democracy

Proceeding on the above lines of degeneration of rulers due to mass psychology, the pattern of collapse of American democracy is very nicely explained by the following ancient quote (though the existential situation is almost like small-town, rural India). See if anybody can recognize the following sentences, purposely listed serially (instead of paragraph) by numbers used for comments that follow:

i. The characteristic of the democracy is equal freedom and open speech to all, with liberty to each man to shape his own life as he chooses.

ii. …. even horses, asses and dogs go free about, so that they run against you in the road, if you do not make way for them. ……

iii. The subversion of such a democracy arises from men who rise to be popular leaders in it: violent, ambitious, extravagant men who gain the favor of the people by distributing amongst them confiscations from the property of the rich.

iv. The rich, resisting these injustices, become enemies to the constitution.

v. The people, in order to put them down, range themselves under the banners of the most energetic popular leader, who takes advantage of such a position to render himself a despot.

vi. He begins his rule by some acceptable measures, such as abolition of debts, and assignment of lands to the poorer citizens, until he has expelled or destroyed, the parties opposed to him.

vii. He seeks pretences for foreign wars, in order that the people may stand in need of a leader, and may be kept poor by the contributions necessary to sustain war.

viii. But presently he finds, or suspects, dissatisfaction among the more liberal spirits. He kills or banishes them as enemies:

Does anybody recognize the similarity of the situation in the above lines and today’s large democracies? See comments in the table below, against sentences which bear the same number as in the original quotation, but regrouped appropriately.

Statement and Statement number. Comment

i. The characteristic of the democracy is equal freedom and open speech to all, with liberty to each man to shape his own life as he chooses.

Comment: This is the most important clause of democracy, and should be called as its “Freedom and Equality Clause”. But at the same time it also includes a crucially important characteristic because of which I have also called it as the “Collapse Clause of Democracy”, and used it ahead in the solution to the problems due to democracy. * See ‘Note’ below.

ii. …. even horses, asses and dogs go free about, so that they run against you in the road, if you do not make way for them. ……

Comment: Today’s US may be different from this in terms of material wealth, but small-town rural India is similar, and the author has surely not visited India!

iii. The subversion of such a democracy arises from men who rise to be popular leaders in it: violent, ambitious, extravagant men who gain the favor of the people by distributing amongst them confiscations from the property of the rich.

vi. He begins his rule by some acceptable measures, such as abolition of debts, and assignment of lands to the poorer citizens, until he has expelled or destroyed, the parties opposed to him.

Comment: This role has today been taken up in the US by the Democrats, in India by several parties etc. Direct confiscation is sometimes resorted to (known as nationalization), but the major means today is ‘printing excess notes’, Woodrow Wilson’s ‘elastic money’. Granting debts and then waiving them off and expanding reservation of government jobs (as affirmative action) prior to important elections, are common tricks in India.

This competition of giving hand-outs is an important part of the “Collapse Clause of Democracy”.

vii. He seeks pretences for foreign wars, in order that the people may stand in need of a leader, and may be kept poor by the contributions necessary to sustain war.

Comment: This role is taken up in the US mainly by the Republican Party as an answer to Democratic Party’s onslaught to gain popularity by ‘socialism’. In India, a large ‘conservative’ party is raring to take it up. It will be difficult for both these parties to give up this role – they will not have an election pitch. And this is the other side of the “Collapse Clause of Democracy”.

iv. The rich, resisting these injustices, become enemies to the constitution.

v. The people, in order to put them down, range themselves under the banners of the most energetic popular leader, who takes advantage of such a position to render himself a despot.

viii. But presently he finds, or suspects, dissatisfaction among the more liberal spirits. He kills or banishes them as enemies.

Comment: These divisions are in nascent stage in the US because the change takes place ‘imperceptibly’, but the original US constitution is now rendered substantially useless to protect the individual. The massive “anti-capitalism” protests there are mark of ‘rich-poor’ division, but meaningless because capitalism does not even exist there. Recession can also lead to secession – point in case is the negligible Texas movement suddenly coming into national focus in April ’09, and talks of states shifting to their own currencies. In India the groups have taken a definite form in different regions, and are now set to coalesce into larger groups with more destructive powers.

* Note: This crucially important characteristic of democracy has not been identified by the above quoted writer or by any other intellectuals since his time, because of which civilizations fail at this point in their development. It is because of this contradictory nature of democracy that the ASPs laud the first amendment as well as curse democracy and multi-culturalism at the same time. Beyond this point, this clause is referred to only as the “Collapse Clause”, because only that part is important for the analysis of moral degeneration due to democracy. One person on a net forum, who saw my write-up prior to its completion, criticized me for talking about “one piece solution” to democracy’s multitudinous, multifarious problems. But just above him, another person had commented that an overwhelming majority of man-kind does not think about these issues! So I could show them there itself that that is the essence of the “Collapse Clause” – that they do not think at all, but they are overwhelmingly large in numbers, so they overwhelmingly determine the government and the quality of rulers. Lead that overwhelming majority to either of foolishness or wickedness, and you have a foolish or evil government. Contain them correctly – which is difficult over the long term, but can be done as shown at the end of this book – and you have a Rational Society which the US was close to at the time of its founding, and more importantly, had far less of moral degeneration.

Coming back to the above-quoted writer, barring development of physical sciences, the situation is the same between the time of the above quote and now. Note one important point – politics, the concept of justice etc were highly developed during the above period, though there was almost nil physical science. Most science, that too school-children’s level by today’s standards, came much later – the above passage was written in 380 BC, which means concept of democracy, justice etc were at least 2 – 300 years older (say about 600 to 500 BC) to write with the above accuracy! From this point of view, we must admire those peoples’ quest for reason, justice etc, and the fact that they had reached up to same level of democracy as modern America! The passage is from Plato’s The Republic – unfortunately, I do not now know the name of the English translator, I vaguely remember the name George Grote but my memory could be wrong. I have the photocopy of page nos 26 to 119 of the book from Mumbai’s “Library of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society”. Page no 26 is the last page of the Dialogue Kleitophon, the rest is The Repbulic. Several developing countries merely borrowed the concept of democracy from the Europeans / British – but being far away from concept of justice, they collapsed like pins after WWII.

The Greeks were fully aware of this problem, and written material is also available of how Olympic sportsmen, Orators (not necessarily rational in thinking but good at oratory irrespective of rational thinking, i.e. sophists and such) will take-over democracy! It is similar to sportsmen, small time female actresses, comedians, media personalities etc taking over democracy in our times – principle is the same, I have called it as ‘irrational soul pleasing’. Despite being so much aware (Plato’s quote being a sample), the Greek and Roman rules collapsed because of this clause.

America had gone far above everybody else, due to Greek / European experience, but more as a consequence of the ASP Revolution, of those peoples’ commitment to reason! They had come very close to ensuring a Rational Society, but are slipping because of the above-mentioned Collapse Clause of Democracy. Now they have substantially turned back, and we have to see which way the coin falls, heads or tails! The Founding Fathers of US were fully aware of this problem and had taken several measures to keep it under control. In an article titled “Democracy and Majority Rule” on the website Atlasphere dated May 29, 2009, the writer Walter Williams tells about the measures taken against ‘majoritarian tyranny’ by the framers of the US constitution; there is a quote from James Madison’s writing against injustice by majority, etc. Further he says, [John Adams predicted, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”]

Though ASP society in its ascent phase was morally even more advanced than the Greeks, we are now back to square one, same place as predicted by Plato for his City in The Republic, back to 380 BC. The same concepts of morality, justice and selfishness, which the Greeks knew during pre-science days, it is now difficult to explain to men watching landing on the Mars on their TV!

And I found following quotes on a web site / article titled “Cabin Dreams” by J M Cornwell, dated March 11, 2009. Below the article is the title: Words of a Prophet and below it the photo of a serene, wise, typically “classical English” man with a hint of a smile, Thomas Jefferson, followed by the quotes:

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who do not.

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debt as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the Government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”

Those truly are the words of a prophet – unfortunately I have to say to him, “Sir! Your words are those of a wise man – the only problem is that your kind of wisdom is no more welcome in the country you perspired to establish. Your people now consider you to be very ancient, out-dated. A hundred years after you another saint and his apostles arose, and your people love them – FDR, JFK, BHO et al. They take so much away from those who are willing to work and give to those who do not! And the other half is indulging in what you tried to avoid – mountainous debts and wars. And both violate the next three of your statements Sir!”

Ayn Rand herself referred at several places to fall of America, for example “For the New Intellectual” starts with America being bankrupt and following a suicidal course; The title: The New Left – the Anti-Industrial Revolution is self-explanatory and articles like “From A Symposium” describe how America is being led to collapse; or the very essence of Atlas Shrugged is the building of a new society out of the collapse of the present one (and the villains are seen in multiple copies, where are the heroes?); Anthem starts with a collapsed modern society of about 1930s (means too much more developed than Greece) – just read the April 1946 foreword she wrote for it to know what she meant by the world proceeding to collectivism, we have progressed so much towards that world; In several essays in Capitalism the Unknown Ideal, she talks about what type of dictatorship is likely to emerge in America – e.g. the title of article (of 1965): “The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus” is self-explanatory and ends with the type of dictatorship America is heading towards; (If I am not wrong, Ominous Parallels was endorsed by her? And today, has the situation deteriorated far beyond?); in the 1971 article “Don’t Let It Go” (from the book Philosophy Who Needs It), she says “If America drags on in her current state (which is unlikely) for a few more generations, dictatorship will become possible.”

Here she was only addressing better Americans to “Don’t Let It Go”, but the unlikely has become a reality, America has dragged on and the speed of getting closer to collapse is now progressively increasing. What was a more distant possibility during her life-time (huge erosion having already happened since 1900) is now a reality – in fact in an article titled “Dismantling America” on the web-site the Atlasphere, dated Oct 27 2009, Thomas Sowell gives a horror-list of government’s atrocities that were not imaginable even one year back! (The meaning of what she meant by saying that they are taking you, not to the days of pre-science, but the days of pre-language, is given ahead.)

What matters now is the solution to this decay of democracy, take-over of the political machine by the so-called ‘lower classes’ released because of the efforts of heroes.

It is said that civilizations have a limited life. Every civilization in the past has perished – and by implication today’s western civilization too, led by the US, is destined to end so. At this point it is important to bring out the connection between Greek, Roman and modern western civilizations / democracies – only these three are based on Aristotle’s philosophy – the importance of this statement is that only these have added far more knowledge than any other civilizations. Some other civilizations have lived for longer time than these three democracies – e.g. the Egyptian civilization lived for 3000 years, Christianity and Islam held sway over major areas for more than 1000 years, etc. The common point amongst these is that either there was very low addition to knowledge or retrogression and priestly monopoly over it. And there was no democracy or freedom, but men were owned by the priests / rulers. This is what differentiates the three Aristotelian civilizations from all other civilizations, and it is important to save the present one with its freedom in democratic form.

Without meaning any disrespect to the people named above, I want to state firmly, that democracy need not kill itself, need not lead civilization to collapse, that a solution is available to this “problem of civilization” – that today, the US may be sliding towards the abyss, but it is not beyond redemption, the slide can be stopped, the rot can be stemmed – provided the men Aristotle called as ‘the wise and the noble’, George Washington called as ‘the wise and the honest’, and identified herein as the 0.5% Good Group, along with their 15% assistants join hands over the correct course of action. That correct course of action is described at the end of this book. No other course of action and piece of knowledge will stop the slide, please note. All other things will get buried once the collapse occurs.

5. Democracy and the First Amendment

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...