re: Check out the blog post 'Friends, I've been receiving a lot of e-mails lately
where the senders are so frustrated and worn down that they talk about giving
up.
Without a positive optimistic plan and ideal to look forward to and work for, what else is left? Hayek in “Why I am Not a Conservative and Ayn Rand in her “Conservatism and Obituary” both detailed out the main Achilles heel in “conservatism.” You all refuse to read them and to learn from them.
- Conservatism is not a movement, it is mainly a reaction.
- It desires to keep, or go back to the old status quo.
- Its ideals are always to go back to a “golden time.”
- Once you save the republic, liberty and freedom then what? What vision do you have for the future that can capture the imagination of young people?
Classical liberalism was not conservative, if was revolutionary. It failed when it absorbed the 19th century idea of historical inevitability. It plan was what the tea parties main plan is minus the desire to interfere worldwide with other nations or to be the world’s cop, only CL’s worldwide vision was future oriented: Cosmopolitanism (universal citizenship), eventual open borders, total free trade (not managed trade), a complete worldwide division of knowledge and labor. The withering away of the state (yes that was originally a CL ideal not socialist/communist). America’s CL founders created a blueprint for a worldwide federation of free states with a free people that can organically grow. Conservatism and socialism put an end to that vision. From sea to shining sea became the limits of America and like all organic organisms, once you stop growing you create a ring of repugnance around yourself that eventually keeps shrinking you until you die. Jingoism and xenophobia kept us from bringing in Mexico, Cuba, Panama, the Phillpines and Puerto Rico, after all you can’t have those Spanish speaking Catholics enter a primarily Protestant country. What an opportunity wasted.
How many “Conservative” have adopted Malthusian beliefs? How many churches have taken the Kool-Aid and have gone green? How many have stupidly adopted the terms and ideals of the conspiratorial neo-left with no understanding of what the real purposes of them are? Sustainability, social justice, the precautionary principle, cap and trade/climate, et al. All Trojan horses, can you tell anyone intelligently how they all hang together and uphold a neo-leftist plan and ideology?
How many of you picked up and read Peter Diamandis new book Abundance or Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist? You limit yourselves and then your groan about there is nothing to do? YOU could become truly revolutionary techno-evolutionaries and take up the techno-neoclassical liberal position! But that would require you to put down your bibles and the latest idiotic work from the right wing bubbleheads: Insanity, O’liely, Bimbo et al.
Your lack of in-depth knowledge is your Achilles heel. While you are playing checkers on the old cracker barrel, your enemies are playing three dimensional chess and then you wonder why they have been slowly winning over the last 70 years?
You’ve ridden the short bus to school for far too long and then wonder how this all happened?
Comments
Dave asked about Classical LIberalism, what it was etc, I could not do more then let the master, Ludwig Von Mises, say it in his own words, http://library.mises.org/books/Ludwig%20von%20Mises/Liberalism%20In...
Once you start reading the Austiran School of Economics everything bergins making absolute sense.
"Philosophers and ideologues have for the most part been peripheral players not the creators of each new age of mankind" Really? They have been instrumental in forming the opinions that are current in society. What the intellectuals think today becomes the zeitgeist of tomorrow. So many have commented upon this fact, how did you ever miss it? Many time the evolution of what Kelly calls the Technium goes ahead anyway and pushes them to the side, but still the reigning ideas in the academy are our political and societal ideologies.
Every political system imagined, right, left etc has one and the same form, the pyramid. Control comes down from the top on to the people. Even the republican form of gov is the same. This IS the shadow of the most primitive parts of our mind projected onto culture. The silver backed alpha male is worshipped and adored. Communism, socialism and monarchy/Imperialism are all projections of the simian mind onto social arrangements. Herd mentality, team spirit, religious groupings etc are all aspects of this unconscious action.
All of our political ideologies, right and left are old, antiquated, static, tending to always want to go back to an ideal time, whipped on by the lash of the fear responsive amygdala.
Boundaries of Order by Shaffer [free here online at http://library.mises.org/books/Butler%20Shaffer/Boundaries%20of%20O...] is such an incredible work as it combines complexity theory with the Austrian School of Economics/classical liberal viewpoint.
Dialectics was one of the first movements to try to understand spontaneous emergent forces that arise in society, Adam Smith’s Invisible hand predates it but is an early systems theory idea. Hegal was moved by this idea but changed its name of the cunning of reason, even Marx and Engels mentions this idea. Complexity theory/economics has now upheld all of the old classical liberal ideas.
“Marx did not evolve,” I find this an interesting statement of yours as his later ideas after 1848 were steeped in evolutionary ideas, as after 1848 he studied economics, and he basically refuted his early position of the Manifesto. He then attacked all forms of democratic socialist interventionism, was for Free Trade, against union wage bargaining etc. It was he himself that said, “Only through the full evolution of capitalism, would the point of revolution be reached.”
So much of todays ideas and understanding of yesterdays ideology would allow one to have a terribly efficient weapon against todays revisionist neo-left. Too bad it is not pursued.
But do all of these apply today? Endless references to philosophers, economists and theorists seldom proves a point. In short relevance is based on time tested and workable solutions which throughout history have been implemented by the necessities and available resources of any given age. The sources of many conflicts has been from which premise one builds a case for the higher good.
There has been a lot of talk about the Hegelian Dialectic as if it was a Marxist Tenant, but Hegel wasn't talking about social struggle. He was deeply religious and he wrote of spiritual struggle. It was only later that the Hegelian principles were applied to the theory of social evolution.
Too often men veiw the world's struggle through the presuppositions of their own personal struggle. Marx did not evolve, he was gradually changed by exposure to idealists like Blanc Prudhon, and Leroux. He was even heavily influenced by very radical anarchist like Bakunin and Bodkin. Each stage of human development has mostly been due to the circumstances events and resources that formed common thinking that was the result of necessity. Philosophers and ideologues have for the most part been peripheral players not the creators of each new age of mankind. Each of the great thinkers were for the most part the product of a multitude of other thinkers that preceded them. The struggle of the enlightenment was largely a struggle to bring about the basic tenets of Free Masonry. That is Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Brotherhood.
This has led to the frustration that has resulted in a global attempt to hammer a square peg into a round hole. One man's liberty can sometimes lead to another man's bondage. Equality is never equal and equating it with liberty can and does often lead to chaos. Fraternity of nations is always over ruled by self determination and sovereignty of nations. And yes in a sorts, all men were created equal, but some are brothers.
With respect my friend, do any of us really believe that the simian brain can conceive something as complex and sophisticated as the natural institution of the ethnic nation state?
A great history lesson! Thanks C. J. Townsend. It would be great if all students in school today could read your historical words as they apply today! Thanks again!
Carlos said: "Todays liberal and progressive ideas are ancient -- do you know the date these ideologies spring from maestro? Yes, the father of all statist regimes is Plato, and his Republic is the blue print, the mother of all statism is Gnosticism in its many forms. The fight between true liberal and socialist is the argument between Aristotle and Plato. Thomas Aquinas and Abelard, between the Franco-German enlightenment and the Scottish-English Enlightenment. It is an ideological battle that goes back to pre-history, the fight between the tribalist simian brain and the new evolving complex brain. Conservatism and socialism are twin ideologies separated by blinders. Once you remove the classical liberal elements out of conservatism and you return to the Tory conservatism of the early 19th century and its Mercantilism you square the circle and you have socialism/communism. Both are based on a romantic return to the ancien regime. Green neo-communism today is nothing but the desire to return to the guild socialism of the Middle Ages, Autarkic regional economics, controlled trade and economy, lords ruling over serfs and peasants.
Chesterton, Belloc and Ropke’s distributism agrees with today’s greens.
Carlos, You are PROFOUNDLY historically ignorant, you dont know political and philosohical history. And you continue to argue a point you are entirely ignorant of. Freedom, Liberty, Equ[l]ity and Personal Rights and Due Process were all originally classical liberal ideals. Jefferson, Washington, Paine, Franklin, Madison, were all CL's Carlos, if you had called them conservatives they would have hit you with a glove and called you out for a duel. The elements you think are conservative today only became so as conservatives adoptd and absorbed many elements of the clasical liebral tradtion, first in England in the late 19th century and then in the US by mid 20th century. The socialists took over the name liberal in America by the mid 1950's. Everywhere else in the world today a liberal is still understood to be for small gov, low taxes, the rule of law and the free market, free trade and capitalism. Only in AMerica is the left right and the right left. Russel Kirk and his group of neo-cons futher distorted the historical reality I just mentioned. Try reading for a change, The Betryal of the American Right, http://mises.org/books/betrayal.pdf and http://library.mises.org/books/Murray%and Left , Right and the rosp...
YOur embracing the term Liberal is a crutch. Liberal in a technical sense but speaking Constitutionally it is conservative. Liberal perhaps due to the John Locke Individualism and ownership ideas but then these two elements are not central to 21st Century Constitutional Republicanism- Freedom, Liberty, Equity and Personal Rights and Due Process are most central than your beloved term "liberal" mr townsend. Todays liberal and progressive ideas are ancient -- do you know the date these ideologies spring from maestro? I do.
Historian said “Under the right circumstances his [Malthus] predictions or rather those of the neo Malthusians could happen.”
The conditions for Malthusianism to come true is a static universe where no new knowledge is ever developed. Linear thinking and the law of diminishing returns is the prerequisite for Neo-Malthusianism to be correct. Malthus and all neo-Malthusians have and will be proven wrong as long as the free human intellect is able to invent, think and produce. Everyone from Marx to Dr Julian Simon and now Peter Diamandis refutes this Paleolithic anti-evolutionary, complexity theory refuting stupidity. Only a Paleolithic mind can believe in it. it has been always proven wrong and every Malthusian prediction has failed. But like every failed "religion" no matter how many times its predictions fail its adherents stay true to the belief.
“but that is not currently on the books, and radical options such as agenda 21 are not justified by Malthusian theory.”
Agenda 21, sustainability, carbon trading, draconian green theology is ALL of it based on the failed theology of Malthus!!! Every single one of these ideas are interrelated with the linear mind that the universe is ruled by the law of diminishing returns only, that all resources are strictly finite, that Humanity must be limited and brought into conformity with existing resources rather then resources expanded through human inventiveness to match human needs.
It is all based on the ideological imperative to create a static, steady state, economic system at full equilibrium that can be managed by a top-down command and control center. All of it is based on 18th and 19th century reductionist Cartesian and overly mechanistic views of the world that have been exploded by the Austrian school of economics and complexity theory/economics. Here we are in the 21st century still debating a 19th century thinker who himself was proven wrong in his lifetiem and even he admitted it! Paul Ehrlich, his 20th century protégé, has also been proven wrong every time, the Club of Rome et al all wrong!
Lord Acton termed the idea of the eternal or constant revolution, it had classical liberal feet well before the socialists stole the idea. I perosnally like the word, the industrial revolution overturned the feudal system and eventually the merchantilist system was defeated by CL philosphy. J.C you also forgot to mention one of the most important concepts of Marx, That the communist revoluton could not come without the complete and full evolution of capitalism!!! Lenin was a revisionist and Mao followed that revision along with Stalin that revoltuion could come before the full evolutuion of the productive material forces and Marx said NO it could not. This change in Marx's idea later in his life pulled him back closer to the classical liberal philosphy and the ideal of constant betterment through scientific and technological development.
In Addition to the Remarks of HISTORIAN:
“ The theoretical basis guiding our thinking is Marxist-Leninism.” Page 1
“ A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” Page 11
“ Without a party built on the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary theory and in the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary style, it is impossible to lead the working class and the broad masses of people in defeating imperialism and its running dogs.” Page 1
“ The democratic revolution is the necessary preparation for the socialist revolution, and the socialist revolution is the inevitable sequel to the democratic revolution. The ultimate aim for which all communists strive is to bring about a socialist and communist society.” Page 25
“ The Socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system; this is an objective law independent of man’s will…….. Sooner or later revolution will take place and will inevitably triumph.” Page 24
'The Quotations Of Mao Tse Tung'
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