LogikAndReazon
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- Feb 21, 2012
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A free society, as the great political thinkers and statesmen have always contended, depends on the virtue of its citizens. Nowhere is this more urgently true and evident than in the once-freest of societies, the United States. Life in a free republic demands that minimum basic confidence -- the individualist's self-reliance -- as a prerequisite for maintaining social order and civility. The so-called "rugged individualism," which has fallen into disrepute and parody thanks to generations of collectivist education, is nothing more than the simple willingness to face life's obstacles, trials, and genuine hardships like a grown-up, relying on one's own resources, and on what can be earned through one's own effort and voluntary interaction. A free society cannot survive the death of such self-reliance.
As this basic, quotidian form of courage wanes, the petulant, self-congratulatory nouveau cowards who have been raised to take over society's reins fall into doing what the excessively fearful always do. They overcompensate in the direction of "security." They refuse to face even adult humanity's most unavoidable challenges -- supporting yourself, planning for potential misfortunes, taking care of your own -- without a "safety net" purchased at the price of their freedom. They sell their liberty -- and their neighbors' -- for a child's idea of security: that is, security provided by someone else, by a mother surrogate, by "society," i.e., by government.
This coward's quest for a safety net that can only be achieved through coercion is the antithesis of good citizenship. It means, in principle, that everyone is seeking to sacrifice everyone else to himself. The mutual respect of the citizens of a free society evaporates into mutual envy and resentment; in short, into an entitlement society.
Read more: Articles: Infantilizing Leftist Morality
As this basic, quotidian form of courage wanes, the petulant, self-congratulatory nouveau cowards who have been raised to take over society's reins fall into doing what the excessively fearful always do. They overcompensate in the direction of "security." They refuse to face even adult humanity's most unavoidable challenges -- supporting yourself, planning for potential misfortunes, taking care of your own -- without a "safety net" purchased at the price of their freedom. They sell their liberty -- and their neighbors' -- for a child's idea of security: that is, security provided by someone else, by a mother surrogate, by "society," i.e., by government.
This coward's quest for a safety net that can only be achieved through coercion is the antithesis of good citizenship. It means, in principle, that everyone is seeking to sacrifice everyone else to himself. The mutual respect of the citizens of a free society evaporates into mutual envy and resentment; in short, into an entitlement society.
Read more: Articles: Infantilizing Leftist Morality