excalibur
Diamond Member
- Mar 19, 2015
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And the American Marxists are following the recommendations made by Aldous Huxley.
Among which is the mad rush to legalize marijuana, and may I add gambling to that as well.
In the preface to the second edition of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley said that anyone who wanted to establish a modern dictatorship would be advised to allow the population complete sexual freedom and freedom to take drugs, leaving everything else to the control of the dictatorship. In my gloomier moments, I can’t help thinking that this is the condition at which we have arrived, though I know that gloom is not a perfect guide to reality.
In France there is a projected law that would allow people to choose as their surname that of either their mother or their father, and for children to change sides, as it were, once they reached maturity, fixed for the purposes of this projected law at the age of 13. There was no widespread agitation in favor of such a law; rather it is a response to a feminist demand that surnames should be put on a basis of reality. Given that single parenthood is now commonplace, and that most children living in single-parent households live with their mothers rather than their fathers, the law—if passed—will result in the feminization or matriarchalization of surnames. After all, many if not most single mothers have no particular desire to immortalize the names of their inseminators.
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The second thing about the law is that it seems to extend the realm of choice, the assumption being that choice is always and everywhere an unmitigated blessing, and that nothing (for example a system of naming) must be accepted not because it is fully rational, or because it accords with everyone’s deepest wishes, but simply because the acceptance of convention that is not obviously harmful in itself is a way of avoiding conflict. In some countries, people drive on the right, in others on the left. The one is not intrinsically better than the other, but to give people the choice, on the grounds that to do so would increase their freedom, would be silly, to put it no higher.
The refusal to accept that some things are beyond our personal choice is gaining ground, as a kind of mad egotistical Prometheanism. A man in the Netherlands wanted to reduce his age by about twenty years in order to be able to attract younger women than he was able to do at his real age, and appealed to the courts to change his date of birth (after all, he still felt frisky). The court refused, but the request was no more absurd than that of the ability on request to change the sex on one’s birth certificate, as is now possible in Britain, a falsification of history that out-Stalins Stalin, and would probably even have made old Josef Vissarionovich laugh at the absurdity of it. Apparently also, a man in Canada “identified” first as a woman and then as a wolf. As the advertising slogan puts it, be all you can be.
Reality, however, is not so easily mocked. When the American mystic Margaret Fuller said that she accepted the universe, Thomas Carlyle is reported to have said, “By gad, you’d better.” Now, of course, we have alternative universes.
www.takimag.com
Among which is the mad rush to legalize marijuana, and may I add gambling to that as well.
In the preface to the second edition of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley said that anyone who wanted to establish a modern dictatorship would be advised to allow the population complete sexual freedom and freedom to take drugs, leaving everything else to the control of the dictatorship. In my gloomier moments, I can’t help thinking that this is the condition at which we have arrived, though I know that gloom is not a perfect guide to reality.
In France there is a projected law that would allow people to choose as their surname that of either their mother or their father, and for children to change sides, as it were, once they reached maturity, fixed for the purposes of this projected law at the age of 13. There was no widespread agitation in favor of such a law; rather it is a response to a feminist demand that surnames should be put on a basis of reality. Given that single parenthood is now commonplace, and that most children living in single-parent households live with their mothers rather than their fathers, the law—if passed—will result in the feminization or matriarchalization of surnames. After all, many if not most single mothers have no particular desire to immortalize the names of their inseminators.
...
The second thing about the law is that it seems to extend the realm of choice, the assumption being that choice is always and everywhere an unmitigated blessing, and that nothing (for example a system of naming) must be accepted not because it is fully rational, or because it accords with everyone’s deepest wishes, but simply because the acceptance of convention that is not obviously harmful in itself is a way of avoiding conflict. In some countries, people drive on the right, in others on the left. The one is not intrinsically better than the other, but to give people the choice, on the grounds that to do so would increase their freedom, would be silly, to put it no higher.
The refusal to accept that some things are beyond our personal choice is gaining ground, as a kind of mad egotistical Prometheanism. A man in the Netherlands wanted to reduce his age by about twenty years in order to be able to attract younger women than he was able to do at his real age, and appealed to the courts to change his date of birth (after all, he still felt frisky). The court refused, but the request was no more absurd than that of the ability on request to change the sex on one’s birth certificate, as is now possible in Britain, a falsification of history that out-Stalins Stalin, and would probably even have made old Josef Vissarionovich laugh at the absurdity of it. Apparently also, a man in Canada “identified” first as a woman and then as a wolf. As the advertising slogan puts it, be all you can be.
Reality, however, is not so easily mocked. When the American mystic Margaret Fuller said that she accepted the universe, Thomas Carlyle is reported to have said, “By gad, you’d better.” Now, of course, we have alternative universes.
