The problem today is not that people do not know what is going on, but that they do not care. However, I see another equally disturbing problem. It appears that people do not want to acquire knowledge if it takes time, thought, and the use of reason and logic. They have been spoiled to television and the internet. Unless they can get information in sound bytes or Internet snippets, they will shut down their senses, click the mouse or remote, and quickly move on.
Here is the danger of that paradigm. If one does not acquire knowledge that is deep and sustaining, he or she will never recognize the approaching danger. Instead of recognizing and dealing with it in the early stages of development, they will ignore it until they can no longer tolerate it. The problem with that is when evil becomes intolerable, it is beyond critical mass and unstoppable.
I encourage people to read. Reading increases ones brain activity better than anything else. If you want a strong mind, get a book. If you want to know what and who has besieged America, I recommend reading “Slouching towards Gomorrah” by Robert Bork. For the next several days I am going to post excerpts from the book. I hope that people will read at least the introduction and first 4 chapters.
Excerpts from Slouching towards Gomorrah:
“If society should reach a chaotic condition of warring groups and individual alienation, a condition in which even personal security is problematic for a majority of its people, authoritarian government may be accepted.”
The Durkheim Constant:
Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology, posited that there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior any community can “afford to recognize.” As behavior worsens, the community adjusts its standards so that conduct once thought reprehensible is no longer deemed so. As behavior improves, the deviancy boundary moves up to encompass conduct previously thought normal. Thus, a community of saints and felons would display very different behavior but about the same amount of recognized deviancy.
Defining Decency Down:
“So unrelenting is the assault on our sensibilities that many of us grow numb finding resignation to be the rational, adaptive response to an environment that is increasingly polluted and apparently beyond our control.”
Defining Deviancy Up:
While defining deviancy down with respect to crime, illegitimacy, drug use, and the like, our cultural elites are growing intensely moralistic and disapproving about what had always been thought normal behavior, thus accomplishing what Charles Krauthammer terms, “defining deviancy up.” It is at least and apparent paradox that we are accomplishing both forms of refining, both down and up, simultaneously. One would suppose that as once normal behavior became viewed as deviant, that would mean that there was less really bad conduct in the society. But that is hardly our case. Instead, we have redefined what we mean by such things as child abuse, rape, and racial or sexual discrimination so that behavior until recently thought quite normal, unremarkable, even benign, is now identified as blameworthy or even criminal. Middle-class life is portrayed as oppressive and shot through with pathologies. “As part of the vast social project of moral leveling,” Krauthammer wrote, “it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant.” This situation is thoroughly perverse. Underclass values become increasingly acceptable to the middle class, especially their young, and middle-class values become increasingly contemptible to the cultural elites.
The Road to Cultural Disaster:
The fact that resistance to modern liberalism is weakening suggests that we are on the road to cultural disaster because, in their final stages, radical egalitarianism becomes tyranny and radical individualism descends into hedonism. Those translate into a modern version of bread and circuses. Government grows larger and more intrusive in order to direct the distributions of goods and services in an ever more equal fashion while people are coarsened and diverted, led to believe that their freedoms are increasing, by great variety of entertainments featuring violence and sex.
Destroying America
As one of the apostles of violence put it, “The idea was not to create a perfect state operating by the clockwork principles of Marxist law, but to promote a chaos that would cripple America, and ultimately cast it into a receivership that would be administered by the morally superior third world…[P]eople shouldn’t expect the revolution to achieve a Kingdom of Freedom; more likely, it would produce a Dark Ages.”
As a footnote (I myself dipped into Bork’s book many years back), Bork and Regnery Publishers are Roman Catholic. 😉
The problem with RCism is that they mix truth with error: I can agree with them on quite a few things (abortion, divorce, no ordination of women, and such), but they are SOOOOO wrong on key things that one can’t just close an eye to those and join ranks with the RCC—no matter HOW putrid our society becomes (I know that people like Packer and Colson, who were amongst the signers of the ECT, did so precisely because of the societal rot—Kreeft even advocated Protestants, RC’s and Muslims banding together against the Secularist perversion! He called it a “cultural jihad.”)