The problem today is not that people do not know what is going on, but that they do not care.\u00a0 However, I see another equally disturbing problem.\u00a0 It appears that people do not want to acquire knowledge if it takes time, thought, and the use of reason and logic.\u00a0 They have been spoiled to television and the internet.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Here is the danger of that paradigm.\u00a0 If one does not acquire knowledge that is deep and sustaining, he or she will never recognize the approaching danger.\u00a0 Instead of recognizing and dealing with it in the early stages of development, they will ignore it until they can no longer tolerate it.\u00a0 The problem with that is when evil becomes intolerable, it is beyond critical mass and unstoppable.<\/p>\n
I encourage people to read.\u00a0 Reading increases ones brain activity better than anything else.\u00a0 If you want a strong mind, get a book.\u00a0 If you want to know what and who has besieged America, I recommend reading \u201cSlouching towards Gomorrah\u201d by Robert Bork.\u00a0 For the next several days I am going to post excerpts from the book.\u00a0 I hope that people will read at least the introduction and first 4 chapters.<\/p>\n
Excerpts from Slouching towards Gomorrah:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cIf 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.\u201d<\/p>\n The Durkheim Constant:<\/strong><\/p>\n Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology, posited that there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior any community can \u201cafford to recognize.\u201d\u00a0 As behavior worsens, the community adjusts its standards so that conduct once thought reprehensible is no longer deemed so.\u00a0 As behavior improves, the deviancy boundary moves up to encompass conduct previously thought normal.\u00a0 Thus, a community of saints and felons would display very different behavior but about the same amount of recognized deviancy.<\/p>\n Defining Decency Down:<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cSo 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Defining Deviancy Up:<\/strong><\/p>\n 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, \u201cdefining deviancy up.\u201d\u00a0 It is at least and apparent paradox that we are accomplishing both forms of refining, both down and up, simultaneously.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But that is hardly our case.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Middle-class life is portrayed as oppressive and shot through with pathologies.\u00a0 \u201cAs part of the vast social project of moral leveling,\u201d Krauthammer wrote, \u201cit is not enough for the deviant to be normalized.\u00a0 The normal must be found to be deviant.\u201d\u00a0 This situation is thoroughly perverse.\u00a0 Underclass values become increasingly acceptable to the middle class, especially their young, and middle-class values become increasingly contemptible to the cultural elites.<\/p>\n The Road to Cultural Disaster:<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Those translate into a modern version of bread and circuses.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Destroying America<\/strong><\/p>\n As one of the apostles of violence put it, \u201cThe 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\u2026[P]eople shouldn\u2019t expect the revolution to achieve a Kingdom of Freedom; more likely, it would produce a Dark Ages.\u201d<\/p>\n