The View From 1776

From 1605 until the late 1960s, Americans universally subscribed to Benjamin Franklin’s maxim,"A penny saved is a penny earned.” Since the Baby Boomer student anarchism of the late 1960s and 1970s, we have become a nation, on balance, worshiping infantile, instant, hedonistic gratification. 

Liberals’ ideas about “values” have to do with the absence of personal restraints and with material goods and services, which is what the welfare state is all about.  Values for the colonists were the elements of spiritual morality, the intangible qualities that differentiated humans from other animals. 

The values of 1776 preached individual self-restraint, self-reliance, and hard work for the future of one’s family.  Liberal values give us what has been called a juvenocracy, a society dominated by the heedless pursuit of instant gratification that is characteristic of inexperienced youth: devil take the hindmost; eat, drink, and be merry.

The current generation are less to blame than their Baby Boomer teachers who fancied themselves so smart that they didn’t need education.  Their mission was to take control of universities, eradicate the classical curriculum that transmitted the values of Western civilization, and to replace it with “relevant” subjects, i.e., the ideology of socialism’s revolutionary social justice.

That brand of social justice preaches that everyone is entitled, indeed has a Constitutional right, to an equal share of society’s goods and services, without having first to work and save to acquire the objects of his desires.

Yes, unsophisticated home buyers failed to understand what would happen to mortgage payments when interest rates rose.  But more fundamentally, they failed to grasp that jobs can be lost, and anticipated salary increases might not come to pass; that elementary prudence demands having the wherewithal to pay before your buy, as well as having a cash reserve to carry you over emergency periods.  Schooled by Baby Boomer “respected educators,” they believed that it is their right to indulge to any extent and rely upon the Federal government to bail them out.

What I wrote in A Divided Nation Without God applies to our economic juvenocracy.

In Beyond Good and Evil (1885), speaking of the ethos prevailing in Western Europe (what we witness today in the United States as a cultural war between Judeo-Christian traditionalists and liberal-progressive, atheistic materialists), Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

Anarchists in 1885 were savagely antagonistic to this [original laissez-faire] liberal faith in “progress”

...they are one in their faith in the morality of commonly felt compassion as though this feeling constituted morality itself, as though it were the summit, the attained summit of mankind, the only hope for the future, the consolation of the living, the great deliverance from all the guilt of yore – they are all one in their faith in fellowship as that which will deliver them, their faith in the herd, in other words, in “themselves”...

Nietzsche could easily have been describing today’s “educated” young people coming out of our colleges and universities, having been thoroughly inculcated with the anti-American, atheistic, and philosophically materialistic religious views of the Vietnam War Baby-Boomers who infest academia’s professoriats.

As many other observers have noted, our short-changed young graduates have been led to believe that universal indulgence in narcotics, sexual promiscuity, and rebellion against the nation’s founding traditions constitutes individuality: Nietzsche’s herd-mentality.  Conformity to the latest media-communicated fad in dress, entertainment, and social justice ideas is “individuality.” The media bombard us with images of youth, turning society into an immature juvenocracy that worships only that which is novel and consciously rejects the wisdom of experience in past ages.

Nietzsche’s “commonly felt compassion as though this feeling constituted morality itself” is the doctrine enunciated by our first socialist Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. – truth is whatever wins out in the public market, whatever viewpoint the media can create in the minds of the majority of citizens. 

Conspicuously absent is any sense of personal responsibility.

Blaming mortgage brokers for the subprime collapse is like blaming alcoholism on the distillers.

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