But when you listen to the gaggle of Democratic Party presidential candidates with essentially the same baseless claim to run your life with policies that would be far more disruptive of your interests, you become aware that you are not hearing the voices of good-natured chuckleheads; but of men and women who fully intend to make their delusions enforceable through the coercive powers of the state.

Most conservative and Republican speakers make only token, superficial responses to the leftists, because they have little depth to their own understanding of what is at stake.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/08/butler-shaffer/when-the-mind-goes-into-default-mode/

By Butler Shaffer

Just because everything is different doesn’t mean anything has changed.
– Irene Peter

It is not a matter of coincidence that the collapse of civilization is accompanied by otherwise intelligent men and women negating their mind’s capacities to think, reason, and understand the complexities of their world. When systems and practices upon which previous social relationships were grounded no longer work, it can be said that the conduct of humans in society is subject to the principle offered by Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic: “Justice is serving the interests of the stronger. Just action is obedience to the laws of one’s state.” I add my own definition in the sentiments of economics: “justice is the redistribution of violence.”

Life experiences inform me that there are no objectively “true” or “correct” principles by which we ought to live. There are, however, principles that lead to differing consequences, the preferences depending upon whose interests are at stake. Politicians are perfectly happy with Thrasymachus’ opinion, while many of us would prefer principles that placed individual interests above those that give priority to collective political interests. It is up to each of us to think through the implications of either alternative, just as the political establishment has consistently found it to its interests to condition and subordinate our minds to its purposes.

Those who seek to control our lives must first gain control of our minds. If one of your neighbors went through the neighborhood with a gun, informing you that he was the sovereign authority therein, and that you were required to obey his orders, how would you respond? When, as a child, I visited my aunt and uncle on their farm, there was a retarded man in the neighborhood who informed us that he was the local sheriff and we had to do as he directed. Since he was completely harmless and pleasant, the neighbors tended to humor him and treat him with respect.

But when you listen to the gaggle of Democratic Party presidential candidates with essentially the same baseless claim to run your life with policies that would be far more disruptive of your interests, you become aware that you are not hearing the voices of good-natured chuckleheads; but of men and women who fully intend to make their delusions enforceable through the  coercive powers of the state.

Most conservative and Republican speakers make only token, superficial responses to the leftists, because they have little depth to their own understanding of what is at stake. The explanation for this, I suspect, is that for decades conservatives grounded their thinking and policies on anti-communist premises. When the Soviet Union collapsed they lost their raison d’etre. They tended to embrace private property and free-market principles not so much from deeply-held convictions traceable to the supremacy of the individual over collectives, but as tools to be employed against the “evil empire.” I heard one current articulate conservative distance himself from the Austrian school of economics and the libertarian philosophy on grounds he was unable to explain. When individuals give up on the principles and practices that provided the foundations for a free, peaceful, and civil society, they find themselves standing intellectually naked in a world that is destroying them and not understanding why.

With rational thought and the search for truth being jettisoned by so many as standards on how to live in a complicated world, it should surprise no one that the modern political arena resembles nothing so much as H.L. Mencken’s “carnival of buncombe.” The likes of Jefferson, Franklin, and Sam Adams no longer dominate political thinking, while Hamilton’s thinking has taken over not only in Washington, but on Broadway! Without norms that aid intelligent minds in the search for understanding, why should we expect politicians to propose policies grounded in anything more profound than the whims of collectivists or the foggy sentiments of “tradition”? With the recent rash of mass-shootings that conveniently provide the statists with more fear-objects to reinforce their powers over a gullible public, I expect that many, if not most, Republican politicians – long defenders of the Second Amendment – will abandon their defenses of clearly expressed Constitutional principles and join with the Democrats to further curtail rights of gun-ownership.

One of the most valuable lessons learned toward the end of Western culture is found in the study of chaos. For those who had not already discovered, one of the truths to be found in the dregs of our deceased civilization is that our world is far too complex, interconnected, and changing in ways difficult to identify or measure. Chaos theory informs us that complex systems are unpredictable; that efforts to anticipate and plan for the future are as prone to error as are the attempts to explain the past (e.g., what was the cause – or causes – of the American Civil War?). As our world becomes ever-more complicated, its previous linear simplicities become more non-linear in nature (e.g., the well-known example of the straw that breaks the camel’s back). For this reason, a hunting/gathering society would be easier to organize and direct to desired ends by central management, than would a modern, international, industrial enterprise…

With George Carlin no longer around to help keep me amused – his mind never functioning in the default mode – I will have to depend on the politicians to keep me entertained. I haven’t checked today’s news, but when I do, I may find that Rep. Dildock will have proposed a bill that would send everyone now living in America back to the country wherein their most recent ancestor lived, and require each to apply for residency or citizenship in order to re-enter this country.

The late Richard Weaver reminded us that “ideas have consequences,” a truth that should be in the forefront of our minds as we sift through the rubble of our fallen civilization for future direction. Added to his warning is another admonition: the failure to live without clear, questioning, energized minds also has consequences.

Be seeing you