Happy Fourth of July-Dependence Day!

!!Trigger warning – Snark attack!! Proceed with clarity of mind…

Who needs ISIS when Greece, Spain, Portugal, France-the totality of the West-can self-destruct from within just by voting for idiots and appointing people into positions of power who have no business (or moral rectitude or moral courage) for holding the position they are in?

I don’t need to name names but these Prime Suspects are currently seeking to placate a deaf, obstinate and Israel-hating-West-hating Iran; these suspects have dealt a fatal blow to the sacred institution of marriage by ascribing “dignity” to godless and blatant lasciviousness; these suspects have mandated Obamacarelessness! Wow! The U.S. can now be like Europe-morally and financially bankrupt with plenty of time off work! Happy Fourth of July Dependence Day!

Not the House of the Rising Sun but similar in Epicurean proportion!

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859)

We were warned …

Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1805 – 1859) prescient warning about soft despotism accurately depicts the political will of our three branches of government including the infamous 2015 SCOTUS. And, it certainly applies to all the over-reaching regulatory agencies armed with the tentacles of the politically motivated unelected. Here is de Tocqueville’s warning (emphasis added-across the post):

“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Four, Chapter VI.

“Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in the republic which they set forth in glowing colors than in the monarchy which they attack; it is more needed in democratic republics than in any others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?”

“Democracy in America”, “Accidental or Providential Causes Which Contribute to Maintain the Democratic Republic in the United States.”

And this…

“I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. So far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.”

Letter to Arthur de Gobineau, 22 October 1843, Tocqueville Reader, p. 229

And this…

“Socialism is a new form of slavery.”

“As for me, I am deeply a democrat; this is why I am in no way a socialist. Democracy and socialism cannot go together. You can’t have it both ways.”

Notes for a Speech on Socialism (1848).

And this…

“Even despots accept the excellence of liberty. The simple truth is that they wish to keep it for themselves and promote the idea that no one else is at all worthy of it. Thus, our opinion of liberty does not reveal our differences but the relative value which we place on our fellow man. We can state with conviction, therefore, that a man’s support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country.”

Ancien Regime and the Revolution (fourth edition, 1858), de Tocqueville, tr. Gerald Bevan

“The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren traditionary faith which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.”

Democracy in America, Chapter XVII.

And this, the piece de resistance…

“The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave.”

Old Regime (1856), p. 204

**

We were warned …

From my post “The West: Moral Courage or Moral Chaos?”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(1918 – 2008)

Excerpts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s speech at Harvard, June of 1978, “A World Split Apart”

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life….”

“Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”

“Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counterbalanced by the young people’s right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.”

“And what shall we say criminality as such? Legal frames, especially in the United States, are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorist’s civil rights. There are many such cases.

Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually, but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature. The world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems, which must be corrected. Strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality and there even is considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless Soviet society.

The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media.) But what sort of use does it make of this freedom?”

“How has this unfavorable relation of forces come about? How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.”

~~~

LGBT Motto

“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these.” The Apostle Paul’s second letter to his son in the faith, II Timothy 3: 1-3