A Few Shiny Pebbles

Although we are in a War on Islamofacist Terrorism, in “a Clash of Civilizations”, we are also in a clash within Western civilization, a clash between those who believe in America and those who are anti-American, who believe in the atheist ideologies of communism and socialism in all their versions, including their attempted co-opting of environmentalism and other causes. This is not something that can be covered in an op-ed for the editorial page. The issues are complex and their implications grow out into a full-fledged Cultural War.

In 1789, after the American Revolutionary War had ended and the United States of America was entering its second decade of existence, Benjamin Rush, a man who had signed the Declaration of Independence, knew that the fight to establish the ideals of America had barely begun. He wrote:

There is nothing more common than to confound the terms of the American Revolution with those of the late American war. The American war is over but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed.

During the 1860s -- approximately 90 years after the Revolutionary War—America brought about the Civil War. It was in essence a war about the survival of America, and Abraham Lincoln stressed this in his most famous speech, in the Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

This Civil War did indeed test whether the United States could endure based on the conceptions of America. It was a war of great violence and great courage, and when it ended, slavery ceased to exist in the United States, bringing the country closer to the ideals of America.

Approximately 90 years later, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, ideas were being taught in colleges and universities to the generation of youth that would lead to the next major revolution to sweep the United States. Unlike the first two major revolutions, this one was not to be a shooting war. Instead, we entered a fifty-year revolution of ideas, an American Cultural War.

Just as the Revolutionary War and the Civil War were moments of destiny in the life of America, this Cultural War that we are now engaged in is a moment that will determine the destiny of everything we hold most dear. The particular cultural war in which we Americans find ourselves will determine the future you and your children and your children’s children will live in and find their lives regulated by. It will determine what is legal and illegal, what is acceptable and unacceptable, what is praised and what is condemned—and it will determine whether you and your children will have a life of opportunity or a life of oppression. It is the most important series of events in your life, whether you acknowledge it or not.

We have major problems in this country. More and more people are beginning to realize that we have a terrible problem in values. These problems demand solutions. But proposed solutions do not come out of a void. People, influenced by what they read and are taught, decide on methods to solve the problems they face. These methods, these solutions, carry philosophies within them.

One of the major bodies of information that exists and has been taught in our schools is an entire world of belief that is decidedly anti-American. These ideas have been taught in our universities and colleges for over seventy years now, influencing generations of students, who later become teachers, professors, politicians, social workers, lawyers, judges, and so forth. The list of problems in America—a list any of us could easily make—are all problems that have been brought about largely due to wrong solutions that have come from anti-American beliefs, from a philosophy in disguise.

All solutions are philosophies in disguise. Cultural values #1 propose as solutions to our problems ideas embedded in the philosophy of America. Cultural values #2 propose as solutions to our problems ideas contained in philosophies that actually go against the basic ideology of America.

Now, there is no suggestion of a vast conspiracy theory here. There doesn’t need to be. People with strong views act on them, and their actions tend to echo the actions of others who agree with them. Like-minded people band may act together in a small group with a common agenda. But the vast majority of enemies are free-lancers. Just as freeways do not become crowded by conspiracy, but rather by the independent actions of tens of thousands of individuals to go north or south or east or west at a given time, so may tens of thousands of people go in a direction in the Cultural War and act in accordance with their perceived beliefs. It doesn’t take a conspiracy to fight a cause—merely a common general viewpoint, and an interest in what others of like viewpoint are doing, have done, and may do in the future. Most of what I discuss or use as examples are just the actions of free-lancers doing their best for something they believe in, or following something that they have learned. This would be admirable, except of course for the fact that what they believe in, or the methods they are following will cause the transmogrification of America into a socialist United States, or some other left-wing nightmare of Utopia, or, at best, simply doing mischief.

The destruction of much of what we value as Americans only requires many individual people, each of them with a philosophy that disagrees with American basic ideas of individuality and liberty and responsibility and such. And then they make an effort to get into the positions necessary to make laws and court rulings, rules and regulations for government agencies, curricula for schools, style sheets for newspapers, rules for universities, and the philosophy behind our law schools and journalism majors. And then, over time, the changes come. . . And suddenly our legal system has changed, and our schools have changed, and journalists are slanting stories, and political correctness is coercive, and people are worried if they say the wrong word, or tell the wrong joke, or look the wrong way. It’s all very quiet and very efficient, and we shouldn’t be surprised now to see the results.

All of these are problems in America. All of these involve values. All can be grouped under categories such as religion, truth, property, marriage, morality, justice, culture, and so forth. I believe that all of these are areas that have not become dysfunctional by accident. I believe that the breakdown in these areas have been deliberately planned and carried out by many people, some working in groups and some working independently, but under the same basic types of ideology. These people are followed by millions of other people who, with the best of intentions, unknowingly carry through with some policies and actions that are actually detrimental to America. All it takes is some people who act deliberately, followed by many people working individually who have been taught the same beliefs as the first group, or who are acting on a previously designed system in ignorance of what the design actually has been co-opted to do.

Now, consider these categories I listed above, the categories in which our problems exist -- religion, truth, property, marriage, morality, justice, culture, and so forth. I listed them deliberately this way, in this order. I think you will agree that these are areas of our problems. Now look at what a Leftist named Bakunin said:

The old world must be destroyed and replaced by a new one. When you have freed your mind from the fear of God, and that childish respect for the fiction of right, then all the remaining chains that bind you -- property, marriage, morality, and justice -- will snap asunder like threads.

The past century has experienced horror after horror carried out by those who follow the writings of certain philosophers. In the 20tyh century alone, over two hundred million people throughout the world have been murdered through deliberate war or other deliberate actions carried out by those who followed versions of a few non-JudeoChristian philosophies. Words written on sheets of paper have driven so-called revolutionaries to destroy the live of millions upon millions of people throughout the world. A man who saw much of this destruction first-hand, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote in The Captive Mind:

It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy. Their bread, their work, their private lives began to depend on this or that decision in disputes on principles to which, until then, they had never paid any attention.

“Influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books . . .” Lives influenced. Unpleasantly. We’ve seen it around the world. Why should we feel that we Americans are immune to this sort of influence?

Bakunin—who, incidentally, was the author of one of those “intricate and abstruse books” that have destroyed life for tens of millions of people in the 20th century alone—really summarized everything in his quote. He fully recognized that the destruction of religion and values leads to the undermining of concepts of “property, marriage, morality, and justice”—the essential elements of our culture, of America.

We see the JudeoChristian religious complex and these American values under attack everywhere we look.

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I don’t expect you to listen solely to me about this Culture War. Let’s look at the way in which these problems were viewed by a man who lived under totalitarian regimes, Solzhenitsyn, who knew the evils of these regimes, and who tried to warn Americans. Robert Nisbet, in The Idea of Progress, writes about him:

[Solzhenitsyn] sees the West’s decline as the result largely of loss of faith in its own values and of revolt, on a widening scale, against authority -- the authority of culture and morality, of the values around which the West has been built or toward which it progressed. And without this kind of authority—which is the absolute opposite of power—there cannot be, Solzhenitsyn declares, stability, liberty, or creativity.

Those who believe in the destruction of American values have been zealously active during the last century. There are dozens of anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-religious, anti-family—and so forth—philosophical systems and beliefs that have been written up in scholarly books and used as texts for study throughout the our education system. Many of today’s teachers, professors, social engineers, and politicians were heavily influenced by these teachings during the 1960s and 1970s.

These anti-American ideas can be found throughout educational textbooks that are very popular on campuses in the United States. And it is not just in lecture halls that this information is believed and taught. Those who think that communism and socialism in all their versions are no longer a force in the intellectual world are wrong. The drives for these false utopian views have merely changed form. Look at the ideas in some excerpts from an article I cut out and kept, an item that appeared in one of the premier scientific magazines in the world: “Essay: Marx Wasn’t All Wrong” by Nathan Rosenberg, Scientific American, December 1991, page 158:

Perhaps we should hesitate before consigning Marx to the dustbin of history. Recent events in the Soviet Union are being interpreted as evidence of the final breakdown of Marxism, but one might question such a reading. . . . . Marx’s writings essentially analyze the historical process by which capitalist societies grow and become transformed. Marx needs to be disengaged from the disastrous 20th-century economic experiments with socialism because in his view of history socialism would emerge only out of advanced capitalist societies. Socialism would arise after capitalist societies became wracked by their “internal contradictions.” Socialist societies were destined, according to Marx, not only to resolve the internal contradictions of capitalism but to inherit the immense productive apparatus that mature capitalist societies were incapable of utilizing. When socialism finally appeared on the world stage, it would immediately take possession of a highly productive industrial technology, and it would administer that technology far more capably than the social system that had generated the technology. Thus, in at least one limited but essential respect, the collapse of socialist economies serves to prove that Marx was right, not that he was wrong. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marx may be said to have finessed the “equity versus efficiency” trade-off by assigning to capitalism the historical role of providing efficiency and to a later socialism the role of delivering equity.

Consider these Marxian ideas -- that socialism will come after the capitalist society has set up the technological base; that it is the “internal contradictions” of capitalism that would wrack capitalist societies and cause immense problems in democratic society; that it will rescue a dictatorial, monopolistic capitalist democracy; and that while capitalism will provide efficiency, it will be cruel and unfair, and socialism will come along and deliver fairness and equity to society. What if some students of communism or socialism decided to “push” society along, to magnify what they viewed as capitalist democracy’s evils and to institute a socialist mentality in people in this country in order to make it easier to bring the crisis that socialist theory predicts? What if this “push” was exactly the impetus that has led to so many bad solutions that have made our problems even worse? The students and activists of socialism and other anti-American philosophies would feel that they were doing History’s own work -- and yet it would actually be their handiwork at trying to destroy America that was bringing about the problems. The problems would not be those of capitalist democracy, but rather actually of socialist theory!

This is one of the essential points of my argument. The anti-American activists are trying to slowly change the philosophical views of the people of the United States. They are trying to change these views into views that will make it easier to establish their dream of a communist or socialist government in Washington. Some of these changes they wish—as can be seen by the quotes in my Culture War: Part One—are in the areas of destroying the family, taking all the morality out of sexual behavior, destroying religion and any idea of God, destroying the ideas of competition and excellence, making people afraid of saying things that are not Politically Correct, making people afraid of being destroyed if they behave normally as men and women in the workplace, abolishing private property, turning control of the economy over to the government, ruining small business with regulations, taxes and fees, and mandates, removing all thoughts about JudeoChristian moral responsibility for behavior, changing the schools into systems teaching students little about the history of the world or of America, little about reading, little about writing well, etc., etc., etc.—in short, they wish to produce the kind of country that the socialist and communist philosophers—like Bakunin—would have welcomed, and would have been able to control. Solzhenitsyn was trying to warn us about these changes in the quote above.

At the same time that they are doing this—at the same time that they are causing tremendous problems for our country—and the world—they are claiming that it is the American system of morality, private property, capitalism, religious beliefs, desire for education about our own country and its history, sexual responsibility, striving for excellence, small business, etc., etc., etc., that is the cause of the problems.

Before becoming revolted by the Communists and defecting to the West, Czeslaw Milosz was a member of the Communist Party and represented the USSR as a diplomat. In a book he wrote about his experiences, The Captive Mind, he pointed out how his fellow Communists dealt with this method of predicting a problem will happen to those you are fighting, creating yourself the conditions leading to the problem, and then point to the existence of the problem as demonstration that your predictions about the system you are fighting were true. He showed how the Communists own actions created the ugliness they claimed they were fighting. The Communists practice a form of argument called the Dialectics:

Dialectics: I predict the house will burn; then I pour gasoline over the stove. The house burns; my prediction is fulfilled. Dialectics: I predict that a work of art incompatible with socialist realism will be worthless. Then I place the artist in conditions in which such a work is worthless. My prediction is fulfilled. . . . . The conviction grows that the whole world will be conquered. . . . . Lies are concocted from seeds of truth. The philosophically uneducated bourgeois enemy is despised for his inherited inability to think.

Note that he added “The philosophically uneducated bourgeois [that is, middle class] enemy is despised for his inherited inability to think.” Of course, the middle class is able to think quite well—despite what intellectuals think. But there is a point about the “philosophically uneducated”—one of the important tasks of the teachers who are anti-American is to make certain that their students do not learn anything that might help them see what is really happening with all this. There has been a careful and systematic destruction of the teaching of pro-American Western philosophy, of American history, of valuing American traditions and ideals, and so forth. All too many educators in our public education system and in our collegiate system are deliberately not teaching Western and American history, and deliberately teaching the histories of peoples who live under socialism, communism, and other collectivist forms of government as utopian, and those in capitalistic countries as being victims. A multi-millionaire offered Yale University a $20 million dollar gift to establish a group of classes around Western traditions and history—and Yale refused it!

Like the artist mentioned in the quote, scientists who oppose the idea that human beings are the primary cause of Global Warming, and who oppose the hysterical claims as to the extent of the potential destruction, are being placed in conditions where their opinions are worthless, censured, made to seem monstrous.

This might be a good time to quote from a copy I kept of an article from the February 27, 1975 UCLA (University of California Los Angeles) Daily Bruin. I was a student at UCLA at that time, and I found this article worth cutting out and keeping. The headline reads: “Carmichael urges destruction of capitalism,” by Daily Bruin staff reporter Frank D. Stallworth. A few paragraphs into the feature, Stallworth quotes Stokely Carmichael:

“If people are to ever live in a world of plenty and equality, the people must ultimately destroy the capitalist system because it thrives on greed and exploitation, and causes hardship and deprivation wherever it is allowed to exist.” . . . . [Carmichael’s] chief solution [to the problems of the oppressed masses] was the implementation of scientific socialism as a means of directing people to a clear interpretation of history. “History is a powerful weapon,” said Carmichael. “If I can control your history I can have you fighting against your own interest.”

I have collected many, many articles over time. I thought it important to keep this article, though at the time I didn’t know why. I majored in mathematics, and I knew little about “scientific socialism”, or why anyone would advocate it. I misunderstood what Carmichael was saying, because I thought he meant that he wanted to control the teaching of history so that he could make us go against our own interests. Much later I realized that what he meant was that he wanted to establish “scientific socialism” because capitalism and JudeoChristian and other American values were wrong, and against our interests. History is a powerful weapon! I know ever so much more now, and I now know that it is those who try to implement “scientific socialism” who are the ones who are controlling the study of history to force people to fight against their own true interest. It is the Leftists who are distorting law, justice, truth, morals, marriage, childhood, science, religion, . . . . The socialists, the Leftists, may as well declare: “If I can control your laws I can have you fighting against your own interest.” Or, “If I can control your children, I can have you fighting against your own interest.” Or, “If I can control your science I can have you fighting against your own interest.” Or, “If I can control your belief in God I can have you fighting against your own interest.”

Well, the Leftist, anti-Americancivilization educators are for the most part controlling our education, and the Leftist ideologically-driven scientists are succeeding in controlling our scientific ideas, and the ideologically-driven moralists are trying to control our morals by destroying our religious beliefs—and they do indeed have us fighting against our own interests. Some Leftists are deliberately following the tenets of Leftist ideologies, and millions of other people are following those Leftists without being aware of the source of many of their beliefs. Look at the inner cities. Look at our schools. Look at the problems in morality and values in general. Look at so much that has gone wrong in America. Look at the Leftists in A.N.S.W.E.R., protesting our just War on Terror, and the Leftists in MoveOn.Org, trying to control our political base, and those who are trying to silence the scientists who come out against Al Gore’s version of Global Warming! The Left has convinced too many people to fight against their own interest, and it’s time people started recognizing what their true interest really is.

Along with writing about the War on Terror, it is imperative that we all examine the Cultural War we are fighting at the same time. We need to investigate what is happening, and what it means, and how it is that these two battlefields of ideas are feeding off each other in the attempt to hurt those of us who believe in what America represents.

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I ended Culture War: Part Two with the statements that the Left has convinced too many people to fight against their own interest, and it’s time people started recognizing what their true interest really is. Along with writing about the War on Terror, it is imperative that we all examine the Cultural War we are fighting at the same time. We need to investigate what is happening, and what it means, and how it is that these two battlefields of ideas are feeding off each other in the attempt to hurt those of us who believe in what America represents.

The Terror War and the Culture War are both threatening America’s existence. Most people are not truly aware of how much danger we are in. Our level of civilization buffers us from much of the evil in the world in ways we rarely realize. If you were lost in a wilderness, you would be painfully aware that each move you made was part of the battle to stay alive. Before you ate anything, or went to sleep, or moved in a certain direction, you would have to consider your options carefully. A mistake could mean serious injury or death. Even if you were an experienced outdoors man, you would know that you were involved in a war of survival. Every year a number of people get lost and die in wilderness areas. In some ways the people in this country, in the whole Western world, are lost and in great danger in a growing manmade wilderness.

Civilization gives us the illusion that our existence as a culture, and as a particular kind of culture that we call American, is not a similar struggle; yet anyone who has lived through an earthquake, hurricane, tornado, or similar disaster knows how quickly conditions can deteriorate. Absolute necessities—water, sanitation, food, shelter, medical care, security, communication, hope for recovery—become objectives of serious struggle and planning. The layer of civilization is remarkably fragile, as we saw in Ruwanda and in Serajevo. The benefits of our particular civilization would be short-lived if we didn’t constantly work to maintain them, and the enemies of our culture, the anti-Americans, are ever on the watch for any weakness they can exploit to hurt us. The truth is that we are under attack by people who don’t want America to survive as the JudeoChristian, freedom-loving, Constitutional America set up by our forefathers. Some of these people are terrorists, and some are Leftist ideological anti-Americans and their followers, and they are often working in parallel efforts to destroy that America and its influence around the world.

While reading some essays written in the late 1940’s in an old textbook, The Essential Prose, I came upon a description of a far off land that reminded me of much that is going on now in America and in Europe. It was written by a man named Laurens Van der Post, when he returned to his home in Africa at a time of crisis in his country:

. . . wherever I went I was horrified by the change. Events that were rarities in my childhood days were commonplace . . . [among them] the increase of political agitation and social confusion, the apparently senseless smashing of shop windows and inexplicable riots in civilized streets. . . . . The windows of the individual mind are shattered long before stones are thrown in the street and the police put to flight by the mob. There is a riot in the human heart and the forces of law and order in the spirit are first overthrown by a nightmare horde. Already deep down in the human soul the individual is melting into the crowd.

Does this sound familiar to you? “There is a riot in the human heart. . .” All around us, our country, the whole Western world, is facing a crisis. It is a crisis of the heart and mind, and we must find answers if we are to survive as a civilization. The future awaits us, but we have yet to build it into what it will become. We are the actors, now, on this stage that history has made for us. It is up to us.

We Americans are always trying to create policies and programs to improve our country and solve social problems. We spent the past half-century specifically relying on experts, authorities, professors, social workers, social engineers, educators, politicians, government programs, lawyers, judges, and many others in official and semi-official standing to come up with solution to our problems. Over this time thousands of social programs have been put into place in an attempt to find solutions, most of them relying on the ideological beliefs that fueled the social, political, revolutionary, and student movements of the century.

Yet beyond the initial Civil Rights Movement, this formidable assault didn’t improve things. Over time, our problems have grown. Eric Hoffer, an American philosopher, wrote:

We of the present have a more vivid awareness of the tragic paradox central to the human condition than had any before us. . . . . Our increased awareness has come from new revelations not about the nature of evil but about the nature of the good. No other generation has been made so poignantly conscious of the perils of doing good. We know that to set out to do good is to run the gauntlet of baffling, grotesque side effects. . . . . The ills and woes which beset our society at present and strain it to the breaking point were born of a concerted effort to right wrongs and do good. . . .

How can we make the necessary changes when we don’t know why setting out to do good has so many “grotesque side effects”, why our “ills and woes” came from the “concerted effort to right wrongs and do good”. . . . We have so many questions, so many uncertainties, so many puzzlements. And yet—

The future awaits us. We sense it just over the horizon, just around the corner, just outside our door. But is the red shimmer in the darkness ahead a welcoming dawn, or an endless riot? Is it a shining opportunity—or a mugging—that awaits us around the next corner, that will come to us as we open that door? Is there anything we can do—we ourselves—to reach forward and grasp the future and write our will into it? We are the actors on this stage of history—is there any way for us to write the script and set the scene? Can we find a way to awaken ourselves from any nightmare we may find ourselves in?

I believe that it is possible to examine the events and beliefs of the past century in a way that will make it all clear, that will show us how and why we are in the peril we face, and that will show us the way to find the answers we need, answers that will carry the imprimatur of truth.

During the time between now and the next election, I am going to try in my blog to examine the problems involved in this growing, manmade wilderness we are in, in a way that may bring clarity and solutions for us to try. It will take time to present my analysis and arguments of the Culture War and the War on Terror, and at the same time to comment on current events. I invite you along on this journey of the heart and mind and soul.

It will involve going through a serious of investigations of articles and quotes and passages from books combined with analogies and illustrations I have created in the past decade or so. It will involve changing a lot of unorganized material into what I hope will be cogent arguments.

In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he pointed out the difference between what can be called bricolage, an assemblage of things gathered together without apparent relationships to each other, and an organic whole, where everything fits and speaks of meanings greater than itself. The crowd at the beach on a hot day is a bricolage, just a jumble of people and items; a football game is an organic whole. The organic whole is special, because it has known (or discoverable) inter-relationships between items, and it shows where the gaps in knowledge are, just as you know when there are too few players from your team on the field, and you start yelling for the punter, or for the offensive right guard to get on to the field. You know what’s missing, what to look for. You know when to cheer.

The best example I know is the invention of the Periodic Chart of the Elements, which explained not only what science knew about the elements it was familiar with, but it also put them into incredibly significant patterns, and it thus also showed that there were unknown elements and exactly what their characteristics would be. This set off a successful search for the elements to fit into the “gaps”, and it also gave a fundamentally straightforward method of dealing with what had seemed a huge pile of disparate, complicated facts. Serious Chemistry was born.

In much the same way, though it may be only at a personal level, a blog gives people the chance to take their mentally jumbled bricolage of thoughts, acquired over a lifetime, and to form an organic whole of them, a cohesive, extended body of thought over time. Moreover, it may help to point out the geography and genealogy of the “gaps” and give a great idea of what kind of answers can be found to “fit” into them.

This is my blog, and I intend to use it.

UPDATE: 040707 I have used a better word for the assemblage of items: bricolage.

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Consider this: What if, especially from the 1960s onward to the present, people of various groups had planned to destroy America, and to replace it with a Leftist totalitarian government for the United States that would be built along the lines of the Leftist governments of the world? If, separately in little enclaves and together in groups of various sizes, working mostly independently from each other but with the same goals in mind, they had developed methods and arguments and “solutions” to problems that were deliberately planned to reduce the United States to a dysfunctional, victim-based, class-warfare society. This society would have its own built-in “devils”—the rich, businessmen, the far right, the religious right, the military, conservatives of every kind, people who compete and achieve, and so on—and its own built-in “saviors”—the liberals, the social engineers, the left media, the activist left wing groups, and so on—and its own built-in special interest left wing groups to receive the benefits of the saviors.

This society would have education practices that taught children that morality and truth were relative, that they should be tolerant of everybody and everything—except the “devils,” of course, like conservatives, etc. They would be taught that sex was recreational, that business and competition and excellence were bad, and that good intentions—those motives sanctioned by the “saviors” and their followers, of course—excused anything. They would be taught that poverty caused crime, that anyone would riot and burn and loot if they were “deprived,” that all problems should be solved by the federal government, that everything anyone wants to be or to have or to do is, as long as it is a politically correct behavior or entitlement, to be considered a “right,” and so on.

This society would look remarkably like the one we have now. Consider the possibility that there is something fundamental to the Left wing that brings with it the society just described. Consider the possibility that much of what has happened to create this dysfunctional society has been a deliberate, carefully thought out and a developed set of activities and strategies by some of the leaders in the Left wing.

What if such things as: a high unmarried birth rate; broken families lacking basic Judeo-Christian values; badly educated people; polarized special interest, ethnic and racial groups; explosive cities filled with rebellion; dangerous schools; and so on—instead of being unintended bad results of well-intentioned reforms, were instead the inevitable and desired results of specific policies of the left wing? What if these were planned results, along with the other intentional policies leaning to multiculturalism, political correctness, activist judiciaries, identity politics, and so on. What if these policies and actions were helped along by well-intentioned people who had the best of motives and didn’t understand that the ideas they were following were set up to drive the United States into a dysfunctional society of a form that would allow for a “take-over” by Leftist forces, who would then drive the country into a fully Leftist state?

Many of those who set the policies for the reforms for the last thirty years cannot claim that they didn’t foresee the bad changes that would come from them—because there exists a body of writings that predicted the very results we have had, and why. They cannot claim that these policies sprang up self-generated each year out of that year’s need—because in order to have gotten to the stage they are in today, they had to build from roots sowed long ago, roots discussed in writing throughout the 20th Century by those who said that they meant to socialize the United States. They cannot claim that this was done by others, for the leadership now in the universities, in Leftist public interest groups, in Leftist mayoral governments in most large cities, the vast majority of those who work in the news and the entertainment media, and the Leftists in power in Washington, are those who grew up during the sixties and seventies and followed the philosophy in those writings that set out the methods to achieve a Leftist society.

They have achieved positions of power in those aspects of society that teach, disseminate information, provide the myths and images to follow, legislate, and control the factions in the inner cities, on campuses, and in so-called fringe groups. Many of those who claim to be trying to find solutions are actually developing policy along pre-determined lines and fomenting discord as part of their overall strategy. Their goal is a government that controls every aspect of life, from cradle to grave. This control eventually approaches that of the totalitarian state that determines everything. I am not saying that everyone who is Left wing is deliberately trying to destroy America. With some it is an attempt to achieve honorable goals, but they cannot see that the underlying beliefs they are following are disastrous for America. The problem is, whether deliberately or not, the Left’s fundamental beliefs demand that they proceed this way.

This doesn’t mean that all Liberals act deliberately to destroy America.

I am not talking about a vast conspiracy. In order to see how these activities can be organized and maintained over time, without everyone in it being part of “a conspiracy”, let’s look in on a group of people who are making a traffic plan for a city.

They take measurements and determine the number of cars that go by each spot in the city. They draw a grid, and plot the various things they have to control: streetlights, traffic lights, turning lanes and permission to turn at intersections, passing lanes, one-way streets, parking patterns and parking meters in some places, parking lot space designation, and so on. When they are done, the city runs well, traffic flows, people come into the city to work and to do their shopping, to see theaters and restaurants—to do all the things people do in a city. The planners are happy. Later, as the city grows, the planners, and new planners, modify the plan to accommodate the new patterns, the new businesses. As the city continues to grow, those planners who come later build upon the traffic plan of those who originally set forth the basic pattern that was designed to allow for growth. The city runs efficiently, and is an asset to the area.

This is the way it is supposed to work.

A Fable—Or Something

But let’s make up a fable about these traffic controllers. What if the planners—say, three people at the beginning of the basic traffic plan, in a smallish city, just happen to be the followers of an odd philosophy that one of them likes, “Noredmeatortheaterpetism”, a philosophy that dictates that they (i) refuse to eat meat; (ii) dislike the color red; (iii) hate the theater because it is isn’t “reality”; (iv) believe that animals should always be free and therefore that they should never be pets; and, (v) believe that shoes and the color green are essential to the soul.

They also have ideas that tell them that a city is a place where society can be molded into perfection. This leads them to see the traffic regulation committee is actually a wonderful opportunity to put their ideas into practice. The only problem they foresee is that other people don’t necessarily follow their philosophy, so they don’t talk about what they’re going to do. They just decide to help out the city and mankind, knowing in their hearts that they themselves are wonderful, caring people. They speak with the highest of motivations about everything they do.

They carefully design a traffic plan that incorporates their beliefs. Because they think that one of the most vicious things people can do is to own animals as pets, they carefully design the traffic grid to make it hard for people to turn into a street that has a pet store in it. People have to go around several blocks if they want to park near the pet store. Since this is bothersome, people go to pet stores in the suburbs. The traffic planners put costly parking meters on the streets nearby, and they make the street in front of the pet store into “no parking” street during several periods of the day. This hurts the pet store even more, and the owner moves it out of town.

The planners use the same kind of techniques on every street, helping some businesses and hindering others. Along with the pet stores, red signs, butcher shops and non-vegetarian restaurants, and theaters slowly lose business and move out of town. On the other hand, shoe stores, green signs, and vegetarian restaurants thrive, with large free parking, great traffic patterns, and so forth—making it a joy to shop in their stores, or dine in their restaurants.

As the pet stores, theaters, non-vegetarian restaurants and “red”-lovers move out of their shops, friends of the traffic planners, who belong to the same philosophical society, learn of the possibilities and move into these emptying shops with their own—“proper”—businesses. Traffic patterns are slowly changed for them. But they do not think that this is unfair, because they know that their philosophy is the true one, and they want to help humanity.

Slowly, over a period of years, the city starts to look the way they want it to. They never explicitly state their beliefs, or the fact that they are using the traffic regulation plan to achieve them. They believe that they are acting for the best of society. They have excellent self-defined intentions.

During this time, they also spread their philosophy, gaining converts in other cities. They also send traffic controllers—that they have trained—out into the country to become controllers for other cities. Other cities start looking “perfect” too.

The plan is perpetuated because the originators recognize that they will not always be in control, and they seek out others who believe the same way that they do. They also educate some people who do not feel as they do into thinking that it is good for the city to only have vegetarian restaurants, and no theaters, and so on. The new planners who come up modify the traffic plans—for the city is growing and changing—but they keep to the philosophy of those who originated the plan. For some of the new planners, it is a matter of philosophy, a philosophy of cities that they agree with. For others, who don’t know what philosophy is being followed, the plan, since it exists, is followed as a blueprint for the growth. Both of these groups of planners are following the kind of philosophical ideas that lived in the hearts of the originators of the plan; some of the new planners know they are following a philosophy, and others do not—but in both cases, the traffic plan is modified over time to look like the original guide.

Because after several years there are no more pet stores, non-vegetarian restaurants, red signs, or theaters in most cities, these establishments take on the aura of the richer suburbs, and people in the cities start to insult those who are customers of these “rich people’s shops.” Red becomes a “suburban color,” green a “people’s color.” Sociologists and psychologists write papers on how the color green and shoes bring pride to people, while the color red and pets signify selfishness and mean-spiritedness. Theories about why “real people” don’t like meat, red, theaters, and pets abound. Movements start, with supporters on both sides of the issues. Reform movements start, reactionaries form, and there is a great upheaval in the country.

A few revolutionaries who have examined history and thought about it all try to explain that the problems started when some people got control of the city traffic department. Immediately these revolutionaries are accused of trying to blame societies ills on street lights, when it is obvious that they are just friends of those rotten meat-eating, theater-going, pet-loving red-wearers. How absurd it is to think that traffic lights can somehow control people’s choice to wear green shoes! (Some university students, going after doctorates, write learned papers on how traffic lights themselves are probably evil, putting red higher above green—while others, forming a group that decries the idea that things that are put higher by a society are better, write equally learned papers showing that hierarchies are themselves evil, and anyone can see that anyways red means stop and green means go and therefore green is the active energy in humankind and red is the negative, evil one, thus proving again that the societal ideas about red (bad) and green (good) are correct. They run out and paint every red thing they see a rather startling shade of green. A new group—the yellowists—forms, preaching calm and compromise.)

The scene closes on three sets of placard-holding picketers shouting vicious insults at each other, and Congress forming a committee to look into urban underground theater movements.

Gee, I Wonder What the Fable Means . . .

Okay, I went a little overboard.

But—maybe I didn’t, now that I think about it. People who believe strongly in a philosophy often try to put it into action. They just know that most of them want only the best for the world. They seem to think that caring about people is qualification enough to take whatever action their philosophy requires—believing that even if it hurts individual persons, The People will be helped.

However, if they are wrong about the nature of their beliefs, if what they are actually doing is harmful to society—or harmful to a particular society, like America—then they are harming society despite their "good intentions". Or let me put it this way: if your actions are going to hurt individual persons—as opposed to that wonderful group known as The People—then you had better be sure that your philosophy is based on ideas that will work. This is like the way that doctors can only justify the pain involved with, say, the treatment for rabies or chemotherapy for cancer, because they are based on good, sound theory and they work in reality.

It is precisely this last little snag in the whole thing that causes the problem. Both the theory and the reality must work. A theory so beautiful it can bring tears of joy to the eyes of a statue does not necessarily have any relation to something that is going to actually work with real, individual human beings.

There is not necessarily direct relationships between intentions and actions, between philosophy and reality. A person may intend to delight a child, and decide to give it a chocolate candy bar. But if the child has diabetes, the child may be harmed, despite the wonderful intentions of the adult. Another person might determine that the child has diabetes, and give the child a moment of pain with a hypodermic of insulin. This second adult’s intentions are just as well-intended as the first, but because the second adult correctly assesses the child’s condition, the interaction has helped the child. This makes taking an action a tricky thing, and definitely not measurable by whether the recipient—in this case the child—is happy or unhappy about the action at the moment, or whether the motivation behind the action is noble.

Likewise, a few people who believe that making an animal into a pet is harmful to society may be harming society themselves if they are officials and are wrong in their beliefs, however well intentioned they are. This means that, in our traffic example, if they set up a traffic plan to injure some businesses and organizations and to help others based on their false beliefs, they will be creating a situation that is harmful to society.

Moreover, in trying to maintain the underpinnings of their design, they may perpetuate something that is harmful to society. Of course, they do not view it that way. They view their control as a way to implement their beliefs in society, instead of viewing the job of traffic control to have been a way to maximize the functioning of the city, the way it should be

Please note that although this is a traffic plan, the philosophical ideas were aimed at the city—and finally at the people in the city—not at the traffic. The traffic was used as a tool to socially engineer the city and the people. So if someone looked at the traffic pattern, they might not notice that it was being used as a tool to achieve a social belief. It would be just a traffic pattern.

The only way that things will deviate over time from the original philosophy is if there comes up a new group of people with new ideas and and awareness of what was happening. And with this major realization of how the philosophy of cities works, and the effects of traffic on that philosophy, this group of people deliberately and directly act on that insight to change the traffic patterns, to go out and invite pet shops and meat-serving restaurants, and so on.

Just as when our fabled revolutionaries pointed to the beginning of the trouble as being the time the traffic controllers got into power, it is wrong to say that they are claiming that traffic patterns make people hate pets, or parking lots force people to build theaters only for themselves and their rich neighbors. It is the philosophical ideas of the people who happened to use traffic control as a tool for their social engineering that are under attack. When I say that the social problems that envelop us so desperately today started their greatest driving force in the 1960s with the programs to help the poor and other minority groups, we are not blaming the poor or other minority groups for society’s problems. It is the philosophical ideas of the people in the 1960s, who read Leftist ideological books, to blame—the ideas that led them to use certain programs to help the poor and other minorities as the tools to achieve the kind of society they wanted.

Inside of a designing plan is a Design. That design is planned for a reason. That reason does not have to be the thing designed, which may only be a tool to achieve a higher agenda. By designing an institution or a set of rules and regulations to achieve a given end that may be quite different from the aims and purpose of the institution, people with a belief can engineer their beliefs into actuality. By recruiting people who believe as they do or who can be trained to believe as they do, they can perpetuate the system.

As I will say in many ways throughout my blog posts, I believe that this has happened throughout the United States. I believe that the Left—that is secular collectivists—have acted just like my hypothetical traffic controllers.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, The Virtuous Republic, Perri Nelson's Website, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, The Random Yak, Adam's Blog, Maggie's Notebook, basil's blog, The Pet Haven Blog, The Amboy Times, Leaning Straight Up, Cao's Blog, The Bullwinkle Blog, Conservative Cat, Conservative Thoughts, Pursuing Holiness, third world county, stikNstein... has no mercy, stikNstein... has no mercy, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, Blue Star Chronicles, Planck's Constant, The Pink Flamingo, CORSARI D'ITALIA, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.