Note: My Taki post is lost in the celebration of Juneteenth. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for those who are in need of audio stimulation. If you need even more audio stimulation, then there is this from the weekend. I was very active over the weekend, so there is this bonus post behind the green door.
The terms Left and Right have been ubiquitous in Western public discourse for so long people just assume they are universal constants. The fact is though, they are neither universal nor constant. There is no African Right or Burmese Left. These cultures have not been shaped by the French Revolution. Similarly, what it means to be on the Right or Left has changed over time. Today’s left-wing American genuinely detests yesterday’s left wing American, who is probably on the Right today.
There is not much in the way of ideology on either side. There has not been an important thinker on either side in a long time. The last important radical thinker was probably Herbert Marcuse or perhaps John Rawls. On the Right, Paul Gottfried and Sam Francis are recent, but their influence is only on the fringe. The main driver of politics is the Left and they are wildly ignorant of the intellectual history that shapes left-wing politics today.
In the main, people divide up over history. What controls the American Left is the sense that the past is littered with monsters. These monsters are things like slavery, discrimination, morality, decency and so forth. The fact that these things have existed means they could exist again. The practical effect of something like slavery, for example, is zero, but the possibility it could return shapes the present. These monsters haunt the dense fog that is the left-wing mental space.
This is why the Left maintains all of its focus on the future, a place that is free of those monsters like inequality and human suffering. It is a secular Gnosticism in which a mystical and esoteric understanding of what lies at the end of history justifies the assault on the present. The monsters of the past haunt this fallen world and the only way out is to destroy this world thus freeing mankind from its grip and allowing man to move into the next phase of human history.
On the other side of this is the Right. They share the Left’s disdain for the present, but for entirely different reasons. They see the present as a degraded version of some past they hold up as the ideal. To be on the Right is to consume yourself with discovering forgotten kingdoms and then imagining yourself in them. Just as the future is an escape for the man of the Left, the past is a refuge for the man of the Right. The difference is his escape is much more detailed and appointed.
It is on the Right where you see the immutable differences between American and European politics. In Europe, the man of the Right can embrace ancient social structures like pre-Christian paganism and tribalism. He can embrace the aristocratic age of the high Middle Ages. These are not pasts that an American can conjure as they do not exist in the American past. The one shared alternative is the period of the interwar years but that brings unique problems.
For Americans, the most popular past is the Founding. Throughout the 20th century, right-wing Americans have said some version of, “If we just return to our founding principles everything will be fine.” Even at this late date there is an effort to conjure the 18th century colonial experience into the present. Implementations of this have been a desire to return to the America of the 1950’s or the 1980’s. In both cases, it is a desire to go back before the start of the present troubles.
This difference between Left and Right explains the difference in tangible results over the last century. Left-wing activity can move forward. Time marches on regardless of human desire, so the illusion of progress is easy to maintain. It just requires the destruction of present customs and traditions. The image of a toppled statue provides the left-wing mind with s symbolic step toward the promised land, which in turn provides a motivation to keep moving forward.
The Right has the insurmountable problem of time. There is no way to go back in time to start over. Time only moves forward. This physical reality that provides the Left with hope provides the Right with dread. Every day they move further from their desired spot in the past, suggesting it will never be attained. This despair results in a stubborn defense of the present, not because of its superiority to the proposed future, but for its vantage point into the desired past.
The reason modern conservatism is stuck in 1985 is because that was the last good viewing point for 1955. Of course, that was the last good viewing point for 1925 and so on into the founding period. Similarly, for many on the European Right, the interwar years were the last high ground to see the fading aristocratic order. For the Right, history is a series of signal fires leading back to a romanticized ideal order where Western man could fully express his nature.
While the Left has the advantage of time, they are increasingly haunted by the fact they are running out of it. The old Marxist framing said that once economic relations were solved, political relations would be solved. That proved to be both impossible and incorrect, so they moved up to the institutions. Once they controlled those, they would guide society into the future. That led to the seizing of the culture. By controlling the means of cultural production, they can build the desired future.
Of course, the reality of the human condition is once again unravelling these plans for the great temporal leap. The only thing that remains is something like a rapture in which the political elect is taken off this fallen world into the promised land, leaving the rest of humanity behind. One reason the Left sounds increasingly like a UFO cult is they are sure the end times are approaching. They cannot articulate it, by they sense the hour is short and the great finale will happen any minute.
The Right is not prepared to make the leap into the abys but they are also haunted by the prospect of time. In their case, it is the reality that is too late to defend the present from the ravages of the Left. There is nothing left to defend. The last bridges to the past have been severed. Like survivors on a lifeboat, the Right is terrified by the prospect of floating along for eternity in a sea of nothingness. For the Right, hell is the eternal present, cut off from the past.
Perhaps this signals the final denouement of the cycle that began with the French Revolution and ushered in ideological politics. The dream of the glorious future will die with the dreams of a return to the glorious past. Politics will lose its sacredness and return to being the struggle over practical things. The sacred and the profane will return to the sphere outside of earthly demands. The sacred will produce moral men to debate the practical, rather than practical men to debate morality.
On the other hand, maybe the West is simply out of time. The long cycle that began in the high Middle Ages has run its course. The people will remain but what defines them, that old Western tradition, including its messianic claims, will fade away, slowly replaced by something not yet born. The West is now a death row inmate waiting execution, terrified of both the future and the past. The former for obvious reasons and the past because it is what brought him to this point.
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Actually, the Left can and does articulate the End Times. All the time, in fact. It’s the “climate crisis” that will wipe humanity from the face of the Earth within 10 years if everyone doesn’t go woke.
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Exactly. The one common driving force the Left still has is apocalypse due to “X.” The causes of the End Times have to change more frequently due to instantaneous digital communications so it is hard to keep up with what will soon end the world but the cause is irrelevant because you care.
The Right now exists, to paraphrase the Dabney quote Z frequently cites, to prove it is good because it also rejects that bad thing it cannot recall.
All modern politics will become tribal because the “Who? Whom?” thing was correct albeit for the wrong reason.
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Zman, this piece is one of your best, if not THE best. Thoughtful and concise, with a powerful main image (the specter of Time) and several powerful subsidiary ones (the death row inmate, the leftist’s past being full of monsters). I take it these reflections will play a prominent role in your book, or have developed as you were writing it. Well done. As the title indicates, this is an eschatology for our age.
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The right seems to be completely oblivious to how technological changes have completely changed the game. While the left has fully embraced warping public discourse in social media through mass bannings and bot swarms (while accusing everyone on the right of being a Russian bot), the right is still stuck in the “public square” debate.
The influx of technology has also made manipulating procedural outcomes far more streamlined as decentralized organizations can communicate with massive efficiency to ensure that no rioters will see jail time. It also allows puppet-masters in the shadows to get much more fluidity of movement with instant communication.
The biggest is technological strength, by far, manipulating financial apparatus though. A large part of the wokeness foisted on corporations is due to huge investment firms promoting DIE initiatives, to the extent they will only invest in organizations who bend the knee to social justice causes. Groups like Blackrock don’t , in any stretch of the imagination, work in the free market, as they are tied in the hip to the Federal Reserve and get sweetheart deals based on their contacts. It’s to the point where these firms are more powerful than our own government, and if our financial elite went hard fascist, our government and most major companies would be posting swastikas before the end of the week.
With the dawn of technology, there’s no reason why every average Joe with good credit should not be able to borrow money from the Federal Reserve at the same rate banks and investment firms do. At one point this would be infeasible, but not anymore. This would crush Big Finance in one fell swoop.
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nah, the people running corporations are just as woke as the gender studies majors. they love being able to focus on bullshit social initiatives, instead of making a profit.
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“woke” corporations are perfect evidence of the merchants sign in a street window professing fealty to the current regime. they say or confess whatever is necessary to keep the shekels coming.
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The problem for both the left and the right is the enlightenment and liberalism as a broad concept.
They led to the pseudo religious belief that human perfection and utopia could be achieved by liberating people from restraints that were benighting them and the sources of all evil and misery.
In the 18th century the most obvious restraints were monarchy and aristocracy. Eliminating those are the founding myth of Americans. Europe followed suit in the 19th century. The limitation of those restraints failed to lead to perfection or utopia so next set of restraints had to be removed. Which failed to create utopia so it was on to the next. Setting up a cycle of “permanent revolution”, an unending quest to finally get it right. Marxism was just one phase in that quest.
Fast forward to,today, and the remaining restraints to human perfection are biological reality. Hence the obsession with transgenderism – the ability of people to become whatever they will. Which will fail and lead to the next step. Which will be even more insane. Nihilism is the left’s ultimate destination – one they are rapidly approaching.
The problem with the American right is that it too is liberal. Embracing the enlightenment-liberal project. It just rejects the more recent reality denying phases of liberalism. And imagines that if only society could reset to 1790 or 1850 or 1910 or 1960 that those conditions could be maintained over the long hall. They fail to realize that those were just points on the road that got us here and going back to them, without rejecting the enlightenment foundation, will lead right back to the same place we are now.
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In the 18th century the most obvious restraints were monarchy and aristocracy. Eliminating those are the founding myth of Americans.
That’s an incorrect, latter-day assumption. The issue was George III personally, as an ignoble tyrant. The Yankees viewed the enlightenment concept of democracy favorably but that didn’t eliminate a monarch if his qualities were amenable to their line of thinking. The elite of that era contemplated making Washington a king. There was also an aristocracy, the elite with powdered wigs and buckled shoes, whose fashions eventually changed but were never themselves eliminated. The Bostonian Puritan elite led the American Revolution, with more somber garb, but their ideas never went completely out of style. They were the same kill-joys that made up Cromwell’s New Model Army and maintained a pogrom against Catholicism that lasted 300 years and a culture that denied the institution of Christmas and drinking on Sundays until yesterday. They were perfectly happy to kill every native American if it meant a few more acres to grow some tobacco.
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There was no great revulsion of the concept of an “aristocracy” among the Founders as you make clear. They were however of the mind that aristocracy by “dint of birth”, was dangerous—if not absurd. I believe it was Jefferson that talked of a “natural” aristocracy forming from the people in his writings.
As a proponent of HBD science, I have no problem with this concept. Indeed, in that respect, the Founder were prescient.
the only thing i would add to your essay, is that the Right has been extinguished by the Left. the latter’s comprehensive take over of society has starved the Right of whatever sustains a political movement. we have people who call themselves “conservative” (a synonym for Right) but in fact are of the Left and merely wear the Right as a skin suit. I would posit that the Left, being a parasitical organism, sealed its own fate when it killed off the host it was dependent upon.
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I wonder if some historian in the distant future will be studying the Fall of the West and come across Z’s essays. They will help explain much.
I was a history major and still enjoying reading history and historical fiction when time allows. Currently reading a Harry Siddebottom novel (Iron & Rust). It had already struck me how often the characters in the late Roman Empire kept looking back on the “better times” of Marcus Aurelius or the heroes of the Republic like Scipio and Cincinnatus. The Romans themselves by then were far into the stage of wealth and decadence while also barely able maintain their frontiers against “barbarians” and enemies on all sides.
What few of those 3rd Century Romans were doing was looking at a brighter future instead if just trying to hang on to what they had.
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Honestly think 95%+ percent of electronic media will be lost to the wind within 20-30 years, even if they still exist in bytes somewhere. There’s just such an influx of useless data it will be impossible to make heads or tails of what is actually useful information.
Books will likely be the only media that withstand the test of time.
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I’d like to think so but I have the feeling that the NYT, MSNBC and the other propaganda arms of Globohomo will be speaking of us to our descendents. I am convinced they have already done so for the people in the times leading up to and concluding with the WW2 years.
In my darkest thoughts, I sometimes wonder if the right guys won that conflict…
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Back in the day, Spengler over at the Asia Times was fond of saying: “It’s not the end of the world – it’s just the end of you.”
The world will recover nicely once the twisted monster that the West has become sinks into irrelevance.
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The Left has been on a “long march through the institutions” for a long time, with their dreams of ending inequality, racism, discrimination, oppression and borders.
Now we’re here, they’ve crossed the finish line, where they control essentially all of the institutions, and they get to see those dreams become reality. Dreams that are turning out to be nightmares.
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They passed that line decades back just the media slicing of culture meant most people never even noticed when it happened.
We are now in “The sequel: perpetual demonic revolution”.
This is an essay worthy of Gottfried or Francis. Well done and thanks.
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“The terms Left and Right have been ubiquitous in Western public discourse for so long people just assume they are universal constants. The fact is though, they are neither universal nor constant….”
Sure they are. You even say so further on in your article. What’s happened is that we now have a political ‘up’ and ‘down’, and a ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ (call it the Z Axis, if you will). You can’t accurately impose a three dimensional model on a two dimensional one without distorting both. But that is just semantics.
Agreed that the left thinks for the future. The most forward thinking conservatives are stocking popcorn, food and ammo, thinking that will make them immune to what’s coming. Or they think that moving out to the country and starting a garden will do it. The left is drawing up retribution lists, sites for the death camps, they’ve picked out their expendable cannon fodder, their political officers for the new managerial class and setting up their next grift.
1980? 1955? Shoot, man… the way things are now…? I’d like to go back to 1936! The new Messerschmidts were in the air, Jewish perverts were getting beat down in the streets, and corrupt politicians and judges were being dragged off and disappearing in the middle of the night, and Fwance and Britain had be told to FOAD, and national pride could be found in every beautiful country tavern along the backroads…
*Ahem*
The sun on the meadow is summery warm
The stag in the forest runs free
But gathered together we’ll meet the storm
Tomorrow Belongs To Me..
🙂
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Let’s not forget how the story that song came from turned out.
An incisive essay and Zman treasure trove of quotable statements. Here’s just one:
…The only thing that remains is something like a rapture in which the political elect is taken off this fallen world into the promised land, leaving the rest of humanity behind…
To which I say: God haste the day when the political elect – left & right – are raptured to the place they merit.
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Let us reminisce over the variety of End of Time/World kooks/liars/heretics.
Not long ago it was Harold Camping (2011) as another heretic crook showing a near repeat of William Miller of 1843/1844 fame. As heretic bookends in Bible world do not forget that even Ronald Reagan believed the Armageddon End Times would occur in his lifetime probably with help from the heretic slob Hal Lindsey who hailed from Dallas Theological Seminary.
Another category no doubt of its own brand is composed of the Paul Ehrlich types with the famine, climate and physical world fearmongering. We should all be dead by now or at least eating Soylent Green for breakfast.
And let us not forget the Andromeda Strain /COVID19 fanatics and the scientific calculations aroma therapy of media/film witch doctors and Ukrainian biowarfare lab junkies.. Turns out perhaps Mike Pompeo and Steve Bannon have more virologist friends than anybody else.
Lately financial collapse is on sale again down at the Left/Right Store. I remember Howard Ruff telling everyone oil was going to be at $100/bl in the 1980s if you could get it. The world was running out of crude and that was a fact. Now there is enough crude in the Orinoco alone to last centuries when blended with other grades also in gigantic amounts all over the Earth.
Perhaps I could interest you in an asteroid collision anxiety as a political centrist? Or… you could go on CNN and speak about the summer of 1816, volcanoes and food riots in Paris as a wealthy electronics slob.
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The Left is ascendant because the parasites are now the dominant cohort of the US population. Decades of printing money in order to purchase the votes of the stupid via welfarism has manufactured a class of dependent deadweight freeloaders that are so utterly useless that they can only survive by continuing to vote for the worst possible person for federal office. This and gerrymandering has guaranteed incumbency for the grifters that now exploit their grip on federal expenditures to enrich themselves by skimming at the margins of trillion dollar budgets. As the junior partner in this criminal enterprise, the Right gets to scrounge for the scraps that are cast off by the Left and otherwise serve as buttboy for their masters. Is this blunt enough for you?
Nothing will change until the environment changes. The Left will grow increasingly more deranged and the Right will scream VOTE HARDER until their vocal cords rip apart. Only the collapse will bring on the hardship necessary to restart evolutionary fitness selection and a return of natural robustness. Or the dementia patient will start a nuclear war with Russia and we will have Armageddon instead.
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The Left looks for Eden in the future; the Right to Eden in the past. Some want to have a chance to obey God and make things right. Others want to eat the fruit and try again to deny God. But the worse want another chance to disobey and crucify God all over again.
All these beliefs are a fallacy as the God man already gave each of us individuals an option to rectify what went wrong in Eden. Then he made a church and that church is here and now physically present in our lives. This continues to be the way forward.
John Hagee wants to roll you a doobie and get you to sign a Texas sized loyalty oath to anti-Christ political Zionism.
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The man upstairs plan may be to destroy Christian Zionism and men like John Hagee. The church has not always been as infested with Zionists.
Part of mankind’s recovery may be both the destruction of progressive Christianity on the left and Zionist Christianity on the right.
Todays choices are that we are allowed to be against neocon wars as long as we favor butt sex.
Or we are allowed to be against butt sex as long as we favor neocon wars.
What if one day we could be both against butt sex and against foreign wars?
And for our people?
The church can still play a role in getting us there.
Christian Zionism and Globalhomo are already self destruction as anti-Christ culture insanity. Perhaps our work is being done for us in these heretic buffets. The godly household should protect their children with the wisdom of separation from the sexual slaughterhouse. As the wicked burn down their own house I’m not calling the fire department.
The hybrid uni-party seen today in regards to the Ukraine situation may have began to splinter. Once you lose the reliable Left at the NYT, it may be a sign of things to come. Or just a slow news day since Biden stayed upright on his bicycle.
Are We Sure America Is Not at War in Ukraine? https://nyti.ms/3y4IMZv
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Elite factions seem to have split. It seems one group of Clouds was delusional enough to believe China would stay on the sidelines while the “West” went to war with Russia. They also seemed to think China would share power with them as a junior partner.
Some time late last year you could see some of the Soros types had soured on the CCP. It never occurred to them that some nations want to preserve their people and cultures. The more realistic among them, essentially the grifters, knew better.
Will they own nothing and be miserable? Don’t discount it.
Maybe simplistic, I believe civilization is in the cities. Can’t speak to Europe, but American cities are long gone. Civilization has been collapsing here for at least 70 years, marked by white flight. It’s only partially acknowledged because somehow people were convinced abandoning the cities was Freedom! and Progress! (Technological advance made it possible, interestingly.) Maybe the destruction of the middle class, more acutely felt with youth, will rip off the blinders and force people to face reality. Akin to hitting bottom and deciding to live as well as you can, or give up and die.
Clinging to civilization is clinging to collapse, now— stubbornly seeking the grave. That sounds dramatic to me, too, but I can’t see it otherwise when people chase the American Dream and things only get worse. Quite a trick somebody pulled.
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What rough beast, it’s hour come round at last, slouches towards America to be born.
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I think it is encouraging to realize that those countries in Europe and Asia that have been the recipients of the left’s tender mercies are the most based in reality. Reality, of course, is a constantly changing thing in politics. Not in nature, but in human social constructs. China went through the Japanese occupation, the Great Leap Forward, and crushing poverty until they began to become “realistic” and started gradually changing Mao’s policies. Russia became the Soviet Union and experienced a nightmare for 80 years under communism, and then another 20 years rebuilding from that mess. The former Soviet Bloc is a mixed bag. Some, like Hungary, are extremely based and opposed to globohomo policies. Poland is very anti-communist, but they rely on globohomo more than they should and want military revenge…..against somebody.
Americans and Western Europeans are the most stubborn about maintaining the current status quo, which changes every 10 minutes. When you become a parody, you don’t see yourself as a parody. You see yourself on the “right side of history”, fully committed to stopping all “injustices” and moving forward into utopia. The only problem with that is you never get to utopia. And the ruling elite like it that way. If everything is 10 years out, like the destruction of the world due to fill-in-the-blank, you have 10 years to rely on the morons forgetting about the last 10 year plan and you can just trot out a new one.
I think that the Russian and Chinese plan to cripple the petrodollar system is the most promising thing in the return to sanity for the West. Western Europe and America have been wealthy by world standards for centuries. Those within those cocoons have been, for the most part, immune to the concerns with surviving that the rest of the world has faced on a daily basis. But, if Russia and China (and India, Iran, and the Muslim world) get their way, the dollar as the reserve currency of the world will go by the wayside, and America will economically collapse. When that happens, Americans will go through a transition that most closely resembles the South following the War of Northern Aggression. However, in spite of the left constantly pulling “the end of the world” out of their asses, the world won’t end for Americans. Yes, people will die, but more will live. It remains to be seen what we will do with those lives.
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The most surprising part has been India’s willingness to change alliances on a dime. Indian social media seemed the most aggressive in calling out the U.S. for their Ukraine rhetoric. The Unites States has been instrumental in their economic progress the past decade but are more than willing to give us the middle finger when their interests direct them elsewhere.
Would be hilarious if the Indians who became woke for social ascendance turned into wreckers against the regime when the U.S. starts trying to flex it’s muscle towards their homeland.
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Like everyone who is not a retarded NPC twat, the Indians have very strong nationalistic views for their homeland.
Try agitating for the destruction of India inside India and you will likely end up on fire or beaten severely.
We need more of that.
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Brilliant piece. Just thinking out loud, but I’ve been sort of kicking around the idea that we’re at the end of the cycle that began with the French Revolution and Bonaparte; the US adopted the Bonapartian mantle of conquest in the name of Enlightnment fictions, and has sought the obliteration of nations that hewed to a more organic creation and evolution thereafter. The South was the first, Imperial Russia followed (Wilson certainly upvoted a lot of Bolsheviks tweets). All that said, Duhmerican cultural hegemony has certainly performed admirably in draining a sense of time/history/tradition from the nations of the West. In this light, GAE’s wars against Confederate monuments and Putin’s Russia make a great deal of sense.
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Zman how open and honest were you with your opinions on Juneteenth for Takimag? I ask because it is 11:11 am EST and they still have not posted your Monday submission. Did they cancel it?
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The Covid-19 debacle has made abundantly clear to me that political labels such as left or right are not real. The real political divide is between those who believe humans must be controlled and those who have no such desire.
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And given the evidence of the last few years what ratio is that coming out at?
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I would say about 80% of our “elite” are in the humans must be controlled camp. This includes 100% of Dems and 50% of Repubs. Only around 40% of the population wants to be controlled. But even that 40% only wants to be controlled because the left is in power. So that drops to maybe 20% of the population that just wants to be controlled regardless, and half of those are black.
Well, that was plenty grim.
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Great Z-man posting, but perhaps I’m not in total agreement/understanding. My reading is that Z-man seems to be saying the past is gone, we can’t go back—a new beginning (unknown) is before us…
I don’t expect to go back to the 50’s of my youth. Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver won’t repeat—if they ever existed. These were myths, even in their time, but as Joseph Campbell tells us in “The Power of Myth”—the myth tells us what a society aspires to, the truth or falsity of the myth is not important.
The values of my youth, that I only can now see and appreciate in my old age, *are timeless*! Those—however imperfectly practiced by imperfect people—we must regain, and this time maintain.
One needs to explain to me how it is wishful/fanciful thinking to return to a societal understanding of the biological nature and therefore roles of women and men? How is it impossible to not promote timeless virtues such as honesty, integrity, self reliance, bravery… Has there ever been a great civilization/society that rose in the recorded past that did not aspire to—and possess—these virtues. Has there ever been one that survived losing these.
No, I want a return to the past—because the (important) past to me is not possessions, comfort, wealth and yes, even technology.
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