Friend to Billy Beck comes up with an interesting quote this morning
“All of this convinced [him] that the technology industrialization had made possible — automobiles, movies, radio, mass-circulation magazines, the advertising that paid for them — was creating an exaggerated desire for privacy. It was making an English upper-class evil a vice of American society. It was, ‘the sad climax of individualism, the blind-alley of a generation which had forgotten how to think or live collectively, of a people whose private lives were so brittle, so insecure that they dared not subject them to the slightest social contact with the casual stranger, of people who felt neither curiosity nor responsibility for the mass of those who shared their community life and their community problems.'”
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Can you see the general ethic?
Guess who.
Answer in comments.
And in the comments as promised he reveals the origin of the quote, and adds a thought or two:
George Kennan in 1938.
This makes perfect sense, to me, when I consider Soviet “containment”.
Kennan was a moral coward. He didn’t have the spine to come out for the Soviets, he certainly was not going to fully condemn them, and containment was the original “Third Way”.
I tell him:
Billy Beck you suggest that he was arguing for the Soviets, albeit limp wristedly. Not knowing much about the man I’ll take your word for it but it strikes me that the ethic he’s arguing for could just as easily have been the Nazis. Given the time frame of the quote it works just as well because so much of their ethic was precisely the same. And then, over on the edge of the map is Spain at the time. So many social political evolutionary cul-de-sacs to choose from, from that time that his comments mesh with rather nicely.
The sad part is, it also meshes rather well with the Democrat party here in the states, today.
There’s a prediction in there, somewhere…
…
And that is the reality of the situation. Every one of those offshoots of socialism including what the Democrats of the United States espouse today attempt to limit if not eliminate the rugged individualism of this nation was founded upon.
As I told billy, there is a prediction in there. I am increasingly persuaded that the Democrat party will fail in its attempt to make socialists of us. The question then becomes, will we allow them to drag us down with them?
