‘Liberty’ without the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not the ‘social gospel’, not the ecumenical gospel that the socialist, universalist pope wants, but faith in the substitutional death and resurrection of Jesus for the forgiveness of our personal sins. Repentance and saving faith are necessary for a changed live… one for now and one in eternity.
"Anyone who truly understands human nature knows that our impulse is to make ourselves slaves in one manner or another. Left entirely to our own devices, the isolated individual tends to suffer from a thirst for annihilation, indulging in excess or deprivation of some kind that will bring ruin."
Yes, this is the human condition, the condition of the self. Kierkegaard provides a description and analysis of this condition of despair in the first two pages of "The Sickness Unto Death." It's hard reading, at least the first twenty times, but crystal clear eventually.
The take-away:
Despair is the human condition.
There are three kinds of people.
Those who don't know they are in despair (this is an inauthentic despair).
Those who know they are in despair and want to be someone else.
Those who know they are in despair and commit to being themselves, in despair.
One can and should consider social media in this context of despair, as social media users work out and express their despair.
What is the remedy to despair? There is no full remedy, says Kierkegaard, but a proper relating to the eternal is the balance that one can seek.
>Freedom in the abstract makes for a very stupid god.
Freedom, or liberty, is not a god. It is a modus vivendi principle
>In many progressive cities across the United States, heroin addicts are free to spend their days shooting up while living in the squalor of the homeless encampments that now line urban streets.
This is not an example of freedom. They are being allowed to infringe on everyone else’s freedom by so doing. Private streets would either not tolerate them, or restrict them to places where they were no longer a nuisance to others. Make the drugs legal too and they will become safer and cheaper allowing many of the homeless to move out of circumstances that “virtuous” politics has caused.
>Anyone who truly understands human nature knows that our impulse is to make ourselves slaves in one manner or another.
It seems more plausible that “our impulse is to make [other people our] slaves in one manner or another”, which politics allows. Only libertarians consistently reject this.
>Left entirely to our own devices, the isolated individual tends to suffer from a thirst for annihilation, indulging in excess or deprivation of some kind that will bring ruin.
Maybe some people would behave this way if you put them in solitary confinement. But if they are free to leave then they will seek out others and a flourishing life.
>This tragic understanding of the human condition brought most premodern thinkers to the conclusion that ordered liberty was the ideal but that this state could only be achieved through the cultivation of virtue.
On the contrary, liberty of person and property is what teaches people virtue: to be responsible in their own lives and decent towards others.
>Order is a precondition for community; community is a precondition for virtue; and liberty is the rare and delicate fruit of a society that is virtuous.
Not many people want to live in a real, stifling, community: they prefer the relative anonymity and freedom of city life. Liberty is the pervasive and robust fruit of any society that generally believes in private property rights.
>Americans have been taught to repeat endless slogans about rights and freedoms but very little about the necessity of virtue, and this has created a nation hungry for the fruit of a tree that was left to wither long ago.
Or, rather, so-called “rights and freedoms”. Virtue is “the fruit of a tree” that is libertarian property rights.
>The progressive worldview is utopian, denying man’s tragic nature and assuming that all negative outcomes are the function of a faulty system.
We don’t have a “tragic nature” and “all negative outcomes are the function of a faulty system”: political power.
…
>On the right, the error is more subtle but no less serious. Conservatives and libertarians on the right often view liberty as the ultimate goal
A modus vivendi is never an “ultimate goal”.
>but share confusion about achieving it
That would be by promoting the general acceptance of tolerating people doing what they like with themselves and their property.
>They may debate the state's size and shape, but both believe smaller government bound by constitutional principles is key.
No, anarchy bound by private property rights is the key.
>However, the mistake lies in assuming virtue results from liberty rather than recognizing that liberty can only be enjoyed by a people who have first cultivated a high degree of virtue.
Virtue results from liberty of persons and their property.
>… For Machiavelli, the key factor that made republican government possible was the virtue of the people.
The key factor that will make propertarian anarchy possible is that most people will see that it is a solution to all the problems that politics causes.
>Under a monarchy, the people did not need to practice a high degree of self-discipline. The king acted as a father to the nation, settling disputes and making critical decisions that required foresight and discipline.
He acted as a shepherd looking to preserve his sheep only in order to maximally exploit them for his own ends.
>The king provided order, and that order allowed the people to prosper even if they did not have the character to rule themselves. Order is more necessary for human flourishing than freedom, a lesson often forgotten by those who have always lived under the benefit of stable civilization.
The “order” (subjection) of a “king” (tyrant) will always reduce human flourishing compared with individual private-property freedom.
>In a republic, the people have significant input into the state's operation,
The iron law of oligarchy would appear to imply that this is a fantasy: mere propaganda put out to allay a restless populace.
>unlike a monarchy where a king makes decisions. If the citizens lack strength or seriousness, they will demand benefits from the state that they can't secure themselves.
That states can do this is their main proud boast and claim to legitimacy. But it is bogus. The “benefits” are an ever-spiralling round of socially destructive privileges.
>An ideal republic features a small government because its people are united by a shared moral vision that fosters virtue. The founding fathers understood this, as John Adams famously stated, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” While any nation can establish a republic, maintaining it requires dedication to both self-governance and self-discipline.
It is inherent to all politics to promote interference with others and self-indulgence.
>Ordered liberty is not the freedom to pursue every base desire
As long as that is at your own expense, it need not impede ordered liberty.
>but the ability to pursue virtue within a shared understanding of the good.
Beyond tolerance of propertarian liberty, “a shared understanding of the good” is neither necessary nor possible.
>Machiavelli agreed with Aristotle that virtue requires community. The individual does not achieve virtue in isolation but must exercise it by pursuing the good in relation to friends, family, religion, and business.
Virtue requires mainly tolerance of propertarian liberty; no community, “friends, family, religion, and business” are necessarily involved.
>Without order, we cannot have community or understand our role within it. Order is a precondition for community; community is a precondition for virtue; and liberty is the rare and delicate fruit of a society that is virtuous.
This all sounds sillier the more it is repeated.
>Machiavelli recognized the necessity of virtue in a republic, but his reputation as a ruthless political realist is well earned. He understood that establishing order often required a leader to commit morally questionable acts.
Establishing order for the benefit of the state or oligarchs will require this; not for the benefit of sovereign individuals.
>This is why republics, such as ancient Rome, are often born out of monarchies where order has been well established and community allowed virtue to flourish. The United States itself emerged from a monarchy that established order in a new land, enabling its people, who had obtained a level of virtue, to achieve liberty through self-governance.
A very modest amount of liberty with only governance by oligarchs.
>While the American people still possess an undeniable capacity for greatness, it would be difficult to describe the nation’s current state as virtuous. Progressive activists have successfully driven Christianity from the public square, replacing it with a hedonistic and secular faith.
Which would be no problem as long as propertarian liberty were tolerated—but it increasingly isn’t.
>This collapse of public and private morality complicates the restoration of a shared identity founded on a liberty that the people are no longer capable of maintaining.
To the limited degree that they ever had such liberty.
>Decadent societies often become subject to Caesarism because they lose the ability to maintain order, reverting to the status of children who must once again be governed by a father.
An enlightened despot might be preferable to an ever-growing state. But that ever-growing state is the proximate problem, not “decadent societies”.
>I find it unlikely that the United States will collectively return to republican self-governance. Many Americans have abandoned the values and shared identity that once defined the country. Additionally, our ruling elite have deliberately imported populations entirely alien to that tradition. However, if we are to move forward, it will begin with organic communities of faithful and hardworking Americans who continue to cultivate virtue. Small government limited by a constitution is not the means to liberty, but the hard-won prize of a community that has already learned to rule itself through virtue.
The best hope for a way forward is as much privatisation as possible. Especially of law and order so that people can pay to protect themselves or change their suppliers. They especially need protection from people who want to enforce “virtue” on them.
I'm not having at it but "freedom" is ambiguous. Liberals define it as "freedom from government encroachment" which is only slightly less ambiguous. That you disagree with their example of freedom because of an indirect consequence is really the proof in the pudding.
>I'm not having at it but "freedom" is ambiguous. Liberals define it as "freedom from government encroachment"
“Liberals” or libertarians? Where? If they have no real theory then some sort of a definition may have to do. However, this “definition” includes the very word that is to be defined. It is equivalent to “X” is “X from government encroachment”. At best, it relies upon a tacit grasp of the very thing that is to be explained. In any case, the government is not the only violator of liberty.
> which is only slightly less ambiguous.
It is completely opaque.
>That you disagree with their example of freedom because of an indirect consequence
You’ve lost me.
> is really the proof in the pudding.
The expression is, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”. Although how this is relevant is, again, hard to fathom.
I think scholars are a bit better at not forcing themselves to see trees instead of the forest. It is liberals and you being lost and pretending to not know the phrase as it was said is just a product of you being egocentric. The world doesn't revolve around you and any Christian should know that although you don't really sound Christian tbh.
Philosophy is about seeing fundamental problems, questions, and confusions that are normally not seen. Sometimes they are still not seen even after being explained. People often prefer their comfortable prejudices to critical thinking.
May I ask - how is this different from what the managerial order supporters are trying to achieve? Wouldn’t it be the case once they achieve near 100% virtue as defined by their own metrics (global outlook, no difference between men and women, no difference between cultures, all ready to believe all marketing and hype, and trusting whatever their managerial ‘expert’ rulers say) then they too could have a smaller state which they would consider a privilege which has been earned by the populations learning to control themselves under *their* shared idea of what constitutes the virtuous?
"However, the mistake lies in assuming virtue results from liberty rather than recognizing that liberty can only be enjoyed by a people who have first cultivated a high degree of virtue."
Liberty itself isn't an actual thing. It's simply only virtue.
You: liberty without virtue leads to ruin
Me: quality of liberty is inherent in the quality of virtues you hold
‘Liberty’ without the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not the ‘social gospel’, not the ecumenical gospel that the socialist, universalist pope wants, but faith in the substitutional death and resurrection of Jesus for the forgiveness of our personal sins. Repentance and saving faith are necessary for a changed live… one for now and one in eternity.
High Entropy/Low Entropy, Chaos/Order. One state takes energy to maintain, the other is the dissipation of energy. True freedom is discipline.
"Anyone who truly understands human nature knows that our impulse is to make ourselves slaves in one manner or another. Left entirely to our own devices, the isolated individual tends to suffer from a thirst for annihilation, indulging in excess or deprivation of some kind that will bring ruin."
Yes, this is the human condition, the condition of the self. Kierkegaard provides a description and analysis of this condition of despair in the first two pages of "The Sickness Unto Death." It's hard reading, at least the first twenty times, but crystal clear eventually.
The take-away:
Despair is the human condition.
There are three kinds of people.
Those who don't know they are in despair (this is an inauthentic despair).
Those who know they are in despair and want to be someone else.
Those who know they are in despair and commit to being themselves, in despair.
One can and should consider social media in this context of despair, as social media users work out and express their despair.
What is the remedy to despair? There is no full remedy, says Kierkegaard, but a proper relating to the eternal is the balance that one can seek.
And as Wood Allen said, "Kierkegaard was right!"
Absurdism is another avenue - a continuation in thought from Kierkegaard.
>Freedom in the abstract makes for a very stupid god.
Freedom, or liberty, is not a god. It is a modus vivendi principle
>In many progressive cities across the United States, heroin addicts are free to spend their days shooting up while living in the squalor of the homeless encampments that now line urban streets.
This is not an example of freedom. They are being allowed to infringe on everyone else’s freedom by so doing. Private streets would either not tolerate them, or restrict them to places where they were no longer a nuisance to others. Make the drugs legal too and they will become safer and cheaper allowing many of the homeless to move out of circumstances that “virtuous” politics has caused.
>Anyone who truly understands human nature knows that our impulse is to make ourselves slaves in one manner or another.
It seems more plausible that “our impulse is to make [other people our] slaves in one manner or another”, which politics allows. Only libertarians consistently reject this.
>Left entirely to our own devices, the isolated individual tends to suffer from a thirst for annihilation, indulging in excess or deprivation of some kind that will bring ruin.
Maybe some people would behave this way if you put them in solitary confinement. But if they are free to leave then they will seek out others and a flourishing life.
>This tragic understanding of the human condition brought most premodern thinkers to the conclusion that ordered liberty was the ideal but that this state could only be achieved through the cultivation of virtue.
On the contrary, liberty of person and property is what teaches people virtue: to be responsible in their own lives and decent towards others.
>Order is a precondition for community; community is a precondition for virtue; and liberty is the rare and delicate fruit of a society that is virtuous.
Not many people want to live in a real, stifling, community: they prefer the relative anonymity and freedom of city life. Liberty is the pervasive and robust fruit of any society that generally believes in private property rights.
>Americans have been taught to repeat endless slogans about rights and freedoms but very little about the necessity of virtue, and this has created a nation hungry for the fruit of a tree that was left to wither long ago.
Or, rather, so-called “rights and freedoms”. Virtue is “the fruit of a tree” that is libertarian property rights.
>The progressive worldview is utopian, denying man’s tragic nature and assuming that all negative outcomes are the function of a faulty system.
We don’t have a “tragic nature” and “all negative outcomes are the function of a faulty system”: political power.
…
>On the right, the error is more subtle but no less serious. Conservatives and libertarians on the right often view liberty as the ultimate goal
A modus vivendi is never an “ultimate goal”.
>but share confusion about achieving it
That would be by promoting the general acceptance of tolerating people doing what they like with themselves and their property.
>They may debate the state's size and shape, but both believe smaller government bound by constitutional principles is key.
No, anarchy bound by private property rights is the key.
>However, the mistake lies in assuming virtue results from liberty rather than recognizing that liberty can only be enjoyed by a people who have first cultivated a high degree of virtue.
Virtue results from liberty of persons and their property.
>… For Machiavelli, the key factor that made republican government possible was the virtue of the people.
The key factor that will make propertarian anarchy possible is that most people will see that it is a solution to all the problems that politics causes.
>Under a monarchy, the people did not need to practice a high degree of self-discipline. The king acted as a father to the nation, settling disputes and making critical decisions that required foresight and discipline.
He acted as a shepherd looking to preserve his sheep only in order to maximally exploit them for his own ends.
>The king provided order, and that order allowed the people to prosper even if they did not have the character to rule themselves. Order is more necessary for human flourishing than freedom, a lesson often forgotten by those who have always lived under the benefit of stable civilization.
The “order” (subjection) of a “king” (tyrant) will always reduce human flourishing compared with individual private-property freedom.
>In a republic, the people have significant input into the state's operation,
The iron law of oligarchy would appear to imply that this is a fantasy: mere propaganda put out to allay a restless populace.
>unlike a monarchy where a king makes decisions. If the citizens lack strength or seriousness, they will demand benefits from the state that they can't secure themselves.
That states can do this is their main proud boast and claim to legitimacy. But it is bogus. The “benefits” are an ever-spiralling round of socially destructive privileges.
>An ideal republic features a small government because its people are united by a shared moral vision that fosters virtue. The founding fathers understood this, as John Adams famously stated, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” While any nation can establish a republic, maintaining it requires dedication to both self-governance and self-discipline.
It is inherent to all politics to promote interference with others and self-indulgence.
>Ordered liberty is not the freedom to pursue every base desire
As long as that is at your own expense, it need not impede ordered liberty.
>but the ability to pursue virtue within a shared understanding of the good.
Beyond tolerance of propertarian liberty, “a shared understanding of the good” is neither necessary nor possible.
>Machiavelli agreed with Aristotle that virtue requires community. The individual does not achieve virtue in isolation but must exercise it by pursuing the good in relation to friends, family, religion, and business.
Virtue requires mainly tolerance of propertarian liberty; no community, “friends, family, religion, and business” are necessarily involved.
>Without order, we cannot have community or understand our role within it. Order is a precondition for community; community is a precondition for virtue; and liberty is the rare and delicate fruit of a society that is virtuous.
This all sounds sillier the more it is repeated.
>Machiavelli recognized the necessity of virtue in a republic, but his reputation as a ruthless political realist is well earned. He understood that establishing order often required a leader to commit morally questionable acts.
Establishing order for the benefit of the state or oligarchs will require this; not for the benefit of sovereign individuals.
>This is why republics, such as ancient Rome, are often born out of monarchies where order has been well established and community allowed virtue to flourish. The United States itself emerged from a monarchy that established order in a new land, enabling its people, who had obtained a level of virtue, to achieve liberty through self-governance.
A very modest amount of liberty with only governance by oligarchs.
>While the American people still possess an undeniable capacity for greatness, it would be difficult to describe the nation’s current state as virtuous. Progressive activists have successfully driven Christianity from the public square, replacing it with a hedonistic and secular faith.
Which would be no problem as long as propertarian liberty were tolerated—but it increasingly isn’t.
>This collapse of public and private morality complicates the restoration of a shared identity founded on a liberty that the people are no longer capable of maintaining.
To the limited degree that they ever had such liberty.
>Decadent societies often become subject to Caesarism because they lose the ability to maintain order, reverting to the status of children who must once again be governed by a father.
An enlightened despot might be preferable to an ever-growing state. But that ever-growing state is the proximate problem, not “decadent societies”.
>I find it unlikely that the United States will collectively return to republican self-governance. Many Americans have abandoned the values and shared identity that once defined the country. Additionally, our ruling elite have deliberately imported populations entirely alien to that tradition. However, if we are to move forward, it will begin with organic communities of faithful and hardworking Americans who continue to cultivate virtue. Small government limited by a constitution is not the means to liberty, but the hard-won prize of a community that has already learned to rule itself through virtue.
The best hope for a way forward is as much privatisation as possible. Especially of law and order so that people can pay to protect themselves or change their suppliers. They especially need protection from people who want to enforce “virtue” on them.
Good heavens, the Facebook line by line reply.
I'm not having at it but "freedom" is ambiguous. Liberals define it as "freedom from government encroachment" which is only slightly less ambiguous. That you disagree with their example of freedom because of an indirect consequence is really the proof in the pudding.
>Good heavens, the Facebook line by line reply.
Rather, the scholarly commentary. You’re welcome.
>I'm not having at it but "freedom" is ambiguous. Liberals define it as "freedom from government encroachment"
“Liberals” or libertarians? Where? If they have no real theory then some sort of a definition may have to do. However, this “definition” includes the very word that is to be defined. It is equivalent to “X” is “X from government encroachment”. At best, it relies upon a tacit grasp of the very thing that is to be explained. In any case, the government is not the only violator of liberty.
> which is only slightly less ambiguous.
It is completely opaque.
>That you disagree with their example of freedom because of an indirect consequence
You’ve lost me.
> is really the proof in the pudding.
The expression is, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating”. Although how this is relevant is, again, hard to fathom.
I think scholars are a bit better at not forcing themselves to see trees instead of the forest. It is liberals and you being lost and pretending to not know the phrase as it was said is just a product of you being egocentric. The world doesn't revolve around you and any Christian should know that although you don't really sound Christian tbh.
Philosophy is about seeing fundamental problems, questions, and confusions that are normally not seen. Sometimes they are still not seen even after being explained. People often prefer their comfortable prejudices to critical thinking.
Well then keep to yours but "critical thinking" isn't a thing. It's only slightly less ambiguous than saying "think(ing)".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
May I ask - how is this different from what the managerial order supporters are trying to achieve? Wouldn’t it be the case once they achieve near 100% virtue as defined by their own metrics (global outlook, no difference between men and women, no difference between cultures, all ready to believe all marketing and hype, and trusting whatever their managerial ‘expert’ rulers say) then they too could have a smaller state which they would consider a privilege which has been earned by the populations learning to control themselves under *their* shared idea of what constitutes the virtuous?
Ethics base don religious dogma or something else?
Freedom necessarily entails responsibility. The mistake many make is assuming they can have their freedom without taking any responsibility.
I find Karl Popper's assessment of Open Society useful for discussions like this.
"However, the mistake lies in assuming virtue results from liberty rather than recognizing that liberty can only be enjoyed by a people who have first cultivated a high degree of virtue."
Liberty itself isn't an actual thing. It's simply only virtue.
You: liberty without virtue leads to ruin
Me: quality of liberty is inherent in the quality of virtues you hold
We are not the same
Any citation for an argument that produces any of these conclusions?
🎯🎯