Q, Q and A…

The acronym of the title stands for Quote, Question and Answer. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been trolling the trolls so to speak, haunting the offerings of a professionally run page on Farcebook. The page is called “Intellectual Takeout” and it is a conservative page sponsored by the Rand Group. They were honest about themselves when I asked, the honesty a fair indicator of honorable intentions. That I often disagree with their implied conclusions does not detract from their right to present them, and they present them well. Nor are they devoid of points I agree with, being Pragmatic Idealist I stand with a foot in both camps. Such is the nature of true democracy at work.

None of which is to say they’re not a propaganda page, they are, and a high end good one. They know what they’re doing, but then again, since I also know what they’re doing this isn’t a problem for me. Genuine high end propaganda will present at minimum five to ten obscure truths to put a foundation (of misunderstanding) beneath any false  assertion of strategic importance. I’m quite willing to mount the minor effort of filtering out the assertion of strategic import in exchange for those obscure truths, many of which are really only available from those who engineered them into reality in the first place *Spock-ish eyebrow, sidesaddle smirk*.

One of their staff presented a post based on the writings of the German philosopher Nietzsche, using the fact that Nietzsche’s definition of “Liberal” is the exact opposite of the definition the majority of their audience has been preprogrammed to apply to that word, twisting that old lie to torque and  over-torque the bolts holding the prison bars of their bigotries to floor of the CNF agendas. (and anyone who’s ever bolted down a set of heads knows that when you over torque a bolt it becomes progressively weaker until eventually it snaps… hence, my motive to hand them the cheater bar ;-).

Anyway and anyhow, that’s what I’ve been up to when not working on the antiPorn story The Care and Feeding of Unicorns or the first full Sundown novel All the Colors in the Box, or setting up the job of building a mighty mouse of an engine to go in the old VW van that’s been a closet on wheels for thirty years so he can go back to fetching the groceries home from the store… or being a mobile motel room for some long overdue travels.

What is below is the quote presented, the question asked of course “is this what’s happening to America?” and below that my response. Just for an example of what I’ve been talking about.

“The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Twilight of the Idols

Ordinarily Nietzsche and I tend to fence a bit, sometimes with the buttons on, other times not, but in this I would tend to agree with him although I feel the quote presented overlooked the most critical component of such a thought, the one that establishes the context from which it is most easily demonstrated a truth.

I would posit that what he spoke of was the price associated to having a motive of one's own choosing, the noble cause, the grand quest. Such a motive self chosen is the deepest essence of freedom. Of all things that elevate the human above the animal it is the sense of a purpose larger than the self, a reason to justify the effort, a reason for all other reasons. Stripped of such motive? Yes, the human tends to degrade as being purposeless morphs into life made meaningless.

Sadly, human history demonstrates that various forms of conflict external to the self are the most common template of motive, they are the most easily understood from the immature perspectives common to that age and stage of life when people are most likely to be searching for such a motive. To adopt a conflict as the essence of a motive then becomes the most futile and self defeating of things for victory in the conflict destroys the larger portion of the value involved... the motive dies with the victory but the habits of war and strife do not. Doubt this? Look long and hard at the world between WW2 and now.

The habits of war die harder than any enemy, and the habits of war can only breed more war causing equal if not greater harm than the original enemy might have. The United States of America is, in my opinion, teetering over the edge of self destructing to this fact. All the forms of hedonism to ever color the dreams of Bacchus become pale outriders to the debaucheries introduced by the habits of war seeking a reason to remain in power.