Parents' death

[pbrower2a]

(07-09-2021, 02:37 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: I'm sorry to hear what you went through, PBrower 2a. After my father's death, I got more accepting of certain views for a few years. In 2015 I spent many hours browsing Mencius Moldbug's website, because of his cynical authoritarianism reminded me of Dad. But eventually, after 5 years or so, I got back to my centre-right communitarian views I held before Dad's death.

The hard lesson that I learned from my father's descent into a vicious personality that would have been good only for a prison term had he not Lost It due to mental degradation is that many people are what they are only because they are under social constraints against releasing the monsters. My father was a manager, and tearing someone down in the presence of others is something that one just does not do. Praise publicly and punish or even correct privately. Maybe criminals are free from such restraints, but the rules that apply among long-term jailbirds necessary for survival in prison or among Mafiosi do not work in a society in which people are expected to defer to customers, clients, and bosses for the maximization of profits at the expense of individuality and self-esteem. I have been a substitute teacher more than anything else, and as you can imagine, discipline is much trickier than is teaching the material. I have the fear that underneath a veneer of civility and Christian ethics (in view of my personality I would have been better off being raised Jewish) I have that Monster lurking -- something bigoted, cruel, selfish, and angry. For4tunately for me I have little arm strength and must run from fights, and I am unlikely to throw stuff as my father did with a large radio. 

Probably because my adult life has been under the thrall of people who have power, indulgence, and gain (get it -- P.I.G., as in the ruling class in George Orwell's Animal Farm... after I read that I invariably get a taste for ham and pork chops) above all else, including all decency toward the rest of humanity I could see danger in any ideology other than humanism. I got cynical about almost all institutions except those that educate (little is more  practical, and even our most rapacious elites know this... and people who are legitimately well-educated are more likely to find abusive behavior by economic elites intolerable, as has been shown in authoritarian societies), preserve or promote knowledge, or do creative activity. Corrupt and inequitable as America got in the neoliberal era, which is practically my whole adult life, I could only be abused and exploited by the economic elites and those in government who do their bidding. If there were ever a time in which to question the assumption of the value of life over an extended time, this was it, even without the overt totalitarianism of fascism, Marxism-Leninism, Apartheid, or Islamism. The rapacious elites could even corrupt churches that told people (this is secularized Calvinism) that God blesses the rich and powerful and those who are not rich and powerful deserve their poverty and subjection. 

The system could corrupt even me to some extent to believe that happiness was largely material, even if I was wise enough to see through advertising. I recognized the word luxury as a scam because even if a vice (it means excess, waste, and ostentation) it was being offered as a virtue as if it were something more valuable, like love, wisdom, or integrity. The other Orwell masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, demonstrates above all else  the complete debasement of life that comes from debasing language so that people can only obey elites or destroy themselves... and if a literary critic finds that the romance between Winston and Julia has no sizzle it is because the system ensures that people cannot develop intimacy because the language has been stripped even of the means of expressing intimacy. Without deep intimacy, love does not exist but the primitive sex drive (either whoring or outright rape) becomes animalistic. 

We all know about the metaphorical School of Hard Knocks. The only good thing to say of it is that it has open enrollment without any need for pesky College Board scores or grade transcripts that can deny entrance to any schools other than diploma mills, and does not cost huge cash outlays. One learns one's lessons the hard way, and that is the recognition that against those who have the wealth and bureaucratic power one is almost certainly a pitiable lose, and that any good that one gets out of life comes at the expense of selling out everyone else to the rich-and-powerful. It's a return of the Gilded Age without the opportunity for starting a small business to evade being treated badly as an employee. 

My response to "Suffer for my greed, you peon! Know your place under MY thrall" is "I HATE LIFE"... well, at least as that person defines life for me or tries to.      

Quote:While starting the thread, I was thinking about:
https://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentu...illennials

Now millennials despise libertarian economics, but this might change when their parents are no longer around and the millies inherit their money.

There isn't so much inherited wealth that one might expect to make life easy. Much of it is in real estate, and residential real estate is valuable only if one can sell it and pocket the difference while downsizing. Nursing homes devoured my parents' assets and ensured that I would have a harsh old age. At this point I often regret that I was even born -- or at least that being a human being in an inhuman social order is less satisfying than being a beloved pet or cherished horse. 

Lonely as life can be, I look at the harsh social order, and I am glad that I had no children for the System to abuse and exploit economically through old-fashioned sweating or through becoming cannon fodder in Wars for Profit. 

Libertarian economics have become largely irrelevant, mostly because the elites who once saw Big Government as a welfare state failed to see the profit possible in it... until they found Big Government a means of enforcing the terms of crony capitalism, the new American Way of Life. Although I would not adopt their extreme anti-intellectualism, I have come to recognize the Old Order Amish as having the only economic order that works without gross injustice. Their world has no use for bureaucracy, so it has no capi9talist equivalent of the old Soviet nomenklatura.  Yes, it is possible to exploit people even if one does not own the assets, as the Soviet nomenklatura did... and that is the message behind the modern fable Animal Farm. 

I do not see America  reverting to libertarianism except in the wake of such a calamity as a war that destroys everything but a remnant of the people consigned to starting over with technology of the pre-electrical era. If Phoenix is largely unscathed and a place like Minneapolis is rubble, they will largely go to Minneapolis or the like because one needs air conditioning to tolerate Phoenix. One can dress for the cold, if necessary in animal hides. People will re-learn how to mill grain and build their own huts. People will get their information from printing presses that operate on muscle power. People will re-learn how to use horses in drayage and in farming.  Such a war is unthinkable -- perhaps until AGW makes a mess of the world order and compels people to fight for survival by taking over "virgin lands" when their peasant holdings are inundated. Think of all the potential for apocalyptic war around 2100! That, I fear, is the next Crisis, one that will make this one look like a High by contrast. 

Libertarianism does not fit a bureaucratic order in which plenty of people have nice jobs because the tycoons prefer that people shuffle papers so that they can afford Buick, Chrysler, and Honda vehicles; spend money on McMansions; wear flashy clothes; and enjoy two weeks' paid vacation. The alternative is that smart people might start reading Karl Marx or some Christian version of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and drawing conclusions unsettling to the elites -- and find plenty of disgruntled people among the proles to make a revolution possible.