08-21-2020, 04:21 PM
(This post was last modified: 08-21-2020, 04:32 PM by Eric the Green.)
(08-20-2020, 08:03 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(08-18-2020, 10:00 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: To preserve our Union we need to ensure that we can never have another leader like Donald Trump. That includes reducing the role of economic power in shaping politics. That includes a revival of faith in learning and reason. That includes restoring humanistic values as an expected characteristic of our economic leaders. People like Donald Trump who believe that nothing is more important than themselves believe in nothing except themselves. Such people cannot convince people outside of those like minded, the vicious, and the gullible.
To some degree that is true and timeless, but some of what you are saying seems to be that we need the 4T mindset. Now, I don't disagree that both are needed now. I just expect that the Democrats will overdo it, and that come the next unraveling the people might get tired of it.
I doubt people get tired of true values, or that they can be overdone. They get swept away by ideologies and deceptions and by charming candidates. They get bamboozled by entertainment. That's how TV stars like Reagan and Trump were able to get elected and steer the USA on the wrong path. There is always competition between true and false values. And a great communicator like Reagan can easily sell gullible Americans on those false values with attractive slogans like "government is the problem." It never was, but Reagan was a good salesman for that falsehood. His horoscope score was unbeatable. And he could easily outsell Carter who was offering "malaise." So I would put it not that people get tired of true values, but they get tempted and deceived away from the straight and narrow, often by talented demagogues like Reagan and Trump.
It can also be stated, as Kenneth Clark said about Rome, not so much that they got tired of good values, but that they simply got-- tired. It takes a bit of faith, enthusiasm, energy and exertion to keep a good civilization going.
This American obsession with personality and fantasy means to a large extent that true values have been on the wane in American society almost from the beginning, but certainly in the last 150 years. I don't think Americans have ever had enough true values to even know whether they are tired of them.
They used to have churches, which compensated to some extent, but even there what was taught did not dissuade but often encouraged greed, racism, and competition and the destruction of Nature. Spengler looked at American Society a century ago in his Decline of The West and said Americans were just a bunch of dollar trappers with no past and no future.
Especially recently, a key problem has been the decline in education. Democrats in power on all levels can start by reinstating the requirements for civics classes in high schools.
True values are never tiring. They grow and develop civilizations. But cycles of civilizations and generations come and go. People and their leaders and teachers do lose touch with true values and get deceived and tempted by what is easier and more indulgent or fear-based.