Bureaucratization and the power of bureaucrats are inevitable outcomes of that agenda, but I don’t think that the sincere preachers of it start with that in mind.

In fact, those I’ve known intend the opposite outcome. The assumption they start with is that Nature, both human and nonhuman, is wholly benign. Just feed the kids and get out of their way, and they’ll grow up wholesome and peaceable. They’ll know instinctively what they need to learn and they’ll inform their teachers—oops, I meant discussion-leaders.

Of course, anyone who believes that has a rabid case of ideology (meaning: shield against empirical evidence), for anyone who’s been around small children more than an hour knows we’re all born savages and that civilization is a long and painful process that goes against the instinctual grain.

That assumption also makes nonsense of all ethical monotheisms, for they assume basic imperfection that must be struggled against. This too is part of the Nature-Is-Good agenda.

In the ’70s some Women’s Liberation groups devised very long lists of minutely detailed rules for daily living, managing lives hour by hour. They didn’t start out with the aim of bureaucratizing their acolytes’ lives; but they had to end that way.

I think, then, that we should interpret those data in terms of unintended consequences. (Of course, unintended consequences happen most often to people who are most indifferent to or cut off from reality.)

I agree the process is not fully conscious. Still, the way the movement functions to create a totally administered society must have something to do with its existence and success.

Consider that schools and universities, which stand for knowledge bureaucratized, support it. Lawyers, courts and functionaries generally, whose power is enormously increased by comprehensive application of abstract principles to all social relations, support it. The Democratic Party, which represents the interests of bureaucrats and clients of the welfare state, support it. The national elite press, which becomes important to the extent all aspects of living become subject to explicit centralized public decision, support it. Those connections can’t all be coincidental.

Basically, it seems to me that at all times and places there are going to be people attracted to the free-to-be-you-and-me, everything’s-the-same-as-everything-else point of view. They won’t get anywhere though unless the view is supported by powerful and enduring institutional interests that think it’s just fine if people look at things that way and not so good if they take a more critical view that makes it possible for them to act independently. So it’s really those interests more than the conscious intentions of the bulk of the supporters that provide the key to what’s going on.

The lack of realism in the public mind is an effect at least as much as a cause. If the press and the educational system lead people to think about things in an unrealistic way it’s likely that it serves important interests, for example the interests of people who’d rather run things themselves without public interference, to have them think about things that way. Elites act to advance their interests without conspiracy and in fact often without a lot of self consciousness. That’s how social systems normally work and become coherent in fact — it’s sort of the Invisible Hand writ large.

The last article linked, the one about women with babies and toddlers who choose not to be employed outside the home constituting “a problem for the government,” is frightening. You read that and your adrenalin actually starts pumping, preparing you subconsciously for some fight-or-flight reaction. Anyone who wants to see what Orwell was talking about — not in the form of a novel but the real deal which he warned might come to pass — please read that article. It happens. It actually happens; he wasn’t making it up. In 1939 Jewish families in Europe were taking their kids to the movies to see The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland just like American families were, but then a few years later were being herded into gas chambers. It does happen. God help us! Orwell was not kidding! He was not fooling around! The battle not only continues, it intensifies!

We will not have peace in our lifetimes from these people — we will not, that’s becoming completely clear.

From the link to the article about Ontario and same-sex marriage:

“Despite favourable reception in other provinces to the ruling, Alberta’s premier said his province remained opposed to same-sex marriages. ‘The law in Alberta is very clear, notwithstanding how some people might feel about it, it’s very clear. It’s as clear as crystal,’ said Ralph Klein. ‘If there is any move to sanctify and legalize same-sex marriages, we will use the notwithstanding clause, period. End of story,’ he said.”

There are heroes alive today. Some men are heroes, as you see in the movies or read about in books. This man seems to be one. In college we read about Beowulf heroically defending his people against Grendel. This man Klein is standing like a rock — like Beowulf — defending his people against Grendel, a Grendel with even greater power to terrify than the Grendel who terrified the Geats — even greater power to terrify, in the sense in which Dostoievsky I think it was (or Tolstoy?) said, if you want to terrify a man, REALLY terrify him, just take away all meaning from his life. That’s what today’s Grendel-monsters are doing — taking away all meaning from our lives and replacing it with heaped-up … nothingness. Replacing it with the void.

From the link to the article about re-classifying pedophilia (for those in Rio Linda, that’s not identical with male homosexuality — it’s the preying upon little children for sex, practiced by adult perverts):

“In previous articles, psychiatrists have argued that there is little or no proof that sex with adults is necessarily harmful to minors. Indeed, some have argued that many sexually molested children later look back on their experience as positive, Nicolosi said.”

My profession is in the medical field. (I am not a psychiatrist.) Any psychiatrist who does not see that a child who is having sexual intercourse or other sexual relations with an adult cannot develop normally ought to be caned like in the olden days, tarred and feathered, ridden out of town on a rail, then brought back into town to be put on public display in wooden neck-wrist-and-ankle stocks in the town square exacly as was done in the days of the Pilgrims, with a sign above his head saying that despite being a psychiatrist (no less!) he couldn’t see that a sexually-molested child had no chance to develop normally. He should be left on public display in the stocks like Quasimodo in the old movie, begging for water now and again from townspeople who come by to mock and jeer him, and should be thoroughly humiliated, until he’s learned his lesson.

From the first article linked:

“The pro-family Christian Institute has said it will reveal evidence later this week of teacher-led discussions on sadomasochism, a ‘naughty bits bingo’ game, and classroom role plays of ‘a married man who was “done” for cottaging.’ ”

Whoever thought we’d have to have groups and institutions that were labeled “pro-family”? No one even imagined that anything or anybody existed that was anti-family. Now, everything is. Every single outfit that’s not explicitly labeled pro-family, including government, is against family and wants to destroy it.

That’s what we’ve come to.

Unadorned’s comments remind us of the greatest contradiction in the ideology of those people: they want to regiment everything in life but sex. Or, to put it the other way ‘round, they’re extreme libertarians with respect to sex, and totalitarians with respect to everything else. How do they reconcile those two opposite doctrines?

Sexual libertinism changes sex from a principle of social order (because it is basic to the family) to a private indulgence on a par with any other private indulgence or consumer good. It’s necessary to the perfection of a system based wholly on rational market and bureaucratic institutions that is totalitarian in the sense that it has no place for any other principle of authority. Those who support such a system will therefore come to support sexual libertinism one way or another.

A FEW COMMENTS ON THE PEDOPHILE ARTICLE:
QUOTE:
Psychiatrist Charles Moser of San Francisco’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality and co-author Peggy Kleinplatz of the University of Ottawa presented conferees with a paper entitled “DSM-IV-TR and the Paraphilias: An Argument for Removal.”

THESE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO TRAIN THE SEX THERAPIST. NOW YOU MAY UNDERSTAND WHY THEIR “TREATMENTS” DON’T WORK. (TCB)

QUOTE:
“Normalizing” pedophilia would have enormous implications, especially since civil laws closely follow the scientific community on social-moral matters, said Linda Ames Nicolosi, NARTH publications director.
…”And other psychiatrists have written, again in scientific journals, that if children can be forced to go to church, why should ‘consent’ be the defining moral issue when it comes to sex?” she said.

…”The courts are so afraid of ‘legislating someone’s privately held religious beliefs’ that if pedophilia is normalized, we will be hard put to defend the retention of laws against child molestation,” Nicolosi noted.

MS. NICOLOSI KNOWS OUR CULTRE WELL. IN THE AGE OF SCIENTISM, SCIENTISTS JUDGE THE RATIONALITY OF MORALS AND THE COURTS DUTIFULLY FOLLOW. IF YOU THINK THAT COURT WOULD NEVER ALLOW FOR THE NORMALIZING OF PEDOPHILIA. CONSIDER ABORTION, BLACKMUN LOOKED TO DOCTORS FOR GUIDANCE. HE WROTE HIS OPINION IN THE MAYO CLINIC. FUTURE JUDGES MAY LOOK TO DOCTORS LIKE MOSER AND KLEINPLATZ. HOWEVER, I MUST DISAGREE WITH MS. NICOLOSI ON ONE POINT. THE COURTS LEGISLATES MORAL POSITIONS ALL THE TIME. FOUR JUDGES VOTED AGAINST THE BOYSCOUTS. THE COURTS ARE PROCEEDING DOWN A PATH WHERE SEXUAL FREEDOM WILL BE MORE VALUED THAN FREE SPEECH. REMEMBER THE BOYSCOUTS. ONE MORE VOTE AGAINST THEM WOULD HAVE PLACED THEIR FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO ASSEMBLY BENEATH SODOMY. (TCB)

FROM THE SAME ARTICLE:
“We do believe that these people have a disease or a disorder, but we also recognize that in having it that it impairs their function, that it causes them suffering that they need to turn for help,” Berlin said.

DR. BERLIN IS THE GURU OF SEX DISORDERS. DR. BERLIN NEVER SEEMS TO RECOGNIZE THAT MOST PEDOPHILES AREN’T HELPLESS VICTIMS. INSTEAD MANY PEDOPHILES ARE MOSTLY MEN AND SOME WOMEN WHO HAVE EMBRACED SEX WITH CHILDREN AS A NEW CIVIL RIGHT. DR. BERLIN’S HELPLESS VICTIMS CREATE ORGANIZATIONS, WHICH PROMOTE THEIR DEVIANCY. THEY HAVE MAGAZINES AND ARE POLITICALLY ACTIVE.

THE FOLLOWING IS AN EXCERPT FROM AN ESSAY ON THE NAMBLA (NORTH AMERICAN MAN BOY LOVE ASSOCIATION) WEBSITE. (TCB)
QUOTE:
As my “perversion” became less perverse, I started looking outward for sources of my feelings of inadequacy related to my attraction to boys. The more I examined my life, the more obvious it became to me that my feelings were not necessarily bad. What was bad were the repressive measures inflicted upon children who chose to love an adult completely and upon those adults who chose to so love a child. Through this exploration, I came to see my repression as but one facet of a much larger pattern of social and political oppression.

The below quote from the British story saying that it is a serious social problem if mothers of small children stay home, made my jaw drop. Carol Iannone once wrote an article exposing the fact that Betty Friedan did not merely call for women to have a “choice” whether to work or stay home (which was what the feminists publicly claimed), but that Friedan and other feminists actually sought to take away the choice of staying home. In the typical manner of progressivism, a radical goal that is at first denied, then hinted at, eventually becomes explicit.

“While acknowledging women’s working lives increasingly matched those of men, it said: ‘However, real problems persist. The employment rates for women with dependent children have remained consistently below those of women without dependent children.

“‘Just 48 per cent of women with a child under two are in employment, compared to 90 per cent of men with a child under two.’”

Also, a curious thing. I’m using a computer away from home, and when I clicked on the first two linked articles I got web pages that said this:

Access to this web page is restricted at this time.

The websense category “traditional religions” is filtered.

The Websense category “Political Organizations” is filtered.

This is another one that can be added to the list:

“Teens Listened to ‘Helter Skelter’ Before Killing Boy”

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,89759,00.html

Here is an analogy from a book about the Internet, software code, copyright, patent, and other rules, “The Future Of Ideas; The Fate of The Commons in a Connected World” by Lawrence Lessig:

“…the debate right now is not about the degree to which free or common resources help. The attitude of the most influential in public policy is that the free, or common, resources provide little or no benefit. There is for us a cultural blindness —an unwillingness to even account for the role of the commons. As Yale law professor Carol Rose argues,… though “our legal doctrine has strongly suggested that some kinds of property should not be held exclusively in private hands, but should be open to the public,” we live in a time when the dominant view is that “the whole world is best managed when divided among private owners.” The very idea that nonexclusive rights might be more efficient than exclusive rights rarely enters the debate. The assumption is control, and public policy is dedicated to maximizing control.” Page 86 of the First Vintage Books Edition, November 2002, footnotes omitted.

Seems to me that today some of the free or common resources that are neglected are common sense and the collected wisdom of the ages, or tradition. They’re free. You can’t charge for them. You can’t claim to own them. You can’t exclude people from using them. They’re already out there. But you can denigrate them, and seek to replace them, or push them out, or cordon them off. And then what?

So the pattern appears in other contexts.

Or is the analogy false?

If so, excuse me. I was struck by the phrases: “we live in a time when the dominant view is that “the whole world is best managed when divided among private owners”; and “[t]he assumption is control, and public policy is dedicated to maximizing control.”

Chris Collins wrote,

“Seems to me that today some of the free or common resources that are neglected are common sense and the collected wisdom of the ages, or tradition. They’re free. You can’t charge for them. You can’t claim to own them. You can’t exclude people from using them. They’re already out there. But you can denigrate them, and seek to replace them, or push them out, or cordon them off. And then what? So the pattern appears in other contexts. Or is the analogy false?”

Mr. Collins, it sounds as if you are saying something very important here — but, and forgive me for this, I can’t quite grasp the point you are making. Could you explain it again? I want to understand it. Clearly, the left is doing the things you say — pushing common sense and the collected wisdom of the ages, that is, tradition, pushing them out, cordoning them off, seeking to replace them, and denigrating them. That much we know — it’s all too obvious that that’s exactly what they’re doing. But what is the rest of the point you are making?

A very interesting comment from Chris Collins. The theme of the original entry was that the attempt to abolish traditional institutions and moral views has to do with the desire to set up a fully rationalized system of control that includes absolutely everything. The abolition of the public domain would be part of that (how long does copyright last now, 95 years?) and another would be the abolition of tradition, common sense and culture generally.

Mr. Collins draws a striking analogy.

If I understand it, he likens tradition — what he calls partly “common sense and the collected wisdom of ages” (an apt description) — to a widely-available “resource,” which is also “free” — no one can “claim to own” it; no one can “charge for” its use; no one can “exclude other people from using” it — it’s “already out there.”

BUT (he continues the analogy), “the attitude of the most influential [people] in public policy is that the free, or common, resources provide little or no benefit.” (Or, tradition doesn’t advance society in the direction certain élites want it to go in, so they look at it as providing little or no benefit.)

Though the passages Mr. Collins quotes refer not to tradition but to copyright vs. public-domain issues involving the internet and software, the analogy seems to fit: those most influential in public policy in BOTH domains do seem to display “a cultural blindness — an unwillingness to even account for the role of the commons” (“the commons” signifying “tradition” in the analogy — a thing which is commonly available to the broad public, is free, is the exclusive property of no one, and which indeed plays a role in society which the influential élites show “an unwillingness to even account for” — ie, an unwillingness to even acknowledge).

But here comes the conflict which Mr. Collins I think is trying to point out. He’s saying that private ownership is often invoked in conservative and traditional thought as right and good, not just on moral grounds but also on practical ones (it actually preserves things better, enriches people more, etc.) and collectivism as wrong and bad (on both moral and practical grounds). But, he’s saying, traditionalism works best as something which is collectively available to all, and unfit to be held as private property, as the élites are trying to do in a way.

“our legal doctrine has strongly suggested that some kinds of property should not be held exclusively in private hands, but should be open to the public”

“we live in a time when the dominant view is that ‘the whole world is best managed when divided among private owners.’ ”

Mr. Collins quotes this in a spirit of irony, in order to criticize this dominant view — he feels that this view is not always right, tradition being a counter-example.

“The very idea that nonexclusive rights might be more efficient than exclusive rights rarely enters the debate. The assumption is control, and public policy is dedicated to maximizing control.”

Ditto.

The way out of the dilemma is, I think, to look at nations, nation-states, and the great traditional religions as the “private owners” of their various “traditions” — those private (private in the sense of “not Marxist” — “not collectivist”) owners of their respective traditions are, if allowed to continue to function as nations, nation-states, and traditional religions, not only reliable guarantors of the preservation of their respective traditions, but the only possible such guarantors. The public domain — ie, Marxism and its myriad progeny in today’s world (multiculturalism, post-modernism, radical deconstructionism of all literary, cultural, and historical meaning, diversity-worship to the detriment of individual ethno-cultures, etc, etc) will destroy tradition.

So, in the world of tradition too, the private domain — in the form of the individual nations, nation-states, and traditional religions — is best for preserving what ought to be preserved.

Another interesting thing about this thread and Mr. Collins’ comment is that it brings out the one-sided narcissism of the modern concept of property. Ontically our property owns us as much as vice versa, the classic case being the cat’s ownership of the human being. Our tradition is our common possession and as such it exerts authority over us. Mr. Collins’ post enhances the original article by bringing closer to the surface a fundamental wrongness in the modern conception of our relation to other persons and things.

A king is an abhorrent thing to a modern because the king is (to the modern) just the owner of his subjects in the modern narcissistic unidirectional arbitrary will-to-power understanding of ownership. A husband’s proper relation to his wife is the same sort of thing in miniature, and in actual fact our relations to other people and things *are* more like marriages than “ownership” in the modern sense. They all entail a responsibility and stewardship that the modern narcissistic concept of property denies.

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