Crosses And Virtues

     Today’s Gospel reading was from Matthew, chapter 16:

     From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.
     Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, saying, Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee.
     But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.
     Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.
     For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
     For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works.

     [Matthew 16:21-27]

     Jesus made that statement about “taking up [your] cross” more than once. There’s been a fair amount of squabbling over what He meant. Today’s Mass celebrant tried to paper it over with a lecture about being ready and willing to help others. That’s that priest’s particular shtick; I come at it from a different angle.

     When I studied Latin many years ago, I came into contact with the school of philosophy called Stoicism:

     Philosophical discourse is paramount in Stoicism, including the view that the mind is in rational dialogue with itself. Stoic ethics centers on virtue as the highest good, cultivating emotional self-control, a calm problem-solving state of mind, and rational judgment to attain lifelong flourishing (eudaimonia). At the same time, passions, anxieties, and insecurities are viewed as misguided reactions that ought to be controlled through self-disciplined practice. Of all the schools of ancient Western philosophy, Stoicism made the greatest claim to being utterly systematic. Central to Stoic ethics was the idea of living in accordance with nature, which meant aligning one's life with one's sense of reason and the rational order of the universe.

     When we speak of a man as stoic, we hearken back to that school of philosophy. We mean he exemplifies the virtues the Stoics valued, beginning with Zeno and flowing thence to Marcus Aurelius:

• He controls himself.
• He is not easily disturbed.
• He does not complain, or parade his sufferings.
• He strives to put his reason in command of his emotions.
• He tempers wild impulses, sudden passions, and the onset of worry and fear.

     Those virtues are the heart of Stoicism. Every man bears burdens of some sort. We admire most greatly him who bears them Stoically.

     Few of us will depart this life by being crucified, and thank God for that. But whatever our burdens may be, bearing them with grace and quiet patience is at the core of what Western Civilization has esteemed most highly: the man who does what he must and asks little of others in the doing. Moreover, whatever his burdens may be – physical, mental, or spiritual – they are his. It’s rare that they can be shunted onto other shoulders. We think little of a man who tries to do so. Others might choose to assist him with some of them, but the responsibility for bearing them is his alone.

     That pair of recognitions demands stoicism from us. A society that lacks it, or fails to appreciate it, isn’t likely to endure and prosper. It may be held together by force for a while, but it’s likely to dissolve under a tide of predation and sloth.

     The cross, in First Century Judea, represented the greatest burden imaginable at that time. Crucifixion was ignominious, protracted, and excruciating. (Note the etymology of excruciating.) To accept such a fate silently and patiently – stoically – marked a condemned man as greater, in that regard at least, than those who had condemned him.

     In that metaphorical way, Christ instructed those who chose to follow Him in what He expected of them: the virtues Zeno and his successor Stoics elucidated and praised. That a number of the Apostles and lesser disciples experienced real crucifixion is barely relevant.

     Lord, though my burdens are far inferior to those You bore, help me to be as stoic in bearing them as You were on Your cross.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Martial Spirit And The Martial Virtues

     Just this morning I encountered this:

The United States has been at war 233 of its 250 years. That's 93% of its entire existences

In its 250 years it has invaded or bombed 70 countries that's more than 35% of the whole world.

There is no greater threat to world peace than the United States

— The Resonance (@Partisan_12) March 28, 2026

     …to which my friend Tom Kratman replied:

This idiotic meme pops up regularly among the insuperably ignorant, and incarnate idiotic.

Short version: No, in order to get this result you must count as war things more properly categorized as law enforcement and count as years any year in which any violent action, to include…

— Tom Kratman (@TKratman) March 28, 2026

     Take care not to miss this portion of the latter:

     That said, yes, we are warlike, [with] more martial spirit than, most likely, the rest of the planet combined. So tremble in your boots.

     From a practical standpoint, there’s value to be had in having the rest of Mankind fear us. Oderint dum metuant, as the Roman military class liked to say. If we must be hated, let those who hate us remember our martial spirit, and the extraordinary military power that looms within it. But it’s worth a few moments to linger over what tempers that spirit: the martial virtues, completely and properly understood.

* * *

     All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle…. All real men like to fight. – General George S. Patton

     Let’s skip over the “No true Scotsman” objections and ask instead whether there’s any truth to Patton’s characterization. Are “real Americans” that pro-combat? Do we really court war because we love to fight? Do we – or our politicians or generals – court war at all?

     Perhaps some professional soldiers like to fight. It validates their choice of career, at least when they win. But that eagerness to go to war isn’t uniform among the uniformed. Even among the eager ones, it’s tempered by an awareness of the costs of war.

     Sayings about why men willingly go to war are many. One of the more frequently encountered sentiments, at least among those who write about warfare, is that when the bullets are flying, you don’t fight for your country, or your cause, but for “your buddies:” the men next to you, armed as you are, endangered as you are endangered, and who fear as you fear. You recognize them as fragile human beings whose lives could end at any instant. And whether consciously or not, you hope they see you the same way.

     In the wars of the Nightmare Century, most of those who went to war did so under compulsion. Today that’s less often the case. Yet even in full awareness of the potential price, innumerable thousands still sign up. I’m friends with a young woman who did so less than a year ago, and who’s already overseas, serving in a “hot zone.”

     In his movie Jack Reacher, Tom Cruise playing the title character sums up the motivations involved:

     There are four types of people who join the military. For some, it's a family trade. Others are patriots, eager to serve. Next, you have those who just need a job. Then there's the kind who want a legal means of killing other people.

     In recent decades, owing to the end of conscription, the first two motivations greatly outnumber the third and fourth. But that doesn’t imply that those men actually hope to go into combat, as General Patton would have us believe.

* * *

     The first of the great martial virtues is this one:

Strike the necessary blow, but no other.

     Contemporary American forces excel at this. They practice remarkable restraint in the use of force. They’re scrupulous about not targeting noncombatants. They’re merciful in victory; an enemy who surrenders need not fear that he’ll be killed “as a lesson to others.” While American standards aren’t observed worldwide, they are nonetheless admired by the militaries of all nations.

     The second great virtue is conditioned by the first one:

Strike decisively.

     No farting around! Determine what you must do for a swift victory and do it without hesitation or encumbrance. No firing rounds into the air. No bombing because you like explosions. Locate the enemy force, close with it, and defeat it so thoroughly that it and its political masters know and admit that they’ve been defeated.

     Much of the agony of the Vietnam War arose from “farting around.” Military theorists of the era regarded that conflict as an opportunity to test their notions, most prominent among them the idea of “sending signals with force.” Communication with the enemy during wartime is mandatory, but it’s the job of diplomats and statesmen, not of soldiers whose lives are on the line. What fraction of America’s 56,000 Vietnam War dead would have lived had the “signals” nonsense been dismissed and our field commanders ordered to strike decisively?

     Third and last among the great martial virtues is this one:

Do not shy back from what’s necessary.

     This third virtue enfolds the other two. If war is necessary, go to war. If an objective must be taken, then pay the necessary price to take it. If a blow must be struck, strike it with all necessary force, speed, and resolve. That is courage; less is cowardice – and cowardice always costs more lives than courage.

     A head of state may be wrong about whether his nation must go to war. A strategist may be wrong about whether his chosen strategy fits the contest. A field commander may be wrong about whether a particular objective must be taken. Such things can seldom be known with certainty ahead of time. That’s why we must close ranks behind them, for to deny them our sincere support would endanger our nation and our men at arms. Yes, even should the aftermath prove our involvement misguided.

     That’s another of the lessons of Vietnam. Had our politicians marshaled their courage, ignored the carping from the Left and the media, and ordered our commanders to fight the war as it needed to be fought, the Viet Cong would have been eliminated and South Vietnam would have remained free of Communist dominance. Perhaps we should not have allowed ourselves to become involved in the first place. Opinions about that remain mixed. But once we were involved, our forces should have been allowed to fight the war to a decisive victory.

     All other martial virtues – strategic wisdom; tactical daring; courage in the trenches; magnanimity in victory and realism in defeat – are derived from the great virtues above.

* * *

     It all sounds so easy when an armchair blatherer like myself discourses on it. But if great virtue were easy, it wouldn’t be rare. That’s as close to tautology as a proposition can come.

     A nation’s military exists to support the decisions of its government with force. To be effective, it must embody the martial virtues. Ours does. Because it does, even those nations that have had to surrender to us know that we can be trusted – that there will be no looting, no deliberate infliction of humiliation, no destruction for destruction’s sake, no interval for American forces to “rape, pillage, and burn.” What other nation could say the same?

     May God bless our fighting men and these United States of America.

Honesty, Clarity, And Other Virtues The Left Strives To Suppress

     To one whose highest priority is power, anything that might obstruct or impede his pursuit of power is a fault to be avoided. That includes any of the conventionally recognized virtues.

     Today the great Chris Muir has something to say about that:

     Note the unabashed use of a word tabooed by our sociocultural shamans. I have no problem with it. American Negroes use it freely, and I refuse to allow anyone to tell me that what they can say to and about one another, I cannot. But then, colored people have a lot of strange ideas, don’t they?

     Chris expressed an important observation in a striking fashion: clarity. Moreover, he bull’s-eyed it in the process: honesty. Clearly, he’d never fit in on the Left. Somehow I doubt that it troubles him overmuch.

     Now let’s look at how Left-wing activists would view Chris’s “American white men are the nigger of the whole world” statement. Would they salute its unflinching honesty about the bigotry being exercised against the nation and the race that built the modern world and three times saved it from irrevocable tyranny? Clearly not, as it runs counter to one of their major weapons for advancement: the inculcation and exploitation of undeserved guilt among American whites.

     Well, what about its clarity? Would that draw the approbation of Leftist activists? Again, clearly not (note the irony). To be clear about an injustice being perpetrated by the Left is to paste a target onto one’s chest. (If you’re a white male you’ve already got one on your back, as the Left prefers to strike its targets unaware. Cowards are like that.)

     Virtues we were once taught to pursue in our spoken and written communications are anathema to the Left. Whenever a Leftist expresses himself on any subject, you may rest assured that both honesty and clarity will be absent from his emission. Nor would it advance either cause to ask him “what do you mean by that?” He’ll simply call you a racist and walk away.

---

     The Western nations are rooted in Christian ethics. I’ve referred on several occasions to the First World as the nations of the Christian Enlightenment. The Enlightenment thinkers may have been indifferent to Christianity as a faith, but they absorbed its ethos whole, and never departed from it. The core of that ethos consists of seven virtues:

• The three theological virtues:
  1. Faith,
  2. Hope,
  3. Charity;
• And the four cardinal virtues:
  1. Prudence,
  2. Justice,
  3. Temperance,
  4. Fortitude.

     For political purposes, faith should be regarded as a secular attribute: i.e., faith in the rightness of the ethos for public action. I’m sure my Gentle Readers need no help in discerning why those seven virtues are anathema to the power-seeker. All seven are clearly – a little more irony there – essential to the maintenance of a free and harmonious society.

     So the Leftist, the ultimate power-seeker, must act to suppress and extirpate the seven virtues wherever they are found. Certainly he must avoid practicing them himself. And he must struggle to suppress the comprehension of why he does so…among others, of course.

---

     “Mr. Rearden,” he had said once, “if you feel you’d like to hand out more of the Metal to friends of yours—I mean, in bigger hauls—it could be arranged, you know. Why don’t we apply for a special permission on the ground of essential need? I’ve got a few friends in Washington. Your friends are pretty important people, big businessmen, so it wouldn’t be difficult to get away with the essential need dodge. Of course, there would be a few expenses. For things in Washington. You know how it is, things always occasion expenses.”
     “What things?”
     “You understand what I mean.”
     “No,” Rearden had said, “I don’t. Why don’t you explain it to me?”
     The boy had looked at him uncertainly, weighed it in his mind, then come out with: “It’s bad psychology.”
     “What is?”
     “You know, Mr. Rearden, it’s not necessary to use such words as that.”
     “As what?”
     “Words are relative. They’re only symbols. If we don’t use ugly symbols, we won’t have any ugliness. Why do you want me to say things one way, when I’ve already said them another?”
     “Which way do I want you to say them?”
     “Why do you want me to?”
     “For the same reason that you don’t.”
     The boy had remained silent for a moment, then had said, “You know, Mr. Rearden, there are no absolute standards. We can’t go by rigid principles, we’ve got to be flexible, we’ve got to adjust to the reality of the day and act on the expediency of the moment.”
     “Run along, punk. Go and try to pour a ton of steel without rigid principles, on the expediency of the moment.”

     [Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged]

     Rand’s prescient vision was largely focused on the economic sphere. Yet it applies without distortion to every realm in human intercourse. The Left is savagely determined to suppress all the virtues of the Christian Enlightenment, and to do so without ever admitting its mission. Therefore it must treat honesty and clarity as mortal enemies to be destroyed. Should those virtues in communication make a true comeback – should we all return to speaking plainly, using words according to their common meanings and eschewing all dissimulation – the Left will go down to a most ignominious defeat.

     So by all means ask the Leftist haranguing you “What do you mean by that?” Smile when he calls you a racist, sexist, xenophobe, homophobe, transphobe, Islamophobe, or whatever. Then tell him, “Your response has been video-recorded. Have a nice day.” Tot it up as your good deed for the day.

     Food for thought.

Incentives And Impatience

     All right, enough with the frivolity, seasonal or otherwise. It’s time for another serious essay, and your Curmudgeon is here to fill the need.

     Our social, cultural, and political orders are displeasing to anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders. They’ve been displeasing for some time: at least thirty years. Over that time, nominal conservatives and others of a generally pro-freedom, pro-civility bent have thrice achieved dominance at the federal and state levels. Yet those periods passed without significant changes for the better. Indeed, despite its hegemony, in some cases matters got worse by the standards of the Right. This has engendered considerable frustration, such that even sober-minded people are seriously discussing radical moves such as secession and rebellion.

     You’re not alone in feeling such frustration, Gentle Reader; your Curmudgeon is there alongside you. But a pair of complementary dynamics has brought us to where we are. One of them has produced our sociocultural and political distresses. The other has robbed us of the requirement for correcting them.

---

     First, a thematic quote from a rather impressive movie:

     "I nursed him through two divorces, a cocaine rehab, and a pregnant receptionist. God's creature, right? God's special creature. I've warned him, Kevin. I've warned him every step of the way. Watching him bounce around like a fucking game. Like a wind-up toy. Like pounds of self-serving greed on wheels. The next thousand years is right around the corner. Eddie Barzoon...take a good look because he's the poster child for the next millennium.

     "These people, it's no mystery where they come from. You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire. You build egos the size of cathedrals. Fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse. Grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green gold-plated fantasies until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own god. Where can you go from there? As we're scrambling from one deal to the next, who's got his eye on the planet? As the air thickens, the water sours, even bees honey takes on the metallic taste of radioactivity... and it just keeps coming, faster and faster. There's no chance to think, to prepare; it's buy futures, sell futures.. when there is no future.

     "We got a runaway train, boy. We got a billion Eddie Barzoons all jogging into the future. Every one of them is getting ready to fistfuck God's ex-planet, lick their fingers clean, as they reach out toward their pristine, cybernetic keyboards to tote up their fucking billable hours. And then it hits home. You got to pay your own way, Eddie. It's a little late in the game to buy out now. Your belly's too full, your dick is sore your eyes are bloodshot and you're screaming for someone to help. But guess what, there's no one there! You're all alone, Eddie, 'CAUSE YOU'RE GOD'S SPECIAL LITTLE CREATURE!" -- "John Milton," played by Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate, describing the milieu that gave rise to his doomed partner Eddie Barzoon.

     Much has been said about the demise of willingness to defer gratification in service to some higher priority. The late M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist of great insight, noted that the willingness to defer gratification is one of the four indispensable tools of personal growth:

     What are these tools, these techniques of suffering, these means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively that I call discipline? There are four: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing. As will be evident, these are not complex tools....Yet presidents and kings will often forget to use them, to their own downfall. The problem lies not in the complexity of these tools but in the will to use them. For they are tools with which pain is confronted rather than avoided, and if one seeks to avoid legitimate suffering, then one will avoid the use of these tools.

     There is more wisdom in those hundred words than you could find in any other book, the Bible excepted.

     The most conspicuous of all the traits that have risen among us these past eighty years is the “I want it now, and by God I’ll have it now” insistence on the immediate gratification of every desire. Virtually no one is willing to wait for anything any longer. In an irony too profound for your Curmudgeon to capture in a net of words, the most intense expression of that trait is the insistence that suffering is always bad: Not only should one never accept suffering; every sort of suffering in progress must be alleviated at once.

     The will to persevere in suffering, confident that it’s the only road to eventual healing, is especially conspicuous by its absence from our political order.

---

     Much has been said and written about the “short time horizons” of professional politicians. Their vision stops short at the next election. What will keep them in office is good; what might impede their tenure there is bad.

     Governmental careerism is indistinguishable in its incentive structure from private-sector careerism. Yet in our republican order, in which officials are chosen by democratic electoral processes, the careerist dynamic depends on another, more widely distributed characteristic: the unwillingness to tolerate suffering even when it’s provably inevitable.

     Consider the deterioration of the U.S. dollar as a case study. The dollar has lost more than 90% of its purchasing power over the century behind us. Anyone capable of making change without a calculator will immediately see that this is a bad thing – that persons whose incomes and savings are denominated in dollars suffer as a result, and that persons whose incomes are fixed will suffer worst. But the dollar’s fall is a consequence of federal borrowing from the Federal Reserve Bank, a process that automatically inflates the number of dollars in circulation, thereby reducing the value of each one. Congress borrows to make up the difference between its revenues and its expenditures: the annual deficit.

     Clearly there are two and only two ways to halt this process:

1. Increase federal revenues;
2. Decrease federal spending.

     Both courses are fatally unpopular with the electorate. Either one would cause suffering among some sectors of society that the public is unwilling to tolerate. Therefore, Congressmen determined to remain in their seats will never vote for either one. Indeed, given the pressures focused upon Capitol Hill by special interest groups that command the loyalties of significant blocs of votes, the more plausible road to re-election is to increase federal spending each year, regardless of federal revenues. Therefore, the slow but steady decline of the dollar will continue indefinitely.

     No one wants to vote for suffering, especially if it would be his own.

---

     If We the People have earned a certain suffering-debt for our previous sociopolitical sins – never mind that we were set upon our sinful courses by an earlier We the People, who passed their accumulated suffering-debt down to us – then our choice is simple:

1. We could accept the penalty, endure it, and come out healed;
2. We could reject the penalty, which would compound the ultimate suffering.

     Since World War II at least, the public has preferred politicians who will “kick the can down the road.” In consequence, government has gone ever further astray and our accumulated debt of ultimate suffering has compounded year by year. At some point, though the moment is difficult to predict, the debt will be paid. If it’s grown large enough, it will destroy our society completely.

     But a payable sociopolitical suffering-debt is like a prison term: it’s finite. It will end. It can and should be endured, especially if the alternative is to raise it to an unpayable level. Our unwillingness to accept and endure the penalties that have already accrued is propelling such debts toward the threshold of sociopolitical bankruptcy.

     What debts does your Curmudgeon have in mind? Five in particular:

1. Government: We have allowed the federal Leviathan to expand beyond all Constitutional borders, and to extend its tentacles into every area of human life. Unlimited power is incompatible with any degree of human freedom.
2. Politics: Owing to the item above, the stakes in political contests have become so large that the contestants have cast aside all the rules: legal, ethical, or prudential. Every election is a battle to the death in which there’s no such thing as an unthinkable tactic.
3. Social Intercourse: The importation of persons hostile to American norms and the rise of victimism-as-social-currency have made it almost too hazardous for persons of different races, sexes, religions, or ethnicities to share a community. Social trust is gone; each of us is at the mercy of “the other.”
4. Family Bonds: The collapse of the earlier bonds that held families and societies together, particularly the obligations that traditionally united each generation to its parents and its progeny, have created a pervasive sense of vulnerability that flacksters for innumerable causes and movements can exploit.
5. Personal Indulgences: The insistence on the immediate gratification of our desires, coupled to the lack of will to accept the costs and endure the suffering, has foreshortened individuals’ vision of the future, what it might hold for them, and how best to prepare for it.

     The incentives We the People followed brought us to where we stand. Most potent among those incentives was our inclination to defer the suffering we and our forebears had already earned. For the generation that emerged from World War II, the term of suffering might have been fairly short: a few years of privation and social adjustment as we relearned Constitutional constraints and the many wisdoms set aside during the Progressive Era. Today the term would encompass at least an entire generation, perhaps two. That is:

1. Millions of “civil servants” would have to find productive work.
2. There would be an end, probably through term limits, to life tenure in elective office.
3. We would need to accept two unfairly condemned social necessities: segregation and discrimination.
4. Families would be forced to care for their own helpless and vulnerable members.
5. Individuals would be denied the ability to “finance” their desires.

     Each of these things would involve suffering:

1. Some former “civil servants” would prove unable to work at real jobs, and would become mendicants.
2. Some politicians would starve right alongside them. Moreover, lower polities would be compelled to accept burdens previously carried by the federal government.
3. The natural segregation of our people according to race, creed, and ethnicity would resume. Members of each camp would discriminate in favor of “our own” at least until “the other” had earned trust by adopting and displaying compatible language, conduct, and values.
4. Needy families would be thrown upon the charity of their neighbors and communities. Some would not receive the help they need to stave off great personal suffering and loss.
5. Many things cavalierly treated as “needs” would become unaffordable.

     The suffering – happily, a relative matter in a nation as rich as the United States – would persist for anywhere from twenty to fifty years. But at the end we would be healed – whole – and immune, for a little while at least, to the diseases we had left behind us.

---

     “If something cannot continue indefinitely, it will stop.” – Herbert Stein

     Ultimately, we know what we ought to do. Yea verily, even “progressives” are aware that we cannot “kick the can down the road” indefinitely. The problem is a lack of will, or framed through its inverse, our impatience with the term of our suffering.

     The trends of the postwar decades have sapped our will to endure by increasing our will to believe that all suffering is avoidable. Concurrently, the debts have accumulated. Never before have we owed so much...and never before have we been so ready to avert necessary suffering by passing our debts along to our children.

     Have a nice day.

Heroes Redux

     Well, the National Football League has begun its “regular season” once again. As is usually the case, the opening game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the New England Patriots was festooned with more celebratory pageantry, hyperbole, and miscellaneous self-glorifying folderol than we usually load onto the conclusion of a war. And as we were warned to expect, a player refused to stand for the national anthem, courting the attention of the media and the fans for his solidarity with...something or other.

     The C.S.O. is an NFL addict. Yes, she’s aware that half the players are convicted felons and the other half are Communist spies. It simply doesn’t matter to her. She’ll watch any NFL game in preference to any other sort of leisure-time activity except a New York Rangers hockey game...and she’ll slough the Rangers game if the NFL game is “important enough.” So in the interests of marital harmony, I endured as much of the Chiefs / Patriots game as I could before the Sandman managed to drag me to his lair.

     There’s no point in asking why. Pro football is most definitely an acquired taste. Those who can’t ignore it and those who can’t abide it are utterly and absolutely incompatible. They might even be mutually infertile. Science has yet to render a verdict. As for me, I’d rather read.

     But needless to say (though in time-honored Curmudgeon Emeritus style, I’ll say it anyway), that’s not really the point of this piece.

---

     Today, Amanda Green’s piece at According to Hoyt starts out by speaking of the NFL, its drug abuse rules – enough with the “substance abuse” crap, please; everything is a “substance” — and some Dallas Cowboys clown and his suspension from play for beating his girlfriend. This is typical of the sort of thing we see today in a piece about “heroes.” It’s also about as destructive a conflation as the English language will support.

     Why heroize some black thug for his ability to run with a football? Why put such a person in the same sentence as the word hero? What the Hell kind of mentality is revealed by such a juxtaposition? Yet it’s done far too often for me even to keep track.

     Long, long ago (2001), I wrote:

     Racing giant Dale Earnhardt died recently. Before his body had cooled, the media were trumpeting the loss of a great American hero. I haven't seen one dissent from this characterization, nor do I expect to see one. The word “hero” has been shorn of its meaning.

     Heroism is a concept that needs and deserves respect.

     There can be no doubt that Earnhardt bravely courted great risks in pursuit of the prizes of his sport. The same could be said of many other sports figures from many places and times. But this does not make him, or them, heroes. To court risk for personal gain does not a hero make.

     A hero is one who puts himself at risk for someone or something else.

     That is the only way to distinguish between heroism and mere courage in pursuit of a prize, whether the prize is a rushing record or the Ark of the Covenant. To laud sports figures as heroes – indeed, even to suggest that heroism is possible within a sporting context – destroys that distinction entirely. It also puts uncounted numbers of impressionable young men at risk.

     Today, when the material and social rewards for athletic achievement are at an all-time high, when the most sought-after professional athletes are paid more than anyone else in this country, and when pro athletes’ behavior is worse than it’s ever been in the history of sports, do we really want our young men to look to the world of pro sports in search of heroes?

---

     I revisited this subject five years ago:

     A society's hero figures are critically important to that society's spirit -- to its conception of its virtues, its strengths, and its destiny. Consider: America became the world's savior, defeating totalitarian powers in three successive world wars, because we stepped up. We weren't fighting for advantages for ourselves, or for our nation; we were fighting for freedom and justice. To the extent that they've served as the world's policemen, our fighting men have been willing to do so largely for the same reason: because we regarded freedom and justice as too important not to be defended, even at great national cost and great individual risk.

     Apropos of the above, the rise of a careerist ethic in the ranks of our senior officers tracks strongly with the entertainment world's promotion of cynicism about heroes, and by extension, about our national character. It's not yet pandemic, but even a hint of it should be viewed with great alarm: a nation whose military commanders think more of their prospects of winning high rank than of the nation and the ideals for which it stands is a nation in danger of being abandoned by its own defenders.

     A nation is more than a demarcated territory. It's more than a Constitutional tradition. It's certainly more than a common language and culture. If it is not more than these things, singly or in aggregate, it has little chance to sustain itself against the assaults and villainies of those who would profit from its diminution or demise.

     I can make a very strong case that no nation, however virtuously inclined, should serve as the “world policeman.” It has all sorts of negative effects over time. But it remains the case a man willing to go to war for others’ sakes exhibits infinitely more heroism than any athlete, regardless of his sport. America’s fighting men did so twice. Time was, we looked to such heroes for models to put before our young men. Alvin York. Audie Murphy. Rodger Young.

     What about Horatius and his fellows?

But the Consul’s brow was sad,
     And the Consul’s speech was low,
And darkly looked he at the wall,
     And darkly at the foe.
‘Their van will be upon us
     Before the bridge goes down;
And if they once may win the bridge,
     What hope to save the town?’

Then out spake brave Horatius,
     The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
     Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
     Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
     And the temples of his Gods,

‘And for the tender mother
     Who dandled him to rest,
And for the wife who nurses
     His baby at her breast,
And for the holy maidens
     Who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus
     That wrought the deed of shame?

‘Hew down the bridge, Sir Consul,
     With all the speed ye may;
I, with two more to help me,
     Will hold the foe in play.
In yon strait path a thousand
     May well be stopped by three.
Now who will stand on either hand,
     And keep the bridge with me?’

Then out spake Spurius Lartius;
     A Ramnian proud was he:
‘Lo, I will stand at thy right hand,
     And keep the bridge with thee.’
And out spake strong Herminius;
     Of Titian blood was he:
‘I will abide on thy left side,
     And keep the bridge with thee.’

‘Horatius,’ quoth the Consul,
     ‘As thou sayest, so let it be.’
And straight against that great array
     Forth went the dauntless Three.
For Romans in Rome’s quarrel
     Spared neither land nor gold,
Nor son nor wife, nor limb nor life,
     In the brave days of old.

     Need I say more?

---

     Sport is entertainment. Those who play it for a material reward are professional entertainers. The promotion of such persons as heroes is an important component of our social degeneration. It’s really part of the larger problem of Celebritarianism, which has made it possible for attractive persons with an entertainment-related ability to sway large numbers of persons into emulating them.

     And it must be brought to a halt if we’re to have a posterity that’s worth our blood, toil, tears, and sweat.

"How Do I Learn Philosophy?"

Some weekend reading; since I personally don't have anything especially insightful to add to Fran's recent Enemies and How to Treat Them Part 2 ("We can beat these clowns. Indeed, we can beat them so thoroughly that they won't even dare to whimper. But to do so, we must be ready, willing, and able to fight.") I want to share an article of interest from Curt Doolittle, an interesting character and writer. He calls his philosophy "Propertarianism" and I don't intend to explore that right now, but it's worth a look.
(My comments)


A reader asked Doolittle "How Do I Learn Philosophy?" Some highlights from his answer:


First, we need to define Philosophy. Which I think I can successfully do by stating it’s a set of ideas that assist us in forming a framework of understanding, whether by imitation of others – whether real or mythical (virtue), rules of conduct and decision making(deontological), or understanding of the mechanics of the universe(teleological), with which we can use limited human knowledge and reason for the purposes of acting to achieve needs, satisfactions, and fulfillments, by cooperating successfully in a world of others doing the same.


I can already sense some of our Gentle Readers raising their hand and saying "But wait, what about X" but I'm not going to parse this definition right now either. Mainly, I want to share some truly interesting insights and opinions that I had not considered before:


-One’s Experience-
i – children and primitive cultures rely on virtue (religion)
ii – adults in developing cultures rely on rules (law)
iii – the wise in mature cultures rely on outcomes (science)
(And then, when the limits of science are exhausted, the wise return to virtue, only at the next higher level.)


Christianity provides a body of myth and ritual with but one purpose: the extension of kinship love to non kin, as a means of generating universal inclusiveness. It is a religion of benevolent pacification cured only by it’s opposite in the martial nobility.
(Obviously there is more than "one purpose" but this is true, as far as it goes. "Martial nobility" married to Christianity is the very essence of "The West.")


Islam provides rules and virtues for people with limited intelligence to observe and daily rituals to enforce them – although this is a false promise since it achieves the opposite.


Stoicism provides a means of achieving personal happiness for those who live in civilized worlds but who have little control over their environments. Stoicism is the opposite of buddhism in that buddhism achieves satisfaction by escapism and internal discipline, while stoicism achieves satisfaction by means of creating many small successes in daily life, accumulating in your achievement of virtue independent of the opinions of others. Combined with Sport it is extremely attractive to men.
(Perhaps the best definition I've seen.)


Judaism provides a means for not only exiting their incompetent classes but an entire body of law to master, and overwhelming pressure to remain within the polity which is ensured by the hostility to outsiders and therefore outsider hostility to insiders. Judaism is perhaps the ultimate synthesis of rule based systems and history even if it is a failed system because it lacks the moral content necessary to hold land. It originated with pastoralists and remains a pastorialist (unlanded) doctrine. It lacks intertemporal moral content. That is why the jews cannot hold land.
(That's a way of looking at it that I've never heard before, at least not with such simplicity and clarity. It has remarkable explanatory power and aligns with reality.)


Aristotelianism (what we call science) is demanding and at times forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, but at least when large numbers of us adopt it, we are able to master reality better than all other philosophies combined. The problem is that it is an aristocratic philosophy because it requires great effort and ability to learn and apply. Which is why we invest so heavily in education: we must.


###


Some reading lists follow--you've probably read some of the works, but perhaps you'll find something new and, ahem, enlightening.


I considered Doolittle's post to be well worth my time. It might be worth yours as well.

Three Glories: A Sunday Rumination

     “You don’t see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Foretelling?”
     “No—”
     “To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question....”
     “The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion....Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future and mine?”
     “That we shall die.”
     “Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer....The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

     [Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness]

     There’s a strange, yet simple idea haunting, or perhaps taunting, me today: the idea that the three “theological virtues” – faith, hope, and charity – are independent of adherence to any religious creed. The theological virtues are closely identified with the Christian tradition. Yet when I put them under close examination, it became necessary for me to ask whether that binding is real, or merely assumed.

---

     Let’s look at faith first.

     To have faith is to believe a proposition without requiring conclusive evidence of its veracity: i.e., without requiring proof. Yet which of the many propositions upon which we stake life and wealth every day is provable? The only truly provable propositions belong to mathematics and formal logic. Science rejects the possibility of proof; all it will allow us is confidence based on experimental repeatability. You cannot prove that any of the things you rely on will persist for even a moment longer. You cannot even prove that the floor beneath you won’t suddenly collapse under your weight. Your confidence in these things demonstrates your capacity to believe without requiring proof: i.e., faith.

     Faith, so long regarded as a word pertinent only to religious propositions, is in reality ever present and ever operating. Without it, we would be paralyzed.

     The total absence of faith leads to solipsism: the inability to accept that anything outside your head is real and definite. Yet in solipsism we find the germ of an important idea. I once allowed a character to put it thus:

     “A very smart man once said that imagination is more important than knowledge.” Redmond guided the truck out of the parking lot and onto NY 231. “It was an overstatement, and context-free to boot. Still, he had an important point in mind. He wasn’t the first to make it, either. What is an outline, Todd?”
     The conversational swerve jarred Todd into a curious state. His thoughts seemed to drift free of mundane reality. He struggled to discipline them.
     “The boundary around an object?”
     “Have you seen any outlines lately?”
     “Huh? I don’t...hm.”
     “In the world outside our heads.” Redmond piloted the truck smoothly down Kettle Knoll. “Did you see anything you could point to and say ‘there’s an outline,’ at any time recently?”
     “I don’t think so.”
     “And why is that? Every object has a boundary, so it must have an outline, right?”
     Todd was overwhelmed by the sense that he was being introduced to a higher realm of thought, a sphere of concepts and relations whose existence he hadn’t suspected.
     He’s way beyond me.
     He fought down his distaste at the admission.
     If I’m going to learn anything more from him, I have to accept it.
     “Outlines are imaginary, then?”
     Redmond pulled into the Iversons’ driveway, stopped, and set the parking brake. “Not quite. It depends on whether you’d say an image—a picture of the world you have in your brain—is imaginary. When we look at the world, we see...things. Objects we take to be bounded and separate from one another. Most of us view the world that way, most of the time. We have to. It makes organized thought possible. And it’s what moved a great writer to write that ‘wise men see outlines, and therefore draw them.’”
     “Who was that?”
     “William Blake. A poet of the late Enlightenment.” Redmond’s eyes twinkled. “He wrote something a bit different a few years later, though.”
     Todd waited.
     “‘Mad men see outlines, and therefore draw them.’”
     “Huh?”
     Redmond held up a hand for patience. “It was an important insight, centuries ahead of its time. Modern physics tells us that there are no absolute boundaries between things, that boundaries and outlines are only tools of thought.” The engineer’s smooth, solemn face seemed to acquire the weight of centuries. “They exist, whatever that means, only as long as we insist on them. And there are subjects where we can’t make any progress at all unless we refuse to see them.”

     [From Polymath]

     The most important aspects of existence, from the perspective of human consciousness, are the categories and concepts we apply to the reality around us. We do that to make orderly thought possible – to provide for the operations of deduction and induction from which all our knowledge of reality flows. And all those products of our minds, and the uber-concept upon which they’re founded – i.e., that they’re truly applicable to reality – require acts of faith.

---

     Hope requires faith. Without faith that, broadly speaking, we know what we’re talking about, that it’s constructive to theorize about it, and that our theories can be tested against external reality, we cannot proceed. All of classical physics was founded on two assumptions:

• That the universe is lawful;
• That behind all the more detailed laws stands a law of cause and effect.

     Perhaps the most important contribution of modern physics to human understanding is this: cause and effect, as classically understood and employed, does not rule all of reality. To cope with the very smallest and very largest of natural phenomena, our notions about cause and effect, so useful at the “macro” level at which ordinary human life takes place, must give way to other premises. But the real significance of that shift in understanding lies in this: despite the failure of “macro” cause and effect – what’s sometimes been called the “clockwork universe” of classical physics – our faith in the lawfulness of the universe, even at those extreme phenomena, remain unviolated. In other words, even where classical cause and effect cease to apply, there are governing laws; we can determine those laws by study and experimentation; and having determined them, we can hope to put them to use technologically.

     Of course, there will always be realms beyond human experimentation. Though we can conjecture about things like the ultimate creation of the universe, we cannot test our conjectures by creating a fresh one. Yet the discovery that human thought is applicable to so much allows us to hope that natural law is pervasive – i.e., that all phenomena are orderly in an ultimate sense. We can entertain phenomena that exhibit randomicity while remaining confident that even seemingly random events are governed by laws we might someday grasp. Consider radioactive decay, the foundation of nuclear physics, as an example.

     All our hope of progress – “the improvement of the human condition, morally, with declining input” – depends upon maintaining our faith in our perceptions and the operations of our minds.

---

     Charity, despite its seeming distance from faith and hope, isn’t about generous actions performed in a conceptual vacuum. It depends upon hope: specifically, the hope that:

• We can see the troubles of others clearly enough to grasp their genesis;
• We can distinguish those that should be helped – the “deserving” – from those that shouldn’t;
• We can then contrive to help the “deserving” without causing them material, emotional, or spiritual harm.

     Now, this is not how most people think of charity today. That’s because of the largely successful campaigns by the apostles of envy to persuade us that anyone who lacks something that he wants but is unable or unwilling to pay for is an appropriate object of charity. That this is not so should be obvious to any thinking person. As I wrote some time ago:

     True charity requires proximity, for at least two reasons. First, the necessary personal connection, the sense that one is helping one's own, fails at any great remove. Second, human fallibility and weakness guarantee that just as some will fail to prosper on their own, others will fail to employ charity properly; indeed, to receive money from others sometimes makes one's troubles worse. When this occurs, the giver must give no further, for other measures -- criticism, instruction, discipline -- are clearly indicated. With any separation between the benefactor and his beneficiary, it becomes impossible to know whether help helps in fact, or only in theory and intention.

     The ultimate aim of true charity is to return its beneficiary to a condition in which he doesn’t need it. Is it not clear that proper charity, that helps those who deserve help without doing them harm, requires knowledge and conviction of uncertain kinds – i.e., knowledge both of how a particular person came to be in need, and the conviction that his need can be remedied nondestructively? Is it not clear that one can never be absolutely confident in such knowledge and such conviction – that one must have faith in one’s ability to know another’s state adequately well, and maintain a firm hope that he can be helped without being harmed?

---

     The above seems to detach the “theological virtues” from all theology. Indeed, having mulled the matter over for several hours now, I can’t see a necessary connection between any theology and any one of the three. That they should be so firmly associated with the Christian faith must have another lesson for us.

     But the theological virtues are not all the virtues by a long shot. There are four cardinal virtues – prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude – vital to a stable, peaceful, and prosperous social order, and these too are usually regarded as Christian teachings. So there’s more juice in this orange than I’ve yet managed to squeeze out. Though it’s rather unusual to conclude a “Sunday Rumination” this way, I’ll take my chances and say:

     More anon.

     (And may God bless and keep you all. Can’t leave that out!)

The Mind Killer: Thoughts On Fear

First, some quotes:

No power is strong enough if it labors under the weight of fear. [Marcus Tullius Cicero]

Fear always springs from ignorance! [Ralph Waldo Emerson]

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it...The basest of all things is to be afraid. [William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech]

Fear is an acid which is pumped into one's atmosphere. It causes mental, moral and spiritual asphyxiation, and sometimes death; death to all energy and growth. [Horace Fletcher]

Fear is like fire: if controlled, it will help you; if uncontrolled, it will rise up and destroy you. [John F. Milburn]

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. [Bertrand Russell]

Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. (He is also a fool.) [Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love]

---

Some years ago, when I was crafting a handful of unusual protagonists for a novel about an unusual family, I had occasion for an extended reflection upon fear. Among the emotions, it alone is "wholly horrible" [C. S. Lewis]. Yet it is one of the two motivators critical to the mentality required for survival. Maslow's Hierarchy should make that obvious. But there's that word again...the one that really means overlooked.

Among the reactions a military recruit must be conditioned to suppress is the fear-powered impulse to flee from combat. Combat is, after all, the reason he's there. To flee is to yield to the enemy. If you're going to do so reflexively, why bother to enlist? If an army is to do so at the first incoming fire, why bother to have an army?

Some armies, be it noted, have been unsuccessful at suppressing their soldiers' fear reaction. Some interesting stories, of Arab armies fleeing from numerically far smaller Israeli forces before battle was joined, came out of the Six-Day War.

Fear is the most important emotion of all in politics:

"The State is based on threat." [Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Illuminatus!]

Governments are sustained almost entirely by the fear they engender in their subjects: fear of one another; fear of external enemies poised to strike; and fear of the government itself.

Yet a thing filled with such power is inherently useful, if it can be mastered and harnessed. "Fire and fear, good servants, bad lords," as Genly Ai says to Therem Harth rem ir Estraven in Ursula LeGuin's early masterpiece The Left Hand of Darkness. Estraven says, almost wonderingly, of Genly Ai that "He makes fear serve him." But Estraven finds illumination in that remark:

I would have let fear lead me around by the long way. Courage and reason are with him. What good seeking the safe course, on a journey such as this? There are senseless courses, which I shall not take; but there is no safe one.

As the perils to life, health, and material security mount around us, it becomes ever more urgent that we find ways to master and harness our fears: each of us, and all of us.

---

The old are often dominated by their fears and their responses to them. I speak from experience on this. Quite a lot of my energy, in these waning years, goes to buttressing myself and my loved ones against the threats I see, or fancy that I see. I'd imagine that's true of quite a lot of us older folks. If you've had five or six decades of pleasant existence on this ball of mud, you're easily led to thinking of security above all other things:

Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is “finding his place in it,” while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of really being at home on Earth, which is just what we want. You will notice that the young are generally less unwilling to die than the old. [C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters]

Today, when the State has become predatory beyond all expectation and its eyes are everywhere, the sense of insecurity among those of us ill-equipped to fight it directly is stronger than ever. The urge to withdraw into anonymity and invisibility can overpower us. And that, of course, is exactly what our political masters want.

Have a gander at this article, reflect on what it means for the right to keep and bear arms, and ponder: Will that right be undone de facto, by Gestapo tactics of the sort John Filippidis and his family endured? Then have a look at the statistics in this paper, and ponder whether you can master your fears sufficiently to speak out against such tyranny.

---

[C]ourage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky. [C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters]

The beauty of courage, the way in which it evokes unconditional admiration from all but the meanest-souled, is the confirmation of the importance of that virtue -- and of the importance of the fear that must be overcome to exhibit it. Courage is the essential component of any realistic hero, for a hero is one who is willing to accept risk, or hardship, or sacrifice, for something larger than his self-interest. We're capable of detecting it even when it's not on immediate display:

"I'd not have guessed, Andrew. I'd not have thought you capable of it. When we met, when I first looked upon your face, I said to myself, 'if ever there's lived a man who knows not the taste of fear or failure, this is he, here he is before me.' " [Me, here]

But there is this: those "meanest-souled," knowing themselves to be the prisoners of their fears, are enraged by both courage and the admiration of courage. The recognition of that virtue in others inherently demeans them. He who has submitted to fear is unable to bear comparison with one who has mastered it. That's why the legions of the Left are relentless in condemning books and movies that portray genuine courage in action for wholesome ends. To him who has surrendered to fear, it is imperative that courage be snuffed out -- that no trace of it remain to garner the admiration of others.

That goes a long way toward explaining the tirades of condemnation toward movies such as Zero Dark Thirty and Lone Survivor, doesn't it?

---

In the mood I'm in this morning, I could go on this way for thousands of words more, but I'll spare you. Anyway, one more quote, probably the best-known fictional statement about fear, from Frank Herbert's classic Dune:

"Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." [Frank Herbert, Dune]

Truly blessed is he who can do so...but how many can? Is it learnable? Or teachable? Or is it forged solely from impulse and experience?

Food for thought.

Thoughts On Conservatism Part 2: Strawmen

As an outspoken libertarian-conservative, I take a lot of flack from all sorts of disagreeable persons -- i.e., from persons who get upset when I attack their positions on rational or empirical grounds. There's a lot of that going around, these days. Opinions, after all, are like assholes: everybody's gotta have one. However, few persons in our contemporary political discourse are all that good at distinguishing facts from opinions, and logic from preferences. Blame whoever you like for it; it's the least attractive feature of today's political interplay.

Among the most risible of all pseudo-ripostes to my contentions is that I'm "advocating for Utopia." A recent objector -- anonymous, of course -- seized on the following passage from the previous piece:

Choose among your values what you think most important to conserve, by all means. Then, having made your choice, ask yourself sincerely: Would any social system, any polity, any corpus of law or system of jurisprudence succeed in conserving those things without the three items immediately above? But with those three things fully in effect among the people, would any great engine of coercion be required to gain or keep what you seek?

...and said:

So, the question is "Is Utopia possible?" or, "What's you're plan to achieve perfect harmony among men?" And if the answer to the first is "No!", or the answer to the second is "I have no plan because that's not possible,"; then we should throw up our hands in frustration, conclude that government is an Unnecessary evil, and all human society is evil "collectivism".

Ignore the poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation. (Yes, "Anonymous," there is a Grammar and Spelling Checker. No, not at the North Pole. His name is Fran Porretto, and he bloviates at Liberty's Torch. Comment at his site and you submit yourself to his mercies.) Measure what my correspondent wrote against what I wrote and ask yourself: Does that constitute a valid dismissal of questions plainly and sincerely asked, or is it merely the largest strawman the fellow could cobble up out of his limited bile and mental horsepower?

Take a moment over that.

---

The late Andrew Breitbart was known, among other things, for his assertion that "Culture is upstream from politics." While the observation is important, it is not fundamental. There's something upstream from culture that's far more basic: the nature and proclivities of Man.

Culture is an expression of the norms prevalent in a society at a particular time. Though it sometimes seems to have an infinite number of facets, they can be partitioned into only three categories:

• What is considered decent public behavior;
• What is accepted in the arts;
• What is accepted in the pursuit of material gain.

Note: I have omitted private behavior. Private behavior can clash dramatically with the public norms of a society; witness Victorian England. Despite our supposed permissiveness about what's publicly acceptable today, this is true in the contemporary United States as well: the domestic lives of many Americans conceal things that would be frowned upon or worse were they to become generally known.

Culture, however, is a transmission system. It relays norms and concepts, both express and implied, to a society's young. When that transmission system contradicts the norms and concepts their parents and designated educators attempt to inculcate in them, a power struggle is in progress. Whichever system has the firmer basis and the greater persistence will prevail. the results are visible only in the behavior of our progeny.

Let's review "the nature and proclivities of Man:"

• Each man is animated by independent volition and individual desires;
• He sees himself as the center of all things; things about which he does not know, or which he regards with indifference, cannot motivate him.
• Though he is capable of limiting his own behavior, he must be provided with a reason to do so:
  1. A conditioned aversion to the behavior;
  2. Fear of the probable consequences of the behavior;
  3. Repugnance toward the behavior itself, on abstract grounds (e.g., a moral code).

When I composed my take on "The Algorithm:"

1. Select a technique that you think will get you what you think you want.
2. Will this technique require you to lose body parts, go to jail, or burn in Hell?
   • If so, return to step 1.
   • If not, proceed to step 3.
3. Do a little of it.
4. Are you at your goal, approaching it, or receding from it?
   • If at your goal, stop.
   • If approaching, return to step 3.
   • If receding, return to step 1.

..I had exactly those properties of human nature in mind.

If a culture at odds with the norms being relayed by parents and other trusted sources of counsel prevails over those norms, our reasons to limit our behavior come under attack. We lose any aversive conditioning to what the culture slathers us with. Our fear of unpleasant consequences is weakened. Any moral code we might otherwise have acquired is undermined, perhaps to collapse into rubble.

From that point forward, the limits on what we can and will do will consist solely of what we can get away with. There is no countermeasure except to win the previous struggle: to equip our young people with bastions of character that are proof against the seductions of libertinism (not libertarianism, damn it!) purveyed by the culture that seeks to twist them.

---

Considering how sharp the great majority of my Gentle Readers are, the above probably seems to most of you to be too obvious to require restating. However, consider once more what "Anonymous" wrote to me:

So, the question is "Is Utopia possible?" or, "What's you're plan to achieve perfect harmony among men?" And if the answer to the first is "No!", or the answer to the second is "I have no plan because that's not possible,"; then we should throw up our hands in frustration, conclude that government is an Unnecessary evil, and all human society is evil "collectivism".

This...person has implicitly evaded the core of my question. But perhaps I should have used smaller words and put it in really big type:

Which Works Better:
Coercion?
Or Character?

Six millennia of recorded history testify that coercion -- the use of the police powers of the State to enforce some standard of virtue -- is almost pointless. There are several reasons for this, but they're better saved for a separate tirade. Contrariwise, when characters are built on solid foundations and buttressed by recognition and approval, they stand firm against any and all temptation. The seeming desirability of an omniscient and omnipotent State to keep us all on the straight and narrow vanishes like a bad dream.

Does that completely obviate the need for government? Only in the minds of those who believe that private methods will suffice to deal with such matters as national defense, border control, criminal jurisprudence, and the soundness of the commons. They have a case to make, and it should not be waved aside. But for those of us who prefer the "night-watchman" State of classical liberal / Constitutional design, the answer is no. (Provided, of course, that we can manage to keep our own State within those bounds.)

---

In casual conversation, the proper response to a strawman such as "You're advocating Utopia!" is to laugh it aside, possibly following that up with "Is that all you've got?" However, current political interchange appears to admit such strawmen on an equal footing with reasoned argument, so one must be prepared.

The "Utopia" strawman is important because it's self-contained. Everyone knows what is meant by such an objection. More, the common response is to deny the allegation, which is a losing move. A better rejoinder would go approximately like this:

Sorry, pal. You're the one who believes in Utopia: a society made perfect by infinitely magnifying the powers of the State. I'm concerned with what works and what doesn't -- and my reading of history indicates that what works is character building and careful attention to where, how, and with whom our kids spend their time. I'm not interested in any totalitarian fantasies about making people good with the blows of a nightstick.

And with that, I yield the floor.