Just Say No

Here's a Must Read by Victor Davis Hanson.  The date is not current - Feb. 17 - but that of which he writes, is.  

The very fact that we have such a thinker and writer among us is a comfort and an inspiration, as is his conclusion here. If I were you, I'd skip this excerpt and go read it all.

 

Decline Is in the Mind

... decline is a state of mind, and proceeds so often from the dreams of utopianism, or the creed that a new generation can change human nature, eliminate war, legislate peace, end inequality, and enforce an equality of result — alone through state power wielded by enlightened despots and philosopher kings amid imposed “civility.” In response, the productive, highly taxed, upper-middle classes become alienated, convinced that their efforts will not lead to their own self-interested advancement. So they adopt “quietism,” a sort of psychological hibernation from society, a disconnect where they virtually drop or hide out from popular culture — a theme as old as characters in Plato, Sophocles and Euripides, authors who at times focused on those so resistant to the redistributive Athenian state.

But it is not easy to turn us into Belgium

In America’s case, these are choices, not fate. The Constitution is still here should we wish to follow it. Our ancestors left us freeways, airports, and universities and a rich infrastructure. Napa Valley, Silicon Valley, and Central Valley agriculture here in bankrupt California are still sources of amazing ingenuity and enormous wealth creation. Even with 9.6% unemployment, millions rise at 6 a.m. to go to work; millions work the night shift. So to nullify that dynamism, well, that takes work. It requires constant sloganeering about inequality. It demands massive social engineering to create huge public work forces to administer redistributive entitlements. It must entice a new privileged elite to go over to the side of crony capitalism and insider favoritism of the GE sort. It encourages a demonized “them” and a deified “us,”,the abyss say somewhere around the Obama’s $250,000 line of annual income.

 

It requires an ideology of envy and jealously and the exit of moral responsibility for self. It dictates that most personal unhappiness emanates from not having what someone else supposedly does, and can be rectified by state action rather than personal improvement. Yet that is all hard to do quickly in America....

Just say no

So because statist utopianism is both against innate human nature and without any historical record of success, it is not inevitable. The sane can stop it by daily, no hourly, saying no to the utopian narcotic, even (or especially) in its most seemingly mundane and innocuous manifestations...

.... If we speak “truth” to power and ignore the incoming salvos of “mean, greedy, selfish, privileged, racist, nativist, sexist, homophobe, Tea-bagger, and yokel,” decline can stop. It really is a state of mind — the choice not to brush off opportunistic rust from hard steel after a very brief rain.

 

 

 
Screen capture of a serendipitous find at DSGN x DVLP, showing "Barack Obama" by metal artist Danno ... in rusted and weathered steel. 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

Thanks, Yael, for posting this excerpt and for paying this tribute to one of our country's national treasures. If there is a wiser or more honorable scholar working in our midst today than Victor Davis Hanson, I don't know who it is. In Pirke Avot, Rabbi Eliezer (talking, of course, about true scholars, not shlemiels with Ph. D's) says that the "words of a scholar are like fiery coals," which many have taken to mean that a scholar's words must never be taken lightly. Professor Hanson's field is classicism, not Talmudism, but I get the feeling that somewhere along the line he read Rabbi Eliezer and then took a vow never to write anything that could be taken lightly. The man's a true scholar.