It’s Victor Davis Hanson and even for him it is unusually good. Referring to our life in the twilight, he manages to sum up where America is today and where we are going in this “hand-basket”. After reading, one can only marvel at how there are Americans in every part of our society: political, business, media, religious, military, academia, labor,et al, who do not grasp the reality of this country’s destruction.
Statism and the voices of megaphones like Jay Carney wear down a population. . .
Still, the human psyche is a strange thing. It needs to feel transcendent, either spiritually or by confidence in children or through the reputation of a life lived well. Crush that spirit through government obfuscation, and the people become the walking dead of a dreary Warsaw Pact Budapest or Prague, given that there is no hope for those who follow. . . .
To keep America exceptional, we need eccentrics, contrarians, doubters, politically incorrect truth-tellers. Take them away, and we are a nation of head-nodders like most other states.
Our nation’s hope as a republic lies in the ability to expose lies, and that is where the Internet comes in. Consider these comments from Jeffry Tucker at Laissez Faire Today, How the Internet Saved Civilization*
The CEO of Google recently summed it up in this profound statement: “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”
By “doesn’t understand,” he means that no one person can possibly comprehend the extent, structure, or direction of this order that is emerging in our time. The knowledge that makes it possible is decentralized among billions of users themselves, each of whom grasps only the discrete choices that he or she is making at any one instant . . .
The political implications have yet to dawn on this generation. We somehow keep pretending as if governments are in charge. They are not. Yes, they loot, menace, regulate, posture, preen, and hector. But they do not finally control. It simply is not possible. Even the strictest regulations that exist in places like China are a national joke. * . . .
People asked me about my optimism. The best case I can make for it is as follows.
The state in all times and all places wants a population of despairing, dreary, hopeless, and weighted-down people. Why? Because such people don’t do anything. They are predictable, categorizable, pliable, and, essentially, powerless. Such people offer no surprises, threaten no change, and destabilize nothing. This is the ideal world that the bureaucrats, the plutocrats, and the technocrats desire. It makes their lives easy and the path clear. Today is just like yesterday and tomorrow — forever. This is the machine that the state wants to manage, a world of down-in-the-dumps and obedient citizens of the society they think they own.
In contrast, hope upsets the prevailing order. It sees things that don’t yet exist. It acts on a promise of a future different from today. It plays with the uncertainty of the future and dares imagine that ideals can become reality. Those who think this way are a threat to every regime. Why? Because people who think this way eventually come to act this way. They resist. They rebel. They overthrow.
Yet look around: We see progress everywhere. What does this imply? It implies that noncompliance is the human norm. People cannot be forever pressed into a mold of the state’s making. The future will happen, and it will be shaped by those who dare to break bad, dare to disagree, and dare to take the risk to overthrow in favor of what can be.
* editors note: the implications of the brutality of some regimes, and the inevitability of the Internet, are not well considered in this article . . . but for now . . .
Read the full Laissez Faire article here after reading Hanson here. DLH and R Mall
