And consider our Western progressive majority, their freedom sense well along the downward arc from the peak of the American founders to the bleak degradations of North Korea. What has progressivism wrought? Today, even the heirs to the American founders have seen themselves subjected to degradations and injustices more extreme than the affronts which compelled their forebears to stage a revolution. And progressivisms grand prize, socialized medicine, has forced in the door at last. Americans who fantasize that Obamacares failure will be its undoing have missed the point. What does failure have to do with anything? All progressive programs fail. If the successful provision of societal benefits were a necessary condition of its continuance, socialism would no longer exist. The necessary condition for the continuance of progressive policies is a ruling elite motivated by power lust -- and time for men to denature themselves in the name of learning to live with it. Socialized medicine teaches that you must not value your life above that of other men. Not only should no doctor care about your personal survival, but you yourself should stop thinking your survival is any kind of priority. You should wait your turn in the only line in town, and be grateful if you do eventually get what you need from central command. After all, what choice do you have? Finally, this degradation -- this total denial in principle of the most basic instinct of all living things, the instinct to preserve oneself through ones own effort -- causes one to see fairness in this universal abject self-denial, to bow ones head before the objective hand of government. This is what becomes of the desire for self-preservation under progressivism. Indeed, this is the purpose of progressivism in all its forms -- from socialized education to the bureaucratically micromanaged economy, and from the moral relativism and collectivist sentimentalism of mass entertainment to the protection of a permanent ruling elite through cronyism and a state-manipulated press. The aim is to produce the sort of citizen for whom I am human no longer essentially means I am free. The goal is to degrade your natural perception of freedom to the level of being content with your bowl of rice -- or, at the intermediate stage, with your smartphones, music videos, and entitlement programs -- purchased with your daughters future, your reason, your self-ownership. That this goal is as close to global achievement as it is today is astonishing -- though no more so than the fact that there are still men left who are able to perceive what has been lost, and to mount a resistance. Read more: americanthinker/2013/11/the_progressive_degradation_of_freedom.html#ixzz2kH0DmfIj Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
Posted on: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 19:37:29 +0000
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