Stephan Pastis' "Pearls Before Swine" cartoon from yesterday. Click the image to be taken to a larger view at the comic's Web page.
It's funny, but it illustrates the eternal conundrum. There are those who insist on a "collective" approach to life: one subordinates one's individuality to the needs of the group. Others insist on an "individualist" approach: one's personal rights and freedoms trump the needs and priorities of the group, no matter what. The truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle. A community made up of full-on individualists probably can't survive, but one made up of hard-line collectivists leaves no room for personal freedom and interests.
From that perspective, I think Rat makes a very good point. Look at San Francisco, Portland, Seattle . . . all cities where deranged individuals have been allowed to run rampant, enforced by a collectivist local and state government driven by individualist socialist extremists. Talk about a contradiction in terms! Everyone who lives in those cities is paying the price for it.
Peter
6 comments:
Peter, you write, "The truth, of course, is somewhere in the middle."
I disagree. Maximal freedom for every one of us yields the best outcomes for all. This has been a recognized truth at least since Adam Smith published "The Wealth of Nations". The freedom of your fist ends at the tip of my nose, but not one mile away from it, as the collectivists and statists demand. Being agreeable and ready to compromise is a mistake, as they will take advantage and trample all over my rights.
Fight, fight, fight until the dying of the light.
What I find interesting is that I used to live in/stay in those cities in the 80s and 90s and I don't recognize them now. Seattle was a fun little town big city and so was Portland and I really enjoyed the City but that was back when the only freak flags you could find were in places like the Tenderloin and Castro. Now it's the entire city and all it took was for ONE moron to refuse to do the job and enforce the law. Just one in each city after being elected by the morons.
There is always a 'middle ground' the problem is DEFINING the middle... Sigh
I think I'm with Peter on this because "maximal freedom" is much to close to full anarchy. Although Ayn Rand made a bit of a mess out of her objectivist philosophy I find her focus on the concept of ethical egoism intriguing, even though she wasn't the only one pushing it to a degree - Hobbes, Nietzsche, even Kant.
But the basic problem is that freedom means also taking responsibility for yourself and people have gradually pushed that responsibility to any kind of authority image they deemed appropriate and that led to loosing their freedom piece by piece.
When the phrase "just be yourself" arrived on the scene, I had a question pop up in my mind: Why does being yourself have to mean being a jerk?
Part of the apparent disjunct between individual freedoms and civil society is that too many people ignore the responsibility and duty side of free will actions, and do not extend the respect to others that they demand for themselves.
John in Indy
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