The Social Darwinism Conundrum
28/April/2010 11:27 Filed in: Weekly
Column
Volume 12, Issue 17
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How many times in these United States have you gone to visit someone and were admonished at the front door, “We don’t allow the discussion of politics or religion in this house!”
Even if it is an unspoken rule, the lack of discourse of both politics and religion and how they are related, dare I a say as a civil discussion, is what has gotten America into our current position.
Just mention Sarah Palin and a volcano of anger or praise erupts almost instantaneously and soon volcanic ash threatens to block out the sun. If someone doesn’t change the subject pretty soon, air traffic will have to be diverted around the area.
Underlying all this joy and mirth is the clashing of worldviews.
One view believes that there is a God, who created everything not all that long ago, and mankind was created in the image of God.
The scientific worldview does not believe in god, maybe aliens, but nothing exists but the natural material reality that evolved by quantum leaps of intellectual complexity over millions and billions of years.
A third worldview states that they believe in God but are agnostic on how it all came to be and where we are going, because they just have enough trouble dealing with daily life.
The forth group believes essentially that they are the zenith of evolution, and because of their superior intellect, the rest of us should acquiesce to their understanding of how it all works, and likewise thank and serve them for being so very magnanimous. These are the Social Darwinists, who now are the dominant religion in America, but as we will see as we continue, are facing a conundrum of epic proportions, that will very soon lead to a battle to the finish among the members. The survival of progressive evolution is at stake and to victor belong not only the spoils, but the vanquished will be eliminated from the gene pool.
So if you happen to be in one of the first three religious groups, for the time being, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, sit back, relax, turn on your television, open a cool one of your choice, and watch the battle unfold.
Well just between you and me, the battle has been rigged, because both of the participants have already been found to have fatal weaknesses, but that does not mean that this sport will not be worth watching.
So let the battle begin!
Last Friday perusing the daily Wall Street Journal’s morning email I couldn’t help but notice the following headline:
The New Master of Wall Street
Obama surveys the financial kingdom that may soon be his.
As a non-subscriber to the WSJ, I was only able to get a brief summary of the article, but doing a search gave the direct link. The article generally states that Obama’s Wall Street reform legislation could at best be described as a mixed blessing, and in the worst case, is but a complex hodgepodge of regulations that will increase governmental and special interest influence over the way big investment firms and banks do their business, yet still gives special favors 2 Big 2 Fail firms.
As last week’s “Trekking to Gomorrah” article closed out our “Why Me?” series, you know I am not a big fan of Wall Street generally, and this bill does nothing to push regulations in the right direction. However I find it more than amusing that even the Wall Street Journal, the world’s most prestigious business reporting enterprise, says that Wall Street is going to give Barack Obama and future presidents control over how they make their money and the majority of their profits.
So I am supposed to believe that Wall Street Investment Bankers, the world’s most powerful and richest Social Darwinists, are going to let, no welcome, Barack Obama, the most prominent redistribution of wealth personality in American history, regulate their enterprises, not only in America, but eventually around the world? That makes buying the Brooklyn Bridge sound like a wonderful investment. Better yet Wall Street is going to give the government a ten percent stake in a perpetual money machine for nothing. That sounds much closer to the spin some people would like you to believe.
Yesterday representatives of Goldman Sachs came to Washington to tell Congress that they did nothing wrong in the civil suit filed by the SEC, that alleges that some awful people were selling sound bundled mortgage securities short, reaping huge profits, and Goldman Sachs was complicit in the whole scheme. This is so very important because these Washington DC enlightened representatives of the people think they can fix the broken, with just of few thousand pages of government gobbledygook.
Now the general impression of Barak Obama around the world is that he is a decent talker, believes that those words do make a difference, and really has a poor follow-through. From watching his basketball prowess on TV, I would say his 3-point attempts lack follow-through also, which really may be the problem with the totality of his administration.
So Goldman Sachs gave Barak Obama a little less than a million bucks for his run for the presidency. Were those donations given to incorporate Barak onto their team, to help them in the game of regulatory hoops, or were they just given so that they knew that he would lack the follow-through that might happen if John McCain were elected? Wall Street Bankers generally and Goldman Sachs in particular are the ultimate elitist Social Darwinists. They have the power and the money to get their way in the world, as we now know it.
Something unexpected has happened in the last year that absolutely no one anticipated and that is the Tea Party Movement. Contrary to, as perceived in the lame stream media, they are not radical conservatives. Lame stream media personalities think they are objective journalists; hence everyone who does not agree with their journalistic abilities has to be far to the right of Rush Limbaugh. In reality Tea Party people hate the Republicans almost as much as the Democrats, they just think that the Republicans should know better. Furthermore these Tea Party people are not Libertarians either, Tea Party people don’t hate government, they just hate what their government has become, and therefore defy all previous stereotypes, except for what they are beginning to understand about their country’s founders.
For some reason Bill Clinton has entered into Tea Party bashing in the last couple of weeks. Now whether you liked or disliked President Clinton in office, everyone pretty much agrees that the man is not stupid. However, his Tea Party remarks seem more inline with his, “I didn’t have sex with that woman,” and “it all depends what your definition of is, is” rather than the statesman he seems to have tried to become after leaving office. In short someone pointed out to Clinton that something is happening and Bill should be properly positioned when things shake out.
Now Barack Obama is really not a financial-elite Social Darwinist. In fact his training is all on the side of the redistribution of wealth, or intellectual-elite Social Darwinism. We see the ascendancy of this type of Social Darwinism in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, in which the Russian Social Democratic Party, morphed into the Communist Party, as Russia became the Soviet Union. This was also the basis of the National Socialists in Germany, which became the Nazis.
Those organizations failed and now Russia is trying to promote some type of market driven economy within a social structure that has no basis of that market understanding, the same is true of the Communists in China. Really only because of the lasting prosperity of the United States, in halls of our urban universities did remnants of this form of elite-intellectual Social Darwinism, maintain the hope that one day they would get the chance to prove that social justice and redistribution of wealth were and are the highest form of human evolution. Now they think they have their chance with Barack Obama, truly one of them, and with the economic turmoil it gave them a chance to not let a good crisis go to waste.
The problem is that this window of opportunity may have already shut, due to the natural law vigor of the American republic, codified in the Constitution and expressed by the birth of the Tea Party Movement and truly independent American constitutional awareness. What Barack Obama may just be beginning to understand and his redistribution of wealth people have yet to realize, is that their fight should not be with the Tea Party people but the other side of the Social Darwinist spectrum, the Wall Street financial-elite.
“So you want to take our money and give it to the union bosses, and your ivory tower intellectuals, all in the lame excuse of helping the poor, the lazy, and the other evolutionary misfits. What part of no, don’t you understand?”
Again we have to thank Russia and their Revolution for the change of saving ours. When Ronald Reagan became President, he forced underground, deep into the ivory covered walls, the hopes of continuing Roosevelt’s New Deal into remaking the United States into a European social democracy. Strangely while the change began in Great Britain under Margaret Thatcher this country became invigorated as F. A. Hayek brought is concept of “The Road to Serfdom” to the USA. So thirty years later, at least some parts of Europe seem to be more market driven, and the United States government wants to become more like Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece.
But what saved us all, at least in that time span, was when Reagan made Alan Greenspan Chairman of the Federal Reserve. During his 18 years at the FED, Greenspan led the financial reforms that followed the Objectivist economic philosophy of Ayn Rand. Rand’s Objectivism grew out of her life experiences as the antithesis of communism that she experienced in her youth in Russia during the Revolution. Greenspan’s actions allowed for the development of laissez-faire Wall Street business growth, and really blossomed in the early years of George W. Bush, until it grew 2 Big 2 Fail. Then and now, politicians’ fear and desire to mess with things they know nothing about; brought us to where we are today.
There is no way we can find any linkage, other than the vitriol, between the words of President Clinton regarding the Tea Parties and the myopic words of former ACORN head Bertha Lewis when she was speaking to a group of Young Democratic Socialists (much of that speech is available as video at various sources). What seems to be angst in the voice of Clinton however boils out through Lewis as genuine fear of the future of socialism. In her talk Lewis sees the worst of all American social vices coming to get her and other socialists and putting them away permanently.
What Lewis doesn’t seem to understand is that the Tea Parties and the new found constitutional awareness, really doesn’t give a hoot about her utopian ideology, or even the social margin plays she may affect. What she really needs to be afraid of is the financial-elite Social Darwinists that really were the power behind the Reagan Revolution and more importantly the American defense buildup that brought about the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But she is right in one aspect, in a world ruled by financial-elite Social Darwinists, her group of intellectual-elite Social Darwinists, will be the first group eliminated from the human gene pool.
So where does that put the rest of us, who are really not all that concerned about atheistic life philosophies? Well like the Tea Party Movement and our gaining constitutional awareness, we all are going to need to do some lifting. As Winston Churchill said:
The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients is coming to a close. We are entering an era of consequences.
He of course was speaking about a war of guns and bullets; with God as our strength this will not be a war as humanly understood, but rather a struggle between spiritual life, or temporal death. What makes Sarah Palin such a lightening rod to all people, is that she understands that tension, and even though should she die, yet she shall live still in a better place than even Alaska.
Over the weekend I heard a song that I had not heard for years. It was written during the Civil Rights Movement, a time not much different than the struggles we face today. Music is truly the art the calms the savage in America and in the world. What we really need is not political speeches, or social programs, or even protest marches or meetings. What we need is the revival of music, that takes people beyond the limits of temporal material life, and helps us to understand that with God in our life, this life is not all there is, but just a beginning. The song I can’t get out of my mind is “People Get Ready,” by the late Curtis Mayfield. The link takes you to an NPR discussion of the song; it is also available on iTunes. While still living in this world the song puts you on that train to where we will spend eternity and where we will continually, “Just thank the Lord.”
People get ready, there's a train a comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
Don't need no ticket, you just thank the Lord
People get ready for the train to Jordan
It's picking up passengers from coast to coast
Faith is the key, open the doors and board 'em
There's hope for all among those loved the most.
There ain't no room for the hopeless sinner
Who would hurt all mankind just to save his own
Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner
For there's no hiding place against the Kingdom's throne
So people get ready, there's a train a comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
Don't need no ticket, you just thank the Lord
© Creative Commons License 3.0, see website for details.
>>PDF copy
>>Print copy
How many times in these United States have you gone to visit someone and were admonished at the front door, “We don’t allow the discussion of politics or religion in this house!”
Even if it is an unspoken rule, the lack of discourse of both politics and religion and how they are related, dare I a say as a civil discussion, is what has gotten America into our current position.
Just mention Sarah Palin and a volcano of anger or praise erupts almost instantaneously and soon volcanic ash threatens to block out the sun. If someone doesn’t change the subject pretty soon, air traffic will have to be diverted around the area.
Underlying all this joy and mirth is the clashing of worldviews.
One view believes that there is a God, who created everything not all that long ago, and mankind was created in the image of God.
The scientific worldview does not believe in god, maybe aliens, but nothing exists but the natural material reality that evolved by quantum leaps of intellectual complexity over millions and billions of years.
A third worldview states that they believe in God but are agnostic on how it all came to be and where we are going, because they just have enough trouble dealing with daily life.
The forth group believes essentially that they are the zenith of evolution, and because of their superior intellect, the rest of us should acquiesce to their understanding of how it all works, and likewise thank and serve them for being so very magnanimous. These are the Social Darwinists, who now are the dominant religion in America, but as we will see as we continue, are facing a conundrum of epic proportions, that will very soon lead to a battle to the finish among the members. The survival of progressive evolution is at stake and to victor belong not only the spoils, but the vanquished will be eliminated from the gene pool.
So if you happen to be in one of the first three religious groups, for the time being, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, sit back, relax, turn on your television, open a cool one of your choice, and watch the battle unfold.
Well just between you and me, the battle has been rigged, because both of the participants have already been found to have fatal weaknesses, but that does not mean that this sport will not be worth watching.
So let the battle begin!
Last Friday perusing the daily Wall Street Journal’s morning email I couldn’t help but notice the following headline:
The New Master of Wall Street
Obama surveys the financial kingdom that may soon be his.
As a non-subscriber to the WSJ, I was only able to get a brief summary of the article, but doing a search gave the direct link. The article generally states that Obama’s Wall Street reform legislation could at best be described as a mixed blessing, and in the worst case, is but a complex hodgepodge of regulations that will increase governmental and special interest influence over the way big investment firms and banks do their business, yet still gives special favors 2 Big 2 Fail firms.
As last week’s “Trekking to Gomorrah” article closed out our “Why Me?” series, you know I am not a big fan of Wall Street generally, and this bill does nothing to push regulations in the right direction. However I find it more than amusing that even the Wall Street Journal, the world’s most prestigious business reporting enterprise, says that Wall Street is going to give Barack Obama and future presidents control over how they make their money and the majority of their profits.
So I am supposed to believe that Wall Street Investment Bankers, the world’s most powerful and richest Social Darwinists, are going to let, no welcome, Barack Obama, the most prominent redistribution of wealth personality in American history, regulate their enterprises, not only in America, but eventually around the world? That makes buying the Brooklyn Bridge sound like a wonderful investment. Better yet Wall Street is going to give the government a ten percent stake in a perpetual money machine for nothing. That sounds much closer to the spin some people would like you to believe.
Yesterday representatives of Goldman Sachs came to Washington to tell Congress that they did nothing wrong in the civil suit filed by the SEC, that alleges that some awful people were selling sound bundled mortgage securities short, reaping huge profits, and Goldman Sachs was complicit in the whole scheme. This is so very important because these Washington DC enlightened representatives of the people think they can fix the broken, with just of few thousand pages of government gobbledygook.
Now the general impression of Barak Obama around the world is that he is a decent talker, believes that those words do make a difference, and really has a poor follow-through. From watching his basketball prowess on TV, I would say his 3-point attempts lack follow-through also, which really may be the problem with the totality of his administration.
So Goldman Sachs gave Barak Obama a little less than a million bucks for his run for the presidency. Were those donations given to incorporate Barak onto their team, to help them in the game of regulatory hoops, or were they just given so that they knew that he would lack the follow-through that might happen if John McCain were elected? Wall Street Bankers generally and Goldman Sachs in particular are the ultimate elitist Social Darwinists. They have the power and the money to get their way in the world, as we now know it.
Something unexpected has happened in the last year that absolutely no one anticipated and that is the Tea Party Movement. Contrary to, as perceived in the lame stream media, they are not radical conservatives. Lame stream media personalities think they are objective journalists; hence everyone who does not agree with their journalistic abilities has to be far to the right of Rush Limbaugh. In reality Tea Party people hate the Republicans almost as much as the Democrats, they just think that the Republicans should know better. Furthermore these Tea Party people are not Libertarians either, Tea Party people don’t hate government, they just hate what their government has become, and therefore defy all previous stereotypes, except for what they are beginning to understand about their country’s founders.
For some reason Bill Clinton has entered into Tea Party bashing in the last couple of weeks. Now whether you liked or disliked President Clinton in office, everyone pretty much agrees that the man is not stupid. However, his Tea Party remarks seem more inline with his, “I didn’t have sex with that woman,” and “it all depends what your definition of is, is” rather than the statesman he seems to have tried to become after leaving office. In short someone pointed out to Clinton that something is happening and Bill should be properly positioned when things shake out.
Now Barack Obama is really not a financial-elite Social Darwinist. In fact his training is all on the side of the redistribution of wealth, or intellectual-elite Social Darwinism. We see the ascendancy of this type of Social Darwinism in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, in which the Russian Social Democratic Party, morphed into the Communist Party, as Russia became the Soviet Union. This was also the basis of the National Socialists in Germany, which became the Nazis.
Those organizations failed and now Russia is trying to promote some type of market driven economy within a social structure that has no basis of that market understanding, the same is true of the Communists in China. Really only because of the lasting prosperity of the United States, in halls of our urban universities did remnants of this form of elite-intellectual Social Darwinism, maintain the hope that one day they would get the chance to prove that social justice and redistribution of wealth were and are the highest form of human evolution. Now they think they have their chance with Barack Obama, truly one of them, and with the economic turmoil it gave them a chance to not let a good crisis go to waste.
The problem is that this window of opportunity may have already shut, due to the natural law vigor of the American republic, codified in the Constitution and expressed by the birth of the Tea Party Movement and truly independent American constitutional awareness. What Barack Obama may just be beginning to understand and his redistribution of wealth people have yet to realize, is that their fight should not be with the Tea Party people but the other side of the Social Darwinist spectrum, the Wall Street financial-elite.
“So you want to take our money and give it to the union bosses, and your ivory tower intellectuals, all in the lame excuse of helping the poor, the lazy, and the other evolutionary misfits. What part of no, don’t you understand?”
Again we have to thank Russia and their Revolution for the change of saving ours. When Ronald Reagan became President, he forced underground, deep into the ivory covered walls, the hopes of continuing Roosevelt’s New Deal into remaking the United States into a European social democracy. Strangely while the change began in Great Britain under Margaret Thatcher this country became invigorated as F. A. Hayek brought is concept of “The Road to Serfdom” to the USA. So thirty years later, at least some parts of Europe seem to be more market driven, and the United States government wants to become more like Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Greece.
But what saved us all, at least in that time span, was when Reagan made Alan Greenspan Chairman of the Federal Reserve. During his 18 years at the FED, Greenspan led the financial reforms that followed the Objectivist economic philosophy of Ayn Rand. Rand’s Objectivism grew out of her life experiences as the antithesis of communism that she experienced in her youth in Russia during the Revolution. Greenspan’s actions allowed for the development of laissez-faire Wall Street business growth, and really blossomed in the early years of George W. Bush, until it grew 2 Big 2 Fail. Then and now, politicians’ fear and desire to mess with things they know nothing about; brought us to where we are today.
There is no way we can find any linkage, other than the vitriol, between the words of President Clinton regarding the Tea Parties and the myopic words of former ACORN head Bertha Lewis when she was speaking to a group of Young Democratic Socialists (much of that speech is available as video at various sources). What seems to be angst in the voice of Clinton however boils out through Lewis as genuine fear of the future of socialism. In her talk Lewis sees the worst of all American social vices coming to get her and other socialists and putting them away permanently.
What Lewis doesn’t seem to understand is that the Tea Parties and the new found constitutional awareness, really doesn’t give a hoot about her utopian ideology, or even the social margin plays she may affect. What she really needs to be afraid of is the financial-elite Social Darwinists that really were the power behind the Reagan Revolution and more importantly the American defense buildup that brought about the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But she is right in one aspect, in a world ruled by financial-elite Social Darwinists, her group of intellectual-elite Social Darwinists, will be the first group eliminated from the human gene pool.
So where does that put the rest of us, who are really not all that concerned about atheistic life philosophies? Well like the Tea Party Movement and our gaining constitutional awareness, we all are going to need to do some lifting. As Winston Churchill said:
The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients is coming to a close. We are entering an era of consequences.
He of course was speaking about a war of guns and bullets; with God as our strength this will not be a war as humanly understood, but rather a struggle between spiritual life, or temporal death. What makes Sarah Palin such a lightening rod to all people, is that she understands that tension, and even though should she die, yet she shall live still in a better place than even Alaska.
Over the weekend I heard a song that I had not heard for years. It was written during the Civil Rights Movement, a time not much different than the struggles we face today. Music is truly the art the calms the savage in America and in the world. What we really need is not political speeches, or social programs, or even protest marches or meetings. What we need is the revival of music, that takes people beyond the limits of temporal material life, and helps us to understand that with God in our life, this life is not all there is, but just a beginning. The song I can’t get out of my mind is “People Get Ready,” by the late Curtis Mayfield. The link takes you to an NPR discussion of the song; it is also available on iTunes. While still living in this world the song puts you on that train to where we will spend eternity and where we will continually, “Just thank the Lord.”
People get ready, there's a train a comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
Don't need no ticket, you just thank the Lord
People get ready for the train to Jordan
It's picking up passengers from coast to coast
Faith is the key, open the doors and board 'em
There's hope for all among those loved the most.
There ain't no room for the hopeless sinner
Who would hurt all mankind just to save his own
Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner
For there's no hiding place against the Kingdom's throne
So people get ready, there's a train a comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
Don't need no ticket, you just thank the Lord
© Creative Commons License 3.0, see website for details.