From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: phl.misc,pa.general
Subject: Why I am not a liberal or a conservative
Summary: long winded and off the cuff essay, also offensive
Date: 7 Nov 92 22:04:30 GMT
Organization: None, Mt. Laurel, NJ

Well, here I am, at 36, and I am neither a liberal nor a
conservative. The liberals are, to put it quite bluntly, blind to
history and, as the aphorism has it, are doomed to repeat it. The
conservatives aren't blind to history, they want to live in it.
Well, as an even older "conservative" put it, the historical
condition of man is "solitary, nasty, brutish, and short".

Both sides have managed to swallow the same fallacy, though, and
that fallacy is very simple to state. They both believe that
fundamentally, human beings are not capable of running their
lives nor their own communities. Both sides imagine that, though
incompetent at these small scale things, we humans are capable of
solving our problems by means of a government.

Both sides suppose, ultimately, that a person is not responsible
for his own life, but that rather society, god, one's
neighborhood, parents, siblings, alcohol, cocaine, whatever, is.
The essential understanding, that you must live your own life and
that no one else can do it for you, is missing or impotent in
both the liberal and the conservative viewpoint.

Yet these two fundamentally identical viewpoints are supposed to
be not only meaningfully different but are popularly supposed to
be exhaustive of the possibilities for social ordering.

This is, of course, not true. It isn't even historically accurate.

Some day, perhaps, the notion that each of us is the fundamentally
responsible agent in charge of our own lives will re-enter public
discourse. When the founders affirmed, in the Declaration of
Independence, that:

	"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are
	created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with
	certain unalienable rights; that among these are life,
	liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure
	these rights, governments are instituted among men,
	deriving their just powers from the consent of the
	governed; that whenever any form of government becomes
	destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people
	to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
	government, laying its foundation on such principles, and
	organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem
	most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

they were not speaking words in isolation, nor words of
thoughtless passion. Whatever else motivated them, they meant
those words, and they meant them as they said them, and they
meant the principles that informed those words, which principles
may be seen throughout their writings and from their intellectual
fathers.

Most of us cannot even imagine what those principles are, nor how
they apply to each of us in our everyday life. Most of us cannot
imagine or contemplate long, having imagined, the radical
*personal* responsibility implicit in their views.

Most of us will, on reading that, suppose that governments exist
to *create* happiness, though its words say otherwise; they tell
us a lesson that only a very few know today: that the *most* that
a government might accomplish is to set the stage wherein it is
possible for each person to seek, and POSSIBLY FAIL TO FIND, his
own happiness.

It is, sad to say, very easy to trace the dying of the United
States, its evolution from a nation informed by a vision of
liberty and personal responsibility to a nation informed by a
vision of elitist control and personal a-responsibility.

The key question is this: how is it that, liberals and
conservatives alike, *no one* has managed to avoid offering
solutions to our perceived problems that are not, *on their face*
laughable?

A prime, and relevant, example: it is supposed that our public
schools need more money, in order to remedy the increasing rate of
illiteracy and other sorts of ill-education that are so
widespread in our society, or that with some superficial tweaking
of their programs, they would turn out educated people.

The immediate question that has to be answered: Why should we
expect an educational system which is not intended to educate,
but is instead intended to train, to actually result in educated
people? You think I'm wrong? Think again. It is a common myth,
but a myth nonetheless, that our public schools are intended to
educate. If that were their purpose, they would be organized
around the traditional academic subjects, with the other areas
they waste our children's lives on being handled elsewhere. If you
doubt me, don't waste time debating it on the net, go read some
books on eduactional theory, past and present, and be prepared to
be surprised. You will be.

Ignoring that, though, what in the world makes anyone think that
people who have repeatedly and continuously shown that they can't
teach will magically become adequate teachers by application of
money or because they've been told to try some new magic formula?
What idiocy is it that supposes that administrative structures
that have been organized around everything but educating will
magically align themselves around that foreign topic, the
education of a young mind, if they're infused with enough funds
or told how they "must" educate?

Let's be real. With increasingly rare exceptions, the people who
teach in our schools shouldn't be trusted to sweep floors, much
less with our children's minds. I mean this from bottom to top;
while some of them are well-intentioned, they are almost without
exception incompetent as teachers or to direct teachers.

To put it quite bluntly, the policies of the twenties have taken
root and it is not that our children are illiterate, but their
teachers are illiterate, and *their* teachers were illiterate.
Most of us, and I almost certainly do mean you, don't have the
vaguest idea what it means to be literate. We don't have anyone
who *is* literate to use as a standard against which to judge the
capacities of ourselves and others and have no abstract standard
which we might apply either.

Come on, define literacy. Can you? I'll save you the trouble:
Literacy is the ability to *write* informedly, coherently, and
extendedly. Yes, write. Not read.

Literacy, you see, is important not merely because it enables one
to communicate through the written word but because it indicates a
well-furnished and well-disciplined mind. Literacy is the sign of
a mind that has matured, that has acquired the knowledge and
tools with which to understand the world and that has acuqired
the habit and discipline to apply those tools to the problems of
living.

This, literacy, is the one element that is absent and will remain
absent from our schools, no matter how much money is thrown at
them or what new programs they enact. All that giving them more
money will accomplish is to allow the teachers and administrators
to further their existing goals. All that changing the programs
will accomplish is that the teachers and administrators will find
ways to not-teach using them.

Our teachers *are not competent* to teach. This is frightening to
consider when one contemplates that *any* normal human being has
all the mental equipment needed to teach. Think about that for
awhile before proposing that the public schools be used to
educate.

You think this is a digression? Not at all. It is just this
illiteracy that is at the root of the problems, and the idiot
proposed solutions, that liberals and conservatives alike see.
You can see what I mean by carefully examining the supposed
solutions to our education problems. There is *no* reason to
suppose that any of them can make *any* difference.

There is something very seductive about the notion that *someone
else* can solve our problem but it is only the immature, the
illiterate, mind that allows itself to lead a life and propose
public policy based on this notion.

While there are any number of supposed technological problems,
problems like garbage, pollution, and the sagging infrastructure,
all of these are rooted in *human* problems. I'm not exaggerating
even a little when I say that the *only* significant problems are
people problems.

Both liberals and conservatives are fond of talking about
"society", as if society were more than you and me and Aunt
Maggie, but the reality is that society is just people. And all
social problems are rooted in problems in people. Solve the people
problems and you solve the social problems. Solve the social
problems and you solve the technological problems.

So, what are the people problems? Well, illiteracy certainly is
one and, pretty much, all the rest are dependent on it. But why
is it a problem? At root, it is a problem because the illiterate,
that is, immature mind believes that it can have its cake and eat
it too, or worse, does not even *see* that it is trying to have
its cake and eat it too. The illiterate, for example, supposes
that it is possible to denigrate the rights of his neighbors
without, sooner or later, losing his own rights.

The illiterate is unable to reason independently and so takes his
ideas from those around him, who being just as illiterate got
their ideas from....'round and 'round in a giant game of
"Telephone". The result is that common knowledge is all too
common but is not knowledge at all. What we think we know just
isn't so.

The result is that some few people, those who have the biggest
megaphones, spread their particular brand of illiteracy all
'round and the rest of the country mouths what they've said while
pretending that they've had an original thought.

But real solutions have to be based on reality, not on wishes.
Real solutions come from an understanding of what happens, not by
mob action grounded in the ignorance of the loudest. And so we
are unable to find solutions of any kind to our problems.

What is the way out?

If we are to not continue our decline into barbarianism, we must
have a population that has the capacity to think independently
and in which common knowledge is that one can live only one's own
life and none other, that one must be responsible for one's own
life and one must refrain from attempting to be responsible for
everyone else.

This is not a new idea. The founders would have wondered how we
could have forgotten it. Neither the liberal nor the conservative
views are compatible with this idea, though.

The funny thing is that the applications of this idea to our
problems are not hard to figure out and there isn't much reason
to suppose that they'll fail, either.

So why not? Because while I may convince you and the guy at the
next terminal, the vast majority of voters want their "slice of
the pie", not knowing that they have no right to the pie and
that, for that matter, there isn't even a fixed pie out of which
theur slice will be taken. The plain fact is that we are a nation
of barbarians who, instead of wielding a sword and plundering our
neighbors, wield a government and plunder our neighbors. So long
as you and the next guy think that the solutions to our problems
are to be found through government, you *are* the problem. And
only when action based on that idea is made ineffective will
there be a reversal.

There is no hope for this generation. They're ignorant, foolish
barbarians and the vast majority of them will go to their graves
without changing in the slightest. The next generation is also
lost because any change will have to first happen in the adults.

The generation after that might be saved. Provided that our
failures so far don't result in the destruction of our country in
a wave of wars of ethnic group against ethnic group.

How then? I keep asking that and hoping that you've followed me
so far. Your grandchildren might be saved but only if they don't
grow up being taught that they are responsible for everyone's
life but their own.

The only way that that might happen is if you *make* it so. Only
if you *personally* abandon the sham of trying to solve
everyone's problems but your own, to run everyone's life but your
own, can you improve the possibility that your grandchildren will
grow up in a world of liberty and equality.

That, my barbarian neighbors, is why I am neither a liberal nor a
conservative.

---
Bill                            { rutgers | decwrl | telesci }!twwells!bill
bill@twwells.com
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