Paranoia on the rise, experts say

If you think they’re out to get you, you’re not alone. [snip]

“In a world full of threat, it may be kind of beneficial for people to be on guard. It’s good to be looking around and see who’s following you and what’s happening,” Combs said. “Not everybody is trying to get you, but some people may be.”

The question is not, “Are you paranoid,” but “Are you paranoid enough?”

Just asking!

Here’s must listen audio of Barack Obama discussing the Warren Court, wealth redistribution, and the civil rights movement:

In the audio, Obama says one of the “tragedies”, his words mind you, of the civil rights movement was its focus on the courts.  The courts couldn’t “break free from the essential constraints placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution” against redistribution of wealth.  Obama goes on to say it’s just as well though since people are less accepting of court mandated change anyway.  So how does he forsee this redistributive action taking place?  Through community organizing and forming coalitions of power that can enact it through the legislative process.

Is anybody else connecting the dots out there?  Obama’s far left-wing associations (ACORN, Ayers, and Wright), which the media insists aren’t relevant, clearly aren’t accidental.  They play a vital role in the strategy that vaulted him into power.  Now he’s in position to form a coalition with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to do legislatively what the courts wouldn’t.  It’s no accident that congressional Democrats are discussing the seizure of private assets in 401Ks.  They know what Joe the Plumber knows–Obama is a Marxist.

There’s only one problem for Obama though–America is still a center, right nation.  Americans overwhelmingly reject wealth redistribution in favor of job creation and improving the overall economy by huge margins (84% to 13%).  I just hope people wake up in time to avert this disaster.

Update:  Here’s McCain on Barack the “Redistributor”.  Best line: “…He’s more interested in controlling wealth than creating it….in redistributing money instead of spreading opportunity…”

“All I know is that I am not a Marxist” - Karl Marx 

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” - Groucho Marx

Conservative radio pundits and some of their callers, along with a few bloggers, have described Barack Obama as a “Marxist. ”  If  by “Marxist” they mean that Obama’s politics are a brew of socialism, authoritarianism and radical egalitarianism, they’re right.  But I see no evidence that Obama believes in violent overthrow of our capitalist system, or in any of the real complexities Marxism aims at the stupid, the envious, the unbalanced, the power-mad and the credulous. 

True, the Black Liberation Theology of Trinity United is infested with Marxist class dynamics and socialism; it offers up some Marxian and Neo-Marxist musings on the subject of consciousness, hermeneutics, violence as means, and an entire honey bucket load of dialectical excreta.   But I doubt that Obama is a BLT believer; its spurious but powerful demands for charity and sanctioned humility compete with his personal vanity, his insight, and his desire for the good life.  We will not see Barack Obama in any real egalitarian arrangement.

As for Marxist orthodoxy, it’s difficult today to find any political philosophy, Left or Right, which doesn’t incorporate some of the prejudices, social values and processes which shaped the pseudo social-science built by Karl Marx.  Some hard, utilitarian market-love adored by conservatives is, in ways, Hegelian/Marxist.  It’s impossible to define or isolate Marxist “thinking” as the sole property of Marx.   

That’s because so little that Marx wrote about, or formulated, was actually original or creative; it consisted of pages of intellectual theft, and the elaboration of ideas and concepts broadcast by his predecessors, collaborators and contemporary superiors, among whom the primary concerns were human liberty and dignity.  The elements of “Marxism” were everywhere before Karl Marx grew his first beard.     

His ideas floated atop an age of rationalism, where eventually Darwin and Freud would add their own gears and wheels to the “scientific” study of mankind.  That Marx’s clockwork absurdities, his  observations and predictions have survived at all into our age of deconstruction is puzzling.  A lot of it is simply obvious and mundane, while its emotive theorizing and puffery continue an egalitarian road blazed by Rousseau, and the communard, utopian silliness of thinkers as far back as Plato.  

The reason I doubt that Obama is a Marxist is that Marxism has fallen on hard times and Obama is no consumer of the second-rate.  Marxism appears in a few places, like shiny scales dropping from a rotting fish - leftist riffraff, for example, who gorge on the lard of weirdo capitalism, then show up to protest in mass-marketed fancy-dress, and assert their devotion to a dead, 19th century socialist failure and crank. Laughable.  

You can also find Neo-Marxism in that intellectual burger joint, Critical Theory,  where brainy work is found for otherwise unemployable socialist academics. Critical Theorists question everything, including Marxism, except the dialectical process which makes Marxism possible.   Hello? Why?  Because without it, Critical Theory would be 100% charlatanry rather than just 99%. 

No, Obama is worse than a Marxist.  He’s a modern “progressive”,  a clever, wildly ambitious believer in the ever-progressing good society.  He believes that group life is a process, and that he’s going to have something to DO with it!  In his world, nothing can be left alone to develop, mature or even regress on its own.  He’s interested in YOU, and that should scare the hell out of you.    

Rhod made a statement about McCain and the politics of power. He zeroed in on the target and put a nice shot through the X-ring.

I wish to let someone else speak to this, give weight to the very bones of Conservatism and flesh out the corpus. This limns the philosophical essence of Conservatism, more importantly it delineates the Us from Them.

You are either here or not. This is White and Black. I hated to edit this and probably did a poor job of it. Sobeit! With luck you might be encouraged to read it in it’s entirety. At the bottom is the attribution.

Howard Roark’s Courtroom Speech

“Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their caves. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had lifted darkness off the earth. Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. He was considered a transgressor who ventured into forbidden territory. But thereafter, men could travel past any horizon. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had opened the roads of the world.

“That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures—because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer—because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage. [snip]

“Man cannot survive except through his mind. […] From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.

“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred. [snip]

“Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.

“The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.

“The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. The parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime motive.

“The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.

“The basic need of the second-hander is to secure his ties with men in order to be fed. He places relations first. He declares that man exists in order to serve others. He preaches altruism.

“Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self. [snip]

“The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption. […] But this is the essence of altruism.

“Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement. [snip]

“Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egotist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.

“Here the basic reversal is most deadly. The issue has been perverted and man has been left no alternative—and no freedom. As poles of good and evil, he was offered two conceptions: egotism and altruism. Egotism was held to mean the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism—the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self. When it was added that man must find joy in self-immolation, the trap was closed. Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal—under the threat that sadism was his only alternative. This was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind. [snip]

“Degrees of ability vary,[…] There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

“In all proper relationships there is no sacrifice of anyone to anyone. An architect needs clients, but he does not subordinate his work to their wishes. They need him, but they do not order a house just to give him a commission. Men exchange their work by free, mutual consent to mutual advantage when their personal interests agree and they both desire the exchange. If they do not desire it, they are not forced to deal with each other. They seek further. This is the only possible form of relationship between equals. Anything else is a relation of slave to master, or victim to executioner.

“No work is ever done collectively, by a majority decision. Every creative job is achieved under the guidance of a single individual thought. An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design. They work together by free agreement and each is free in his proper function. An architect uses steel, glass, concrete, produced by others. But the materials remain just so much steel, glass and concrete until he touches them. What he does with them is his individual product and his individual property. This is the only pattern for proper co-operation among men.

“The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men. This includes the whole sphere of his creative faculty, his thinking, his work. But it does not include the sphere of the gangster, the altruist and the dictator.

“A man thinks and works alone. A man cannot rob, exploit or rule—alone. Robbery, exploitation and ruling presuppose victims. They imply dependence. They are the province of the second-hander.

“Rulers of men are not egotists. They create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of dependence does not matter.

“But men were taught to regard second-handers—tyrants, emperors, dictators—as exponents of egotism. By this fraud they were made to destroy the ego, themselves and others. The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or to harness them. Which is a synonym.

“From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism.

“The creator—denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited—went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective.

[snip]… The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing for themselves. But observe the results.

“The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off! [snip]

“I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society. […]

From the film The Fountainhead (1949), by Ayn Rand