The Remnant
may never come, or at least if it does, it will come as Britain’s did: for all the wrong reasons. Here are a few reasons why, according to an interesting systemic analysis:
1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force.
2. Psychopathologizing and Medicating Noncompliance.
3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy.
4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top.”
5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously.
6. The Normalization of Surveillance.
7. Television.
8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism.
Go read it for explanations of each.
The youth today should be enraged at the spending that the previous few generations did on credit of the future that they will never pay. The national debt placed on the backs of future generations is presumptive, hubristic, and selfish in a way that history may never have seen, or at least not since the later end of the Golden Age of Rome. The spending the government is doing now is 4 times in a year what it took from the inception of the country to Reagan to previously amass as debt. Everyone is hurting, as we hear almost daily today. But the source of that hurt appears to be an overbearing regulatory, police, warfare, welfare, and corporate state that has lost track of the importance of the little guy and the freedom that made this country the most literate and wealthy nation ever to exist on the face of the earth. Still, our youth are not angry. In fact, it doesn’t even seem like they can be bothered to pull their shallowing minds away from Jersey Shore or hedonistic lifestyles based around sex, alcohol, material goods, and the immediate present. Where the few can be convinced to care about politics and national policy, the ability to think has been hindered by poor schooling and failure to understand the most basic of concepts. Instead, we have a generation of youth who feels instead of thinking, basing all arguments on emotional and non-rational urges full of half-baked logic. No longer do you need to know anything about anything to have an opinion about national policy. But really, what else would we expect? The current state of media and politics is a game of cheap one-liners and buzzwords that are supposed to inform viewers of how to salivate upon hearing. For example, the Republican debate this week. What sensible policy to get us out of the financial hole we are in can be conveyed in the 30 seconds each clone drone candidate was allowed to speak? The result is inevitably that the best salesman wins. The person who lies to you the best about his/her policy by distorting the facts will inevitably win. The lies of politicians are the sins of laziness of the people, intellectual sloth of the people failing to actively disagree with the dupe. If a man wants power, is he the one who should have it? Christianity, Chesterton, and common sense do not think any but the poor (think both money, circumstance, & opportunity, here) and humble should rule:
Is there any answer to the proposition that those who have had the best opportunities will probably be our best guides? Is there any answer to the argument that those who have breathed clean air had better decide for those who have breathed foul? As far as I know, there is only one answer, and that answer is Christianity. Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man’s environment, but in man. Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment. I know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest–if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this– that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators of definable justice. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown the rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor. A Christian may consistently say, “I respect that man’s rank, although he takes bribes.” But a Christian cannot say, as all modern men are saying at lunch and breakfast, “a man of that rank would not take bribes.” For it is a part of Christian dogma that any man in any rank may take bribes. It is a part of Christian dogma; it also happens by a curious coincidence that it is a part of obvious human history. When people say that a man “in that position” would be incorruptible, there is no need to bring Christianity into the discussion. Was Lord Bacon a bootblack? Was the Duke of Marlborough a crossing sweeper? In the best Utopia, I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position at this moment…
