Ideological dysentery

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Something has gone terribly wrong in our country. The values we had aspired to of rugged individualism, community, family, morality, ethics, all of them have been replaced or bastardized, corrupted and morphed into viler and more wretched versions of themselves. And there is no one person to blame for this shift away from those traditions and traditional values. We are all, in some sense, responsible for the collapse of our culture, whether we admit it or not.

There has been a conflagration, particularly among those who value liberty, between libertarian and libertine.

While similar, there is a world of difference. And I do not think that the above definitions provide enough clarity to speak to what I am saying. So I will elaborate…

Libertarians follow many factions, but the through lines of the many branches is the reliance upon the self and the community as one of the fundamental tenants of the philosophy. But even this idea has been corrupted. I remember in college being a part of the campus Libertarian club, and the biggest thing that we did during my time there was to sell “pot” brownies. We purchased small plastic plant pots and sold brownies out of them as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Libertarian Party’s proclivity toward drug decriminalization. Even the “Libertarian” club had fundamentally engaged in the Libertine natures that come with bastardizing personal responsibility.

We have spewed and defecated in the cultural stream, and it is from that stream that we drink, imbibing the refuse that we had just put forward and thinking we are clean. My truth has replaced the truth, undermining actual justice. We focus on race, gender, and sex so much to the point that we do not see ourselves re-instituting the immoral practices of segregation. We have become slaves to the systems that had lifted so many out of poverty and had given us an unparalleled quality of life with amenities that no king or queen would have dared to dream possible. We have constructed a network so elaborate that shutting it down results in millions of people being forced into starvation. And yet we don’t see it.

We are the first-order thinkers. We are the ones who see the fence cutting across the road and don’t even bother to ask why it is there. Whether it is our reliance on the public education system making us perfectly replaceable cogs in the wheels of industry, our frayed and broken values that rely on pursuing pleasure above all else, or our commercial institutions that claim to be environmentally conscious but push us to buy the latest bauble or trinket with parts sourced from humungous strip mines and assembled with near slave labor. We espouse virtue, but revel in vice. We perform our outrage online for the likes and admiration of people who would never dare lift a finger to make a difference in their own community.

We have forgotten, or maybe never have tasted at all, the clean waters of liberty. We have come to think of the taste of corruption as the default. We are so focused on living this life and getting as much from it as possible regardless of the future. And we think that somehow, this dystopian nightmare is a utopia.