God, those two in the first picture look like a right miserable pair of rectally enbroomhandled bores, don’t they?
So, seriously (not that my first sentence wasn’t serious) this is classic misdirective propaganda, in which the intention is not to illustrate the caption, but to associate each caption with positive or negative (in the minds of the intended viewer) imagery. It’s always dishonest; this particularly so. Only a temperance loon would take it at face value; in fact, let’s do that, and have “traditionalism” accompanied by a hatchet faced harridan in a ridiculous hat and “modernism”[1] accompanied by some smiling, happy people enjoying a nice drink as free individuals.
The funny thing is, the reason that this picture even makes any sense is that “traditional” values- the hatchet faced temperance harridans- are now back in vogue. We are currently re-running the late 19th and early 20th centuries’ hysterias about drinking (and other drugs), obscenity, white slavery, and so on. That’s your traditionalism. Crazy people making unnecessary laws to solve imaginary problems, spurred on by crass propaganda just like this.
Honestly, those two in the “traditionalism” pic; they could sour milk just by looking at it.
[1] Which you, Sean, should know should be “modernity”- modernism is a particular set of social, political, artistic and architectural movements of the early twentieth century.
No edict (or other government policy) will turn the people in the right hand picture into people like those in the left hand picture. Although (yes) the people in the right hand picture will end up financially dependent on the state (as will their children) – so the people who say that lack of self control does not matter are just wrong (flat wrong). People who do not learn to control (govern) themselves – end up being controlled by the state (and dragging everyone else down with them).
As Gladstone said so often – “of one thing I am certain” it is not to the state that we should look to for moral improvement.
The central mistake of “Social Conservatives” in POLITICS is to look to the STATE (to FORCE) for moral improvement.
It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the state, and of Civil Society – it shows a lack of understanding of human beings.
The “Sword of State” is just that (a weapon) – one can not use it to positively create good things (such as moral improvement). It can only (at best) be used against other force.
Moral improvement can only be made if the state GETS OUT OF THE WAY )(allows it – stops UNDERMINING Civil Society). only then can the long hard slog of working for moral improvement (for self control and self government – in a literal sense) really have any hope of success.
Being slightly less miffed now, here’s another observation. What, after all, is modernity? It contains good things and bad things. It has tablet computers and Ed Balls. It has jet aircraft that take you on holiday, and David Cameron’s strange buttered potato complexion. It is the good and the bad.
So we might say that both pictures are illustrating something good about modernity; choice. Neither of them is representative of the whole of life; even the people on the right may be caught at a bad moment, after a night on the tiles. They may be perfectly decent people staggering back from a night out. But even if they are not; they represent something very good- choice.
The women on the right would not have so many choices, traditionally, particularly regarding an education. Likewise those on the right have chosen to get bladdered. We may think this is a bad thing (I don’t, but others are entitled to think so), but this is the whole nature of choice; some will make bad choices. Anyone who cannot tolerate the fact that freedom will enable some people to totally cock themselves up really isn’t interested in liberty.
So perhaps we should just have one caption: “liberty”, and show that liberty will enable people to choose how they live; to succeed or fail, to try things out and mess up, or try things out and prosper.
I suppose that’s why socialism has caught on, and will be the defining-philosophy for the rest of human history. It teaches that “the fact that you have messed up is someone else’s fault, not your own”. As the ads for mis-sold pensions said the other year: “MIS-SOLD A PENSION? THEY OWE YOU”.
I got back about £8,000 in “mis-sold PPI”, but only because I was told I could, and because i really needed the dosh. I’m not saying I was “mis-sold” it at all for I agreed each one at the time, while sober.
Oh, the PPI scam! I made a tidy sum on that one too. I’m told the next one will involve car insurance. I can hardly wait for the judges to speak the magic words.
“Anyone who cannot tolerate the fact that freedom will enable some people to totally cock themselves up really isn’t interested in liberty.”
Yes, very true.
“So perhaps we should just have one caption: “liberty”, and show that liberty will enable people to choose how they live; to succeed or fail, to try things out and mess up, or try things out and prosper.”
And in view of the proportion of people who don’t wholly subscribe to the project of maximal liberty (political liberty, with the usual constraint that it demands equal honoring of the like liberty of others), as in the first quote, anyone who advances such a radical (and it IS radical) idea will be dismissed in either fear, scorn, or hatred. Mostly fear, I think.
Of course, there’s also the fact–FACT–that it generally takes awhile for a person to complete a radical, i.e., profound or “foundational” change in his worldview.
So, young people, who tend to be looking for a social or political condition against which to rebel, and for a social or political condition to which to rebel, are a likely source of potential libertarians.
And the Mature (certainly not “Elderly”!) Senior-Citizens have a tendency to see some value that they formerly rejected in some traditions, some social conventions (the existence of which is an inescapable fact) and some version of conservativism, or, “don’t throw out Gizmo with the Gremlins.”™ There is also a potential for a positive re-assessment of political liberty in this bunch.
You and I seem to be in agreement that the choices presented in the poster are not the only ones. 😉
And the more I look at the thing, the more I think the message really is intended to convey “A pox on both their houses.”
Again Ludwig Von Mises has been here before us (well he was born in 1881).
Mises noticed that the young “rebels” against morality and so on (what Kipling called the “Gods of the Copybook Headings” – the moral praises that children in Victorian times practiced their handwriting by writing out) were not really rebels at all.
The young students (and so on) were actually incredibly conformist – both to their little cult-groups and to the ideas of the intellectual elite (which they took to their “logical” conclusion).
Yes the young radicals could switch from “Brown” (national) socialism – with its drivel about “national assets” and the economy should be “run for the good of the people”, to Red socialism (with its drivel about “the workers” being “exploited” by “international capital”) and they could switch back again – but it was just swopping one form of socialism for another (whist screaming about “freedom” and “liberty”).
They (the young radicals) did not hate Germany for being collectivist – they hated Germany for not being collectivist ENOUGH.
The “New Left” in the United States in the 1960s were what Mises had seen decades before in Germany – he has no illusions about these young “idealists” (unlike Rothbard).
The radicals have not “sold out” their principles by becoming college professors and senior officials for Obama – these ARE their principles.
The only “freedom” they are interested in is freedom from right and wrong – freedom as POWER – the “freedom not to be free”.
Yes, quite. But the thing is, the rebellious in each generation rebel against something in particular, namely, the mores, conventions, beliefs, ideas, or expectations of their elders. So in our time, there is some hope that young people will be drawn to libertarian ideas out of sheer rebellion against the general librulism or leftism of their parents and professors.
I do think that in each generation the seriously rebellious are in the minority, just to be clear.
But the “rebels” of the ’60’s were the kids who identified with the rebellionism glamourized by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. The “Counterculture” types. And they’re the ones I was thinking of. Those are the ones who were at the oldest my age. For instance, Bernardine and Young Billy, were rebelling against their Main-Street or Upper-Crust society…and Miz Dohrn is only a year older than I am. Wherefore she robbed the cradle, as the eminent Mr. Dohrn, a.k.a. Bill Ayers, is a year younger.
Within their “cult-groups,” yes, these sociopathic perennial adolescents were quite conformist. –And actually, that’s part of what the right-hand side of the poster speaks to, I think: The conformity inherent in the “non-conformity” of “Modernism.” If you feel the need to show your non-conformist status by including the f-bomb (or unmitigatedly scatalogical terms) at least twice in each sentence; if your idea of sticking it to your parents or to society in general is to think it cool to go about in your underwear, despite the fact that you look more reminiscent of the Elephant Chorus in Fantasia than of Miss Sally Bowles … that is the conformity of “non-conformity.”
But I am ranting off-topic.
Anyway, that’s what I was thinking of. It seems to me that where the stage of Adolescent Rebellion takes one (insofar as one suffers it at all) does depend partly on the current Received Behavior and Beliefs.
*SIGH*…. Then again, after seeing what the malformed idiots who are students at George Washington University think of Shrill for President…please tell me that they will ALL find success and happiness as litter-pickers. I can only pray that Michelle Fields had to trawl the campus for weeks to find this bunch. Watch it and weep. Or be glad your sound is bust.
At primary school the teachers asked us to bring food from our parents to “share with our friends” at a party – they (the teachers) then demanded I share the food with my enemies (not my friends).
The teachers had to use physical force to take the food (not a difficult task as a I was under 11 years old at the time).
Was I a noble rebel?
No my enemies were noble rebels – because they robbed people (when there were enough of them – they did not tend to be very brave). and had similar attitude to private property that the Guardian reading teachers had.
Thus I came to understand what “rebels” are – they are conformists (fanatical ones). And I came to understand what “freedom” now means – it means robbery and physical attack.
Paul, this is really my whole argument against industrial style schooling. It’s basically a communist society. It took me years to realise that.
I didn’t have a bad time at school, but I always felt this niggle that something was just terribly wrong with it, and that idea has found form as I get older. That’s why when people argue about e.g. school vouchers vs state allocation etc, I feel somewhat that it misses the point. I think school is just a bad system, period. It needs replacing with education.
God, those two in the first picture look like a right miserable pair of rectally enbroomhandled bores, don’t they?
So, seriously (not that my first sentence wasn’t serious) this is classic misdirective propaganda, in which the intention is not to illustrate the caption, but to associate each caption with positive or negative (in the minds of the intended viewer) imagery. It’s always dishonest; this particularly so. Only a temperance loon would take it at face value; in fact, let’s do that, and have “traditionalism” accompanied by a hatchet faced harridan in a ridiculous hat and “modernism”[1] accompanied by some smiling, happy people enjoying a nice drink as free individuals.
The funny thing is, the reason that this picture even makes any sense is that “traditional” values- the hatchet faced temperance harridans- are now back in vogue. We are currently re-running the late 19th and early 20th centuries’ hysterias about drinking (and other drugs), obscenity, white slavery, and so on. That’s your traditionalism. Crazy people making unnecessary laws to solve imaginary problems, spurred on by crass propaganda just like this.
Honestly, those two in the “traditionalism” pic; they could sour milk just by looking at it.
[1] Which you, Sean, should know should be “modernity”- modernism is a particular set of social, political, artistic and architectural movements of the early twentieth century.
…And on the right, we see Moderns making silly asses of themselves, and not looking as though they’re enjoying it all that much.
If the poster’s supposed to be propaganda, the message I get is that neither “Traditionalism” nor “Modernism” is any good.
Which is pretty much the case. :>)
No edict (or other government policy) will turn the people in the right hand picture into people like those in the left hand picture. Although (yes) the people in the right hand picture will end up financially dependent on the state (as will their children) – so the people who say that lack of self control does not matter are just wrong (flat wrong). People who do not learn to control (govern) themselves – end up being controlled by the state (and dragging everyone else down with them).
As Gladstone said so often – “of one thing I am certain” it is not to the state that we should look to for moral improvement.
The central mistake of “Social Conservatives” in POLITICS is to look to the STATE (to FORCE) for moral improvement.
It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the state, and of Civil Society – it shows a lack of understanding of human beings.
The “Sword of State” is just that (a weapon) – one can not use it to positively create good things (such as moral improvement). It can only (at best) be used against other force.
Moral improvement can only be made if the state GETS OUT OF THE WAY )(allows it – stops UNDERMINING Civil Society). only then can the long hard slog of working for moral improvement (for self control and self government – in a literal sense) really have any hope of success.
Being slightly less miffed now, here’s another observation. What, after all, is modernity? It contains good things and bad things. It has tablet computers and Ed Balls. It has jet aircraft that take you on holiday, and David Cameron’s strange buttered potato complexion. It is the good and the bad.
So we might say that both pictures are illustrating something good about modernity; choice. Neither of them is representative of the whole of life; even the people on the right may be caught at a bad moment, after a night on the tiles. They may be perfectly decent people staggering back from a night out. But even if they are not; they represent something very good- choice.
The women on the right would not have so many choices, traditionally, particularly regarding an education. Likewise those on the right have chosen to get bladdered. We may think this is a bad thing (I don’t, but others are entitled to think so), but this is the whole nature of choice; some will make bad choices. Anyone who cannot tolerate the fact that freedom will enable some people to totally cock themselves up really isn’t interested in liberty.
So perhaps we should just have one caption: “liberty”, and show that liberty will enable people to choose how they live; to succeed or fail, to try things out and mess up, or try things out and prosper.
I suppose that’s why socialism has caught on, and will be the defining-philosophy for the rest of human history. It teaches that “the fact that you have messed up is someone else’s fault, not your own”. As the ads for mis-sold pensions said the other year: “MIS-SOLD A PENSION? THEY OWE YOU”.
I got back about £8,000 in “mis-sold PPI”, but only because I was told I could, and because i really needed the dosh. I’m not saying I was “mis-sold” it at all for I agreed each one at the time, while sober.
Oh, the PPI scam! I made a tidy sum on that one too. I’m told the next one will involve car insurance. I can hardly wait for the judges to speak the magic words.
Ian,
Yes, very true.
And in view of the proportion of people who don’t wholly subscribe to the project of maximal liberty (political liberty, with the usual constraint that it demands equal honoring of the like liberty of others), as in the first quote, anyone who advances such a radical (and it IS radical) idea will be dismissed in either fear, scorn, or hatred. Mostly fear, I think.
Of course, there’s also the fact–FACT–that it generally takes awhile for a person to complete a radical, i.e., profound or “foundational” change in his worldview.
So, young people, who tend to be looking for a social or political condition against which to rebel, and for a social or political condition to which to rebel, are a likely source of potential libertarians.
And the Mature (certainly not “Elderly”!) Senior-Citizens have a tendency to see some value that they formerly rejected in some traditions, some social conventions (the existence of which is an inescapable fact) and some version of conservativism, or, “don’t throw out Gizmo with the Gremlins.”™ There is also a potential for a positive re-assessment of political liberty in this bunch.
You and I seem to be in agreement that the choices presented in the poster are not the only ones. 😉
And the more I look at the thing, the more I think the message really is intended to convey “A pox on both their houses.”
Sadly no Julie.
Again Ludwig Von Mises has been here before us (well he was born in 1881).
Mises noticed that the young “rebels” against morality and so on (what Kipling called the “Gods of the Copybook Headings” – the moral praises that children in Victorian times practiced their handwriting by writing out) were not really rebels at all.
The young students (and so on) were actually incredibly conformist – both to their little cult-groups and to the ideas of the intellectual elite (which they took to their “logical” conclusion).
Yes the young radicals could switch from “Brown” (national) socialism – with its drivel about “national assets” and the economy should be “run for the good of the people”, to Red socialism (with its drivel about “the workers” being “exploited” by “international capital”) and they could switch back again – but it was just swopping one form of socialism for another (whist screaming about “freedom” and “liberty”).
They (the young radicals) did not hate Germany for being collectivist – they hated Germany for not being collectivist ENOUGH.
The “New Left” in the United States in the 1960s were what Mises had seen decades before in Germany – he has no illusions about these young “idealists” (unlike Rothbard).
The radicals have not “sold out” their principles by becoming college professors and senior officials for Obama – these ARE their principles.
The only “freedom” they are interested in is freedom from right and wrong – freedom as POWER – the “freedom not to be free”.
Paul,
Yes, quite. But the thing is, the rebellious in each generation rebel against something in particular, namely, the mores, conventions, beliefs, ideas, or expectations of their elders. So in our time, there is some hope that young people will be drawn to libertarian ideas out of sheer rebellion against the general librulism or leftism of their parents and professors.
I do think that in each generation the seriously rebellious are in the minority, just to be clear.
But the “rebels” of the ’60’s were the kids who identified with the rebellionism glamourized by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. The “Counterculture” types. And they’re the ones I was thinking of. Those are the ones who were at the oldest my age. For instance, Bernardine and Young Billy, were rebelling against their Main-Street or Upper-Crust society…and Miz Dohrn is only a year older than I am. Wherefore she robbed the cradle, as the eminent Mr. Dohrn, a.k.a. Bill Ayers, is a year younger.
Within their “cult-groups,” yes, these sociopathic perennial adolescents were quite conformist. –And actually, that’s part of what the right-hand side of the poster speaks to, I think: The conformity inherent in the “non-conformity” of “Modernism.” If you feel the need to show your non-conformist status by including the f-bomb (or unmitigatedly scatalogical terms) at least twice in each sentence; if your idea of sticking it to your parents or to society in general is to think it cool to go about in your underwear, despite the fact that you look more reminiscent of the Elephant Chorus in Fantasia than of Miss Sally Bowles … that is the conformity of “non-conformity.”
But I am ranting off-topic.
Anyway, that’s what I was thinking of. It seems to me that where the stage of Adolescent Rebellion takes one (insofar as one suffers it at all) does depend partly on the current Received Behavior and Beliefs.
*SIGH*…. Then again, after seeing what the malformed idiots who are students at George Washington University think of Shrill for President…please tell me that they will ALL find success and happiness as litter-pickers. I can only pray that Michelle Fields had to trawl the campus for weeks to find this bunch. Watch it and weep. Or be glad your sound is bust.
http://eaglerising.com/6212/terrifying-video-sheds-light-future/
I see they’re not short on opinions … only on knowledge. Heh…the video editor, or Miss Fields herself, sure made the most of the point!
At primary school the teachers asked us to bring food from our parents to “share with our friends” at a party – they (the teachers) then demanded I share the food with my enemies (not my friends).
The teachers had to use physical force to take the food (not a difficult task as a I was under 11 years old at the time).
Was I a noble rebel?
No my enemies were noble rebels – because they robbed people (when there were enough of them – they did not tend to be very brave). and had similar attitude to private property that the Guardian reading teachers had.
Thus I came to understand what “rebels” are – they are conformists (fanatical ones). And I came to understand what “freedom” now means – it means robbery and physical attack.
Paul, this is really my whole argument against industrial style schooling. It’s basically a communist society. It took me years to realise that.
I didn’t have a bad time at school, but I always felt this niggle that something was just terribly wrong with it, and that idea has found form as I get older. That’s why when people argue about e.g. school vouchers vs state allocation etc, I feel somewhat that it misses the point. I think school is just a bad system, period. It needs replacing with education.
Good points Ian.