Revolution In America
What would it take to overthrow the U.S. government? The question may seem academic, but all governments fail. The U.S. government will too, for the usual reasons: its ever increasing size, rapacity, and attempts to control all aspects of life; the corresponding shrinkage of its constituents’ liberty; imperial overreach; welfare-state bread and circuses; debt; spreading poverty; crony capitalism, rampant corruption; widening income disparities, and oligarchic arrogance. As clearly odious as the government is, shouldn’t we do all we can to move it towards its inevitable rendezvous with failure?
Previous comments... You are currently on page 5.
People do often give up, cut back or go into something else somewhere else when confronted with constant punishment for their success, but yes, that does not make it a good thing, only a realistic moral possibility for your own benefit -- in a bad context limiting what should and could be your choices -- as a way to cope in your own life the best you can under bad circumstances. It's no grand victory over the statists and not a way to achieve positive social change. A naturally occurring cutting back where one has to was secondary to the plot and could not by itself have made the theme of Atlas Shrugged possible to illustrate. To illustrate her theme in a finite work of fiction she needed both the acceleration and the tension -- between those who organized the withdrawal and those who kept morally struggling until they recognized her moral point in accordance with their own struggle.
_Some_ people do have a tendency to see apocalypse as a cleansing leading to a 'do-over' presumed to successfully spring from the sky. But it's not an innate human characteristic and I don't believe it is what keeps us going. Those with the tendency you describe are the anti-intellectuals who completely miss the point of the philosophy of Atlas Shrugged with its emphasis on ideas as the cause of social and cultural change, with no short-circuit possible there or anywhere else in life, and its emphasis on the role of causality in moral choice with no remnants of a duty to "wishing makes it so" (the whim-worshiper banging his spoon on his high chair, augmented in this case with Wallys flamboyant rhetoric and dramatic histrionics about spilling other people's blood for the Glorious Revolution).
What keeps rational people going is an understanding of what is proper and possible in human life and its potential, and what is required to get there no matter how small or great the scope of the goals. As Ayn Rand put it "Those who fight for the future live in it today", which requires understanding the full context and its meaning for the specifics of what is and isn't possible in your own life, while never loosing site of the ideal.
The original Constitution has been changed via amendments and Supreme Court misinterpretation. And a party system has broken the separation of powers and taken away the representation of the people.
No amount of honest people will fix it, until we repeal the amendments (16th and 17th) and add a few to correct the Supreme Court's changes, mitigate Political Parties and prevent this from happening again. THEN and only then will the dishonest people no longer be attracted.
If you deny the reality that the system has been corrupted, then you are missing an important piece to solve the puzzle.
But this is all there at the link. So please read the Society Project, before you ask me more questions that are already answered there.
The rest of the answer to your final question of what's broken in the Constitution is also at http://www.TheSocietyProject.org.
READ.
In my reading it was showing that things got bad enough, even diehard producers would give up. It was not, IMHO, saying that was a good thing.
Humans seem to have this innate narrative of an apocalypse washing away a decadent world with a better world rising from the ashes. It crops up everywhere. Maybe it keeps us going when things seem hopeless. But it's dangerous IMHO when people try to get that better world by hastening the apocalypse.
As I said, if we had honest and honorable people that operated with fealty to the word and intent of the Constitution, then we wouldn't have the problems that we do.
Since you seem to have some problem with the Constitution, please identify specific aspects which have corrupted the politicians.
Are you going to read the material at the Society Project or do you want me to sum up every point to answer your objections for you and repeat everything that's at the link that you can READ for yourself. Assuming you are interested and not just a nay saying critic with a negative attitude..
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015...
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure." Thomas Jefferson
I incorporated one assumption in my article: on current trend, the government will get larger, more powerful, more rapacious, and more corrupt, and correspondingly, the liberties of its constituents will continue to diminish. Certainly no one appreciates the power of ideas and discussion more than I do, but ask yourself if that trend slowed, much less reversed, after publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957. I would argue that it accelerated, especially since 9/11. If my central assumption is accepted, (even for argument’s sake, although I am convinced it’s correct), then the question presents itself: what can be done? If one waits until “continue to diminish” is replaced with “vanish,” it will indeed be obvious to all that the government has become totalitarian. It will also be far too late to do anything about it.
When “general censorship” is imposed, if past totalitarian practice is any guide, it will be part of a package of measures that may include: nationalization of important businesses, suspension of habeas corpus, suspension of elections, outlawing political parties, martial law, summary detention of all those known to have anti-government views, seizure of the internet and news media, seizure of private firearms, the mandatory exchange of precious metals for the government’s currency, and bans on people and money leaving the country. My guess is that it would be in response to some egregious “terrorist” incident, possibly a false flag. Under such circumstances, people might make a break, in their minds at least, with the government, but that will be the only kind of break possible.
You say that, “Denouncing most of what government has done in the last 33 years does not justify the violence and chaos of a revolution and does not make it possible in reality, let alone achieving in the aftermath.” Yes, revolutions are almost always bloody, but the blood spilled in all the revolutions in human history is a drop compared to totalitarian governments’ oceans just in the twentieth century (an estimated 100 million deaths). Faced with a choice between “violence and chaos” and abject totalitarian slavery, I’ll choose the former.
One of the things our government has done the last 33 years is to acquire what can only be described as the apparatus for a turnkey police state. As Edwin Snowden and subsequent revelations have made abundantly clear, the government has the ability to monitor virtually everything we do. You worry that my post might “makes us all further susceptible to unjust government surveillance and attack.” I think that statement is dangerously naive. I think anyone on this site should assume they are on a government list somewhere, and have been from the moment they signed up. That’s how governments operate as they descend into totalitarianism. As I stated earlier, I don’t know what incident will prompt the government to turn its key and initiate the police state, but my bedrock assumption is that sooner or later it is going to happen.
That is why I wrote my article, to suggest an offensive strategy while we the people still have some sort of capacity to implement such a strategy. As I said in my concluding paragraph: “It will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to persuade sufficient numbers to take that initiative, but in passivity lies ruin. By the time that ruin is obvious to all, it will be far too late.” Victims of totalitarian regimes are victims, in large measure, because they were unable to project trends and to conceive that those trends’ continuation would result in their imprisonment or death. Ayn Rand was lucky to get out of the USSR; most did not. Many Jews in Germany only realized that the Nazis would kill them when they boarded the cattle cars for the death camps. In America, I believe that it is much later than most people think. Do I believe that Americans will revolt while they have a chance? Probably not, but if nobody raises the possibility and suggests a strategy in a public forum, while we still have public forums of which we can avail ourselves, that small likelihood goes to zero.
shrugged into early retirement before it fell ....... -- j
Load more comments...