How Does a Nation Lose Its Soul?
Butler Shaffer at LewRockwell.com - trick question. A nation has no soul. Only individuals have souls. Surrender your judgement to a collective, any collective, and you have given your soul away. Don't do it. [jomama]
Most people do not comprehend the dissimilarity of public and political reaction to Bill Clinton's and George Bush's behavior. Clinton's offense was not that he had lied about illicit sex, but that he had chosen to engage in it in the "oval office," thus desecrating the holy temple of the statist religion. Had he confined his trysting to local motels, his acts would have brought about no more criticism than was visited upon FDR or JFK for their liaisons.
To inject moral or philosophic considerations into the political process totally misconceives of the basic nature of the state. To confront a collectivized mind with normative principles is as much a waste of time as trying to educate a person in differential calculus whose understanding of mathematics has been confined to using an abacus; or to explain the communicative powers of the Internet to a medieval man accustomed to sending fire signals from towers.
Mr. Bush, his Machiavellian supporters, and the Democrats understand this essential fact of politics quite well. If the Republicans suffer at the polls this November, it will not be due to any moral hostility to the wholesale lying or the slaughter of innocents directed from the White House, but only from a substantial deviation from the political forms, practices, and litanies upon which collective minds insist.
...
A nation -- any nation -- does not lose its "soul" for, being an abstraction, it has none to lose. Only individuals can suffer such a loss, which they do whenever they allow their sense of being to get submerged in any collective.
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