France fell because there was corruption without indignation. – Romain Rolland
Two graphics from WRSA today:
Let’s add a famous quote from Founding father John Adams:
Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Without a fair acquaintance with history, it’s difficult to appreciate all the above. Yet they are accurate statements of the human condition. I have no doubt that when Marshall Fritz founded the Advocates for Self-Government, he had the same sentiment in mind.
It’s possible to be politically absolutely free – no government and nothing resembling one anywhere in sight – and still not be personally free. Addictions and vices are the worst oppressors known to Man. One who is in their thrall is hardly able to take a free step or think a free thought.
Moreover, as Germany’s Weimar years testify most eloquently, a nation in the grip of unresisted vice can find itself in quite another kind of grip when a reaction against rampant popular corruption masses, swells, and peaks. It’s not just Christopher Isherwood who thought so.
The tragedy is that decent people appalled by a plague of vice turn to government to quell it. But governments cannot eradicate vice. The record shows that they can’t even reduce it. Personal vices and the monetary incentives they create are too strong, and far too diffuse, for centralized action to counter. Diffuse maladies can only be countered by diffuse remedies: personal revulsion that leads to personal opposition, and – hopefully – personal reform.
A vignette from the late Sam Francis illustrates this plainly, if somewhat inadvertently:
For months in 1987 in Detroit, citizens complained to the police about teenage prostitutes from a crack house in the neighborhood who solicited old men and adolescents on the street, about drug dealers firing guns in the air for fun, and about a shoot-out between drug gangs while neighborhood children played in the street. Not once did the police respond to any of the repeated calls. Then one day after the shoot-out, two local men named Angelo Parisi and Perry Kent walked up the street, set fire to the crack house, and burned it to the ground, and within minutes police arrived to charge them with two counts of arson and assault with a deadly weapon. With community support, both men were acquitted by a jury of all charges, and there are stories similar to theirs in other American cities.
The reaction by the police is symptomatic of much that’s beyond the scope of this screed.
The case was put nicely by a writer-philosopher largely unknown to the public of today. His name was Albert Jay Nock:
There’s only one way to improve society. Present it with a single improved unit: yourself.
Just some pre-Sunday Mass thoughts. Make of them what you will.
