House of Eratosthenes

Michael Hausam, IJReview, writes a fascinating column titled “Michelle Obama Neatly Summarizes the Entire Progressive Agenda During a Nutrition Interview”:

In an interview with MSN’s Healthy Living, she made two particular statements that deserve further comment.

Before coming to the White House, I struggled, as a working parent with a traveling, busy husband, to figure out how to feed my kids healthy, and I didn’t get it right.

Our pediatrician had to pull me aside and point out some things that were going wrong.

I thought to myself, if a Princeton and Harvard educated professional woman doesn’t know how to adequately feed her kids, then what are other parents going through who don\u2019t have access to the information I have?

Is it really that hard?

As a parent of five, it didn’t take a pediatrician consult for me to figure out what to put on my kids’ plates. It may surprise the Obamas to discover that many parents have successfully fed their offspring without Princeton and Harvard degrees, in addition to not needing “access to information.”

Lastly, as many “working” moms don’t earn $316,912 a year, in addition to a husband who was earning $162,100 as a Senator, perhaps the First Lady protesteth a tad too much.

Then she spilled the milk, so to speak:

It’s so important for our schools to make the hard calls for our kids, because parents are struggling enough at home.

Excuse me, who should be making the hard calls for “our” kids? Our schools, who admittedly have a tough job to do, are not and should not be given the right to make “hard calls” in our place…the progressive assumption, that they know what is best and are going to decide for us, is condescending and arrogant. And isn’t the liberal mantra all about “equality”?

So much to ponder here. Why can’t our progressive betters be honest about it, and say yes, we’re going to keep going no matter what, we are never going to stop until some central authority far removed from you is deciding everything and you’re left deciding nothing. Why are they always going through this phony charade of “Just this one more rule, or just this one more piece of micro-managing apparatus, and life will be perfect”?

Two: From where do they get their obviously sincere and complete confidence that these unnamed-betters are going to make better decisions? Those of us who live in the real world understand it isn’t too likely, since distant people can’t have a command of the facts “on the ground,” pertaining to the actual situation. Not only that, but if they knew about the domain of knowledge in general, and it has something to do with making a profit, wouldn’t they be actually doing it rather than telling others how to do it? To say nothing of the fact that the proggies have no idea who these betters are, or will be, any more than the rest of us do. One day they might actually be…perish the thought…Republicans. How come the progressives among us never seem to give that any serious thought even though time after time it has come true?

And three: Yes, what about that equality thing. We can envision an equal-society as a lot of things, reasonably. What isn’t reasonable is to envision it as a place where these people over here, have to do what they’re told by those people over there, because of class membership. That would be part of the definition.

I have my theories about this. One of the ways conservatives and liberals can be distinguished in a way most people can understand, is that conservatives believe in equality at the starting line and liberals believe in equality at the finish line. Inequality, therefore, on Planet-Liberal is a situation brought about by our attending to our own affairs with our varying degrees & quality of confidence, competence, liquid assets, friends, drive, determination and L.I.C.O.R.I.C.E. — Leadership, Initiative, Creativity, Ownership of our own problems, Resourcefulness, Ingenuity, Courage/Conviction and Energy. Nevermind that most of these, and arguably all of them, are ultimately decisional; people are perfectly capable of deciding “I haven’t been getting up off my ass lately, I should do that more & better.” If we’re all managed, and involuntarily, by some committee nearby or far away, then we’re all made equal. And it doesn’t matter if the decisions handed down by the committee are good ones that help us, or bad ones that hurt us. That would explain why they don’t seem to care about that part. It would also explain why they have no concern at all for who is on the committee, except for those occasions on which someone has just been appointed, by a liberal, and the talking-point has been circulated that the new appointee should be lionized as if he or she has done something remarkable (when, usually, we’re talking about nothing more than some well-connected liberal commie-academic or lawyer, with a track record of very few original thoughts, or none at all, about anything).

I don’t know if that explains everything — it seems to — or that this is the explanation. I do know there is something in the agenda opposed to the idea that the “little people,” so to speak, should be making their own decisions. That much seems to be beyond any reasonable disagreement, and I’m not sure even ardent liberals would disagree. I suppose a few of them would object to me being free to write it down where others can read it, ++chuckle++ without running the remarks by a committee for approval first. They have a phobia, I think, against autonomous decisions.

In that sense, they are not alone. And in that sense, they are not so much a cause of what’s going wrong in our society, but a symptom of it. You see it in business every now and then. Every once in a great while it will become disastrously clear that the larger, more distant layer of management really, really botched this thing up and the latest debacle could have been avoided if the smaller, more local and more knowledgeable layer could have made the call instead, and someone will chirp away with the Dangerous Idea^TM: Maybe, going forward, that’s where this sort of decision should be made, smaller-is-better? It’s really, super-awkward, since it becomes obligatory for the chairman-of-the-meeting to shoot the idea down right away, nip it in the bud before it gains life, and yet there’s no rationale for doing so. That’s okay though. The bureaucracy will usually find some way to kill the Dangerous Idea.

Probably by way of something that has to do with the environment.

Point is, there is something happening here that doesn’t have to do with conservatives or liberals. It has to do with excellence and mediocrity. This world of equality in which they place their hopes, never comes any closer to that goal than this: to create an environment in which mediocrity is never called out because there is no excellence against which it can be contrasted, and thus identified. There are no little-laboratories; some commission or some guy far away says how it’s going to be done, and the little people way out here, just do it. That kind of equality. So what they seek to eliminate is not quite so much inequality, since the people on that commission certainly would not be equal — but, innovation. Equality amongst the “proles.” The little people. The dangerous people, who are genuinely likely to come up with effective new ways of doing things. The fear is not that they might make the big, removed, mediocre commission-people without any original thoughts look bad; the fear is one of motion. A new idea, conceived where the action is all taking place, is a new idea likely to work, and a new idea that is likely to work might make it necessary to move around a bit, as it’s implemented on a grander and grander scale.

They don’t want anything new built. It frightens them. That’s my theory, anyway. Mediocrity, as we are reminded so often, is not quite so much a level of outcome or of effort, but a way of life. It is, in its own way, a passion.

Ever read Escape from Freedom? It’s a bit jargon-y, and it’s silly Freudian jargon to boot, but the basic concept is gold. He says there are two kinds of freedom, “negative” and “positive.” Or, better, “freedom from” and “freedom to.”

Freedom from is the laundry list of Enlightenment / Classical Liberal values: Freedom from royal absolutism, freedom from superstition and the authority of the Church, freedom of conscience, etc.

Freedom to, though…. that’s the tricky one. Wiki calls it “the use of freedom to employ spontaneously the total integrated personality in creative acts.” Whatever that means, and whatever those are. Fromm himself (quoted by Wiki) is no help: “in the spontaneous realization of the self, man unites himself anew with the world.” Because it’s so hard to define, Fromm argues, most people can’t handle it, and don’t want it. It actually causes psychic pain — “I’m free from all the shackles that Rousseau and Voltaire said were keeping me from happiness, and I’m actually worse off than before! Back then, life was stifling, but at least I knew who I was and where I fit in.” To combat this, Fromm argues, people subsume themselves in big, faceless, uniformed movements like Fascism.

Fromm was a commie, though — he was a founding member of the Frankfurt School — and those guys are world champs at creating problems and contradictions out of thin air. Most any American conservative has a clear picture of “freedom to,” and it’s beautifully simple — freedom to marry and raise kids as we see fit; free to pursue our careers without acres and acres of red tape; freedom to enjoy things like Duck Dynasty; freedom to go to church if we want to; freedom to associate with whom we choose, with the corresponding freedom to not associate with whom we choose.

Freedom to, in other words, live our lives without the constant bullying and nannying of unelected, unaccountable, faceless bureaucrats seven thousand miles away.

That’s the irony which makes Escape from Freedom a doubly informative read. Fromm couldn’t understand this simple, easy definition of positive freedom because he was a Marxist, and so to him, all that stuff is the very “bourgeois materialism” he’d spent his whole life fighting. A life dictated by unelected, unaccountable, faceless bureaucrats seven thousand miles away was the goal to people like Fromm. Freed of all responsibilities for the mundane, material concerns of life — like not having to worry about what to put in the kids’ lunches — we’d all be free to “employ spontaneously the total integrated personality in creative acts.” His description of “fascism” and its psychological roots is a spot-on diagnosis of modern liberalism.

Most liberals of my acquaintance would be perfectly happy being members of the Ladies’ Bake Sale committee down at the local Methodist church. That’s exactly the level of officiousness they crave, combined with exactly the level of power they’re comfortable wielding. But alas, God is dead, and so they’ve got to get Michelle and Hillary! to do it for them.
- Severian | 06/18/2014 @ 07:01
Excellent article. I also like Severian’s comment regarding the “freedom from” vs. “freedom to”. I had heard of this concept before but didn’t know where it came “Fromm”. I take it that “freedom from” leads to mediocrity, whereas “freedom to” may lead to excellence – although the latter path is beset by many dangers, it is overcoming these that allow exceptional people to succeed
- IcelandSpar | 06/21/2014 @ 06:21
A good point could be made that excellence relies on both, does it not? The American Revolution, with America’s industrial superiority coming about generations later, would be an example of “freedom from” being a necessary prerequisite to the achievement of excellence.
- mkfreeberg | 06/21/2014 @ 08:08
Fromm argues that both are necessary to achieve “self-actualization” or whatever it is (I forget his term; like Our Betters, who never get around to describing what their utopia looks like, Freudians never could seem to describe the psychologically healthy man). You can’t have “freedom to” without first having “freedom from.”

I’m extrapolating a bit here — most of his book is about Martin Luther and the Nazis — but I think he’d argue that we get so caught up on “freedom from” that it blinds us to what “freedom to” really is. This is certainly the case with Our Betters — they’re always just one more law away from utopia, as Morgan so nicely puts it, because we’re still not completely free to be kiddy-fiddling transgendered wiccan performance artist aromatherapists while in command of a ballistic missile submarine. This, I’m further extrapolating, is why all of liberalism’s heroes seem so damn miserable all the time.

Here again, the most interesting part of the book is how badly Fromm misdiagnosed it. He’s a Marxist, so one of him main “freedoms from” is freedom from want — the starving man cannot self-actualize. However, as a Marxist, he believes that central planning will provide this; that, given a “proper” supply of rations from the Central Planning Committee, we’ll all go on to write symphonies or something, because we won’t be so busy scratching to survive.

In other words, the main “freedom from” will be provided by the very organization that makes all those “freedoms to” meaningless. Doesn’t that sound exactly like modern liberalism? You’re absolutely free to do whatever you want, provided it complies with these 77 volumes of minute, all-encompassing regulations, and you surrender most of your profit to the government, and you only express approved opinions. Because social justice.
- Severian | 06/22/2014 @ 09:23
mkfreeburg’s point that excellence relies on both “freedom from” and “freedom to” reminds me of the Founders’ discussions that, in order to arrive at a truly good solution to society’s problems, both sides of the issue must be given the chance for expression, and each side should give serious consideration to the other. This is a sentiment that seems to be sadly lacking in today’s political arena.

And as Severian wrote: “we get so caught up on “freedom from” that it blinds us to what “freedom to” really is” – again, this quickly defines today’s “progressives”.

Too much “freedom from” denies society the benefits of “freedom to” (and, of course, too much “freedom to” has its own issues). A government that simply provides for all needs is one presiding over a stagnant (declining?) society. From Brave New World: ” ‘My dear young friend,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘civilization has absolutely no ned of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunity for being noble or heroic.”

I just recently saw the 1933 film “Gabriel over the White House”, in which a president cures societies problems by suspending the Constitution and Congress, I think in a manner in which Hitler was behaving or was soon to be. Apparently this was one of FDR’s favorite movies, and he even had some influence on the editing. It’s interesting to note how it was portrayed and received in 1933, and to think about how it would be today. (Wikipedia has a summary.)
- IcelandSpar | 06/29/2014 @ 07:06

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“Then She Spilled the Milk, So to Speak”Wednesday, June 18th, 2014

“Then She Spilled the Milk, So to Speak”
Wednesday, June 18th, 2014