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Who needs independence anyway?
Every progressive person knows that Independence Day is for extremists. The dream of the new post-national nation is Co-Dependence Day in which we all live interdependently under social credit systems in 15 minute cities with an endless array of agencies looking over our shoulders.
A few centuries ago, some young men refused to have their property and their political autonomy redistributed to an elite thousands of miles away. The very idea of having a revolution over such a thing seems entirely absurd to today’s wokes. Private property and nations, not to mention individual freedom, are relics of a dead, racist past.
Or as another Englishman envisioned, “Imagine there’s no countries”. It’s easy if you live in the EU.
All that the Crown really wanted was for the colonists to pay their “fair share”, a share that was determined thousands of miles away. All that the colonists wanted was the rights of Englishmen that they believed they were entitled to. After a great deal of bloodshed, the colonists won the right to be Americans instead—an odd series of consonants and vowels having to do with an Italian explorer but meaning personal freedom and limited government. Now we have free things, unlimited government, and our freedom shrinks in proportion to the growth of our free things and of the government that hands them out.
To the denizens of public housing watching the fireworks burn briefly in the sky, who get a free ride on everything from food to housing by taking away everyone else’s freedom and future, the fireworks are just one more free thing in the sea of free things that they swim in.
To the Democrat voters of the welfare state, this is Fireworks Day. Every country has its fireworks days and this is the day that this one chooses to light up the night sky. The day means nothing to them because though they are surrounded by free things, they aren’t free. The difference between freedom and free things has been progressively erased so that many think that the American Revolution was fought because the British were racists or weren’t providing free transgender surgery to the colonies.
If only they knew about the NHS, they would vote to undo the American Revolution in a flash.
There is a big difference between a free country and a country of free things. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both. Rugged individualism has given way to stifling crowds, co-dependent on each other, lined shoulder to shoulder, clutching at each other’s wallets, crying, “Take from him and give to me.”
We are a nation overflowing with the right to things paid for with other people’s money.
The fireworks that shoot up in a wonderland of blue and red, silver and gold, are a faint echo of the real thing, the gunpowder that blasted back and forth between the lines of government troops, their Hessian mercenaries and the rebel colonists who chose to ride free, rather than bend their necks to the plans of an expanding empire. The faint smell of gunpowder and the dark shapes of the barges only mime the war that was fought here. A play of light and shadow whose meaning reaches fewer and fewer people each year.
The expected speeches will celebrate some notion of independence, but did so many men risk their lives just to end up with a system that made the one they escaped seem positively libertarian by comparison? If they had known that they were going to end up with some version of the NHS, along with death panels, in a co-dependent system where everyone is looted for the greater good of the looters—they might have stayed home on their farms, sadly watching the fighting from a distance.
JFK’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” was always a hollow lie. Half the country is expected to ask what their country can do for them, while the other half is expected to ask what they can do for their country. This simmering civil war is often pegged as a class war, but it isn’t about class. There are billionaires and paupers on both sides, and the divide cuts across the Middle Class, dividing those who derive their income from private business from those who receive it from government and government-subsidized employment.
The Fourth of July is Independence Day, but every other day is Co-Dependence Day, the days we celebrate our integration, our volunteerism and our compliance with a vast system which makes everyone dependent on the government and which makes the government dependent on everyone who still works for someone other than the government.
Empires function by draining every drop from their possessions to cover their costs. The British Crown tried to drain America to pay down its debt, resulting in growing protests from the population and eventually a revolution. Now the Empire of Co-Dependency is draining its independent subjects for the benefit of its dependent subjects and the dependency infrastructure that employs its numberless bureaucrats who govern it all.
A new crisis is always here to justify higher taxes and bigger government.
The American Revolution was not a struggle for another nation, one of many, but for a free nation. It was not split off to accommodate the national strivings of an ethnic group or their historical destiny. Its guiding idea, like its national holiday, was independence, but independence means very little unless it reaches the individual.
A nation where everyone is part of one great co-dependent community, a centrally planned marketplace that can only be balanced if everyone is forced to buy what they are told to buy, is not a free nation. It will not even be independent for long. The logic of co-dependence is to expand that dependency beyond the borders and make the region and then every part the world dependent on one another to balance out the numbers.
Co-dependence required an end to states rights. It will eventually require an end to the rights of nations.
Like all pyramid schemes, the burden of dependency is passed on to greater and greater systems until its weight is more than that of the entire world. That burden of co-dependency is like a rock rolling downhill; it gathers more and more mass to itself, increasing its momentum, until it crashes.
The system attempts to stay ahead of the inevitable crash by making sure that every productive person pays his “fair share”. It hunts for individuals and nations who still aren’t rolling downhill, tips them over and pushes them off the mountain. All in the name of the greater good.
The new Crown is not a person, it is an idea. The throne at whose foot a formerly free people kneel is the golden seat of the welfare state. While the fireworks light up the sky, a counterrevolution undid the revolution. There is a new king and his face is on every magazine cover in the land. His bounty is a jagged bear trap that turns everyone into a ward of the state at their own expense.
As the last wave of fireworks die out, the shooting stars sinking to earth and vanishing into the darkness, the light of Independence Day fades and the crowds slowly trudge away from the brief spectacle, past the lines of police barricades, through narrow streets, past government buildings, back to their co-dependent lives in a co-dependent nation where the will of the people and the rights of the individual matter less than the latest proposal to solve the problems of their independence by making the country a more dependent place.
A few hundred years ago in these streets, men and women celebrated the end of tyranny, and in its darkest hour, lines of grim men marched along the waterfront up to the highest point on the island to mount a final defense. Sometimes the older buildings still wear their shadows on their brick walls and by the golden light of the fireworks you can almost see them, shadows moving in the darkness, their footsteps taking them north, a faint song on their lips, muskets in their hands, their lives lost and gained in defense of their freedom
All in the name of the greater good. As always, Daniel, brilliant and poetic.
Do you mean God and the Kingdom of Christ? A Christian believes that is the greater good. A Muslim believes Allah and Paradise is the greater good. A Marxist believes Almighty Society and a utopian future that never arrives is the greater good. A Utilitarian believes “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” is the greater good. A Nazi believes the greater good is the good of the Aryan Race.
In all of these versions of the “greater good” the good of the individual becomes irrelevant, superfluous, peripheral, crushed and sacrificed, for the “greater good”.
All of them are different versions of ALTRUISM, the doctrine of self-sacrifice. The good of actual, real, flesh and blood individuals must be sacrificed for the altruist greater good.
And you believe Objectivism is the greater good. In your “perfect world” the actual, real, flesh and blood normal individuals will be sacrificed for the Objectivist greater good.
And you will be there waving your collection of Ayn Rand and Lenny books, spurring on the massacre by the Objectivist brownshirts.
That is of course, assuming you manage to stitch together a collection of 1000 or so Randian followers.
Yeah, islam and Marxism are sooper dooper altruistic.
Christians perfor more charity and give more money to charities than any government on Earth, by far. It absolutely is a benevolent religion. And the Declaration of Independence and Constitution irrefutably serve the greater good of Americans.
Your Ayn Rand bullshit is wearisome.
Yeah, a little altruism can be a good thing. If you can help someone a little without any cost to yourself, why not, even if one doesn’t believe in the spirit.
The outside world is a mixture of good and bad, one always has to discriminate between the good and the bad. The government uses altruism as an excuse to tax and seize power, but that doesn’t mean all altruism is bad. Altruism in moderation. If it doesn’t harm you.
Ayn Rand’s understanding of Western civilization was at best cursory, and it shows in her work. She was not a well educated woman.
Tthis is one of your entries that I actually like. And I was of course being facetious when speaking of the “greater good.”
What an excellent column. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Co-dependence (collectivism) is the result of altruism. Independence (individualism) is the result of rational selfishness.
“It is obvious why the morality of altruism is a tribal phenomenon. Prehistorical men were physically unable to survive without clinging to a tribe for leadership and protection against other tribes.” – Ayn Rand
“The day means nothing to them because though they are surrounded by free things, they aren’t free.”
Only the final, EXTERNAL, product can be given away for free, but all the internal substance that was necessary and inescapable to produce the external product can never be given away for free. You can give a free government school, with government teachers, but you can’t actually give a free education. The actual education carries the non-free, internal, cost of thinking effort, work, and labor of the student. If the student is not willing to pay that internal, intellectual, spiritual price he will not achieve his education.
You can give a man a free copy of Euclid’s Geometry but if he never does the work of opening the book and learning the substance of the book you’ve given him a free book which is no better than having given him a free cinder block to sit on.
No man can think for you, he can give you the product of his thinking, but not his actual hard work of thinking. Your own thinking can never be given to you for free, you and only you can pay that price.
“The action required to sustain human life is primarily intellectual: everything man needs has to be discovered by his mind and produced by his effort. Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival . . . .” – Ayn Rand
Do you know how the Eskimos pronounced a death sentence THX?
It was a simple shunning. They just shunned people because in the environment they lived in that was the same as a death sentence. Now, you might say they were primitive but I’m not sure how modern circumstances are entirely different.
Thanks Una, excellent example.
If the Declaration of Independence is still in effect, then the Democratic Party (or, using its shadow name, the People’s Democratic Socialist Party) needs to be outlawed. It is overwhelmingly a criminal enterprise anyway. Republicans are slightly better.
A criminal enterprise is what I call the Dirtbagocrat party too, because that’s what it is.
Like Mafia grifters pretending to be a political party. The Democrat Party has a lot of ties to the Mafia.
Mothership will deliver all your dread disease vaccines. Stay safe.
President Biden doesn’t like us.
We have multiple premises here. First we have the premise that Biden is an actual person that still has actual feelings about anything that his puppet strings don’t dictate. This is a great allegory for the US itself as currently constituted.
The 2nd premise built on the first is that Biden gives a fig about “us”. Biden could not care less about “us”. What concerns “Biden” is the “special relationship”. Obviously “Biden” frowns on that for reasons Mogg will avoid like the poxxy plague in his MoggoLogue..
As demented and under strict control Alzheimer Joe is, he still feels acute greed and pedophile instincts.
Good one. Alzheimer’s may shut down the higher brain functions, while the lower brain functions continue to operate.
Yeah, Jungle Joe is an animal at this point.
Actually you have no independence, not even in your mind,
Of course the minds of most people are free.