Infantile America
By Thomas E. Brewton
Collapse of the subprime mortgage market reflects the "don't trust
anybody over 30" mentality of the Baby Boomers.
From 1605 until the late 1960s, Americans universally subscribed to
Benjamin Franklin's maxim,"A penny saved is a penny earned." Since
the Baby Boomer student anarchism of the late 1960s and 1970s, we
have become a nation, on balance, worshiping infantile, instant,
hedonistic gratification.
Liberals' ideas about "values" have to do with the absence of
personal restraints and with material goods and services, which is
what the welfare state is all about. Values for the colonists were
the elements of spiritual morality, the intangible qualities that
differentiated humans from other animals.
The values of 1776 preached individual self-restraint, self-reliance,
and hard work for the future of one's family. Liberal values give us
what has been called a juvenocracy, a society dominated by the
heedless pursuit of instant gratification that is characteristic of
inexperienced youth: devil take the hindmost; eat, drink, and be merry.
The current generation are less to blame than their Baby Boomer
teachers who fancied themselves so smart that they didn't need
education. Their mission was to take control of universities,
eradicate the classical curriculum that transmitted the values of
Western civilization, and to replace it with "relevant" subjects,
i.e., the ideology of socialism's revolutionary social justice.
That brand of social justice preaches that everyone is entitled,
indeed has a Constitutional right, to an equal share of society's
goods and services, without having first to work and save to acquire
the objects of their desires.
Yes, unsophisticated home buyers failed to understand what would
happen to mortgage payments when interest rates rose. But more
fundamentally, they failed to grasp that jobs can be lost, and
anticipated salary increases might not come to pass; that elementary
prudence demands having the wherewithal to pay before your buy, as
well as having a cash reserve to carry you over emergency periods.
Schooled by Baby Boomer "respected educators," they believed that it
is their right to indulge to any extent and rely upon the Federal
government to bail them out.
What I wrote in "A Divided Nation Without God" ( http://
www.thomasbrewton.com/index.php/weblog/a_divided_nation_without_god/ )
applies to our economic juvenocracy.
In "Beyond Good and Evil" (1885), speaking of the ethos prevailing in
Western Europe (what we witness today in the United States as a
cultural war between Judeo-Christian traditionalists and liberal-
progressive, atheistic materialists), Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:
"Anarchists in 1885 were savagely antagonistic to this [original
laissez-faire] liberal faith in "progress"
"...and even more to the bungling philosophasters and brotherhood-
visionaries who call themselves Socialists and desire a "free
society" – but in actuality the anarchists are of the same breed, of
the same thorough and instinctive hostility against any social
structure other than that of the "autonomous" herd (they go so far as
to reject the concepts of "master" and "servant" – [Neither God nor
Master] is one of the Socialist slogans)...
"...they are one in their faith in the morality of commonly felt
compassion as though this feeling constituted morality itself, as
though it were the summit, the attained summit of mankind, the only
hope for the future, the consolation of the living, the great
deliverance from all the guilt of yore – they are all one in their
faith in fellowship as that which will deliver them, their faith in
the herd, in other words, in "themselves"..."
Nietzsche could easily have been describing today's "educated" young
people coming out of our colleges and universities, having been
thoroughly inculcated with the anti-American, atheistic, and
philosophically materialistic religious views of the Vietnam War Baby-
Boomers who infest academia's professoriats.
As many other observers have noted, our short-changed young graduates
have been led to believe that universal indulgence in narcotics,
sexual promiscuity, and rebellion against the nation's founding
traditions constitutes individuality: Nietzsche's herd-mentality.
Conformity to the latest media-communicated fad in dress,
entertainment, and social justice ideas is "individuality." The media
bombard us with images of youth, turning society into an immature
juvenocracy that worships only that which is novel and consciously
rejects the wisdom of experience in past ages.
Nietzsche's "commonly felt compassion as though this feeling
constituted morality itself" is the doctrine enunciated by our first
socialist Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. – truth
is whatever wins out in the public market, whatever viewpoint the
media can create in the minds of the majority of citizens.
Conspicuously absent is any sense of personal responsibility.
Blaming mortgage brokers for the subprime collapse is like blaming
alcoholism on the distillers.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc.
The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of
writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
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