Third Story: The Welfare State, Lack of Self-Restraint, and Our Legal System
The Limits of the USA are very Clear to Solzhenitsyn
Not as “Designed” by the Founders but, as Self-Imposed or “accepted” by the Voters. There is a lot of lamentation and finger pointing.
The guarantee for failure! When LBJ established the welfare state, typical of the cookie cutter style mass solutions dictate, they forgot the real animal angst for people always to want more and more. However, at the height of the cold war (we had just kicked the Russians out of Cuba), LBJ put the USA society support system on a steroids diet of social system support! He continued adding overarching laws (called ACTs) that included food stamps and other social programs.
In the Harvard transcendental speech, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn said:
“Every citizen has been granted the desired freedom and material goods in such quantity and of such quality as to guarantee in theory the achievement of happiness — in the morally inferior sense of the word which has come into being during those same decades. In the process, however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still more things and a still better life and the struggle to attain them imprint many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings. Active and tense competition fills all human thoughts without opening a way to free spiritual development.”
Ergo, the government prints money to print checks for everybody and subsidizes our every desire, no matter how crazy. The result is the country’s bankruptcy. This is like writing checks without funds in the bank, except the government has a “trust us we will pay our debt” card. This affects us not only economically but morally as well. DO you think our banks will give us a card like that? Where will the money come from? How will we create a bigger paycheck so we can pay the debt? This is only a way “to buy votes.” it may work short term-but will kill us long-term.
THE Definition of INFLATION — the government prints money to print checks for everybody with an “I will pay this debt back promise.”
We clamor for more and demand that the rich be made less affluent; where are our “common” values; have we lost our concept of Nation? Solzhenitsyn:
“So who should now renounce all this? Why? And for what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of common values and particularly in such nebulous cases when the security of one’s nation must be defended in a distant country? Even biology knows that habitual, extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.”
The rich and corporations made their money following the laws of the land and are taking advantage of the legal facilities the government allows them.
They cannot vote into government people without the rest of us approving them with our votes.
We have given ourselves away in architecting a habit that follows only every letter of the law.
Common sense has been left behind.
“The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad,” says Solzhenitsyn.
Not only that,
“People in the West have acquired considerable skill in interpreting and manipulating law.”
The interpretation of all this is that we (the people) have learned to behave like SERFS. We live by the limits of the LAW only! This is why lawyers are so popular and hated simultaneously; we created that monster.
“Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law, and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required.”
No self-restraint is required as long as it is the envelope of the law. We live as if we were slaves of the law.
Solzhenitsyn explains:
“Nobody will mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice, and selfless risk. It would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames.”
Our Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is supposed to be the legal limit that makes decisions by the intent given in our “Constitution,” which is based on our Moral Law, the “Declaration of Independence.” And even then, we want SCOTUS to affirm laws based on “our current” beliefs, a NEW Moral Law? Where is it written as a perennial baseline belief? Does it yield a “new Constitution?”
Why? We do not have any judgment for what the middle of the road for life is. We swing between extremes.
Solzhenitsyn explains it very well in this paragraph:
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale than the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven with legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses. And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.”
We have to look at how hard Pelosi worked to create a “legal hanging” for Trump. This was discussed in the first posting, “Our Rights and Obligations,” where Solzhenitsyn said,
“In today’s Western society, the inequality has been revealed [in] freedom for good deeds and freedom for evil deeds.”
In the end, Mediocrity triumphs because we create the excuse of restrictions imposed by laws in our Republic.
We do not try to score a goal using common sense; we go directly to the 3-point play using the “law.” This does two things; it truncates communication among us, and we yield our sense of community for a “cut and done” solution method that only helps to separate us.
We find that using administrative power is much easier. In other words, we find it more expeditious to “slow kill the Nation.” How? We take philosophical sides. We don’t work hard with an ideal to improve government and make it better for the rest of us based on the “Law of the Land.”
We do NOT have a long view for improvement. We are myopic and want INSTANT gratification in EVERYTHING! If we have a paycheck, it goes from our pocket to our mouth. Then, “we clamor for more!” There are no savings to speak of in this Nation of ours.
The moral of the story is? By Solzhenitsyn
“Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually, but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature. The world belongs to mankind, and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems, which must be corrected. Strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality, and there even is considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless Soviet society.” Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, “A world Split Apart.”
Next: Fourth Story: The Social Pressure for SELF-CENSORSHIP