CHAPTER TEN – LET’S ALL DANCE NAKED ROUND THE BONFIRE – Part One
ORIGINAL HIPPIES, LIBERTARIANS AND THE TEA PARTY: The fundamental core values of the mid-1960s hippie counterculture movement were 1. A craving for independence. 2. A celebration of individuality. 3. Joy in the freedom of self-sufficiency. 4. An acceptance of the natural order of things. The Tea Party and Libertarians are the social movements in contemporary America that can rightfully claim to be the ideological heirs. Sadly, by the late 1960s the hippie counterculture ideals became contaminated by big government socialists. The hippies lost their way, forgot their roots, embraced statism and a nanny state progressing to a bully state marked by collectivism, dependency, force and coercion, all in an attempt to control others.
COUNTERCULTURE: A way of life and set of attitudes opposed to or at variance with the prevailing social norm. The late 1960s counterculture opposed capitalism.
COUNTER COUNTERCULTURE: The new campus counterculture embraces Milton Friedman/Ayn Rand conservative values counter to the prevailing progressive establishment norms including 1. Individual freedoms with personal responsibility. 2. Free market capitalism over fascist crony corporatism. 3. Fiscal responsibility over unsustainable debt. 4. Content of character over racial-gender-class identity. 5. Limited government over progressive statism (socialism).
THE ESTABLISHMENT: Denotes a dominant group or elite that holds power or authority in a nation or organization. The Establishment may be a closed social group which selects its own members or specific entrenched elite structures, either in government or in specific institutions. Bureaucrats, media, academia, Hollywood and Wall Street comprise our contemporary leftist progressive establishment.
ALTRUIST: PC for do-gooders and bleeding heart liberals. Man has no right to exist for his own sake, service to others is the only justification of his existence, and self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.
STATISM: The political expression of altruism is collectivism or statism, which holds that man’s life and work belong to the state—to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation—and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.
SELF-ACTUALIZATION, SELF-LIBERATION, SELF-TRANSCENDENCE: “No one is more interesting to anybody than is that mysterious character we all call ‘me’, which is why self-liberation, self-actualization, self-transcendence, etc., are the most exciting games in town.” – Robert Anton Wilson
NAVAL-GAZING: Self-indulgent or excessive contemplation of oneself to the point of being narcissistic, or a single issue at the expense of a wider view. Naval-gazing is an old hippie practice passed on to our self-absorbed Millennials.
APPEAL TO NATURE: An argument or rhetorical tactic in which it is proposed that “a thing is good because it is ‘natural’, or bad because it is ‘unnatural’. Often used in green marketing campaigns as well as the propaganda campaigns of ecologists. An appeal to nature is indeed the foundation principle of the entire green movement.
CLIMATE ALARMISM and CLIMATE REALISM: A climate alarmist says, ‘the sky is falling, do something!’ A climate realist says, ‘if a warming planet, weather man-made or natural cycles, has a net benefit to mankind, why should we be alarmed if there is no crisis?’
PROGRESSIVISM: The belief that you can get something for nothing, that you can get the government to take something by force from other people and give it to you. Historically the unintended consequence of progressivism is an unsustainability of debt which robs from the young, relatively poor to give stuff to the old, relatively wealthy. Constructing a collectivist utopia requires that human nature be altered and therein lies the rub, something the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony quickly realized nearly 400 years ago.
OBJECTIVISM: The philosophy of Ayn Rand, advocating independent thinking, rational self-interest, individual rights, laissez-faire capitalism and reason over faith. There is no greater moral good than achieving happiness, accomplished by productivity, moral integrity and respect for the rights of others. Objectivism has been an inspiration for both Libertarian and Tea Party movements.
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