Utopia is not an option

Going back to Aristotle and Plato, there are basically two ways to look at philosophy. And yeah, philosophy is a bore, right? Except that human beings run on philosophy, whether we each are aware of it or not. Your philosophy determines what decisions you make. It's pretty basic and pretty simple.

So let's start with Plato and the Allegory of the Cave. Basically, Plato painted this picture of a bunch of people sitting around doing shadow puppets on a cave wall. You know, a light casting shadows of the shapes you make on the wall. Plato said these vague shadows were kind of what humankind could grasp of "perfection." Perfection itself was from heaven or Mt. Olympus or someplace and being human, we could never completely perceive it or understand it. We could only kind of grope around in the semi-dark and hope to approximate perfection with our little shadow puppets.

Aristotle didn't have much patience for all that nonsense. He said look at reality as your base and draw your ideas and abstractions from that. Basically he invented science. I don't know what you might consider to be Aristotle's concept of "perfection." Maybe something that worked the way it was supposed to. I mean, every flower is perfect, isn't it?

So from these very different kinds of foundations, two different kinds of philosophies have grown. Most people I know believe in an odd mixture of both.

The difference is the material and the spiritual, the secular and the sacred, etc.

So we end up with some philosophers contriving these very elaborate mental structures and visions of a perfect (Utopian) society and all.

And then we have real life.

You can identify a Utopian society very easily. They are usually predicated by, "If everyone would just... be a little less selfish... take care of their kids... buy electric cars... join a labor union... give up ice cream," and so on.

You know what? Not everyone is going to do it. So if you insist on implementing any type of Utopian society -- like a marxist or communist society -- you quickly learn that it's necessary to "break eggs to make an omelet," Josef Stalin's poignant observation. He never hesitated to break as many eggs as he himself, with his vision of Utopia, believed was necessary. This was millions of "eggs," all the dissenters and suspected dissenters that he could round up and either murder or send to Siberia.

Then you have governments built on the idea of, "Just exactly what is absolutely smallest bit of government control we need to do to get along peacefully without getting in each other's way?" This is based on the notion that you will never get complete agreement or conformity on anything. That different people will value different things and make different choices. So the question becomes not how to get everyone to be the same, but how to support everyone's efforts to be individual.

Which do you prefer?

The Comrade follows the Platonian model. He knows what's right and good for everyone. He has this certain vision of perfection and he's going to tax us all up the wazoo -- or worse -- until we bend to his will.

Or we can vote him out of office and go back to being free under the U.S. Consititution -- the one document in human history that embodies the human race's best effort to all get along without getting in each other's way.

Enough for now.

Save the Republic.