- Liberty is not the base virtue. It is the crowning flower that appears when virtue is possessed. The drive to the possession of virtue over generations within Western Civilisation resulted in increasing liberty.
- The freedom to do as one chooses — liberty — is only eucivic when one has internalised the principles that impose atrocity as and where necessary.
- Then someone got enlightened and crowned liberty as a virtue itself. Idiot.
- Through this idiocy the drive to virtue resulting in liberty was replaced with a drive for exercise of liberty, regardless of virtue — egalitarianism.
- As the drive for virtue faded, we persisted virtuously, but upon the momentum built up in our culture and our people. That virtue wasn’t being generated was largely invisible, although men like Carlyle noticed. In his day it evidenced itself as a prevailing lack of realness, of sham echoes of things real.
- Imposing liberty upon those who had not the virtue for it led to increasingly dyscivic action. The institutions that supported the growth of liberty were hollowed out from within, as those institutions required atrocity to function, and men without the self-control necessary for it were given liberty. Liberty and atrocity require greatness for proximity. And thus the required atrocity faded.
- As it faded, the pervading culture of true virtue was lost.
- And so today we are left with this rancid mess we call modernity. Virtue is despised, and must be hidden to grow. Liberty is forced every lower, to people less and less capable of wielding it to the benefit of others, at ever increasing cost to society.
- And in this environment, virtue is being reborn. Remarkable.
END
To the Greeks, an “idiot” was someone uninterested in civic virtue; someone who just wanted to watch the athletes compete. The idiot was not necessarily stupid – but he was selfish and shortsighted, a dead weight on the polis.
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I would rather substitute the word “atrocity” for the opposite of virtue: “vice”. Virtue, in your interpretation is the mechanism on which institutions work. When virtue is no more, becomes a vacuum; but when a convenient behavior operates institutions, vice ensues. Therefore: “The institutions that supported the growth of liberty were hollowed out from within, as those institutions required “vice” to function”
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There is some difference in the usage. Vice is indeed the opposite of virtue, but Atrocity as used here and at the link is not. Atrocity is action against the interests of the individual by the group; vice is action by the individual against the interests of the group.
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I would say rather the Atrocity is used here as the virtuous reaction to vicious liberty.
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“Liberty is not the base virtue. It is the crowning flower that appears when virtue is possessed. The drive to the possession of virtue over generations within Western Civilisation resulted in increasing liberty.”
Your entire premise lies upon a false premise. Liberty and virtue are fundamental concepts, equal in stature, that complement one another. A free people, with increased likelihood to engage in vice, requires guidance of internal mechanisms as a counter a lack of external restraint. Virtue does not originate from within unless people have the freedom to choose it. In a civil society, where people mutually agree on what is and what is not virtue, liberty is derived. The principles of justice and equality were borne out of this liberty-virtue pretense.
Now, how one defines virtue and liberty, of course, with competing metrics by their rabid toadies, is at the crux of today’s issues.
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So, as you have basically said, people require limitation in order to not engage in vice. Without that limitation, the only way they do not engage in vice is once virtue becomes internalised. Those more capable of internalising virtue are favoured, and produce children who have that capacity. Those less capable are cast out, and fade away. Over time, under sovereignty, the capacity to internalise virtue builds, and external constraint is no longer required; people have the capacity for freedom from constraint; Liberty.
The flower of a long process of building virtue, generation by generation.
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