“My father taught that the only helping hand you’re ever going to be able to rely on is the one at the end of your sleeve.” — J. C. Watts, Jr.
“Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.”
— Lydia M. Child
“Discipline must come through liberty… We do not consider an individual disciplined when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.” — Maria Montessori
Even though I don’t even remotely like the guy who said this, I still think that this quote is the most apt for describing what is happening to our (Western) civilization:
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. “
I found an interesting quote by Thomas Jefferson: “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.”
I think he was in essence correct (only instead of “many centuries”, it took less than a century for people working in agriculture to fall under 50% of the American population, and today only 2% of the USA’s population works in agriculture), rural people who are self-sufficient and hard working generally have neither the inclination, nor the time, nor the encouragement of the local community for socialist idiocy (and the general societal degeneration (substance abuse, sexual deviancy, “multiculturalism”, etc.) that goes along with it), and both my real life experience and online research would seem to confirm that this is the case, out of the 100 most populated cities in the USA, at least 72 are run by some kind of leftist, out of the 100 most populated cities in the European Union, at least 75 are run by some kind of leftist (and as you can probably guess, the majority of the major EU cities not run by leftists are located in the Central and Eastern European member states of the EU) , even in the traditionally most freedom loving European country, namely Switzerland, 7 (including 4 of the most populous ones) of the 10 most populous cities are run by some kind of leftists (either “social democrats” or “greens”), so I think that Thomas Jefferson has been proven right.
I am actually not really in agreement with Jefferson here. He had a rather romantic view of farmers that has not proven to be correct. On the whole they are the most rapacious and socialist of them all… as long you don’t take their money! I think the problem with Europe is totalitarian authoritarian history of each country except for Switzerland. I believe that the Swiss federalist system is what has saved the Swiss from the worst degeneracy of socialism, and it has done the same for the USA although in the USA this federal system has been under attack for 50 or more years and is crumbing.
Well, yes, many modern “farmers” are parasites living off subsidies from the government, but when Jefferson mentioned farmers, I think/assume he meant yeoman farmers working on their own small family farms, not large corporations (or even foreign governments) owning millions of acres of farmland and getting illegal labor from Latin America to do the farming jobs for below minimum wage pay.
Yes, but I still think his view was overly romantic. And I think romanticism is one of the most dangerous of intellectual flaws.
That might be so, but in either case I think the basic premise is correct, self-sufficient and industrious people neither need, nor want some socialist government micromanaging their lives, and even though modern immorality has negatively impacted even many rural communities, in general rural communities are still socially healthier than urban ones.