L. Neil Smith's
THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE
Number 88, September 4, 2000
Just Pave the Road to Serfdom Wider as the Population Grows
by Joshua Freeman
Special to TLE
Neil, that article you penned last week is truly representative of your best work. I'm sad to say that I must dispute your optimism, though. May I point out that "your generation," one that was in less and less invasive public school than is the youngest, produced a healthy crop of socialists and fascists, in fact, in overwhelming proportions to the numbers of liberals (I mean the classical kind, here; I'll not surrender this word to socialists.)? What reason do you have to suggest that the next graduates from the Indoctrination Centers of the Land of the Free will differ in percentage?
After all, ritalin was not available to subdue the quicker class members thirty-some and forty-some years ago, when the school system vomited out the likes of Bills Clinton and Bradley, Al Gore and George Bush.
Sixty channels of glorious state-controlled wonder did not spill forth from the telescreens of yesteryear, whose size has only grown into the monstrosities that Ray Bradbury predicted, those that overshadow reality.
Progressive education had only just begun its campaign of smashing the self-respect of most of those below and above what the Progressives perceive as average. "Gifted education" of the sixties and seventies did not consist almost entirely of platitudes like "Smart people are special" and "Being smart is cool" to grant a strange mixture of ego-bloating and guilt to many of the brightest students subjected to the United States's magnificent school system. The first victims of that ego-bloating have only now begun to crash back down into reality. Many burned up on re-entry.
I don't know when drug campaigns like the following were implemented, but young people haven't always been told that thinking and rational consideration are superior to "just saying no."
To pretend that the only direct sources of this fuzzy mind-control were governmental would be naive [John, please amend the "i" in "naive".], although they were all enhanced, in one way or another, by the state. For who but the students of an "affirmative action" system could produce the same militant realization and non-realization of race that provides an unnecessary confirmation of George Orwell's prediction of doublethink? Who but they could produce the insane sexism that so segregates society today, extending far beyond the areas that it could rationally be considered a decider of action?
The anger and frustration stored in futile childhoods, devoid of outlets for emotion and almost similarly so for creativity have stored up a brutal supply of rage and frustration, and have left much creativity to rot back into the primordial muck from which we came, has "risen" into the ear drum-numbing, mindless, nearly emotionless garble that is ever more constantly shoveled into most of America's youth every day, the volume of which is regulated only by the lack of speakers powerful enough to shake steel molecules apart from each other.
In the sixties and seventies, MTV didn't yet provide yet another diversion from that hated and dreaded crime, thinking, for most Americans under the age of thirty.
Days spent locked in classrooms sterile in interest but not in bacteria force students into observing the sensory overloads that MTV offers for so little to their parents-the youth, of course, would never be allowed to pay for it themselves. And who, of course, can provide a more time-consuming baby-sitter to the parents than cable at a measly thirty-dollars-or-less per month?
Of course, the comparatively wealthy parents of many children provide much of those childrens' mind-control at home.
Hope for the future? Yes. But quite cautious hope. I'm ever more tempted to agree with Albert Camus: "One starts living honestly when one starts living without hope."