Thursday, August 14, 2003

In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1689), John Locke gives an intricate account of the role that education plays in inculcating the moral and intellectual virtues that equip individuals for a life of liberty; and in Locke’s view, it is parents, within the confines of the fundamental association of the family, who have the responsibility to ensure that children receive this education.

-Peter Berkowitz, The Liberal Spirit in America


In this essay, Berkowitz discusses the tensions in American political thought. He obviously prefers the word "tension" to "contradiction."

Friday, August 08, 2003

In other words, sexual "freedom" is really a form of social control. What we are really talking about is a gnostic system based on two truths.

The exoteric truth, the one propagated by the regime through advertising, sex education, Hollywood films and the university system, the truth, in other words for general consumption is that sexual liberation is freedom. The esoteric truth, the one that informs the operations manual of the regime, in other words the people who benefit from "liberty' is the exact opposite, namely, that sexual liberation is a form of control, a way of maintaining the regime in power by exploiting the passions of the naive, who identify with their passions as if they were their own and identify with the regime which ostensibly enables them to gratify these passions. People who succumb to their disordered passions are then given rationalizations of the sort that clog web pages on the Internet and are molded thereby into a powerful political force by those who are most expert in manipulating the flow of imagery and rationalization.

-E. Michael Jones, Eyeless in Gaza: Sexual Liberation as Political Control