|
A free and great people of United States have embarked on a course, which must result in their own total and permanent transformation, without ever having had a serious public debate on whether or not they want to be so transformed. The purpose of this essay is to help open up a debate. There is a need for the information, ideas and arguments that will make it intellectually and morally respectable to question our current policy and the orthodoxy that upholds it.
Description
National Suicide as an Escape from Self-Knowledge; It is here, with this idea of an ill-conceived but powerfully felt and ideologically enforced moral duty, that we may have found part of the answer to our earlier question: where do people get the unquestioning confidence that a scheme which goes against all human experience will work so well here? The truth, I suspect, is that people know deep in their own minds that it will not work; but their moral ideology and the fierce social sanctions supporting it forbid them to think or utter this truth. To admit that their global morality is mistaken would mean admitting that they are, by their own standards, "racist"-the very worst thing that anyone can be by those standards. Consequently they repress the knowledge of the disaster their policies are leading to by, paradoxically, rushing ever more fervently toward it. It is like a man in the grip of an addiction. To abstain and thus face himself would be unbearable, it would cause too much anxiety; so to flee from that anxiety that is the price of self-knowledge and freedom, he plunges with ever more abandon toward the very thing that he knows will destroy him. The only difference is that in America's case the object of the addiction is not a harmful drug, but a confused morality, which tells us that it is "racist" to preserve our own society.
|