While responding to
Seneca III at
Crusader Rabbit a couple of day ago, I expressed some relatively
mild criticism of John Stuart Mill when pointing Seneca to
an informative commentary by Mike Gray over at
The American Culture. In retrospect, I imagine even mild criticism of such a "Progressive" icon hits someone who thinks himself progressive with terrible cognitive dissonance.
Well, commenter “Jon”
responded to me with defensive condescension and pointed me to
the first in a string of Mr Cropper video lectures about the famous Mill essay "On Liberty".
Because he left a phony email address, I could not inform "Jon" that the video series to which he sent me actually reinforces what real conservatives ought rightly fear about those who have long hidden behind JS Mill's "open mind" apologetic to shield them in their attacks on Western civilization.
Better even is what I discovered . (Mr Cropper really gets
cranked when discussing consequences between 4 and 7 minutes).
Partial transcript from first 4 minutes in the next 8 paragraphs:
"It is desirable, in short, that in things that do not primarily concern others, individuality should assert itself. If it were felt that free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being, there would be no danger that liberty would be undervalued." -- J.S. Mill.
If we could get to people that understand that individual freedoms are important for all of us to have the nice things we have -- like enough food to eat, houses to live in, freedom from war and poverty and whatever. If people understood that individuality as such, the freedom of the individual, is essential to bringing us the good life, then everybody would understand why we have to leave the individual free.
That is a lovely thought, and it's tempting, but it's not true. Today you can tell them that. You can say "Now look. We need the individual to act as he pleases as long as he doesn't hurt others." [And gives a list.]
And there is a group that responds: "To Hell with all that. I want trees and..." [gives a list of primitive, pristine land, untouched by humanity "forest primeval" sort of wishes.] "To Hell with mankind's good. To Hell the well-being" as John Stuart Mill says. "I want Nature to be better off."
There are even some crackpot idiots who rather not see us go to the Moon and other planets. Here are these balls of rock and dust floating through space. They hate mankind so much, they don't even want us to go there and disturb the rocks and dust. It is a sick, sick person who prefers mankind just disappear or reduce their numbers, or something, just so rocks and trees and fish can live. To remove this drive to go to Mars and the Moon is just -- is diabolical.
I wish he [Mill] were right about this. If we understood that it's freedom that leads to our well-being, we would all be in favor of freedom. As a matter of fact, if you think that freedom leads to our well-being, there are these people who will say
"OK. Freedom is obviously a bad thing then. We need to have state controls on stuff. We need to stop the building of new power plants; we need to stop new highways; and stop new housing; we need population controls on people; and the number of new babies being born; and reduce the population."
You cannot get passed them. It's called environmentalism. It's a new cult, a new religion. They don't even profess to be scientific; at least the communists were scientific about their nonsense, or claims to be. These people just claim morality is all they're after. And that humans are immoral; destroying trees is immoral. So you can't convince them Freedom is good -- it leads to SUVs. That's why they're pissed.
Mr Cropper is demonstrating the kind of thinking that leads to my complete overview of why Western Civ is being destroyed from within. He is one step removed from asking this question,
“If our “leaders” are so humanitarian, how is it that we never hear them direct a harsh word at the Malthusian, Utilitarian and Green nutcases?”
for which the plausible answers are not comforting for individuals and any desire they have for their own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.