"Jay P Hailey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> kindly posted: >http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/moderates-radicals.html
>Moderates and Radicals >by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. including: >Concerning the dispute between moderates and radicals, the glaringly obvious >is seldom pointed out: it is a heck of lot easier to be a moderate than a >radical. That's definitely not true. Neither takes more effort than the other. > To be a moderate means to side, at least partially and often >largely or completely, with conventional wisdom. It means that you can be >friendly with powerful people because you are no threat to them. Heh...as if merely having certain opinions in civil society would make one either (a) influential with, or (b) unfriendly to, powerful people! OK, Rockwell wrote "can" above, suggesting that having certain opinions might be necessary, albeit not sufficient, to make one either an undesirable or a friendly person to "powerful people". However, so many counter-examples can be given of persons in roles of power being friendly with those whose opinions are very different, or positively on the outs with those sharing the same opinions, that it can't even be necessary. One may see this in any large enough organization. People in positions of power must be pragmatic enough that they judge others by criteria other than mere opinion. Mostly, they look for people who are productive and useful to them; meanwhile they may make enemies of those whose ideas are virtually the same, and therefore are competitors. >Think of a prison populated by those who are planning a break and those who >seek better food and more exercise time. To look at the two groups, there is >no visible difference between the way they treat the wardens, except that >internally those who plan to escape regard them as the enemy, But such an analogy is entirely inappropriate for civil society, wherein there are no enemies in the position comparable to the prison warden. Indeed, persons who are discovered to think of others as enemies (think Nixon) are strongly deplored for such thinking. >The difference between the radical and the moderate is not one of degree. It >is an intellectual and mental outlook of a completely different sort, one >that goes to the very heart of whether one views the people in power as the >source of the problem, or the source of the solution. The problem therein is the focus on the people, rather than on problems and solutions per se. The effective person, whether radical or moderate, won't concentrate on people in power as an object either way. In Your Sly Tribe, Robert _______________________________________________ Libnw mailing list Libnw@immosys.com List info and subscriber options: http://immosys.com/mailman/listinfo/libnw Archives: http://immosys.com/mailman//pipermail/libnw
