The Mill Paradigm

The secret that the West is a Liberal dictatorship still isn't out. For the penny to drop it needs some distance, like it needs an outsider to make you aware you've developed a nasty habit. I have long been reluctant to make this statement: to Classical Liberals/Libertarians it is an oxymoron, an impossibility given the mutual exclusivity; today even the ultra Left Dutch Greens appreciate that Liberalism stands for freedom, so how can it possibly constitute a dictatorship?

The problem is that Liberal morality is cast into laws - to the point of even becoming 'human rights' - and foisted onto the world at large, thereby criminalizing rejectionists; whether they're hapless grannies objecting to being mooned by gays for homophobia, or gays protesting against imams who call for them be cast from minarets for Islamophobia, or priests criminalized on both counts.

This happens in reaction to Islamic modernophobia, and under pressure from activists and their advocates in the European Parliament and elsewhere, at the expense of the freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. It cannot go on like this. Practising U.K. barrister Neil Addison in "Religious Discrimination and Hatred Law" provides the first comprehensive survey of legislation concerning religion in diverse areas such as criminal law, discrimination, employment and harassment, and charts the growing role of courts.

In "The Impossible made Possible: the Dictatorship of Liberalism" and "EU Phobia: more Crimes against the Ideology!" I posited that Christianity was the basic source of morality at the time Liberal thought developed and it is consequently built into the philosophy. By no means were Liberalism and Christian values ever mutually exclusive, until - not that long ago, Leftist Liberals swapped the Classical values for Socialist ones (here's Dr Sanity's invaluable chart once more). Among the proponents is a brand of fanatical atheists who have adopted selections of John Stuart Mill's Liberalism, minus the wisdom, conditions and restrictions, plus the virulent Marxist zeal. Classical Liberalism's founding philosophers are turning in their graves.

The disrobed Mill paradigm has also been adopted as the life-style of choice by the Liberal populace in general, whether they are aware of it, or not. The basic principle seems to be just tailored for current epoch: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of the community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant".

This licence for radical individualism is popularly the sole and sancrosanct moral rule governing Western society today: do as you please, as long as you don't hurt others. It seems simple and sound, but it is selective shopping, as Mill added the restriction ".... accepting the consequences of your actions". But these are usually left for others to deal with.

It is hard enough for sages to foresee the lengths and breadths of their actions; the consequences for ourselves, and moreover the consequences for others are often near impossible to fathom. Therefore, what Mill would have us add, are the Victorian virtues of a sense of responsibility and prudence. Mill: "It was better to be Socrates discontented than a fool satisfied." Well, we all know what happened to those graces: given the psychological effect of the nanny state - acting as a perpetual baby-sit to pick up the pieces - preventing people from maturing into fully fledged human beings, attaining their full potential.

Mill's popularly practiced, disrobed principle - to which added the sole modern restriction of consent by the persons involved - implies no one has the right to interfere, or to pass moral judgment. Analyzing the latter, British doctor and writer Theodore Dalrymple came to the conclusion that this actually means that "the highest form of morality is amorality". Isn't it fun how selective shopping in philosophy can turn wisdom into vulgar popular social dross: 'mind your own d#*% business!', 'who the f#*% is the Pope?'

The same doctor Dalrymple in "Our Culture, What's Left of It" sketches us the postmodern life in Britain's slums. It doesn't take much imagination to turn that reality - of which the real victims are the children - to be generally true for the whole of north-western Europe. The postmodern society isn't yet willing to accept their moral bankruptcy, to be reminded of life, before Christianity made its civilizing influence felt.
Here's a picture of Mill and his wife: oozing approval of so much permissiveness, don't they?

But back to our Liberal Dictatorship and the values it has proclaimed universal human rights: on whose 'Authority' have they done so [1], if I might reciprocate that pregnant question?

Paul Belien, editor of Brussels Journal and an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute in a column in the Washington Post on 23rd May, "Europe's Culture War" describes the interface between the Left Liberal values - now 'moral law' across the European Union and guarded by the European Court of Human Rights - and classical Christian values: abortion rights and gay rights.

Let me state on a personal note that the times homosexuals were rather fun, are long gone. What is left is blind activism, hysteria, fallacy, and beyond hedonism: decadence and degeneration, pure and simple. These gay rights centre on the allowance of annual street parties in each and every given capital city, displaying all that Roman orgies also had to offer, minus the style.

More seriously, gay activism fights for legal rights to adopt children and same sex marriage, which is already accomplished in many Western countries. The argument against, that they constitute an infringement on family values, are not accepted by gay activists on the grounds that these are Christian values, which don't apply to them.

Would the argument that children have no say in the matter - their inability, given their age, to express consent - cut any ice with them in the matter? The argument that a child needs role models, two parents, one of each gender, I won't even mention in the light of the Liberal dogma. Would the argument that marriage is originally a religious institution perhaps destroy their appetite for state-sanctified same-sex nuptials? Or could it be, that this is exactly the reason they want these rights in the first place: usurp, pervert and destroy?

Liberals have long denied the existence of the slippery slope. Given the developments in the matter of abortion and partial birth, it can be safely said - as suspected - that this is dog food. Where is the line that must not be crossed, if not life itself? As per Ann Coulter's elemental query, if you don't believe in God, what keeps you from committing mass murder?

The next item on the moral erosion program will be the sanctity of children: pederast activists are already working to swap consent - which presently stands between them and the legalised act - to read "understood to consent, unless otherwise is indicated"! Governed by the perverted Mill paradigm that everybody simply must answer to his or her personal urge, they now try to convince themselves and others that their heinous attentions are a matter of 'nature', society's revulsion caused by 'nurture'. Just when you think it cannot possibly get any worse, it just did!

There is no good reason at all why we shouldn't find the European Parliament's agit prop bus in the streets of Moscow and Latvia in a few years time, delivering that message in the name of just the next unequal group requiring emancipation at the expense of the powerless.

I am resting totally assured that some Left Liberals are presently in danger of bursting a brain capillary from sheer indignation at so much reactionary moralising! They should realize that the most common failure of Roman pagan society was their inability to make the protection of the innocent and vulnerable a matter of morality. We are reverting to those violent times, but that wouldn't be a problem, would it - any culture being the same as any other ...