Progressive Perfections
Necessity is the mother of invention. Progressivism seeks, as a matter of overt principle and coercive policy, to eradicate all necessity — material want, physical disadvantage, social failure, feelings of inadequacy or self-hatred, emotional insecurity. Thus, to the extent the progressives are successful, they will, as a consequence of the covert principles and authoritative policies of Nature, eradicate all invention, or at least all invention not pertaining to the infinite perfectibility of the great god of the progressive masses, Pleasure.
There has never been a man of consequence who evolved in a condition of psychological comfort, without essential opposition or resistance, and without at times — particularly in youth — feeling alone “in a dark wood,” as Dante so pithily identified the locus of the soul’s self-discovery. Progressivism seeks to outlaw discomfort, opposition, and resistance, and to render genuine solitude practically impossible and morally obsolete, as “selfish.” It thereby effectively aims to thwart the development of greatness of soul, which is to say humanity in the highest and standard-setting sense, forever.
Growth, as that notion has been understood by philosophers, artists, and civilization in general throughout most of history, essentially entails the development of independence — a lifeform’s increasing capacity to manage its own existence, order its own priorities, and provide for its own needs. Thus, by analogy with the maturation process found within each living species, the species themselves were generally ranked hierarchically on the standard of their relative capacities to achieve independence in living. In theory and practice, this meant ranking living things in accordance with their potential for the most spiritualized existence, i.e., the life least bound to the material flux and temporal transience of the dependent and self-preservational Now.
Progressivism, in defiance of all that intellectual and sentimental history, has redefined independence itself as evidence of immaturity, specifically as a failure of the individual to submit himself properly to the interdependent and interchangeable flow of collective life, the advance of the “social mind.” All the stresses and tensions between man and society that once painfully and gradually allowed the individual to separate himself to some degree from the moral ownership and intellectual intimidation of the shouting crowd are now reduced to the lexicon of mental illness, to be expunged from the soul with drugs, “counselling,” and continuous, rigorous indoctrination or re-education through the public schools, anti-discrimination laws, and the propaganda of the popular entertainment industry. Self-esteem and the smarmy moral relativism of “inclusiveness” have supplanted “know thyself” and “stand on your own two feet” as the wisdom of the new age. The independent adult with his eye on the stars rather than on the crowd is now reduced to either a laughingstock or a reviled public enemy, as the occasion demands. In short, regression to a childish life lived at the bosom of The Universal Mother, the State, has replaced everything that once stood as the minimum condition of human maturity.
