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Quote of the Day: The Secret Knowledge
Our country has created the most effective and beneficent, the most productive and the most just civilization in the history of the world, by forming laws based upon that shared truth: compassion no less than greed will, in the hands of the State, cause misery. It is not the job of the State to be compassionate, but to be just.
Mamet, David. The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (p. 191). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
David Mamet wrote this in 2011. In 2008, he came out as a conservative in a courageous essay published in the Village Voice: “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal”. He is one of the most successful and critically acclaimed playwrights of modern times (Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed the Plow, et al.). If you haven’t read The Secret Knowledge, I highly recommend it – practically every sentence is worth highlighting.
Published in General
Mamet wrote in a retrospective of his “coming out” that some of his friends became acquaintances, his acquaintances became enemies, and his enemies became demons.
Sounds like what happened to me.
C.S. Lewis wrote several times about the danger of busybodies who run government or schools supposedly for the good of others. It’s very hard to shake a person loose from a policy when he is convinced that he must take away a freedom for your good.
Exactly.
I heard either this quote or a similar one many years ago. It was one of those quotes that caused me to stop and ponder, because in my foolish youth, I thought certainly sometimes compassion is called for. But as I pondered it, I realized it was correct because then application of the law was arbitrary and therefore unfair. If one judge felt sorry for you and another didn’t, oh well. And it imbued way too much power in judges, because they could dismiss the law in the name of compassion.
That’s why on all the traditional statutes of the lady representing law and justice, she wears a blindfold. Helps in being dispassionate in dispensing justice.
Maybe that’s why the Left hates Jews. Without redistribution and partiality toward “victims,” how would Democrats buy votes?
“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. For example, Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions. For in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy. He really is the enemy of the human race– because he is so human.”
–GK Chesterton
Case in point religious NGOs helping so called migrants invade and destroy our country instead of fixing their own dung holes.
Yeah, it’s all Luther’s fault that little old ladies had to choose between heating their hovels in the winter and centuries of torment in Purgatory when Johann Tetzel passed around the collection plate.
Get bent, Gilbert.