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QOTD: Rugged Individualism
Holman Jenkins, in the Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2020
None of us likes to think we aren’t brave, but journalists and motorcycle gang members are perhaps unique in interpreting their own slavish conformity as rugged individualism.
Yes, we have an competitive press in this country. But how independent is it really? You can get exact same take on the news from dozens of different sources. Or, on occasion you can fail to get any take on a story at all because the media has all joined in a mad rush to not cover it.
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Who are you going to believe? The press or your lying eyes?
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This is positively Yogi-Berraesque. (Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.)
Not totally unique. It’s a manifestation of the Liberty of the Ancients, built around the sovereignty of the clan rather than the sovereignty of the individual.
The difference is that gang members are fine with being outsider 1%ers*. While journalists are also 1%ers (if that) they insist on dictating what the laws are going to be and that everybody must think the way they do.
I sometimes wonder how “independent” the bikers would be if there weren’t a lot of other people making the parts for their bikes.
That’s one natural progression of the Liberty of the Ancients. Once clans reach a certain level they’re no longer content to simply raid their neighbours and so they get into the conquering business. For example, it’s widely believed that Rome started as an outlaw bandit camp, and that subjugating its neighbours was seen as justice for past wrongs rather than as expansionist aggression. They were simply defending their Liberty, man. “Gotta get them before they get us.”
Or take the Vikings, whose word for “booty” literally translates as “debt”, as if the treasure they stole was payment for services rendered. The Liberty of the Ancients means that everybody not of the clan are subjects of the clan (even if they don’t know it yet).
Yay one recently I just heard about was on a China news podcast. There appears to have been massive voter fraud in the April South Korea elections of which China might of been heavy involved. Because factually correct statement you can go to jail on because they don’t serve the public interest and the ruling part who was most likely was part the fraud gets to determine public intrest. You have not heard anything about it.