Altruism, the most noble of intentions

Have you ever watched someone who is reading a really good book? I mean really observed them. Perhaps you were in a library when you heard someone exclaim and looked up (obviously your book wasn’t as good as it could have been) to see a reader, oblivious to anyone else in the room, with an intense expression on their face. Maybe you sat down in an airport gate area and noticed a reader who didn’t look up when the flight was called for the second or third time. Whatever the case may have been, I know the next thing you did was try to see the title of their book. With any luck, you found a good book to read.

I know I’ve been that reader, lost in the story, literally woven into the fabric the author has crafted. Really good books are like that, sucking you in until it is almost irritating to return to the real world around you. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series comes to mind, as do Anne McCaffery’s The Dragonriders of Pern series and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan stories. I can remember befriending the local bookstore proprietor so that I could be on the list of people for whom he reserved one of his limited copies of upcoming releases. The good old days of the corner bookstore. But I digress…

Over the past several years I have found myself reading less entertaining books such as Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny, Niall Ferguson’s The Ascent of Money and Peter Schiff’s Crash Proof. However, I remain the reader who runs down to Barnes and Noble and picks up a book that has been turned into a movie so I can read it as the author intended before seeing a script writer’s perversion of the story. That is sort of how I discovered Terry Goodkind’s The Sword of Truth series.

In looking for something to watch on TV, I stumbled upon ABC’s Legend of the Seeker. I missed season one, but went back and caught up online after the first couple installments of season two. Then I saw an interview with the author, Terry Goodkind, and made it a point to pick up the first book in the series (Wizard’s First Rule). I was hooked. The next trip to the bookstore involved picking up book two and ordering books three through six. I just finished book six, Faith of the Fallen, and it is so relevant to today’s politics that I found myself reading paragraph sized excerpts of it to my wife and having to explain the back-story in the the process. She smiled indulgently through the whole exercise, bless her heart.

I understand that Goodkind describes himself as an objectivist and I will not pretend to know diddly about objectivism (perhaps that shall be my next path of inquiry). What struck me about the storyline in Faith of the Fallen was the socially destructive force of altruism. Goodkind seems to have taken the proverb ‘Hell is full of good intentions or desires’ and, quite literally, played it out in his story.

Now I find myself looking at the Obama administration's use of altruism to destroy the very fabric of the United States of America and constructing parallels to Goodkind's storyline in Faith of the Fallen. What scares me is that The Order was successful for hundreds of years and I see no reason why today's 'altruists' should fail in their efforts.

L'enfer est plein de bonnes volontés

"Hell is full of good intentions"

By now you know I can't pass up the chance to take a deeper look at our English and its evolution. (Why 'our' English? Because a British friend of mine would publicly crucify me on my own blog if I tried to get away with assuming that British English and American English were the same thing. I would find myself on the "defence" for the indefensible.) You shouldn't be surprised then to learn the familiar proverb 'the road to hell is full of good intentions' has a simpler beginning; or that it is French in origin. History is replete with these adaptations.

So why the proverb? Because I believe that many Americans today are operating on the basis of good intentions gone bad. I know that isn't the case when it comes to the leadership, but my 'good intention' is to give the many the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps I will avoid that trip.

The anecdote goes that Benjamin Franklin, upon leaving Independence Hall at the close of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, was asked what form of government he had given us. His reply was "A Republic, if you can keep it." Those words ring truer today than at any time in our history.

I hear a lot about compromise these days. Every time I hear how the Republicans lost so they should compromise it reminds me of the time I stood alone on a vote. I argued my position as best I could but, in the end, I was the lone vote in opposition. Everyone else was upset with me for not agreeing with them and, truth be told, I was floored by their response. Somehow my business partners (it was a vote on the direction the company was to take) were of the opinion that, because they were in the majority, I should compromise my position so that the vote could be unanimous. It was an enlightening experience.

My point is this: some things you just can't compromise on no matter what. Worse, compromise just for the sake of compromise is just plain ignorant.

This country was founded as a representative Republic (a representative democracy in the form of a constitutional republic) not a direct democracy. The answer to why is straightforward: to prevent a tyranny of the majority. The powers of the federal government were enumerated. The federal government itself was broken into a triumvirate and specific checks and balances were put in place. The point of all this was to protect individual liberty and the rights of property. The United States of America is supposed to be a nation of laws, not of men.