Roger,

I like to think that Western Civilization, or at least the United States and its English-speaking allies, is slowly waking up to the threat.

A lot of our problems in the face of the Islamofascist threat are at bottom due to what I have seen described as “political Taylorism”. Political Taylorism is the adaptation of Frederick Taylor’s ideas of industrial production to human societies. The Progressives looked at the miracles that Taylor’s methods had wrought in the realm of industry– ever more product of ever-higher quality at the same or lower prices as before, with ever-less inputs of labor and material– and the Progressives thought that Taylor’s methods should be applied to human societies. Their goal was undoubtedly well-intentioned– a more humane society, one without material want or fear of oppression. But applying Taylorist principles to human societies inevitably reduces human beings to the status of dead matter, mere raw material for the carrying out of The Plan.

That’s bad enough– it explains the barbaric behavior of far too many people, organizations, and governments of the far Left. (The sentence, “In order to make mayonnaise, you have to break a few eggs” should make any Leftist with a conscience wince. Alas, there are too few such creatures in the world.) Worse still for us in this post-Communist age, the political-Taylorist view of human-beings-as-raw-material still animates too many people of a “progressive” mindset. To be fair to these modern-day Progressives, they don’t (or at least, *most* of them don’t) want to send people into the gulags. But raw material isn’t supposed to have a mind of its own, and the Progressives certainly don’t encourage free thinking, even if they don’t actively suppress it.

And so, since the days of the New Deal at least, we the people have been told not to think for ourselves and act for ourselves, but instead to let “the experts” run the show and do our thinking and acting for us.

And there lies the source of the “flaccidness” that your other commenters have pointed out. Life today may be too easy, but we’ve also been taught to *not* struggle either for or against anything. Such struggle or striving only disrupts smooth working of The Plan.

Fortunately, The Plan only works to a point. In its early days, The Plan delivers big improvements because one-size-fits-all arrangements generally are an improvement over what is usually a poverty-stricken, disorganized mess. (Think of the Soviet Union in the years after the civil war of 1917-22. Those Five Year Plans worked wonders because there was such room for improvement.) But once a society reaches a certain level of prosperity, The Plan ceases to work well– people want variety and customized items, things that a one-size-fits-all arrangement doesn’t deliver very well at all. (Again, look at the Soviet Union after about 1980, or the United States after about 1960. The wheels started coming off the machine of central planning, because what it provided was not what people actually wanted.)

And that’s why I have hope for our future– people are less content nowadays with what The Plan delivers, are starting to think and act for themselves again, and in so doing are starting to see the Progressives for what they are– authoritarian bull-manure artists. “Tolerance” and “diversity” and “ask ourselves why they hate us” are just so much bull-manure, and is being seen as such by more and more people.

Hang in there, Roger. Better days are coming.

And thanks for reading my rant.