/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17232159]

How influential is this book going to be now that we’re watching liberalism decay yet still reasserting itself day after day?

[Anonymous No.17232163]

>>17232159
There's no need to explain that liberalism failed. You just take a look at America and understand immediately.

[Anonymous No.17232181]

>>17232159
No more than before, and no more than books the left reads about why conservatism failed.

[Anonymous No.17232187]

The book has already been influential. Michael Lind incorporated a lot of the criticism Deneen had into his recent books, as did pic related.

The only people who didn't take Deneen's book seriously are unsurprisingly enough, liberals. But that's because they are already in power, so they can basically ignore any criticism with a hand wave anyway.

[Anonymous No.17232225]

It's a bittersweet feeling to be in the know.

[Anonymous No.17232266]

Is this a good book?

[Anonymous No.17232271]

By what metric has it failed? If anything it's been vindicated.

[Anonymous No.17232280]

what are the odds this faggot is kvetching about mobs on twitter right now

[Anonymous No.17232290]

>>17232271
If I close my eyes everything will be fine

[Anonymous No.17232299]

>>17232271
I assume that book will probably answer your question. Mayhaps read it and find out.

[Anonymous No.17232303]

>>17232159
>>17232187
>>17232225
Another good one (pic rel)

The more I look at the situation, the less hope I have and the more I am seriously looking at living a rural life. My cousin has already done this, although working his farm is not his day-job. Frankly, people (by which I mean normies) just scare the shit out of me now, especially how they've lost their minds due to a leedle flu.

[Anonymous No.17232305]

>>17232159
How influential is this guy going to be now that we’re watching liberalism decay yet still reasserting itself day after day?

[Anonymous No.17232312]

>>17232159
>Why Liberalism Failed
Forced diversity is dystopic and consumer society is dysgenic.

The end.

[Anonymous No.17232320]

>>17232303
I think you're being a bit too paranoid right now. People are so used to the comfort they're not gonna do anything to destroy it, they have WWII and other things so ingrained in their minds. And by that I mean regular people but I guess there are always retards who can fuck everything up for other people.

[Anonymous No.17232329]

tldr of Deneen:
>liberalism is a failure which is apparent to anyone possessing even the semblance of intelligence but I´m not going to produce any solutions just generic localism though I wish my faggot Catholicism had more influence in the US leftists are the real racists no I´m not a crypto-liberal I swear

[Anonymous No.17232335]

>>17232329
Everyone has to do this sort of mental gymnastics to even get published. Otherwise, they would've been ostracized by retards that are vast majority of our society.

[Anonymous No.17232344]

>>17232271
>By what metric has it failed?
Liberalism, properly understood, has not failed, but rather it has been subverted by a combination of money, misuse of language, and outright lies. When you say liberalism nowadays, it effectively means oppression by an elite class who have and misuse the keys to power for their own ends.

Although nobody says things like in Orwell's 1984 like "freedom is slavery" people have done something more insidious that Wittgenstein actually predicted; in his posthumous work, Culture and Value, Wittgenstein posits a society that is totally dominated by a single religion. All the people have freedom of speech in this society, but they are incapable of thinking outside the box of this religion, because its language is so pervasive. What essentially happens, without anybody knowing it, is that words like "freedom is slavery" are not said, but the word freedom means slavery to the masters of the religion.

Arguably we saw this at the Capitol; notice how everyone condemned these people for trying to usurp "democracy." But "democracy" simply means "ruling class" in practice.

[Anonymous No.17232347]

>>17232329
>nooo you can't point out a problem unless you have a solution to it!! you can't say anything bad about the political order unless you can create a utopia that will fix everything noooooooo!!!

[Anonymous No.17232352]

>>17232329
I never understood the "he describes the problem but provides no solutions whatsoever". What if his aim is to only describe the problem in order foment discussions? The title is "Why Liberalism Failed" and not "Why Liberalism Failed, and how it should be replaced". I'd be a fool if I expected olives from an orange tree.

[Anonymous No.17232354]

>>17232320
>WW2 ingrained in their minds
And that is the problem; NPCs don't take from WW2 that it is good to leave people alone to do as they wish, they take from it that Nazi = bad, and Nazi is whatever the media says is Nazi. It's a literal grug meme, because they are a bunch of sub-human apes who are barely capable of passing a driver's test, let alone governing the country by elective democracy.

[Anonymous No.17232365]

>>17232352
I will explain it to you. People say
>he describes the problem but provides no solutions whatsoever
when they actually don't think there is a problem, fully support the matter under discussion, and want to discredit anyone who says anything critical about it. They act like they agree that there is a problem because it makes you think they are sympathetic to your own views, which allows them to manipulate you more easily. Hope that helps.

[Anonymous No.17232382]

>>17232354
I guess you're right, you convinced me. But I don't think there's anything we could do about it anyway, people are so impulsive and thoughtless that if it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen anyway. One of the things my country's history taught me, is that the good people are always fucked and left alone at the end, no matter what they do or how noble they will act. All we can do is try to survive with dignity.

[Anonymous No.17232397]

>>17232329
Problem with this hyperbole is that everyone is a liberal *in some way* if you're living in the West. Critiquing liberalism doesn't mean you don't acknowledge liberalism's strengths, only that we need to move beyond it.

In fact, the whole premise of liberalism is that it paradoxically failed because it actually succeeded. We already live in the world that John Stuart Mill and John Locke wanted, and yet that world is filled with negativity, deaths of despair, extreme economic and social inequality, and last but not least, an elite class that is filled with completely useless people.

[Anonymous No.17232403]

>>17232397
The whole premise of Deneen's book is that liberalism*

[Anonymous No.17232416]

>>17232365
Thanks anon, it did help. It's amazing the level of dishonesty some people can muster at times. Knowing where a problem is stemming from is many times more valuable than simply being ignorant of it. Once you know where it's coming, part of the job is done because now you can focus on seeking solutions and eventually addressing it with the right solution.

[Anonymous No.17232431]

His thesis that liberalism is slowly imploding because of its own contradictions is so patently obvious that it baffles me that this is such a neglected analysis in mainstream discourse. The “culture war” is just a simulated conflict of two sides of liberalism — conservatism which is dying and reviled by the younger generations —- and progressivism (or wokeism) which is steadily becoming the preferred ideology of capital. Everything in mainstream politics still accepts the basic premises of freedom and equality (even leftists do). The popularity of identity politics seems like the opposite to liberalism but in fact all these identities are performative corpses of things that liberalism has eroded over the decades (gender, sexuality, family, and ethnic cohesion being reduced to BLM and LGBT). Nothing in mainstream politics even matters or has truth to it, liberalism has become the most empty and sclerotic system ever and needs to create narratives like it’s a reality TV show to keep the consumers entertained with our soulless reality

[Anonymous No.17232451]

>>17232382
Which country if you don't mind my asking?

[Anonymous No.17232461]

>>17232431
This.

Anyone who thinks wokeness will go away naturally because it isn't "profitable" needs to stop watching PragerU and Ben Shapiro videoes. Cold War Reaganite liberalism is dead.

[Anonymous No.17232478]

The worst is that people who really should get it are blinded by the leftists who joined the Republican party and managed to redefine conservatism in the common lexicon to be their form of liberalism. I suppose they were only able to pull it off because the founding of America is liberal in nature.

[Anonymous No.17232479]

>>17232329
Everyone who wants to talk about taboo topics has to write in a way that the real meaning is hidden between the lines, away from the eyes of the people it wasn't meant for.

[Anonymous No.17232529]

>>17232478
>the leftists who joined the Republican party and managed to redefine conservatism in the common lexicon to be their form of liberalism.

That's not what happened though. Reagan was a libertarian who redefined being conservative to be libertarian instead of "Old Right", and all the evangelicals and actual social conservatives fell for it.

[Anonymous No.17232543]

>>17232529
What the fuck do you think a libertarian is? The word comes from liberal. Liberals are leftist.

[Anonymous No.17232559]

>>17232543
The only way you can justify calling liberals left-wing today is if you're some kind of pre-Revolutionary France reactionary.

[Anonymous No.17232581]

>>17232431
I really enjoyed reading your reply and you taught me a new word - sclerotic. Thanks anon <3

[Anonymous No.17232585]

>>17232559
No, I'm not going to disregard history and the philosophical tradition that all liberalism stems from. This is precisely what the neocons did because it serves them rhetorically to essentially push genuine right wing thought off the table. Whether it's the progressive liberals of John Dewey or the Republican liberals of John Locke, these people are sons of the enlightenment and they have always been considered left wing. You're in a thread about Patrick Deneen's book you really should know better.

[Anonymous No.17232601]

>>17232344
quality post. A properly functioning democracy is a delicate thing, and ours (while never perfect) has been brutally taken over by a wide swath of elite interests, democrat and republican alike. Nancy Pelosi and Lindsey Graham should both be fired out of a cannon

[Anonymous No.17232611]

>>17232585
Yeah but in the context of liberalism being the dominant and hegemonic ideology in society today it doesn't make sense to call it left-wing.

Socialism and communism is the left-wing of liberalism, and the reason why is that they want to abolish liberalism in favor of what they view as a system that *transcends* it, just like liberalism itself transcended feudalism, aristocracy and monarchy.

[Anonymous No.17232713]

>>17232352
That picture is hilarious. I wish I could be so brainwashed, seeks comfy desu

[Anonymous No.17232773]

>>17232611
No, it doesn't make sense to use right or left wing as if they're applicable to all times and places because it comes from a specific and it has a particular meaning. You've made yourself stupid by degrading the language you think with. Please stay out of politics.

[Anonymous No.17232885]

>>17232773
>No, it doesn't make sense to use right or left wing as if they're applicable to all times and places because it comes from a specific and it has a particular meaning.

Well I don't disagree with that but that's an entirely different discussion you fucking brainlet.

[Anonymous No.17233153]

>>17232344
This is the case, liberalism has died and a random assortment of feel good moral issues paid for by middle class tax money has become the religious surrogate of the supposed liberal mass of men. Class issues are secondary or forgotten, basic religious lip service to things like diversity or the environment serves as a shield for the most grotesquely rich to fund whatever projects of domination, control, or further ownership they want.

I would say the United States' Republic can be declared dead on the 6th, not because some hooligans stormed the Bastille, but because the oligarchy revealed its unified contempt and disgust of plebians to the whole world. Only a religious fanatic now would deny the reality the US is an oligarchy.

[Anonymous No.17233169]

>>17232159
I'd wager this book will be remembered as the most influential political work of the early 21st century

[Anonymous No.17233223]

>>17233169
If publishers will accept the book I am working on, it will most likely outshine this by far.

[Anonymous No.17233259]

>>17233223
Lol ok bro

[Anonymous No.17233373]

>>17232344

A part of the reason political liberalism is floundering truly is that it is so materially unequal, but there is a discordance between political liberalism and the economy. The economy doesn’t exist under a liberal regime, it exists under a regime of servitude. There are several varieties of liberalism, but the 2 major ones which are the liberalism of natural rights, and the liberalism of “justice and liberty” so to speak. The former has pretty well defined principles for its political philosophy, mainly the idea that people have natural rights that literally cannot be usurped from them, as in their own inalienable will. That tradition is associated a lot with Locke. But the justice and liberty tradition is more the standard, and it is associated with people like Smith, Hayek or Rawls (even Hobbes, although I wouldn’t call him liberal). The idea is that there is some way to think of the conditions of liberty and justice, which we then create or nudge institutions toward fulfilling because we value liberty and justice.

And while the latter is the prevailing view, either implicitly or explicitly, it is because it is very floaty and is kind of just an ad hoc rationalization for what exists. It has usually been deployed to champion what exists while also suggesting relatively minor ways in which it could be perfected. The natural rights tradition was much more radical in the sense that it was actually deployed to justify revolution almost every time it presented itself, but its advocates rarely took it to its conclusions because the conclusions were unsavory. The conclusion of the natural rights tradition is that servitude in general is an illegitimate social role, and that doesn’t just include servitude to an absolute political sovereign, but also servitude to a master, as in the traditional master/slave relation we call employment. Ironically, for how much liberalism has resisted that conclusion, I think it would bring the most stability to the whole system. Markets, contract and private property all prevail, but excessive wealth inequality is extinguished and individualism and community find a significant resolution in the private sector rather than the state.

[Anonymous No.17233629]

>>17232397

>We already live in the world that John Stuart Mill and John Locke wanted

I think both would look a little askance at it, although Locke less so. Mill expected cooperatives to displace private capitalist driven firms, and he was not only optimistic but quite enthusiastic about the idea. He believed it would not only be more ethical, but create more responsibility and sense of social ownership or inclusion on the part of the worker owners, and he largely built up this view from observing the cooperatives that had formed through the work of Robert Owen. Having at first a lot of skepticism about them, he later felt that they had proven themselves socially advantageous and became an advocate when he wrote the Principles of Political Economy.

But Locke of course was always in favor of the whole institution of servitude, and I think would only be uncomfortable with the extraordinary size of private interests. He was hesitant in the Two Treatises to suggest that it was appropriate or just for private property to be able to be accumulated to an unlimited degree, and placed somewhat anachronistic limits to it in accordance with the conditions of his time by having an almost homesteading principle (the notion that you couldn't appropriate something to yourself if it denied the ability for others to do the same, which was implying that a appropriation should exist in conditions of abundance, because if appropriation exists in a condition of scarcity then your appropriation of resources denies others access to those resources, and so causes social conflict).

[Anonymous No.17233734]

>>17232344
>Liberalism, properly understood, has not failed
What is the proper understanding of it?
>a society that is totally dominated by a single religion
That is what is currently coming. It is not necessarily a bad thing. The reason is because if the religion is correct then it is a good thing people adhere to it, because they adhere to truth. However the religion that is beginning to take hold is satanic.

[Anonymous No.17233755]

>>17232305
Mr. Marx and his ideological successors are nothing more than aesthetics at this point.

[Anonymous No.17233757]

All right, liberalism has failed. Now what books do I read to continue to unfuck my head from it all?

[Anonymous No.17233823]

>>17233629
I know that Mill had a fantasy of civic virtue, but I think he underestimated how corrosive the idea of liberty is to everything around it.

Like, religion for example. Religious observance and attendance is just collapsing everywhere, and one of the primary reasons is that it is not longer socially acceptable to "indoctrinate"(e.g. inculcate religion into their children as has been done for millennia), because this is hostile to a child's rights in a liberal ontology.

And this kind of absurdity will just continue, in a 100 years it wouldn't surprise me if parents can be arrested and sanctioned by the state if they do anything that can be considered at odds with the kid's consent.

[Anonymous No.17233905]

>>17233823
>Religious observance and attendance is just collapsing everywhere, and one of the primary reasons is that it is not longer socially acceptable to "indoctrinate"(e.g. inculcate religion into their children as has been done for millennia), because this is hostile to a child's rights in a liberal ontology.
where I live the biggest trends of resigning from the Church have nothing to do with what you claimed
>And this kind of absurdity will just continue, in a 100 years it wouldn't surprise me if parents can be arrested and sanctioned by the state if they do anything that can be considered at odds with the kid's consent.
what is the point of arguing with hyperboles.

[Anonymous No.17233929]

>>17233823
People who fret about the decline of religion in the West make no sense to me. You do realize Europe's gonna be a Muslim stronghold by 2070 right? Even if you don't like/follow Islam, you have to admit the prevalence and strength of belief in religion will only be increasing.

[Anonymous No.17233933]

>>17233905
>where I live the biggest trends of resigning from the Church have nothing to do with what you claimed

Of course it has.

How many Jews do you think would voluntarily circumcize themselves if they had to wait until they are 18 years old because of consent? Obviously very few. I'd argue only the very Orthodox would.

The transmitting of a religion and tradition to children isn't voluntary, and the reason it isn't voluntary is precisely one of the largest reasons religion continues to exist, if this fundamental concept is considered socially taboo, then religion will slowly go away.

[Anonymous No.17233939]

>>17233933
and precisely because it isn't voluntary*

[Anonymous No.17233949]

QRD on this book and its arguments?

[Anonymous No.17233953]

>>17233929
We're importing people who are religious therefore the natives aren't becoming irreligious. You're a good thinker.

[Anonymous No.17233963]

>>17233929
I don't personally fret that much over the decline of religion, but if that thousands of years old tradition cannot stand firm against liberal ideology then what can exactly?

[Anonymous No.17233965]

>>17232159
>liberalism decaying
Dude we're moving toward neoliberals seizing complete control of the west.

[Anonymous No.17233976]

>>17233953
Regardless of whether native or imported, the West is still going to be more religious, not less.

[Anonymous No.17233981]

>>17233823

>but I think he underestimated how corrosive the idea of liberty is to everything around it.

I know this is just my own speculative bias, but even as I'm very sympathetic to the liberal tradition and take its ideas very seriously, I think Marx's core insight (or at least his brand because of how much he emphasized it) was that the prevailing ideology is going to be conditioned by whatever is beneficial to social reproduction, so in a sense the perverse deployment of liberal principles seems to have less to do with their own logic and more to do with the world that is using them to philosophically justify itself. Many of the principles are mangled into a grotesque mess of contradictions and weird conclusions, but in the progressive sphere (like obsession with consent and power dynamics to absurdity) I think it is a manifestation of the powerlessness to deal with actual hegemonic inequality in the economy, which translates to the state (or is in symbiosis with it). They're basically just the red herring of the whole system, recognizing how so much of modern liberal society is morally objectionable and strange, but being pushed in the direction of absurdity because it isn't threatening.

You can still find a whole set of academics who have discussed, completely outside of Marxism or communism, the subject of having a cooperative market economy, of why it hasn't manifested, of advocates giving philosophical justifications based in liberal thought, of examinations of how they can be quite competitive business forms etc. but it really is just a blip in the wider culture. It is almost never mentioned. I've talked to plenty of average people about cooperatives, and just because of how embedded I am in the whole literature on them I'm always caught by surprise when people have never heard of them. But it makes sense, because it is incredibly rare that you see anything about them in the media. From my perspective the common discourse on state vs. private solutions to social issues throughout common mass media feels like it glaringly omits an attempt to promote a cooperative economy, which has the potential to resolve many issues without making a utopian break from what exists.

[Anonymous No.17233993]

>>17232305
As long as the ones self-identifying as Marxists are actually liberals (more or less al Western Marxists) his philosophy will only serve as some sort of aesthetic.

[Anonymous No.17234037]

>>17233981
Well a large part of even Patrick Deneen's thesis comes from Marx even though he himself is a traditionalist Catholic.

I mean, this "all that is solid melts into air" - critique of liberalism and capitalism isn't a new critique, but the problem right now is that internet and technological capitalism is accelerating this feature a lot faster than previously, which means that all the negative externalities caused by this acceleration isn't being dealt with and absorbed by the system.

The Trump phenomenon and European populism is in large part a consequence of Reaganism and Thatcherism engaging in a completely ruthless form of what Schumpeter called "creative destruction", e.g. completely destroying the manufacturing centers of several Western countries and sending all the capital to China for almost 40 years straight.

The people who say capitalism and liberalism are ending, are wrong. But the people who say that capitalism and liberalism is becoming decadent and that it's power centers and managers doesn't know how to solve the problems it causes are right.

[Anonymous No.17234111]

>>17234037

>But the people who say that capitalism and liberalism is becoming decadent and that it's power centers and managers doesn't know how to solve the problems it causes are right.

Absolutely. The machine really is out of control at this point, and the continued attempt to project control by various institutions because that is kind of their social role seems to be the source of a lot of the feelings of confusion among the general population. Even though sometimes I feel like I just subscribed too heavily to Adam Curtis's whole emphasis on that point, but it is frequently how I orient my understanding of the public discourse and the general vibe of mania within the media and the public. The constant rollercoaster ride of doom, salvation, conspiracy etc. feels like everybody is trying to figure out who is actually in control, while the people who are in leadership positions are just desperately trying to look like they are in control.

[Anonymous No.17234114]

>>17233734
>What is the proper understanding of liberalism?
I suppose I should answer this since I said it; the proper understanding of liberalism is a society where the minority qualified to rule, recognize that they are essentially there for a few limited tasks that have nothing to do with the moral or religious life of the individual. The liberal government recognizes that its job is to collect taxes, keep a register of births, marriages and deaths, maintain some means of collective defense of private property and persons. Freedom is granted to individuals, since there is no dedicated interest in society that is willing or able to exert moral or religious control. That's the purest liberalism, and it died somewhere in the 1910s.

The impure form of liberalism is progressive liberalism, in which the state adopts the role of provider for non-government services like health care, and education subsidies.

But this impure form of liberalism begins to blend with traditional government (i.e. monarchy) when the government begins to involve itself with psychiatry, moral education, and indirectly vilifying or promoting religions.

Literally China tier though is where the government is more or less the only religion, and obedience to it is the only law.

[Anonymous No.17234174]

>>17234111

Also I don't really agree with Hobbes about sovereignty, but he probably would look at modern society and feel vindicated. At this point in time the liberal revolutions increasingly look like a bargain of temporarily increased liberty for anarchy at a later date:

>>17232225

I will agree that the principle of liberty as so core to liberalism right now, which is still widely shared even if it is interpreted very differently, has created this undulating rebellion that is ripping modern society apart from the inside even as modern society constantly tries to reaffirm that it is the inheritor of the true principle of liberty. It is like it is dangling over a cliff and clinging to a sword so it doesn't fall, but of course the sword is just slowly sawing through the hand. But regardless of all of that, I accept I may be naive and it seems there is no reason to believe any social system can enjoy stability forever, but I still think at least one of the most substantive solutions to the problem would be the cooperative market economy.

[Anonymous No.17234208]

>>17232352
Is that supposed to be normal?

[Anonymous No.17234298]

>>17234174
I don't think you should be so narrowly focused on the economy. I don't see how a cooperative market economy could solve things like mass-immigration or societal anomie.

[Anonymous No.17234356]

>>17233965
>According to Deneen "we should rightly wonder whether America is not in the early days of its eternal life but rather approaching the end of the natural cycle of corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations."
Do you disagree?

[Anonymous No.17234362]

>>17234114
China has nothing to do with liberalism. It is a marxist dictatorship of the proletariat

[Anonymous No.17234365]

>>17232352
It is just basic "sand in the eyes" argumentation from liberals and radlibs who cannot actually refute him

[Anonymous No.17234395]

>>17233929

If Christianity was abandoned by modern europe, Islam will probably never be accepted. Christianity was like a mountain slowly chipped away and Islam is a house of cards.

[Anonymous No.17234406]

>>17234362

[Anonymous No.17234435]

>>17234298

This is where I admit my speculative bias, which makes me border on the utopianism I'd generally accuse others of (including Marxists, even though I think there is a ton of value in Marx), but derivative from that whole view that prevailing ideology conforms itself to the kind of social reproduction that exists, I think it is possible the cooperative form can shift ideology through its shift in the material incentives. This would only really work if cooperatives were highly generalized across the economy, but assuming cooperatives either enforced on themselves through their bylaws or from outside through state/federal statute the condition that all workers must have an equal share in the enterprise, then the incentive for the cooperative is to limit its share of labor to capital. Every new laborer dilutes ownership of everyone else, so productivity gains are preferred to hiring. This has possible consequences for the unemployment rate, but cooperatives also have more stable employment within because laying people off means having to buy them out, which can be an even greater liability in a downturn than continuing to pay them a salary, so the unemployment rate should be more predictable at least. But another incentive here that is visible in Mondragon is to increase employment overseas, since hiring in the home country brings the necessity of adding new owners while doing it overseas can be rationalized through different legal environments and culture. So for mass-immigration, I think that cooperatives actually have a possibility of turning the incentives on their head. Offshoring all the low-value manufacturing and labor intensive work damaged people's conditions at home, and corporations have an incentive to dilute labor's value at home to boost their profits there by bringing in more laborers (skilled or otherwise). But if they're all cooperatives, the corporate incentive becomes to not bring people into the home country, but rather to increase profitability by exploiting labor in countries where wage labor is still dominant.

I think this would be a temporary, transitional relation though. If cooperatives could grow dominant as a model in the metropole, they'll expand outwards. Eventually foreign labor will likely be inaccessible, but it seem possible less people will want to move anyways because they'll be sharing in the wealth of their local and national economies through their own process of mutualizing the economy.

But as far as societal anomie, I don't think being a "worker-owner" would fix it. I think people would possibly have more self-respect, and may even share in some of the old benefits that are genuinely attributable to the old soviet style countries, specifically that people felt materially "equal" and like their social experience was shared. I think even Merkel has made some comments about feeling "peaceful" during her time in Easy Germany. Obviously it had other issues.

[Anonymous No.17234574]

what a great thread on such a loaded topic

[Anonymous No.17234746]

>>17234114
>tasks that have nothing to do with the moral or religious life of the individual
I like Aristotles polis, in which people come together for the common good (which is a moral / religious purpose rather than merely utilities and protections). This common good is basically the end at which all the functions of the polis are aimed towards. Since I am Catholic, this would translate to - the function of the polis is to facilitate for the salvation of the souls of its citizens.

I think what you describe has indeed failed / fails in theory because it results in a complete moral degradation of society, and destroys communal cohesiveness. This is true because when there are no moral standards that all people within a community agree upon, it inevitably fragments, because it is not fully ordered towards one end, but rather, as many ends as there are citizens. Ultimately those ends are mostly wrong as well, as we have seen, things like comfort, money, scientific achievement, etc.

At the crux of things, I think the problem with liberalism is that it takes the most important matters in both individual and communal life, and puts them in an irrelevant and personal back seat. I think it would work better among nations, meaning one nation does not conquer another to enforce beliefs or morals (unless the other nation is, for example, mass sacrificing people, at which point it becomes a moral duty to intervene). That would be because nations do not necessarily have to be one, but rather are many, whereas the polis ought to be one.

[Anonymous No.17234921]

>>17234746
I think it fails for that reason but my diagnosis is different insofar as I think that; though the government might give up trying to control people, the people actually don't appreciate this. People are evil to the core and because of this self-knowing procured for humanity by Eve's transgression, they are not happy unless their neighbour is weighted down with as many shackles as there are laws. Few people actually desire to love their neighbour as themselves. Many people will seek God all the day long, but if the Lord asked them to free their neighbour, they would rather be thrown into the sea like Jonah.

[Anonymous No.17234935]

The specters of Communism and Fascism will haunt Europe for as long as Liberalism persists.
Can't wait for everything to explode, we can finally gas the kikes and send all the rich fucks to gulags.

>This post was made by Nazbol gang

[Anonymous No.17235271]

>>17232187
kind of retard desu at least in feudalism you could kill the king to get a new one if anything we will carry on the democracy fraud until the very end

[Anonymous No.17235361]

>>17234921
>though the government might give up trying to control people, the people actually don't appreciate this
You're saying that as if anything beyond a liberal form of Government is a negative control effort, and that it ought to be appreciated. So I am pretty confused about your point, because I would not say that this high level of individual licensure is a good thing. Also people are fallen, but they absolutely can love their neighbors, and it seems like a pretty common thing in history to have small tight knit and happy communities. They / we still have sufficient grace from God to love.