By Sibyl West
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN Texas Moderation is good when it comes to most personal behaviors -- eating spending sports sex. Too much of any good thing -- even something as life-giving as sunshine -- can be detrimental. But there can be no moderation in regard to principle.
Since what is good leads to success and what is evil leads to failure in any compromise with evil it is only evil that wins bringing failure a step closer.
Witness the direction of American society in the last 50 to 80 years as the moral guidelines of the 10 Commandments and U.S. Constitution have been marginalized and then rejected.
A moderate is someone whose chief goal is to be included and liked by everyone. Invariably he ends up being respected by no one a reality that he studiously neglects to notice.
A moderate is someone who is so open-minded that his brain has fallen out whose singular distinguishing characteristic is his inability to take a stand whose chief virtue is a complete absence of the instinct of self-preservation.
Moderates do not play to win. They are playing not to lose or else they pretend to be just playing by moving their arms and legs creating a new committee or having another meeting keeping the minutes but losing the hours. (Richard Harkness observation -- A committee is a group of the unwilling chosen from the unfit to do the unnecessary -- comes to mind.)
In other words moderates hold back. Why? Because becoming an individual living out their God-given nature to the fullest is just too damned scary to even attempt.
There is a term in Sanskrit for such as these: praja those who are born. The leader is called Prajapati -- literally 
father but also one who takes care and protects like a father those who are born. (I feel the need to explain this because government has attempted to make fathers obsolete.)
It is an observable fact that most human beings on this planet cannot think but can only feel. They need and even prefer someone else to make decisions for them -- an attitude which has a bonus advantage in that if anything goes wrong they can easily put the blame on someone else.
The impersonal moderates have obliterated that one problem if nothing else. The inherent virtue of a committee is that no one identifiable person is responsible for anything.
On the vanishing American spirit
The strange phenomenon I discovered upon my return to the U.S. is that all Americans are opinionated but seldom as the result of their thinking through problems logically.
Instead many seem to have bought their ideas and conclusions prt--porter ready-made and off the rack of the modern media factory.
Yes regular Americans seem self-confident but theirs is more often than not a conviction based upon hype imagination and lack of confrontation in their peaceful and what many perceive as stupendously boring lives.
People in general crave change and excitement because:
father but also one who takes care and protects like a father those who are born. (I feel the need to explain this because government has attempted to make fathers obsolete.)
It is an observable fact that most human beings on this planet cannot think but can only feel. They need and even prefer someone else to make decisions for them -- an attitude which has a bonus advantage in that if anything goes wrong they can easily put the blame on someone else.
The impersonal moderates have obliterated that one problem if nothing else. The inherent virtue of a committee is that no one identifiable person is responsible for anything.
On the vanishing American spirit
The strange phenomenon I discovered upon my return to the U.S. is that all Americans are opinionated but seldom as the result of their thinking through problems logically.
Instead many seem to have bought their ideas and conclusions prt--porter ready-made and off the rack of the modern media factory.
Yes regular Americans seem self-confident but theirs is more often than not a conviction based upon hype imagination and lack of confrontation in their peaceful and what many perceive as stupendously boring lives.
People in general crave change and excitement because:
- The nature of the uncultivated mind is fickleness & dissatisfaction and
- Excitement has been touted as fashionable.
And the misery that always accompanies excitement is a ready cause for sympathy and attention from others which is always welcome.
Will we let it be said that the only thing Americans are exceptional at anymore is a peculiar species of pathetic self-absorbed whining?
Personal responsibility with all the uncertainty it brings is the inconvenient fact of life for those who have chosen what Samuel Adams called the animating contest of freedom over the tranquility of servitude.
- Freedom to choose
- Freedom to give & withhold consent
- Freedom of voluntary and therefore wholehearted participation
- Freedom to try to fail and to ultimately win to create a new and improved version of something already existing and to claim ownership
- -- all these constitute the brass ring the prize reserved for those whose motto is In God We Trust.
This I perceive in my more than half a century of observation and experience as what constitutes the American spirit.
Sibyl West is the editor in chief of Ramparts360.com who was named 2010 Blogger of the Year by Americans for Prosperity-Texas. She is a perennial student of Vedanta philosophy who lived for 25 years in the Far East.
