https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/is-this-world-war-iii-5507449Is This World War III?
by Jeffrey A. Tucker
10/10/23
Excerpts:...All of this unleashed the proverbial Pandora’s box of evil, from widespread moral disorientation to substance abuse to community and familial breakup to economic devastation to educational loss—none of which any person in charge takes responsibility for. Instead, the lies continue and escalate too, almost as if truth is no longer a thing that anyone in power values. And this attitude has transferred down the levels of the social order. People today are headed toward a nihilistic pit of thinking that none of the old wisdom matters. Our history is corrupt, they say, so we might as well tear up the whole of what we were and experiment with something completely new.
The trouble is that the news is about nothing but division, hate, violence, and disregard for the basic dignities and rights for which our ancestors fought many generations to achieve. Speaking for myself, I never previously realized just how fragile liberty all was (a “delicate fruit” said Lord Acton). I had assumed that our civic protocols and habits of trust would always be with us, because, after all, humanity has a remarkable capacity for learning from our successes and failures and gradually improving the world. That presumption turns out to be my single worst intellectual error.
Looking back now, we are all seeking to find historical analogies for our times. We are inexorably drawn back to the two previous world wars. The first great war hit seemingly out of nowhere, a product of bureaucratic bungling and elite arrogance. It left us with nothing but wreckage and a new awareness of the human capacity for evil. But history was not done with us yet.
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At the end of the Cold War, we were all perhaps tempted by the idea that we are done with all that. We were destined for decades if not centuries of peace and prosperity. But perhaps we forgot that those results do not happen automatically. They are a consequence of a people who believe in something, some truths we have elevated above all others.
Among those truths is the belief that human dignity is a central principle, human beings have rights, peace is better than violence, diplomacy is better than war, voluntarism is always better than force, and no ideological dreams should ever be permitted to override the aspirations of a common person to live a better life.
Transgressing on those principles introduces great peril to the orderly and prosperous world we had come to take for granted. We find ourselves trying to find our way back to the hopes we lost. The hell we are experiencing gradually and then all at once is born of minds and hearts gone very wrong.
So too the solution is in the human mind and human heart.
As we witness a world in decline on all fronts, looking for hope wherever we can find it, let us have renewed appreciation for the fragility of the good life and all those who came before to grant that as our inheritance. We give them the highest honor to think and act as they did to build better lives and a better world. We should all work to turn back the tide of violence and hate before it is too late for this generation.
More at URL above...Another superb essay by Jeffrey Tucker, who has been batting close to 400 lately at the Brownstone Institute. His pieces appear regularly in the opinion section of The Epoch Times...
