Reply #19: * embodies the basic sickness of modern society.

[Arianrhod]

Freud warned us in his final book, Civilization and Its Discontents, that human beings are basically raw animals seeking desperately to grasp onto survival, which desperation produces incredibly neurotic and even psychotic behavior--behavior that we hide behind a thin facade of "sophistication" and "intelligence", eating meat with knives and forks and tablecloths and violin music rather than pouncing on defenseless animals with bare nails and teeth, engaging in our "hunting and gathering" in the supermarket rather than in the jungle, subject urges which we subsequently view with mild nausea. He despaired of mankind's future--which he envisioned as a bleak, self-absorbed preoccupation with the basic needs of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. "We are 'lived'", he said, "by unknown and uncontrollable forces." Although I myself lean towards Jungianism rather than Freudianism, I can't help but acknowledge that, in this observation, he is painfully correct.

How can 51% of the populace embrace a coke-addled, drunken, cowardly, malevolent bully the way they do *, and remain sane, rational human beings? My own view is that they are not sane, they are not rational, and they are not human beings. The very fact that * has to tack the word "compassionate" onto his conservatism is an indictment against the country; the conservatives are anything but compassionate, and their use of the term is disingenuous at best, as well as a tacit acknowledgement thereof. They revel in their inhumanity, their immorality, even as they project themselves as the arbiters of all that is good.

Such is the Puritanism our country is founded upon.

We need to repent.