| | Barry, You sound like a twenty-first c. version of Herbert Spencer. I think that your idea is correct fundamentally. The prospects of making it happen seem daunting. I wrote a paper for an English course on Matthew Arnold's "Culture and Anarchy" presenting his critique of "Philistinism" (an epithet for XIXth c. middle class). My professor was a Marxist who loathed Herbert Spencer's libertarianism. I got an A on my paper. His comments were that he had never seen anyone critique the whole concept of public education using Herbert Spencer (Social Statics) versus Matthew Arnold (the grandfather of modern public education).
In the USA Marxists were able to gain ascendancy via public education (thank you to FDR and the New Deal) They secured tenure for their colleagues and showed Americans at large that they were "good people" with American interests at heart. All of this happening while Rand was quibbling with Rothbard over anarchy and performing ex-communications. Alan Greenspan was still trying to figure out if existence exists, and the Republicans were the only ones left to confront the statist advances.
Yes, today "Johnny" can't read or write but he knows the world needs love and self-sacrifice. He "feels" an overwhelming sense to get his "feelings" down on paper, but he can't think. When he becomes a university professor he writes papers and books that include sentences like this one about Shakespeare: "...Of course Jacobean tragedy does effect some kind of closure, but it is usually a perfunctory rather than a profound reassertion of order [providential and political]. We may feel that such closure was a kind of condition for subversive thought to be forgrounded at all. But we should recognize too that such a condition cannot control what it permits: closure could never retrospectively guarantee ideological erasure of what, for a while, existed prior to and so independently of it." Don't worry that I am taking it out of context, it didn't make sense there either:)
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