The best solution to the globalist âvillageâ is the revitalization of the real village. We need reinvigorated local communities with thriving local economies comprised of multifarious small to medium-sized businesses. We also need revitalized and reinvigorated local government with real power, which means wresting power away from Washington DC and reinvesting it closer to the people whom government is meant to serve.
Itâs more than twenty years since Hillary Clinton told us that it takes a village to raise a child, and more than ten years since Rick Santorum responded with his riposte that it takes a family. These two perspectives would appear to be diametrical opposites and yet, in point of fact, and as we shall see, it takes both a village and a family to raise a child.
The real point of contention is that Hillary Clinton doesnât really believe that it takes a village to raise a child, in spite of her polemic, because she doesnât really believe in villages. Her use of the word is a mere euphemism for Big Government solutions to political problems. She doesnât trust villages because she doesnât trust the people who live in them. The village mentality, like the small-town mentality, is not open to radical new approaches to traditional human problems. The village is not âprogressiveâ enough. What Mrs. Clinton really believes is that it takes a huge city and a burgeoning Federal Government to raise a child. And by raising a child, she means teaching the child to despise the village, with its local roots and traditional morality, and to embrace the utopian and oxymoronic âglobal villageâ in which the child ceases to be part of a genuine local community and becomes, instead, a âcitizen of the world,â a mere microcosmic minion among the multiple millions who inhabit the one globalist âvillage.â
The best solution to the globalist âvillageâ is the revitalization of the real village. We need reinvigorated local communities with thriving local economies comprised of multifarious small to medium-sized businesses. We also need revitalized and reinvigorated local government with real power, which means wresting power away from Washington DC and reinvesting it closer to the people whom government is meant to serve.
But what about the child? Does it take a family or a village to raise a child?
There can be no doubt that the role of the family is sacrosanct, no doubt about it, but the family needs help, and the child needs friends other than family members. And this is where the village comes in. The village should have a school, or a choice of schools, and the family should have the choice of sending the child to school, or of choosing not to do so. Should the family choose to homeschool, it is often helpful for several families to get together once or twice a week in homeschool co-ops, enabling the children to make friends and enabling parents to pool their skills and resources for the common good. Yes indeed, it does take a village as well as a family to raise a child, but it has to be a real village and not a fake village; it cannot be the urban wolf in rural clothing which Mrs. Clinton offers as a euphemistic and oxymoronic alternative to the family.
There is, however, one other crucial member of every village and every community whose very presence or absence is indicative of the communityâs health or sickness, and that is the village idiot.
Every village needs its own idiot. And, thanks be to God, since every village needs one, every village throughout the whole of human history has always been blessed to have one. And here the word is being used in its literal and traditional sense, as referring to âa person so deficient in mind as to be permanently incapable of rational conduct.â It is, therefore, not being used in the euphemistic sense as a catch-all word for those who have succumbed to stupid ideas. Mrs. Clinton might be considered an idiot in this latter euphemistic sense but she is not a real idiot in the sense that the village idiot is a real idiot. She is not âdeficient in mindâ but defective in reasoning, the latter of which is a consequence of bad philosophy. A real village idiot, on the other hand, is mentally disabled and is, therefore, unable to grasp or grapple with any philosophy, good or bad. He is innocent of the criminal negligence of the mind to which Mrs. Clinton has succumbed for the simple reason that he is innocent in the primal sense in which he is incapable of being guilty. He is not culpable for his idiocy and, in turn, his idiocy makes him incapable of culpability. He is truly innocent which is why he is sometimes seen as a holy innocent, or a holy fool. He is not the same as the holy fool who acts foolish in the eyes of the world in order to teach the worldly wise other-worldly wisdom; he is not, therefore, like certain Old Testament prophets or Christian saints, or literary âholy fools,â such as Poor Tom in Shakespeareâs King Lear, Prince Myskin in Dostoyevskyâs The Idiot, Innocent Smith in Chestertonâs Manalive, or the eponymous hero in Myles Connollyâs novel, Mr. Blue. He is not acting the idiot, he is the idiot.
Although village idiots come in many shapes and sizes, the most recognizable is the one whom modern science has labeled as having Down syndrome. It takes a village, as well as a family, to look after such people.
How the village looks after its idiots says a great deal about the state of the village. In healthy communities the whole village helps the one who is mentally handicapped, knowing that he needs the charity of those around him; and letâs remember that charity is the anglicized form of the Latin, caritas, which is divine love, the love that God lavishes on all of us. If caritas reigns in the hearts and in the actions of the villagers, especially in the way that they treat the weakest and most helpless members of the community, the village will prosper; if caritas is absent, the weakest will be neglected or even destroyed so that the strong can be liberated from their responsibility to the weak and vulnerable. In the latter case, the village soon becomes a place where the strongest tyrannize the weak.
The place of the village idiot as the touchstone or litmus test for the judging of the health of society is central to the plot of two wonderful works of literature. In Flannery OâConnorâs novel, The Violent Bear It Away, the attitude of the âhealthyâ characters to the mentally disabled child serves as the very means by which we judge them. Insofar as we see the child as the innocent victim of the sins of others we see him as symbolic of the scourged and suffering Christ. In Arthur Powersâ novella, The Book of Jotham, we see the life of Christ through the eyes of a mentally disabled disciple, judging the goodness of the other disciples by the manner in which they see or fail to see the goodness of the idiot in their midst.
Moving beyond the truth of fiction to the ugly world of fact, the historian Mark Deavin has uncovered evidence of the Nazi governmentâs extermination of children with Down syndrome in the 1930s. In our own day, and in the same demonic spirit as that which animated the Nazis, countries such as Iceland boast of their own Final Solution to the idiot problem. In that frozen land, in which hearts are turned to ice by the sin of pride, every child with Down syndrome is systematically exterminated in the womb, butchered as soon as genetic testing reveals the extra chromosome. And lest we think such horrific genocide is restricted to Norse barbarians in the Nazi German past or the neo-Nazi Icelandic present, we should realize that politicians, such as Mrs. Clinton, believe that a mother has the right to choose to kill her own idiot children, should she wish, as she has the right to kill any of her other children, idiot or otherwise. Itâs not a question of whether it takes a family or a village to raise a child, itâs whether a mother has the right to raze them.
It has been said that most of us are here to learn but that children with Down syndrome are here to teach. Those with mental disabilities teach us the most valuable lessons about the real heart of love, which is that we must sacrifice ourselves for others and not sacrifice others for ourselves.
It takes a village idiot to teach such lessons. Without such teachers, we become tyrants.
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Internal dialogue - continued;
Yes, Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher of âder Ubermensch,â the Superman, and the famous quote, âGod is dead,â is not very smart. Of course, thatâs probably because heâs been dead since 1900. It is a little difficult to think once you are no longer alive and your brain has turned to stinky muck in your coffin under the ground. And you cannot hope to defend your recorded intelligence in the written works you have left behind if you are totally dead and unaware of how people may be misinterpreting your ideas.
This is old crazy Fred with his pet hairy caterpillar which he always kept right under his nose his whole adult life.
Crazy Fred was born in 1844. He was multi-talented, being a philosopher, poet, musical composer, and a writer of fiction. He was something of a genius for a while. At the age of 24 he became the youngest person ever to hold the prestigious Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, His radical philosophy created a critique of truth that leaned in favor of perspectivism. And as he continued down paths of making ironic aphorisms and exercising his wits to wander into thinking that life is meaningless and the roots of nihilism, he more or less stumbled into the view of his philosophy that there was no hope for the future but the improvement of the self.
I think it could be argued that Crazy Fred did indeed become a monster with the abyss staring back at him. At the age of 44 he had a complete mental breakdown. After that, for the remaining 11 years of his life, he had to be cared for by his mother⌠until she died in 1897, and then by his sister Elizabeth until he died in 1900. If street stories are to be believed, he escaped from his home, found a horse being beaten by its owner, stepped in to save the horse from the beating, then turned to the horse, hugged its neck, and died.
This drawing by Hans Olde shows Crazy Fred during his insane years. It was used as a textbook illustration for dementia.
His writings were inherited by his sister Elizabeth. And she was an ultra-nationalist. Under her management, his writings were edited to fit her agenda for a new Germany, and so his ideas were credited with founding the Nazi movement and the quest for Aryan superiority⌠eugenics and genocide were to follow.
Ironically, Crazy Fred was radically opposed to anti-Semitism and most of the ideas that Hitler and the Nazis would give him credit for.
Donât get me wrong. There are a lot of good things in Crazy Fredâs philosophical teachings that make him worth reading and studying. He identified two distinct forms of thought that operate in culture. He called them Apollonian and Dionysian styles of thinking. Apollonian is associated with the sun god Apollo, rationalism, logic, order, and clarity. Dionysian is associated with the god of wine and sensuality, Dionysius, emotionality, chaos, intuition, and obscurity. These cultural definitions are very useful for understanding human behavior.
But Crazy Fred is controversial to this day. I am not the only one that thinks heâs a coocoo bird and wrong about a lot of things. And, yet, his work led to very good things as well as the questionable. Much of the philosophy of the 1960âs owes its progress to him, from the Apollonian Bertrand Russel to the Dionysian Albert Camus.
Nietzsche said, âWhat doesnât kill us, makes us stronger.â
Clearly, I believe I myself am proof that Crazy Fred was wrong about that one. After six incurable diseases, surviving skin cancer, and making it most of the way through the Covid Pandemic alive, an awful lot of things didnât kill me so far. By rights, if what Fred said is true, then I should be stronger than Superman. X-ray vision and the power of flight too. You can tell by the picture that if I am like Superman, then I have seen entirely too much Kryptonite up close.â
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