Email
Print
SyndicateSaul, Barack, and Me, Part VI
By Robert Ringer - Thursday, January 14, 2010
By Robert Ringer
In Part III of this article, I said that, unlike BHO, Saul Alinsky had a soul, as evidenced by his saying, “I salute the present generation. Hang onto one of your most precious parts of youth, laughter. Don’t lose it as many of you seem to have done. You need it. Together we may find some of what we’re looking for — laughter, beauty, love, and the chance to create.”
What I meant by that statement was that Alinsky had feelings. Nonetheless, as I have previously stated, he was a complex man who was full of contradictions. Anyone who spends his life in a meaningless pursuit such as “community organizing” has to be plagued by contradictions, because without them, he would be forced to come face to face with the reality that his life has no worthwhile purpose.
So, while there was a friendly, deep-feeling, humorous side to Alinsky, he was also a man of steeped in self-absorption, narcissism, and amorality. Of course, he was incapable of seeing the truth about his life, because he had invested far too much ego in his childish pursuit to take from “the rich” and give to “the poor.”
Which brings me to Saul Alinsky’s remarkable explanation of “the low road to morality”:
The fact is that it is not man’s “better nature” but his self-interest that demands that he be his brother’s keeper. We now live in a world where no man can have a loaf of bread while his neighbor has none. If he does not share his bread, he dare not sleep, for his neighbor will kill him. To eat and sleep in safety man must do the right thing, if for seemingly the wrong reasons, and be in practice his brother’s keeper.
I believe that man is about to learn that the most practical life is the moral life and that the moral life is the only road to survival. He is beginning to learn that he will either share part of his material wealth or lose it all; that he will respect and learn to live with other political ideologies if he wants civilization to go on. This is the kind of argument that man’s actual experience equips him to understand and accept. This is the low road to morality. There is no other.
As I said, Alinsky was full of contradictions. On the one hand, he warned of the dangers of dogma, yet flatly stated that not only was his view of morality correct, but that the only road to morality was to recognize that you had to share your wealth or risk having it taken from you by force — or even be killed!
His words remind me of something the late and liberal Bennett Cerf, one-time president of Random House Inc., is purported to have said, as told by Nathaniel Branden in his book Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand: “You have to throw welfare programs at people — like throwing meat to a pack of wolves — even if the programs don’t accomplish their alleged purpose and even if they’re morally wrong.”
When Branden asked Cerf why, he purportedly whispered, “Because otherwise they’ll kill you. The masses. They hate intelligence. They’re envious of ability. They resent wealth. You’ve got to throw them something, so they’ll let us live.”
There’s no question in my mind that both Alinsky and Cerf were right in their assessments of why you have no choice but to “share” some of your possessions. But to refer to it as the “low road to morality” is preposterous. It is, in fact, a no-road to morality. Giving up any part of one’s wealth out of fear is immoral.
When a thief has a gun pointed at your head, you give him your wallet out of fear. This is not a low road to morality for you. The only morality involved is the immorality of the thief. Brilliant, contradictory, dogmatic, convoluted — that was the Saul Alinsky who made such a dramatic impact on millions of people, and is better known today than he was at the peak of his career.
The young and angry BHO bought the convoluted view that giving out of fear was the only way to arrive at a “moral” outcome, and, in fact, was so enamored of it that he taught Alinsky’s philosophy and methods for twelve years at the University of Chicago Law School. Coupled with his community organizing experience and close ties to SEIU (Andy Stern: “Workers of the world, unite!”) and a host of left-wing radicals, BHO came to the White House well prepared to “fundamentally transform America.”
It is hardly a coincidence that the vast majority of his appointees and associates are socialists — even communists — and that he prefers Christmas ornaments adorned with the smiling face of mass murderer Mao Zedong to that of dear old Santa.
In Part VII: Saul Alinsky’s view of “means and end.”
_______________________________________
Liberty Education Interview Series
Please encourage your family, friends, and coworkers to listen to the Liberty Education Interview Series. Liberty needs all the support it can get right now.
_______________________________________
To comment on “Saul, Barack, and Me, Part VI”, please login below:
You have permission to reprint this article so long as you place the following wording at the end of the article:
Copyright © 2012 Robert Ringer
ROBERT RINGER is a New York Times #1 bestselling author and host of the highly acclaimed Liberty Education Interview Series, which features interviews with top political, economic, and social leaders. He has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, The Lars Larson Show, ABC Nightline, and The Charlie Rose Show, and has been the subject of feature articles in such major publications as Time, People, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Barron's, and The New York Times.
To sign up for his one-of-a-kind, pro-liberty e-letter, A Voice of Sanity, Click Here.
Comment Policy: We encourage an open discussion with a wide range of viewpoints. Make your case passionately, but please keep your comments civil and to the point (150 words or less). Obscene, profane, abusive, or off-topic comments will be deleted. Repeat offenders will be blocked.
If your comment does not appear, it is likely because it violates the above policy or contains links or language typical of spam. We reserve the right to remove comments at our discretion. Thanks for your participation.
4 Responses to “Saul, Barack, and Me, Part VI”
Leave a Reply
1500 characters maximum.
How can I locate parts I II & III of this article?
It seems to me that Saul Alinsky resembles the Ellsworth Toohey character from Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”. Toohey was an intellectual giant who used his skills to intimidate followers (including his own niece)that the only moral life was to sacrifice yourself to the collective. The only people he couldn’t control were people of integrity like Howard Roarke whom he tried to destroy. By the end of the novel Toohey finally admits his motivation all along was to consolidate power over people of means.
It’s amazing how Rand was able to recognize and illustrate so clearly people of Alinsky’s mindset so many decades ago. Alinsky was not the first “Ellsworth Toohey” to be inflicted upon society, and he certainly won’t be the last
As the present government can no longer hide or obfuscate the true and sobering statistics of our national rapid plunge into undeniable collapse, the American people starting to wake up and get it. They know they’ve been played and lied to with more empty promises based on “feel good” policy and philosophy, that simply does not work in the real world.
Watch for more outrageous and wilder desperate moves from the current administration and their political cohorts, as they feel their support and their power slipping away as the truth breaks into the fantasy and exposes to the light, the bleak outlook should the nation remain on this current suicidal course.
There is a survival instinct in every individual and in every society. The crux of the matter is whether that survival instinct will kick in amongst the majority of Americans before this threat to our very survival can consolidate power.
It’s time to do penance by rejecting the political “business as usual” outlook, and thus return the nation to the values that produced stability and prosperity.
My working definition of “no soul” is different in this current discussion:
What I mean by “soulless” is lacking in character, heartless, no human core, diven by ambition, desirous of power, empty of morality, wanting to lord over people, motivated by an evil philosophy(such as community organizing), a lover of corruption rather than a lover of God and/or people, habitual lier, hypocrite, ego without virtue.
In short, the perfect example of a very large group of modern day soulless people—living dead— are the oligarchists who are running America into the ground for their own personal gain. The banksters,
brokesters, community mobsters, the bureaucratic racketeers, the syndicated federal government, and on and on the list goes of people who have lost or are losing their souls.
The processing of our children’s minds in the highly centralized public school system( aka The Public Brainwashing Asylums For The Young) is the starting point for ripping the souls right out of our
children and turning them into soulless hybrids of Alinsky. The finished products are not real people at all, but they are little soulless community organizers and/or enviro-organizers. The little
neo-social/fascists grow up to love, laugh, sing, and express “FEELINGS” of joy as they shred to pieces what’s left of the Bill Of Rights. These little children are now Alinsky’s children. And boy
would he be proud of his brainwashed, soulless army.
This growing army—Alinsky’s army— is massing and organizing itself for the final assault. True, it’s not well lead, but neither is its opposition; However, The Alinsky army’s numbers are vast. And soon—in our lifetime— the soulful lovers of God’s inalienable rights will loose those rights as the soulless army coerces them away. The soulful will be body scanned and brain scanned. They will be forced to conform to the soulless, collective will…….
There is one other option that will present itself after lovers of freedom fail to educate and rehab the brainwashed and soulless hoi polloi. What is that option?
After all the muddling through stops, then there is going to be a classic climax of good-vs-evil. Some people will choose a side and fight, and some will run away and just try and survive
The outcome of the this classic fight will depend on leadership, strategy, and valor.
“In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.”
Let’s hope Mr. Mark Twain is wrong and the timid among us start to grow a spine. Speaking of spineless, did you see the latest Sarah Palin interviews? All those soft-ball questions that Glenn Beck pitched, and Sarah The Spineless Palin could not even come up with even one inspiring thought. What a laugh, I mean really, her and Glenn discussing their “favorite founding father” George Washington. I can see it all now, Sarah The Spineless Palin hailed as the female version of George Washington by the Republicans.
Clearly, Glenn has a soul and he understands how to use the term soulless very well in his discussions. Sarah, on the other hand, reminded me of a deer in the headlights. She may be called a barracuda, but she acts more like a hooked goldfish.