The Drummond Diaries

The Drummond Diaries 10/9/72 - On Back to Nature & Aggression: It wasn't civilization and free market business that caused man to be aggressive; these things were caused BY man's aggression. There is an inverted reasoning among the various denominations of social utopians that would have us believing in some implausible world of the past where simple nature folk tended cattle and fished in the shade all day. Then along comes an evil called "society" that forces its will on the surprised inhabitants, who then become aggressive and try to shake off this burden. In this scenario, "society" becomes an abstraction, a sloganeer's selling point, and they make that abstraction sound like some Grendel-like horror stalking the fens of the human mind in search of fears to prey on.

But it was man himself who placed that load on his own shoulders in an attempt to control those very aggressions that, unchecked, threatened to destroy him. The story is an old one, and modern society is simply a new backdrop for this latest rerun of a misunderstood idea. That man is still incapable of controlling his primal desires is simply more evidence of the fact that he has not matured, and maybe never will.

Nevertheless, this seedling of an idea persists, almost like a permanently imbedded collective memory. The "Garden of Eden" story. Avalon. Isle of the Blessed. The catalog of places that never were seems endless.

The Drummond Diaries, Sept '72: Right vs. Wrong - In a society that has lost its values, "wrong" is no longer a concept but simply an expedient. By inference, "right" also has no place on any sort of value scale and cannot oppose "wrong" on any moral or ethical grounds; it is either no longer recognized, or is measured against some other standard. If it is no longer recognized, then to speak of "doing what's right," even if intended to prevent furthering a perceived wrong, is simply a functional myth, or maybe a functional expedient. And the problem with expedients is that they are not immovable baselines; they are conditioned by circumstance and politics. Nazi Germany was proof enough of that. 

So where does that leave a society that has lost its values? In a valueless society, is an act simply an act, devoid of meaning, like a stone in the woods falling on a colony of ants and killing them? Is economic expediency the only metric left? Or how about utilitarianism? "What is useful is right." Does anyone but me see the lightless tunnel at the end of that policy?

Therein lies the danger for a society that no longer has any values, or that doesn't recognize itself any more.