Maggie's Farm

But folks they only agreed to let him have ALL the power for 18 months. Heck it took me that long to get enough credits in college to get out of the first semester.

He's just goining to speed up a few necessary changes and then he'll, like Cincinnatus of Rome, return to his farm and grow coffee beans with Juan Valdez.

Cincinnatus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnatus

A great addition to Hayek's Road to Surfdom is a book by Allan Bloom in 1988..."The closing of the American Mind" Some thoughts in review.

"Nearly all of us Americans say that we believe in liberty and equality. But how many of us would be able to defend these beliefs against an attack by a really intelligent anti-egalitarian such as Nietzsche? Our regime was founded on the idea that reason, not religion or brute force, should rule. It was not always obvious that such a regime was either good or possible, and arguments had to be made to convince people to support its creation. The Enlightenment philosophers provided those arguments. As Bloom notes, the Enlightenment brought the philosopher (i.e., reason) and the regime into harmony as they never had been before. (Socrates, the archetypical philosopher, had of course been executed for impiety.) Rousseau, while agreeing with the the fundamental Enlightenment idea of equality, argued forcefully that reason alone could not found and sustain a society, and in the process invented the modern idea of the bourgeois, the product of the reason-based society, hatred of which was an important element of both Marxism and fascism. But it was Nietzsche who provided the really devastating attack, arguing that listening to our heads rather than our hearts had killed what was really worthwhile in us, that we need to stop reasoning and start coming up with new "values."
The middle chapters of the book are the best overview of political philosophy that I have come across. Bloom understands Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Nietzsche as I believe they would have wanted to be understood. Especially Nietzsche, whose ideas are described with the utmost respect, even though it is implicit that if we are to keep our regime we ultimately must reject those ideas. The sections on "Values" and "Culture," which describe how some German ideas with a great deal of nobility in them mutated when they got to America, are riveting.

Bloom can see that our regime, even as it prospers economically, is in crisis. We Americans mouth the words of Jefferson, but really believe Nietzsche. We do not believe in the primacy of reason. Equality and liberty are nothing more than prejudices for most of us. They are merely "values," and if pressed, most of us would not be able to explain why we like those values better than other ones. Regimes decay for a variety of reasons, one of which is internal contradiction, as in the fall of the Soviet Union. The American regime, with its emphasis on human rights, liberty and equality, is based on the primacy of reason. If most Americans do not now believe in the primacy of reason, then our regime has an internal contradiction. I take Bloom to be saying that this contradiction has come about because those in a position to educate the rest of us have failed to do so. That is where the opening and closing sections on young people and university education come in. Those sections are interesting (and obviously near and dear to Bloom's heart) even if not as informative as the middle chapters, and, even if the section on music is flawed as some other readers have pointed out, they provide concrete examples and describe consequences of the intellectual crisis."

I do apologize for prattling on about the Road to Surfdom.
I should have (which I am very bad at) read the material closer.

Now about this road to Sefdom in Venezuela...is that near Maracaibo or closer to Puerto La Cruz?

BD...Amazon.com just look at the reviews, you'll recognise it..I should have given full attribution to the reviewer who did a bang up job.

It is wonderful that we are discussing books with true value.
Hayek's, The Road to Surfdom was first published by the Chicago Press, September 18, 1944...1944..coming to it's 63rd anniversary.
Allan Bloom's work, The Closing of the American Mind was published in 1988..19 years ago..
Then we take in Hobbes,Locke, et. al and we're gett'n some place.
But the point I want to make is how accurate I think Bloom was back in '88 and how little has changed in the education field to remedy the shortfalls in critical thinking skills.
Oh well, I know when I studied the Enlightenment, after covering ancient and medeival political theory I marvelled at how the minds of men over time came to a wonderous crescendo right when the New World needed that thinking.
I am still in awe and pray that many many others rediscover the Enlightenment and what it meant to mankind.