The same old collectivist bromides

“Only a brute, a fool or an evader can agree to exist on such terms or agree to give his fellow men a blank check on his life and his mind, to accept the belief that others have the right to dispose of his person at their whim, that the will of the majority is omnipotent, that the physical force of muscles and numbers is a substitute for justice, reality and truth.”

– Ayn Rand, from her novel Atlas Shrugged.

You have heard it said before, many times, over and over and over again: “It takes a village to raise a child. Educating our children is everyone’s business.”

“You, the public,” the rabid liberals tell us (in their rapacious haste to confiscate our wealth), “must understand your responsibility and your role in our community.” “Share, cooperate, submit,” they demand and declare. “Sacrifice yourself for the public good. Work together in a fine spirit of friendly, harmonious cooperation.
Work for the benefit of our children,” they urge us, relentlessly.

(Always for the benefit of ‘our children’, even if some of us don’t have any children–and always for the sake of others, for the common good, whatever that ‘good’ happens to be, so long as it is anything other than your own personal interests, rights, or ‘selfish desires’).

It is the same old collectivist bromide, in various forms, repeated over and over again for effect: for the advancement of socialism, for the almost complete abdication of individual responsibility, reason, merit, logic, and rights.

Merely consider the logical implications of the trite platitude, “Education is everyone’s responsibility, everyone’s business.” If education is indeed everyone’s responsibility, then no one is responsible; no one can be held totally accountable: we are all at fault. We are all equally to blame.

If public education is a mess, if Marianas High School SAT test scores amount to a farce, the PSS is not to blame. It is, on the contrary, our entire fault, collectively. We are all held responsible. No one is to blame. Indeed, no one can be blamed. After all, we all share this ‘responsibility’–collectively.

Consider again the dire ramifications of that statement, of that slogan: “Education is everyone’s responsibility.” What does it really entail? If the PSS cannot do its job with the funds allotted (looted), what are we to conclude?

Well, if it is, indeed, really our responsibility, then, once again, we are all totally to blame. It’s our fault. Perhaps we are once again being too greedy or too selfish. Perhaps we ought to contribute more of our hard-earned income toward the subsidy of a hopelessly inefficient and allegedly corrupt government bureaucracy–a bottom-less pit, no less.

The net effect of these deceptively innocuous bromides is far more sinister than one might at first grasp. The ultimate result is the subjugation–the immolation–of the individual against the Collectivist State. “The next step,” one PSS official assures us, “is to develop a ‘manifesto’ of the community’s educational needs and goals.”

A community ‘manifesto,’ no less.