Re: What is a liberal?

"No society can surely be flourishing and happy..." because no society really ever exists.

When you start treating such concepts as "society", "community", "family" as having having a beating heart, breathing air as a real human being, then you have left this reality and have entered into a fantasy dream world. It is only the individual that has any reality.

"...of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable." This is only the reflection. The one that is seeing the others, only he, can be flourishing and happy... and what is seen is but reflection... it is the result of a choice that had been made long before.

"In other words, when we care about the welfare of others it comes back as a benefit to ourselves. It's a fairly selfish ideal. When we treat others well, we hope to be treated just as well in return."

You are, so to speak, standing on your head by saying this. To live life according to this philosophy is to take the first step in the wrong direction. Only when one truly cares about himself, does it become possible for the sharing of real wealth to occur... Otherwise it is just a business deal, one beggar hoping to get something from some other beggar that they have helped. This is a conditional love, it is pseudo and superficial, not authentic and not rooted within one's inner being, which is the source of real strength and true love. And with this wrong first step, you start traveling down the road that ends to where we are at this present moment. With pretension everywhere. Appearances having precedence over inner sense, common sense at a loss, and insanity found everywhere.

When one is capable to stand on his own feet, to take care of himself... then he becomes capable of influencing others to do the same for themselves. Only when one is able to manage his own life is he capable to help others to manage their lives. Humans tend to learn from example. Teaching them to be dependent on the State will help them to continue remaining weak and not responsible for their own life situations.

Christian ideology is flawed in this regard because it teaches first to love thy neighbor. It skips the first step, which is to love oneself. And when the first step is missed, all other steps will lead you further and further into being lost within the labyrinth.

The founding fathers, if really liberal, needed to look a little deeper inside of themselves to see that they needed to disconnect with the religions that they brought with them from Europe, in order to create something that would be different than the places from where they escaped. They ended up just bringing their diseases with them. And the cancer continues to grow to this day.