“He who is not a républicain at twenty compels one to doubt the generosity of his heart; but he who, after thirty, persists, compels one to doubt the soundness of his mind.”
I really dislike this quote. It always comes across like it's designed to ease greedy people of their guilt for moving to the right as they earn more money. To me, being sound of mind is wanting everyone to have what you have, or at least an equal shot of getting there from wherever they had the roll of the dice of being born.
Well sure, it’s “sound of mind” to you because that’s your political view.
To people on the right it’s just completely naive. The first half is mathematically impossible and the second half is so wishy washy that it leaves room for everyone to claim they were born further back in one aspect or another on the proverbial board.
The quote is not nice and I don't blame anyone for taking issue with it.
However I don't see people feeling any guilt as they move right. Nor do I see a need for greed to corelate with the right leaning politics. The same teachings that lead me to lean right also lead me to donate more than 10% of my income. I think all people that can should donate to charity but I don't think anyone should be forced to. I take issue with the idea that forcing others to give money is generosity.
I think that’s possibly a fundamental misunderstanding of left ideas.
The point is not to force generosity on others. The point is to fight back against unjustified value extraction by the powerful and to democratize the workplace.
Socialists see charity as trying to patch over symptoms of an inherently deeper problem. It’s not a philanthropic movement. It’s a worker movement.
To interpret the quote charitably, I think it's more that age can come with an appreciation with the fragility of society, the recognition that it's a miracle it works at all, and a humility about how much and how rapidly a system can be changed without being destroyed.
> humility about how much and how rapidly a system can be changed without being destroyed
I guess everyone familiar with US history should find the quote to be utter bullshit, then.
The American Revolution, Civil War, Emancipation Proclamation, 19th Amendment, Great Depression, WWII, and Civil Rights Act were all major upheavals in society that brought on rapid change.
A lot of people died prematurely, but a lot of lives were later extended or saved to balance that out somewhat, and the system surely didn't collapse.
The system did collapse, that's why so many people died prematurely and why the system that came after was radically different than what came before. Keeping the same name just creates an illusion of continuity.
Well, there are plenty of examples outside of the US's fairly young history where revolution has not always gone so well. Plus, I think one could argue that the US is still to prove that it can survive the aftermath of the Civil War. Sometimes collapse takes a while.
Well, since the quote comes from a Frenchman in 1875 I don't think we should read present day US politics into it. But I'm not sure what a républicain does believe.
Reminds me of a great 30 rock joke, being fiscally liberal and socially conservative.
Politics is really just dividing up the shared resources, which is the root of that joke. Who cares about politics and doesn’t care about the resources part?
I guess after 30 people forget how to share per that quote. Never happened to me though. Personally I don’t even think it’s accurate, in my life I’ve never seen people swing from generous to… let’s just say “not”
The people who were always like that a little got more so.
> Reminds me of a great 30 rock joke, being fiscally liberal and socially conservative.
You can tell online people isn't representative because they think it's a joke when this is actually pretty common among average people. (Who aren't on a single position on the political compass but are instead "cross-pressured".)
Is it a thing anywhere? Who chooses not to care about the resources, the things you're there to divvy up.
Not caring at all is certainly a choice I can see individuals making, but someone who is politically engaged and doesn't care about the resources, I can't even fathom it.
God, this is such condescending nonsense. The older I get, the more left I lean, because the more of the world you see the more you see what chaos our current ideology has wreaked upon it. The only people I see going the way this quote does are unthinking idiots who were fashionably "liberal" in their youth without understanding any political theory, and are now fashionably "conservative" with even lesser understanding.
Yeah, it starts condescending and gets worse once you understand the argument: "as an elite, you will learn in your 20s how the policies and goals of conservatism are self-serving, and you will therefore adopt them."
In my 20s I bought a house, started filling a brokerage account, started managing people -- so I certainly started to feel those incentives, but I am both principled enough to not act entirely out of self interest and wise enough to realize that I would have to be considerably wealthier before the capital-side incentives actually overtook the labor-side incentives in their importance to my bottom line.
Unfortunately, even these meager principles and this sliver of wisdom are rare enough that "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" abound.
Hard same. In some sense I don't think my values have changed much. I've always been dispositionally moderate and compassionate. Indeed, in a lot of ways I'm dispositionally conservative; for example, I'm a proud member of the Boring Technology Club. [1] (As the Christians say, "Test everything; hold fast to what is good.") But the older I get, the more my compassion and my curiosity drive me to see through the bullshit and to question the people who talk about being conservative but act to conserve the worst of our history, not the best of it. So although I remain a dedicated incrementalist, many would see me as increasingly radical.
I personally find it more and more difficult to subscribe to any ideology.
I think societies, states and economies are emergent properties of people living together. But the more I know people, the less I believe overarching systems, models and grand narratives.
They are all wrong. Not only in respect of what should be. We can’t even agree on what is or has been.
I'm not sure if I can escape from your accusations of idiocy or of fashion-following, but I am someone who's moved further right as I've gotten older.
When I was younger I was more confident that the world and institutions could easily be remade or replaced just by reasoning about them intelligently, and I was also more confident that everyone's interests and morality roughly converged, so not very much had to be done to allow us to get along and live together in harmony. (Nonetheless, I think it's likely that you'd have considered my adolescent beliefs to already be right-wing and to be lacking a consciousness of political theory.) Now I'm more apt to think there are things that we can't redesign, things we depend on that evolved with no one designing them, and lots of immutable constraints from human nature. Also that a great deal of the harmony we experience is fragile, and we might be much worse off without it.
(For what it's worth, I would also try to avoid making generalizations about people that imply what they're supposed to believe based on their age -- or making fun of people on the basis that their beliefs are supposedly out of step with their age.)
You have to admit that the State causes many of those problems. Police brutality would not be a problem if there were no police, for instance.
One response is to say we need to empower the State with more authority to regulate those problems, with the hope that it doesn't just cause even more problems.
Another response is to say we need less State authority, and find other ways of dealing with certain problems typically given to the State. Not every problem is a nail to hammer with the State.
