“Moral Narcissism and the Least-Great Generation”

“Moral Narcissism and the Least-Great Generation”

I wish I could remember who brought this piece by Roger Simon to my attention, but I can’t.  And, for that, I apologize.

Anyhow, it seems apropos in connection with one of my earlier posts today.

By the way, although I’m of a later generation than the one to which Simon refers, I remember reading the Communist Manifesto myself, along with other Marxist materials, over lunch-breaks while I was working construction during high school summers.  When he describes the frisson of rebelliousness that he felt in reading such things, I know exactly what he means.

I was never interested in becoming a Marxist — I was also reading Ayn Rand at the time — and I certainly wasn’t tempted by the murderous anarcho-dictatorial regime in Beijing, let alone by the equally murderous but dull-gray and sclerotic one-party state in Moscow.  Still, I dreamed then (and I dream now) of a better world than the fallen one in which we live.  And I thought that I could learn something from Marxism.  (In fact, I think I did, though I reject Marxism as a whole as a horrific and brutal failure.)