Learning from Badu and Hayek

"""""""""At a time when most movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty, those who cherish freedom are likely to expend their energies in opposition. In this they find themselves much of the time on the same side as those who habitually resist change. In matters of current politics today they generally have little choice but to support the conservative parties. But, though the position I have tried to define is also often described as "conservative," it is very different from that to which this name has been traditionally attached. There is danger in the confused condition which brings the defenders of liberty and the true conservatives together in common opposition to developments which threaten their ideals equally. It is therefore important to distinguish clearly the position taken here from that which has long been known - perhaps more appropriately - as conservatism......Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance.""""""""""""""""

-FA Hayek


"""""They who play it safe are quick to assassinate what they do not understand-
They move in packs, ingesting more and more fear with every act of hate on one another they feel more comfortable in groups, less guilt to swallow.
They are us, this is what we have become: afraid to respect the individual. A single personal event or circumstance can move one to change, to evolve and love themselves."""""

-Erykah Badu




yes the word that bleeds out of her head at the end of the video is "group think".

How often do the principles of an old-school "Conservative" such as Hayek exist in such harmony with those of a contemporary "Liberal" such as Badu? More often than what you'd think because both "conservative" and "liberal" are fabricated terms used to divide us against ourselves through the popular vices of lazy intellectual and moral habit. Why these seemingly divergent principles are in such actual harmony is because both are fundamentally American- they both demand that the individual person take account of their humanity as individuals and be bold enough to not be ruled or lead by simple 'group think'.