Plato | Benefactors of One Another

You have again forgotten, my friend, I said, the intention of the legislator, who did not aim at making any one class in the State happy above the rest; the happiness was to be in the whole State, and he held the citizens together by persuasion and necessity, making them benefactors of the State, and therefore benefactors of one another; to this end he created them, not to please themselves, but to be his instruments in binding up the State.

— Plato, The Republic, Book VII

Newt Gingrich's Confession | A Rewrite by Lawrence O'Donnell

This, I think, is the kind of thing the young man in the post called Unlinked is reacting to...

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Unlinked | Will American Millennials Reboot Marriage and Parenting?

This week, the Pew Research Center reported on the attitudes of 18-29 year-old Americans toward parenting and marriage. In a nutshell, the study found that being good parents is more important to a majority of these Americans than having a successful marriage. You can read the report for yourself.

Not in the report is what I thought I caught … whispered between the lines … floating on the wind... 

I wrote it down as I heard it, but maybe it was only in my mind….

"Do as You Would Be Done By" | One More from Professor Lewis

I have said that we should never get a Christian society unless most of us became Christian individuals. That does not mean, of course, that we can put off doing anything about society until some imaginary date in the far future. It means that we must begin both jobs at once—(1) the job of seeing how ‘Do as you would be done by’ can be applied in detail to modern society, and (2) the job of becoming the sort of people who really would apply it if we saw how.

— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001 edition, p. 88

C.S. Lewis | ...the same old game under the new system

What is the good of drawing up, on paper, rules for social behaviour, if we know that, in fact, our greed, cowardice, ill temper, and self-conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them? I do not mean for a moment that we ought not to think, and think hard, about improvements in our social and economic system. What I do mean is that all that thinking will be mere moonshine unless we realise that nothing but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly. It is easy enough to remove the particular kinds of graft or bullying that go on under the present system: but as long as men are twisters or bullies they will find some new way of carrying on the old game under the new system. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco, 2001 edition, p. 73

This is not the least of our problems just now ... substituting — perhaps mistaking — agreement or compliance for goodness; and excusing bad behavior ... illegal, immoral, cruel, dehumanizing behavior ... because the perpetrators are on the side we call good. As the saying goes: God is not mocked; we reap what we sow.

So … sow fair and equitable dealing, maybe?

To that, add this: Of citizens surveyed by Pew in 25 nations, more people in the U.S. — more than half — see their fellow citizens as morally bad. 

It's one thing to look at our neighbors and see badness; it's another, far worse thing to believe they are irredeemably bad.

Getting over *that* is gonna take some work.

source

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-country-survey-americans-especially-likely-to-view-fellow-citizens-as-morally-bad/

Follow the Money: Jon Stewart on Teachers + Wall Street

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