Kreeft: Hitler, Playboy with clothes on, sex and money

 "Sex is currency..." -Switchfoot

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Peter Kreeft:

...  I have verified over and over again the principle that there is only one thing needed for you to believe any of the 100 most absurd ideas possible for any human being to conceive: You must have a Ph.D.

For instance, take Time magazine—please do.  Henry Thoreau said, “Read not the times, read the eternities.” Two Aprils ago [note: written before economic downturn], their lead article was devoted to the question, “Why is everything getting better?”  Why is life so good in America today?  Why does everyone feel so satisfied and optimistic about the quality of life in the future?  I read the article very carefully and found that not once did they even question their assumption.  They just wondered, “Why?”  And you thought Enlightenment optimist and the dogma of progress [were] dead?

It turned out upon reading the article that every single aspect of life they mentioned, every reason why everything was getting better and better, was economic.  People have more money.  Period.  End of discussion.  Except the poor, of course, who are poorer.  But they don’t count because they don’t write Time.  They don’t even read it.
I suspect that Time is merely Playboy with clothes on.  For one kind of playboy, the world is one great bit whorehouse.  For another, it’s one great big piggy bank.  For both kinds of playboy, things are getting better and better.  Just ask the 75 percent of Americans who love Bill Clinton, the perfect synthesis of the two.
They love him for the same reasons the Germans loved Hitler at first when they elected him: economic efficiency.  Autobahns and Volkswagens.  Jobs and housing.  Hitler wrought the greatest economic miracle of the century in the 30s.  What else matters as long as the emperor gives you bread and circuses?  People are pigs, not saints, after all.  They love slops more than honor.

I think sexual pigginess and economic pigginess are natural twins, for lust and greed are almost interchangeable.  In fact, our society sometimes doesn’t seem to know the difference between sex and money.  It treats sex like money and treats money like sex.  It treats sex like money because it treats it as a medium of exchange, and it treats money like sex because it expects its money to get pregnant and reproduce all the time.  So we need some very elementary sex education.   link,

 See also:

Timelines and Testations: Jesus, Sexonomics and Facebook