Ernst Jünger

The following essay is an anonymous translation of excerpts from Ernst Jünger’s Der Waldgang (1951) from Confluence: An International Forum, vol. 3, no. 2 (1954): 127–42.

1. Fear is one of the most characteristic phenomena of our age. Its appearance is all the more perplexing, because it follows closely upon an era of individual freedom in which even the misery which was still familiar to Dickens had become almost unknown. How did this reversal come about? Were one to choose a turning point, one would find none more suitable than the day of the Titanic shipwreck. There light and darkness clash; the hubris of progress is confronted by panic, luxurious comfort by destruction, automatism by the catastrophe which appears as a traffic accident.

Indeed, increasing automatism and anxiety are closely related. They appear whenever man limits the scope of his decisions in order to ease his fate by technological means. To be sure, these limitations result in a variety of conveniences; but they are accompanied by an increasing loss of freedom.

The individual is no longer rooted in society as a tree in a forest, rather he is comparable to the passenger in a rapidly moving vehicle whose name may be Titanic, but also Leviathan. As long as the weather holds and the outlook is pleasant, he will scarcely notice the curtailment of his freedom.

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Paul Craig Roberts

ObamaCare’s Latest Scam: The private sector allied with government is a second IRS

The government of the “world’s only superpower,” the “exceptional,” the “indispensable” country, claims to know what is best for Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Mali, Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, China, indeed for the entire world. However, the “indispensable” country cannot even govern itself, much less the world over which the “superpower” desires hegemony. The government of the “world’s only superpower” has shut itself down.

The government has shut itself down, because it cannot deal with the budget deficit and mounting public debt caused by twelve years of wars, by financial deregulation that allows “banks too big to fail” to loot the taxpayers, and by the loss of jobs, GDP, and tax base that jobs offshoring forced by Wall Street caused.

The Republicans are using the fight over the limit on new public debt to block ObamaCare. The Republicans are right to oppose ObamaCare, but they are opposing ObamaCare largely for ideological reasons when there are very good sound reasons to oppose ObamaCare.

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