There are Chinese towns near the border with North Korea that send rice across the Yalu River in exchange for girls to marry. It makes sense. North Korea needs rice, because communist farming is a failure. China needs girls, after thirty years of sex-selective abortion and female infanticide. And this neat little arrangement in an obscure corner of the East holds an important lesson for what is left of a Western civilization looking down the barrel of a gun of its own aiming: the feeling of self-determination can be reduced to the satisfaction of having a daughter to sell for food.
As totalitarian dreamers of both the one-party and multi-party varieties have long understood, and have come to count on, humans have an almost infinitely elastic ability to accommodate themselves to conditions that seem inescapable or predetermined. Our natural desire for self-preservation virtually guarantees it -- there is almost no degradation that men cannot learn to live with, given enough time.
"Learning to live with it," however, is both a natural reflex and a great danger. For although self-preservation is not at all the same as acquiescence, the former can devolve into a rationalization of the latter due to the slackening of will and reason that results from battle fatigue and the stretching of the soul's moral cords by' the constant pull of inescapable conditions. And when this slackening of the soul occurs, men may become bound to oppressive rulers more firmly than could ever be achieved with mere chains and fences. For what they are losing is a faculty of perception less obviously vital to our bare existence than others, and therefore easier than others to survive without, namely the capacity to feel free.
Via: American Thinker
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