Old, Obscure, Great Books Review: No. 3

The things never taught in formal education never cease to amaze me as I discover them in educating myself. There are so many lessons from the past to be learned that are applicable to contemporary problems that one wonders if these contemporary problems would even exist if the past's lessons had been learned.

For this review are two books on little-known history that are loaded with practical and (implicit) philosophical lessons on the moral and intellectual corruptness of collectivism. One is on what is now called "foreign aid," the other on pseudo-science.

East Minus West = Zero: Russia's Debt to the Western World, 862-1962, by Werner Keller; translation and introduction by Constantine Fitzgibbon; 1962, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 384pp. 

How often do collectivists denounce “Western greed” for pillaging and exploiting other parts of the world? How often do collectivists demand that the West give vast amounts of aid to “underdeveloped nations” to bring them up to our standard of living? How often is the West accused by collectivists of deliberately keeping down those poor nations? Collectivists ceaselessly demand some type of international welfare from America and the West for the benefit of some backwards nation as if they have never received any. It is just self-evident to them that if a third-world country can just get the right kind of aid in the right amount, then that nation will be on par with the West, realizing a long-overdue “justice.”

What the collectivists do not do is actually learn from reality and history. That would discredit their program. For instance, Russia received nearly a thousand-years worth of Western assistance - and consistently lagged behind. The Russians, like the second-handers in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, discovered or created nothing new in knowledge, industries, or arts on their own, depended wholly on those who did - for nearly a millennium.

Werner Keller's East Minus West = Zero starts with the background to the founding of Russia. Russia was populated by primitive, tribal clans “rooted in prehistory” when Scandinavian Varangians were, in the ninth century, trading with Greece and Baghdad via routes they established in what is now Russia. “The Eastern Slavs, across whose lands the Varangians travelled, had neither the ability nor the desire to combine politically and thus to create a state of their own. External teachers had to be called in before this could be achieved” (16). The northern Slavs decided they needed a government to settle the bloody feuds and quarrels that were breaking out with the different Scandinavian groups, however, they knew nothing about governing so they requested the Varangians provide them with a king. They obliged and Russia as a country began.

In 956 the Russian Princess Olga visited Byzantium. “The results of this first encounter with superior Western culture were to be considerable. For shortly after the Russian state visit the first steps were taken upon a path which, for over a millennium, was to be pursued by the eastern state. It was then that a policy was formulated which has not changed to this day, a policy of acquisition from the West in order to assist Russian development, of constant endeavour to ‘catch up and overtake’” (25).

Byzantine Christianity and culture began pouring in to Russia. From this the Russians became literate and learned skills like building stone architecture and composing music.

In the 15th century after the Mongol occupation ended Western influences again penetrated Russia. Ivan III brought in a large group of master builders from Western Europe so they could turn Moscow in to a city with architectural splendor equaling that of the Western capitol cities. Ivan also began arming by copying the West. Western armaments were bought and copied and Western armaments experts were brought to Russia.

Ivan IV, “the Terrible,” established mini-colonies of Europeans with all sorts of expertise that were put to work for Russia’s benefit. Upon Ivan’s request, Queen Elizabeth of England provided a navy for Russia.
The importing of know-how from the West continued for the next few centuries until Tsar Peter the Great in the 1690’s decided to start stealing the West’s know-how. A Russian mission nearly three-hundred strong toured the West gaining access to everything they could. Peter was part of the group disguised as a common NCO named Pytor Mikhailov. “Tsar Peter’s journey to the West reads like a list of instructions for all future Russian spies in the field of commerce and industry. [Peter] had money and notebooks ready in his pockets at all times. Educated persons who talked to Pytor Mikhailov noticed his superior intelligence, and the smiths and master carpenters in the Dutch shipyards were astounded at his great skill, his interest in their work, his thirst for learning and his knowledge of their crafts” (73). The next year, Peter cut short the journey because of a mutiny in Moscow. Still he managed to bring back some nine-hundred Western specialists to work for Russia.

Russia’s total dependency on buying, stealing and copying the fruits of Western knowledge continued through the centuries, knowledge which was at times used against the West, like military knowledge and armaments in Peter’s invasion of Sweden.

Keller also chronicles the voyages of discovery around Russia’s far coasts which were led, not by Russians, but by Westerners sent by the Tsars.

After Napoleon’s invasion, Alexander I determined to rebuild Petersburg so it surpasses Western cities. The rebuilding was done with Western architects, an Italian in charge of the effort. Keller sums up the Russian attitude toward architecture thus, “The mania for enormous cathedrals and vast palaces, and for the acquisition of valuable art collections, was in sharp contrast to the unbelievably old-fashioned cultural and economic conditions prevalent in the country. Russia preened herself in borrowed plumes”(157).

In the 19th century many significant advances in the sciences were made - by Westerners. This was also the period when Russian intellectuals were able to equal their Western counterparts, and then only a few and after studying under some of the West's best minds.

When Lenin seized power in Moscow in 1917, it was the German government that financed him and helped him build the Red Army. The German government then promptly became the first target by Lenin of Soviet subversion.

After three years of attempting to industrialize Russia failed completely, Lenin declared this eternal profundity: “Our programme was right in theory, but impracticable.” “Lenin behaved in a typically Russian fashion and… the Red rulers did exactly what their predecessors had always done,” namely, live off of Western minds. Western engineers, scientists, and technology “must come to Russia so that ‘Bolshevik Progress’ might begin” (196).

The second half of East Minus West focuses on Soviet Russia’s massive importation of Western knowledge and skill. The stealing and copying of Western innovations from everything up to the atom bomb and space technology was executed on a staggering scale, often with witting or unwitting help from Western heads of state. The best - or worst - illustration of this was the Great Falls debacle when the Soviets were taking planeloads of materiel and documents out of the U.S. during the Lend-Lease plan of WWII.

Also important are the semi-philosophical ideas that were appropriated from the West and used against it. Keller does not go into detail on philosophical ideas, but one can see how these ideas actually fitted together and reached a climax in Soviet expansionism.

Keller quotes from 1846 an Englishman who was in Russia for many years: “Russian policy is to acquire all those practices of civilized countries which lead to national aggrandizement… In all spheres apart from the physical, and above all in intellectual matters, Russian policy has been to instill in her subjects maximum subservience, a superstitious terror of power and a mindless materialism” (77-78).

The first doctrine was theological. After Byzantium fell to the Turks monks fled to Russia and brought with them the idea of a new seat for the Orthodox Church, a “Third Rome.” Moscow was deemed by the Russians as this Third Rome. It was the heir of Byzantium that would protect the world’s Christians.

Russia believed it had a divine mission.

Secondly, the idea of Pan-Slavism developed with Herder and the German romantics in the 18th and 19th centuries and the Russians turned this into a doctrine of xenophobic Russian nationalism against the “corrupt West.”

Russia believed in its moral superiority to the West.

The last major philosophical idea that the Russians imported from the West was Marxism. It began when Russian émigrés in Switzerland started a Marxist socialist party. It was not hard for Marxism to capture the Russian mind. “[Marxism] appeals to the Russian desire for a Messiah, for it is a sort of a secular religion,” according to the philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev.

The communist Russians were aggressive secular religionists, armed with weapons, including atomic weapons, ultimately built for them and to be used against those builders.

East Minus West = Zero is an excellent and fascinating book. The reader will be shaking his head in disbelief over and over at Keller's account of what Westerners have done in Russia. It is also an important book for understanding Russia.

After reading East Minus West, one sees the parallels between that history and what Western businesses and governments are currently doing in other parts of the world that are at best, semi-backward, and hostile to the West. It is the same story all over again. The primary lesson to be learned is that if a country remains mired in backwards collectivism and religion it must grow itself into a culture of independent-minded, reality-oriented, thinking it if wants to progress. A millenium of Western developing of Russia at Russian direction was not enough for Russia to catch up. The "greedy, unjust exploiters" were not those providing the development. Just giving them the technology because it is "humanitarian" is unjustifiable. If they are not fit for modern science and technology, they do not deserve to have it handed to them from those who created it. Doing so is also a demonstrable danger, time and again, to the West itself.

                                          ********************

Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought, by Mark H. Haller; 1984, Rutgers University Press; 264pp.

In reading old books on late 19th and early 20th century American history one can come upon passing references to eugenics and the eugenics movement, enough to stimulate one’s interest in what it was about. Those brief, occasional, passing references to the scientists, social workers, politicians and others who believed the human race was in danger of being biologically degraded and therefore worked for laws and institutions for purposes like sterilizing people who were feebleminded and defective or restricting immigration on racial grounds, eventually arouses one’s interest in what the whole story was with eugenics.

I was even more curious about eugenics after reading Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. It has a brief appendix on the history of eugenics and its parallels with the global warming movement: widely accepted “science” that does not tolerate disagreement; bogus research generously funded by philanthropists and government; adherents in public office passing laws based on it that we are to live by; etc.

How did eugenics start and why did it last so long - and be so influential if it was only pseudo-science? How do we learn the lessons of believing in a pseudo-science - one that lasted for decades - and basing laws and institutions on it so that we do not do something like that again? Did not intellectuals like philosophers of science, historians, sociologists, and others afterward look back at this period to analyze it and endeavor to figure out the flaws in thinking and belief that allowed science to prominently uphold and spread nonsense for so long?

These questions and others were in the back of my mind for awhile and I intended to find some books on the eugenic movement. To my surprise I could not find any - so much for our intellectuals trying to learn from the past!

Finally, I discovered Mark Haller’s Eugenics (originally published in 1963), and it is described on the back cover as “the first comprehensive history of the rise, fall, and gradual revival of the eugenics movement in the United States.” It’s the only such book I have been able to find. It seems, for whatever reasons, as far as intellectuals are concerned the eugenics movement never happened.

As we can fortunately learn from Haller’s book, eugenics began in Europe with the convergence of different streams of scientific and social thought that eventually spread to America. What was eugenics? Eugenics was “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding” according to an American eugenist (3).

Francis Galton (1822-1911) was a “gentleman scientist” and became interested in human heredity after his cousin, Charles Darwin, published Origin of Species. Galton coined the term, “eugenics” and provided much of its doctrine. Galton believed “that man’s character and capacities were primarily shaped by heredity and that the present generation therefore had the power to control and improve the inborn qualities of the many generations to follow. In time this became for him a new ethic and a new religion” (10). “He foresaw that eugenics might become a sort of national creed, so that law and custom would work together for the improvement of the race” (17). Galton was by no means a complete quack, however. He did make important contributions to science and was one of the first to reject the then common belief that acquired characteristics could be passed on to the next generation, so much of his work held up when Mendelian genetics were discovered.

Galton’s disciple, Karl Pearson, in his studies of heredity became convinced that environment meant nothing and heredity everything. Pearson “feared that civilization was menaced by the fecundity of the poor. He insisted that human progress came only through a struggle of class against class, in which the superior classes won, and through a struggle of race against race, in which the higher races supplanted the lower” (13-14).

The other major contributor to eugenic thought was the field called “criminal anthropology.” “Criminal anthropology grew from investigations in various of the countries of Europe and exerted wide influence both there and in the United States. It reflected the extreme hereditarian ideas which developed in the wake of evolutionary thought” (14). In France, B.A. Morel wrote on hereditary degeneration causing social ills like alcoholism, criminality, insanity, and others, eventually culminating in sterile idiocy. Another important criminal anthropologist was the Italian, Cesare Lombroso. He thought that criminals had distinct physical characteristics because they were a certain type of human defective. “So well did the theory of criminal anthropology fit the presuppositions of post-Darwinian thought that for a time it received a respectful and often uncritical reception in Europe and America” (17).

In America it was the social workers, prison wardens and physicians, insane asylum superintendents, sociologists, and the like who were the forefront of the eugenics movement. These caretakers of the “feebleminded” assigned to heredity a major role in these human deficiencies. Also, many new professional societies were forming and publishing specialized journals. “Increasingly they centered upon heredity as a major factor in the burden of dependency and delinquency. From such persons, the experts in their fields, came the theories and impulses that first led to eugenics” (26). For instance, psychiatrists came to believe in surgically sterilizing the insane so they could not propagate; Alexander Graham Bell feared that a race of deaf humans might result from the deaf intermarrying; physicians believed that “inebriety is a disease” caused by heredity (30).

The last major factor in forming American eugenics was the arrival in America in the 1890’s of European racial doctrines.

Lastly, the eugenics movement got formal intellectual leadership.

Agricultural breeders and university biologists formed the American Breeders Association in 1903. In 1906 the American eugenics movement came to be a significant force when the Association formed the “Committee on Eugenics” comprised of important intellectuals with the purpose “‘to investigate and report on heredity in the human race’ and ‘to emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood’” (62).

Charles Davenport, a professor at the University of Chicago, became the prominent eugenist among those named to the committee. A biologist and eugenist, he even met Galton and Pearson while in England. Davenport was also a man with an inferiority complex and was highly sensitive to criticism. His uncritical approach to science eventually left him out of the mainstream as scientists learned more about genetics as the years passed. In eugenics he sought confirmation for his belief that a man was determined solely by his heredity. Urging that action be taken before all the relevant information was gathered was another of his traits. One critic of Davenport and his associates said, “Their efforts seem to me to be directed not so much to discover the laws of the transmission of insanity as to fit the facts to Mendelian theory” (70).

Davenport was hardly unique in having a dogmatic, uncritical approach to heredity, as Haller’s chapter, ‘Eugenics Orthodoxy,’ shows. Eugenists convinced themselves of some outlandish beliefs.

Haller quotes Charles R. Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin: “we know enough about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear in a generation” (76). Also, many eugenists even believed that history is a “branch of biology.” For example, the fall of Rome was explained by the “poorer hereditary quality” of its citizens. The racial stock that founded and formed America was at risk of becoming extinct, according to eugenists. Eugenists wanted to prevent war because it was a waste of germ plasm. Not wanting to let go of their reformist cause of banning alcohol on the grounds that alcoholism was an inheritance from an acquired characteristic - Mendelian genetics discredited this - the eugenists asserted the existence of “blastophthoria.” This was the process of alcohol in the blood causing cell damage that could be hereditarily passed on.

Then there was the Big Scare the eugenists propagated in the second decade of the 20th century: the “menace of the feebleminded.” This myth “became a major force in American social thought” (95).

Eugenists concluded that the feebleminded were more prevalent in society than previously believed and were to blame for prostitution, pauperism, juvenile delinquency, and many other problems. This was deemed a menace to present and future generations and it urgently required a eugenic solution. “Hence the menace of the feebleminded became the battle cry of an intensive public crusade to extend the care and control of the mentally deficient. The menace of the feebleminded was the subject of Sunday school tracts, was lectured about before women‘s clubs, business clubs, and colleges, and was a major topic in most periodicals devoted to social reform. In virtually every state there was an organized campaign… to awaken the public and secure legislation” (109-110).

This menace was exposed as a myth when conscripts in the Army were given the new intelligence test the eugenists and others devised. The results of the tests, when applied to the population at large, showed that half the country was feebleminded! Clearly, this was not accurate. Psychologist J.E. Wallin criticized the tests: “the vast majority of delinquents and criminals who have been classed as feebleminded during the last decade… are not feebleminded at all, certainly no more feebleminded than many millions of citizens who are law-abiding, respectable, and self-supporting” (114). Nonetheless, the myth of the menace of the feebleminded continued for another decade.

Sterilization laws continued to be passed and when brought to the Supreme Court in the Buck v. Bell case were upheld as constitutional. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind” (139).

Eugenics started waning in the ‘20’s. Then “the works of many eugenists became pessimistic tracts on economics and politics with an ever thinner underpinning of science” (161). The American Genetic Association’s, Journal of Heredity, continued “to publish uncritical and naïve studies of human heredity” (168). By the ‘30’s, new, young scientists began entering the field and more often than not simply ignored eugenics than attempted to refute it.

Eugenics is rather short, limited in scope, and not an in-depth examination of the eugenics "science." It strikes me as an introduction to the subject and gives to the reader an overview, which makes it is an excellent book to start studying the subject - however, one must also stop there as well for the apparent lack of books on the subject! For what it is, Eugenics is an excellent, highly readable book.

As to my questions about how did the pseudo-science of eugenics become so widely accepted for so long, Haller's book offers some answers.

Genetics was a new science and the eugenists in particular proceeded with dogmatic certainty before they knew enough about it, drawing conclusions that suited their presupposed beliefs. They also committed many basic fallacies and were often uncritical and unprofessional as scientists. Many treated it as a religion and saw themselves as saviors of civilization from an imminient catastrophe. It also spread through propaganda and fear.

In sum, science was turned into a politicized pseudo-science, becoming a type of religion for advancing statist-collectivism at the expense of individual rights. Consider how outrageous is the "scientific" claim that the individual's genes belonged to the collective! For eugenists, the standard of the good was nature and its future. The Supreme Court even so ruled.

Does the history of eugenist "scientists" sound similar to anyone today?

It is not hard to imagine Al Gore in 1910 calling for eugenics sterilization and immigration laws because "the data is in and the debate is over!"

Old, Obscure, Great Books Review: No. 1
Old, Obscure, Great Books Review: No.2

Obama: By Interfering in Your Lives I Fulfill Mine

Barack Obama gave a speech in France; (this is the transcript: REMARKS BY PRESIDENT OBAMA AT STRASBOURG TOWN HALL) the ideas in it being more suitable to the docile serfs of Europe than self-reliant Americans - but Obama hopes to change that.

The most revealing part came at the end in the question period. What he said in the body of his speech can then be better seen in light of this. Here is his answer to a question:
But having said all that, I truly believe that there's nothing more noble than public service. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to run for President. (Applause.) You know, you might work for Doctors Without Borders, or you might volunteer for an -- or you might be somebody working for the United Nations, or you might be the mayor of Strasbourg. Right? (Applause.) I mean, they're all -- you might volunteer in your own community.

But the point is that what I found at a very young age was that if you only think about yourself -- how much money can I make, what can I buy, how nice is my house, what kind of fancy car do I have -- that over the long term I think you get bored. (Applause.) I think your life becomes -- I think if you're only thinking about yourself, your life becomes diminished; and that the way to live a full life is to think about, what can I do for others? How can I be a part of this larger project of making a better world?

Now, that could be something as simple as making -- as the joy of taking care of your family and watching your children grow and succeed. But I think especially for the young people here, I hope you also consider other ways that you can serve, because the world has so many challenges right now, there's so many opportunities to make a difference, and it would be a tragedy if all of you who are so talented and energetic, if you let that go to waste; if you just stood back and watched the world pass you by.

…but you'll have a great adventure, and at the end of your life hopefully you'll be able to look back and say, I made a difference.

Let's see if we understand this. If, according to President Obama, you think only about yourself, how to improve your life and pursue your goals, you get “bored.” Not making a difference in others’ lives is “letting the world pass you by” - after deciding that improving and living your own life is “boring” and “unfulfilling.”

Please, Mr. President, speak for yourself. There is no justification to project your emptiness on everyone else.

How Obama descibed himself is exactly like what Ayn Rand wrote in The Fountainhead about "second-handers": "They have no self. They live within others. They live second-hand." The reason is because they "have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation - anchored to nothing ...the source of his actions is sattered in every other living person." Obama concluded that prime concern with his life was boring and diminishing - and that is what must happen if one goes about living one's life as a second-hander lives. "He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has suceeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me.' Then he wonders why he's unhappy. Every form of happiness is private."

Holding that the individual pursuit of happiness is necessarily ultimately “boring” is not based on reason - nor is deriving from that that serving 'the greater good' brings fulfillment to one’s life.

Notice that none of these “noble” public servants, like our Comrade President, ever explain how merely shifting perspective and purposeful effort from oneself to the collective transforms “boredom” and “emptiness” to “a larger purpose.”

If it is true that being concerned with oneself is boring and ultimately empty, then it is true for me, you, him, her - everyone. If the individual life has no meaning and satisfaction to offer how can any collection of lives mean more when they are made of - individual lives that are meaningless? Why do things for others if they themselves are individual nothings like you are? Imagine a group of people who share this view getting together and saying, “we all have been pursuing our lives and goals and found them boring, so to fulfill and enlarge our lives we’ll serve the good of all.” This is utterly bizarre, even surreal - but this is what this view necessarily implies. If one person's life equals zero, or, 0 x 1 is equal to zero, then how does 0 x 1,000,000 (for that many people's lives) equal something larger than zero? Concern only with yourself diminishes your life - but concern with others who have “boring” and “diminished” lives equals: enlarging your life!? How is the sum worth more than all its individually worthless parts? Comrade President’s conclusion is a whopping non-sequitur, so “making a better world” is not “a larger project,” according to his own premises. It is just as "diminished" and “boring” - if not more so! - as is making his own life better.

Even putting that aside for a moment, just how is a “noble” public servant going to achieve his goal of "making a difference" in others’ lives if they are similarly “bored” and “diminished” by being concerned with themselves? What can he do for them that they cannot? There is nothing moral or noble about this. What gives Obama the right to take it upon himself to use others as a means of removing boredom from his life by meddling in their affairs? To think that he finds that to be a “great adventure”!

So where exactly, Comrade President, does your “fulfilling” of your life by “nobly” “making a difference” in mine end, and my liberty to live my (not-boring) life begin?

Public service is most noble? Look around. Is the ACORN voter-fraud group Obama worked with, noble? What about corrupt, career politicians who serve the public as a phony way to really serve themselves? Is the corrupt Rod Blagoevich “most noble” for being a public servant? How about Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who brought us the mortgage fiasco? What is noble about the countless other “public servants” of their ilk?

What this adds up to in the "noble " practice of serving that "larger purpose" is explained by Comrade President in the body of his speech:
We also know that the pollution from cars in Boston or from factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, and that that will disrupt weather patterns everywhere. The terrorists who struck in London, in New York, plotted in distant caves and simple apartments much closer to your home. And the reckless speculation of bankers that has new fueled a global economic downturn that's inflicting pain on workers and families is happening everywhere all across the globe.

The economic crisis has proven the fact of our interdependence in the most visible way yet. Not more than a generation ago, it would have been difficult to imagine that the inability of somebody to pay for a house in Florida could contribute to the failure of the banking system in Iceland. Today what's difficult to imagine is that we did not act sooner to shape our future.

Now, there's plenty of blame to go around for what has happened, and the United States certainly shares its -- shares blame for what has happened. But every nation bears responsibility for what lies ahead, especially now, for whether it's the recession or climate change, or terrorism, or drug trafficking, poverty, or the proliferation of nuclear weapons, we have learned that without a doubt there's no quarter of the globe that can wall itself off from the threats of the 21st century.

The one way forward -- the only way forward -- is through a common and persistent effort to combat fear and want wherever they exist. That is the challenge of our time -- and we can not fail to meet it, together.
**************

This is our generation. This is our time. And I am confident that we can meet any challenge as long as we are together.

**************

...our fates are tied together -- not just the fate of Europe and America, but the fate of the entire world.

The rest of the speech, like the above excerpts, casts every problem and proposed solution through the perspective of collectivism. We are all interdependent, we are all responsible to and for each other, even if separated by an ocean, and collective action is the only way forward. We need more "noble" government officials interfering in and controling as much of our lives a they can. He says nothing about individual freedom and flourishing - other than primary concern with it bores and diminishes oneself.

Then Comrade President gives us insight in to his larger philosophical beliefs:
We know that transformational change is possible. We know this because of three reasons: First, because, for all our differences, there are certain values that bind us together and reveal our common humanity: the universal longing to live a life free from fear, and free from want; a life marked by dignity and respect and simple justice.

Bound together in our humanity and common values, in a utopia of effortless existence: a heaven on earth with the negative safety of not fearing and not wanting and having unearned dignity and respect. Like a second-hander, he means "dignity and respect" as coming from others, not oneself. Then one has "dignity and respect." How is that vision of society supposed to inspire anyone? What rational person would want that pathetic fantasy world? And where in Comrade President's utopia does independence of purpose and values along with the struggle to achieve and earn them fit in? How can it in a world of men who lack desire to grow one's own mind and self because they have automatic dignity and lack of want? Of course, he fails to answer how dignity and respect are possible for induividual lives that are necessarily "boring" and "diminished."

Next, Comrade President reveals where his philosophical roots lie:
Our two republics were founded in service of these ideals. In America, it is written into our founding documents as "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." In France: "Liberté" -- (applause) -- absolutely -- "egalité, fraternité."

America was founded on the principles of individualism, that a man is free to live his life as he sees fit provided he violates no-one's rights; that he must work to support his life and reap the fruits of his own labor; that government exists as the means of securing these and similar ends - a far cry indeed from the stagnant, heaven on earth he mentioned.

That, in its modern guise, has its roots in the French Revolution and is expressed in its egalitarian-collectivist slogan that perverts the concept of liberty. The American ideals and the French ideals are not the same, but like many collectivist-statists who want to stealthily impose the shackles of French "liberte" on free Americans, our Comrade President package-deals the two as if they are related. "Freedom from fear and want" came from FDR, who in turn got those phrases from the Soviet constitution. (We know how free from fear and want Soviet citizens were!) And it is the French Revolution that gave us communism and socialism (not to mention political terrorism). It is the French Revolution that served as the model for communist revolutions and coups from Lenin's in Russia to Pol Pot's in Cambodia.

It is highly worrisome that an American president is inclined philosophically to the egalitarian-collectivist-statist ideas that led to and grew out of the French Revolution. Obama's words are eerily similar to those of the villans in Ayn Rand's novels. But those are the kinds of philosophical ideas that are suited to people who find placing prime concern on one's own life to be "boring and diminishing" and therefore need to find a "larger purpose" of "making a difference" in the lives of others.
What if, hypothetically, all our lives were fabulously successful and problem-free, Comrade President? What would a handful of "noble" public servants like yourself who got bored by pursuing your own diminished lives do to "serve a larger purpose"? You all would have no real reason to interfere in our lives and lacking that, you would be facing utter irrelevancy in your own - deservedly so.

What to do then?

That's easy. Simply concoct "problems" and "crises," "fears" and "wants" that (allegedly) can only be addressed by government interference and government-imposed collectivism.

This way out of your own irrelevance you then publicly rationalize as "serving a larger purpose than oneself."

How noble.