In the news today I read an article about American head of the Free Congress Foundation comment’s regarding our recent election of a minority Conservative government.
Canadians too “hedonistic”
I had never heard of this guy, Paul Weyrich, so I looked him up. Earlier this week on the Free congress Foundation he wrote the following piece:
Conservative Canadian Prime Minister-elect Espouses Positive Change
In his opinion Canadians need “to correct some premises of Cultural Marxism, which Canadians have espoused, such as same-sex marriage and abortion-on-demand”. He says that after he personally investigated the situation he found:
“The people of Canada have become so liberal and hedonistic that the public ethic in the Country immediately could not reversed”. Gee, he makes it sound like we’ve got the clap or something.
When I hear the word hedonistic or hedonism I envision scantily-clad people cavorting on some desert isle, sleeping late, engaged in frivolous play and coveting every petty indulgence or luxury. Hmm, almost sounds like a TV show…
Just so I would understand exactly what hedonism meant, I looked it up. The Living Webster Dictionary defines hedonism as: The doctrine that the chief good and man’s primary moral duty lie in the pursuit of pleasure.
Pursuit of pleasure? Hmm, where have I heard a similar phrase? Oh yes, it’s all coming back to me…
Second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, writen almost 230 years ago says:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Ok, the Declaration actually says happiness and not pleasure but I always thought the two words were closely related so once again, I looked it up.
My Gage Canadian Thesaurus lists the following synonyms for happiness: beatitude, blessedness, bliss, cheer, cheerfulness, cheeriness, chirpiness, contentment, delight, ecstasy, eletion, enjoyment, euphoria, exuberance, felicity, gaiety, gladness, high spirits, joy, joyfulness, jubulation, light-heartedness, merriment, pleasure, satisfaction, well-being.
I don’t know about you but some of these states don’t sound so awful bad to me. However since I found this list in a Canadian reference book and some may think it biased, (especially as it used the word “gaiety” as a synonym), I looked up happiness on an on-line reference and found similar results.
In light of this research, I take no offense to Mr. Weyrich’s characterization of Canadians as hedonistic. We can’t help it – we are fun-loving folk. That may be as a result of our “cultural Marxism” but I like to think it’s because we have stronger beer.