Cicero wrote his friend Atticus of how the actor Diphilus took a potshot at Pompey the Great by repeating a line from a play: "nostra miseria tu es magnus"- "By our misfortunes are you Great." Pompey's reputation amongst the masses was falling by then, so the crowd loved the little smear, and called for multiple encores.
It's a great line. I wish whatever work it is from were still extant, but not so. "By our misfortune- by our misery- are you made great." It stayed with me for decades.
I was thinking of it a while ago when I ran into another post about some government somewhere overreaching into lives of families and people, as we become the ruled more and more to a class that increasingly believes they know what is best.
It usually isn't a powergrab as much as it is a reach into a vacuum. People increasingly seek their freedom, but never the price that comes with it. Burke wrote that with inalienable rights comes inalienable responsibilities. Spiderman says that with great power comes great responsibility. Neither are much listened to today. We are more like the Athenians descrbed by Gibbons: the one freedom they desired was the freedom from responsibility. Licence, not liberty. Someone somewhere is stuck picking up the tab for our mistakes. We tell the government to do it, even if it means they expand power into somewhere they didn't before, somewhere they shouldn't now and wouldn't if we did as we are supposed to, then we try and tell them not to reach too far and wonder how things got to this point.
Only in our misfortune are they fortunate. Only in our misery are they great. Only in our weakness are they strong.
It usually isn't a powergrab as much as it is a reach into a vacuum. People increasingly seek their freedom, but never the price that comes with it. Burke wrote that with inalienable rights comes inalienable responsibilities. Spiderman says that with great power comes great responsibility. Neither are much listened to today. We are more like the Athenians descrbed by Gibbons: the one freedom they desired was the freedom from responsibility. Licence, not liberty. Someone somewhere is stuck picking up the tab for our mistakes. We tell the government to do it, even if it means they expand power into somewhere they didn't before, somewhere they shouldn't now and wouldn't if we did as we are supposed to, then we try and tell them not to reach too far and wonder how things got to this point.
Only in our misfortune are they fortunate. Only in our misery are they great. Only in our weakness are they strong.
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