Civic Nihilism/Parasitic Vines

This civic nihilism that we call libertarianism is like a parasitic vine that we have allowed to creep up and eventually cover and kill the tree. Rather than robustly respond and destroy it, we have, in a sense, nurtured it.
The tree becomes nothing more than food for the vine, and eventually dies and is subsumed by the vine.
We are now (and have been) to the point where, instead of working on how to improve and refine the elements of our society, as we did in the past, we are dismantling and destroying all that generations have built up.

To: To the Best of Our Knowledge re: Does the Soul Matter

The existence of the soul to my mind is a universal idea throughout cultures societies and religions until modern European culture. Most still have a traditional belief in an inner person that is separate from the physical body. Moreover, the materialist impulse has a profoundly bad track record. Why not, then, have a guest that does believe in an actual soul? To those of us in the arts, materialism explains such a small subset of reality. In a way, the lack of a traditional perspective might feed into the idea that NPR represents a small band of thinking.