Consistency Over Time

Someone worried that with change of financial fortune would come complacency. But this is a profoundly Marxist insight, that the truth is a function of historical circumstances. We are susceptible to those lines of thought that appeal to us in whatever place it is in which we find ourselves. So, too, with the old chestnut that a young man who is not a liberal has no heart, and an old man who is not a conservative has no brain. Marx is hoisted by his own petard in this case. Nietzschean perspectivalism, another radical view, lends itself to the same conclusion. Youth rebels against age, and either wrings its own neck in perception that its fate lies in becoming what it had opposed, or becomes what it is, which is human and changeable. A wise man should never disavow youthful perception as wrong, but listen, because herein lies the future, and he would not have had his elders be deaf to him at his age.