We've enjoyed David Hume's more happy-go-lucky attitude, his skeptic at the billiard table, rational grasp of what Individualism might be. The Calvinist, the individual answering to the gates of heaven, definition was in his view a religious nuttery which over the years has caused a damage to our intellect by attempting to create an unwarranted concreteness which Hume, who died in August of 1776, disparaged as humorless, or perhaps humourless, form of sloppiness of confidence which in Hume's view was remedied by a solid breakfast along with a good Tawny Port and lots of it.
When you look across the savannah - and I don't mean the tourist trap in the North American US State of Georgia where the State Bird is a Brown Thrasher, I mean the notion of freedom as a wilderness floating endless toward the horizons, the occasional thorny tree, a giraffe, lions chasing hartebeast while cheetah laugh as they wonder what you or I might taste like and so on - what you'll see of us people is a head with a big brain on stilts that takes ten to twenty five years to grow into a tool making clever clever with a certificate of achievement that entitles it to a career, it has a union if it's lucky or professional body to preserve its set of living standards, a stability, a zoo for giraffe, lions, hartebeast and cheetah that's sometimes mistaken for an entitlement.
Entitlement, whether earned or unearned, is, to use the Scottish word as a tribute to Hume, the ball peen beating thinner and thinner with hammer of personal possibilities in the increasingly odious ranges, hills and vales of "I am Blessed" by the deceits that keep me from even trying to be honest.
