I hope everyone noticed Lisa Readel’s letter (EW 2/18) with the quote from the late Barry Lopez regarding social responsibility: he felt that “the instability of my own country is partly the result of its support of an adolescent’s ideal — that the people should be free to do whatever they want — and its obsession with personal gratification, whatever the cost.”

That brings to mind the lack of social/political responsibility exhibited by Republicans, Libertarians and conservatives whose ideologies are founded on individualism, ie. selfishness. You won’t hear them utter the phrase “the common good.”

The economist John Maynard Keynes had this to say: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

Richard Cosby

Eugene