For the longest time, I wondered “why can’t they just leave me the heck alone?” I figured a major part of tolerance was the understood reciprocal agreement to not bother one another. I’m OK, you’re OK. Good fences make good neighbors. Live and let live. That sort of thing was frequently said by the left, and it sounds good to me. But time after time, they didn’t. Zoning laws, building restrictions, gun laws, speech laws, ever more and more and more and more laws that were intrusive and the very definition of “not leaving me alone.” Oh, they always had a good excuse, like “protecting people,” or “protecting the environment from big, evil corporations,” or “saving children,” or whatever. Of course they demanded I leave them alone to do their own thing, with I’m happy to do, but they always find a way to try to busybody everyone on the libertarian / conservative side of things. Sometimes the left allied with the libertarian types to push things through that conservatives don’t like. Other times they horse-trade and make deals with conservatives to find a middle ground, but them, magically, then never live up to their end of the bargain, like “spend on our thing today, and we will cut spending on this other thing tomorrow…” but then the cuts never came. And so the ratchet keeps moving only one way.
I’ve read history, and the left keeps doing things that “unexpectedly” has bad side effects, often things that conservatives or historians warned about. Welfare to help people “unexpectedly” locks them into a poverty and unemployment trap. Aid to single mothers “unexpectedly” encourages divorce and single parenthood. Wage and price controls “unexpectedly” cause shortages and misallocation of resources. encouraging divorce with financial (welfare and tax) incentives results in destruction of the nuclear family. Shutting the basic precepts of the Christian faith out of public life resulted in an upswing in self-destructive behavior. Increasing government-funded programs to “aid” people resulted in an increase fraudulent / socially-destructive behavior and tax-dollar waste. “Aid” to Africa effectively props up dictators and genocide. The minimum wage increases unemployment. Public schools and curriculum “improvements” make learning less effective, less fun, and more divisive. At every turn, the side-effects of their actions make things worse in the big picture and long run, while having nice-sounding soundbites and pat (but flawed) reasoning.
It all seemed so insane and obvious, why couldn’t those on the left see what they were doing to our nation, I wondered. Are they insane, stupid, foreign agents, or well-intentioned but clueless fools, I asked myself? I saw hints of the answers to their choices, words, and behavior here and there. Animal Farm held clues, as did The Gulag Archipelago. Some things from the morals of Aesop’s Fables gave some insights, thinking a lot did, too. The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics revealed some of the underlying cognitive psychology / brain structure-function / genetic clues. Hoffer’s The True Believer started laying some significant patterns of behavior, with some explanatory / philosophical “why” spelled out. Then I came across this quote by J. Katzman on the Order of St Possenti discussion board.
For Leftism, “the struggle” is how you participate and gain social status. So the only way to play is to identify an enemy. If one doesn’t exist, you must create one.
Grok the core: You can only play by identifying other people to hurt.
Yes. That about sums it up. Commies ratting out someone else to reduce their own prison sentence, and the more absurd the accusation the better. Environmentalist shutting down American businesses and costing people their livelihood, just so those industries can be moved overseas where there are worse worker protections and effectively no environmental laws. Our economy is booming so they push COVID19 FUD and wreck the economy. Socially things are getting better so they push the rabid “all whites are racist” line to sow division, envy, hatred, and distrust. Across the board, it’s about hurting people, dragging them down, adding to the suffering rather that uniting them, but always claiming to be doing the opposite. They are inverters of truth and reality.
That quote was followed up by another forwarded by Katzman, but originating with Ryan Waldron:
False religions assign guilt rather than offering forgiveness,
and seek humiliation rather than humility.
Between those two quotes, I see a simple test to determine if someone is on the side of good or evil, regardless of who they portray or see their faith. Do the full real-world effect of their actions and positions hurt more people than it helps? And, does it weaponize apologies and humility to humiliate and divide, separate people into the clean and unclean, help people to improve or reward the accuser? Do they try to build up the weak, or tear down the strong?
By all those measures, the modern left of all stripes fails miserably.
Leave a comment