Winston Churchill said, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” This is a sad truth, but it still does not shake my convictions regarding democratic process.
Somehow the conflicting self-interest of millions achieves better things (though never perfect things) than anything that a small band of elitist surrogate decision makers has ever or will ever be able to achieve. The cumulative and specialized decentralized knowledge of millions is always superior, even by accident, than the designs crafted by those same centralized decision makers no matter how intelligent they are.
That said, those intelligent and equally crafty band of self-promoting elitists show themselves more than capable of convincing the general public otherwise. They are gifted in coaxing the masses into giving up their decision making power in the hopes that these politicians will be able to do something better with it. No matter how disastrous the results are, these same politicians are able to convince the voting public to give up even more power to them, year after year after year.
It doesn’t matter that the ideology of these politicians is twisted, that their long range goals are demonic, that their every effort has radically unintended consequences worsening every situation they claim to want to help. It doesn’t matter that their philosophy is dark and wrongheaded from the start. It doesn’t matter because little of what actually takes place in the media and on the political stage is about real ideas, methods, plans or philosophies.
Politicians win or lose on bumper sticker phrases that wheedle their way into the basic reasoning of the masses and confuse their ability to track the ramifications of their actions in the real world.
I stand amazed at how many solid faithful Christian believers can’t see through the malarkey of these bumper sticker sentiments, accusations, and labeling. You see it in the memes they share on Facebook and the terminology they allow to infiltrate their discussions about the reality of the world. They lose all patience with reasoned dialogue, evidence, history and carefully gathered and evaluated statistics.
50 percent divorce rate!: (Doesn’t exist; has never even been close.) It is a false statistic used accidentally by some and deliberately by others to unseat the nation’s confidence in the nuclear family. Why fight to protect an institution that is such a complete failure. Only it’s a lie. Those advancing an agenda that is at odds with the general will of the masses use false statistics to overwhelm the hearts and minds of their opponents, to make them feel like they are fighting a losing battle, to make them give in to what seems inevitable.
Ageism: How did a term designed to shame those who reject the elderly who still have so much to give, having cultivated so many years of experience become a calling card term to convince Millennials that their ability to look things up on Google is of equal worth to their teachers’ decades worth of experience and maturity?
Inequality: How did equality get so radically redefined without anyone noticing it? The constitution is designed around equality of worth and process in the eyes of the law. Equality in the media and left-wing agenda has become an equality of result. This means that people, regardless of the choices they make, the effort they apply, the natural starting point they inherit, the gifting they have and develop, or the investments they make, are all supposed to end up at the same place (except the surrogate decision makers, of course). If any inequality exists in society it is automatically assumed to be the product of racism/discrimination/corrupt systems, etc.
Rights: Do people even know what a right is anymore, and how insidious its redefinition is for our society? Natural rights/negative rights are rights to remain inviolate… a right to keep life, liberty and property. Positive rights, the definition given by the left and media—presented innocently as if these are what our founding fathers intended when they wrote the constitution—means that some people have the right to receive certain products and services from others… which those others are responsible to pay for… violating their natural right to life, liberty and property. You cannot have both natural and positive rights in society; one of them must give way to the other.
Patriarchalism: The belief that all inequality of outcome between men and women is the result of historic economic, cultural, and political systems designed to keep women from achieving their potential in the world. Men are afraid of women’s natural superiority you see, and so we had to use everything at our disposal to keep a handle on things. This, of course, is one part frustration over the slowness with which the systems of society shifted when the real historic reasons for male and female roles began to change, one part boneheaded ignorance about how cultures developed throughout the millennia of human societies, and one part complete misconception about the natural inclinations of gender.
This doesn’t suggest that men are never discriminatory against women, nor that women are never discriminatory against men, but tossing around the term patriarchalism accomplishes little that is honest about the way the real world works. It is a sledge hammer to pulverize the wisdom of the ages, reducing all tradition to the residue impulses of hatred against women.
In truth, it suggests some pretty horrible things about women if you think about it. It suggests that women are so weak that they have spent the whole of human history at the mercy of men, that the only freedom women are capable of gaining for themselves is the freedom that the government (mostly made up of men) is able to forcibly carve out for them at the point of a gun, tank, and rocket.
I reject it. Women are and always have been partners with men in creating sustainable cultures and societies the world over.
Tolerance: Tolerance has undergone a radical transformation in meaning. The political correctness movement has transformed a word of harmonious disagreement into a term for silencing any opposition to the active agenda of the left and the progressives. Tolerance once began at a point of disagreement, now tolerance is a term used to suggest that one is intolerant if they voice a disagreement. To be tolerant is to NEVER say that someone else is wrong… except for rejecting those who think others are wrong, that’s not wrong. No one has a right to be liked, championed or celebrated, nor to be hired if they can’t do the job, nor to be artificially sustained when they refuse to participate in their own upkeep.
Government: Somehow the entire conception of Government in America has shifted away from a government of the people for the people and by the people (with strong constitutional limitation on its duties and powers) into a government over the people by an elite class of surrogate decision makers. They have, through media and bumper sticker methods made it axiomatic in the mind of the voting public that government exists to solve society’s problems, to orchestrate society’s future, to engineer society’s every ideology and institution. Anything worth doing is worth being done by the government, no matter how inefficient government tends to be. They are our political nannies and anything that they imagine is for our betterment is championed at any cost… we pay the bills after all. They wish to tell us how we should cook our meat, how much soda we should drink, how we should raise our children and what we should teach them, what is and isn’t reasonable as part of our basic religious convictions, who we can and can’t approve of, and who we can and can’t do business with.
Here is the duty of a government of the people. To maintain a vigorous protection of the natural rights of each citizen, defending a man and his property from violation by friend, neighbor, or foreign element. There are some things that only the government can do for the citizenry, by citizenry permission, like police and military interests, water, roads, and the like, but these things should be few, taxes minimal, freedom maximized.
Many are so eager to get something for nothing that they rarely count the cost of the Government’s confiscation of property from some in order to artificially sustain others. We imagine that we MUST fix this, MUST help these, MUST solve this situation. We imagine horrible things will happen if we allow people to take personal responsibility for their lives, including paying the price for their own foolishness, indolence, and ignorance.
Income Gap: Here the very existence of income disparity (some people earn a lot of money while others make only a little) is deemed the product of unfair processes cunningly designed by the rich to fatten themselves on the proceeds and labor stolen from the poor.
Given how weak the average American’s grasp is on the real economic processes of the world, this is a powerful bumper sticker phrase filling those who buy into it with guilt and a readiness to sign away their future to help the less fortunate.
Economics, however, are not cunningly designed processes by the rich against the poor (though sometimes rich people steal from the poor, visa versa) but are rather natural processes about the way human beings work in relationship to others and in relationship to the resources available to a society… i.e. Economics is more like gravity or the instinct for survival than a rigged roulette wheel.
The rich are the greatest resource that the poor have in terms of their value for creating systems which improve the lot of all involved. Those gifted in business are the greatest capital that a nation has. Everyone works for a rich man, so to speak, and, to paraphrase William J. H. Boetcker, one never prospers the wage earner by destroying the wage payer. God bless the rich, they are a promise of bounty for all of us who are willing to work harder and smarter.
Racism: This is a term with such a varied and ungraspable definition that it is a powerful tool in blackening the reputation of those tarred with this brush. Who wants to be, or worse yet, be thought racist… not me, that’s for sure. What, however, qualifies anything as racist?
STOP USING TERMS THAT YOU DO NOT HAVE A CLEAR UNDERSTANDING OF, TERMS WITHOUT DEFINABLE LIMITATIONS.
Does racist need to suggest that a person intends any harm to those of other races? No.
Does racist need to suggest that a person thinks negative thoughts about people of other races as a category? No.
Rather, racist defines anyone and anything that the left deems to negatively affect certain minority groups in the short term… including the accidental provoking of that groups annoyance at your opinion, even if said opinion has nothing to do with issues of race or culture.
Anything that demands equal performance of duty from certain minority groups is deemed racist (the left doesn’t think that these groups could possibly be expected to compete unless given counter advantages to compensate for what they imagine are natural and designed disadvantages in life… which sounds both counter-productive and racist to me.)
Anything that suggests that certain minority groups have cultural identifiers in values, choices, or characteristics is deemed racist… so you aren’t supposed to acknowledge differences even if those differences are scientifically quantifiable, and statistically verified.
You, of course, are NOT racist if you do all of these things and add open contempt, hatred, and malicious plotting against whites and prosperous Asians… If you also belong to one of a handful of worthy minorities.
We could go on all day, but let me conclude by encouraging people to look beyond the bingo phrases that creep into political talk whether it is on social media, the regular media, or flying out the mouths of politicians whose primary goal in life is to rule over you.
Soon, I’d like to discuss the racist term “White Privilege.”
