“The more you look, the more you see.” — Robert M. Pirsig
“Not necessarily, Bob ol’ buddy.” – Me.
Dennis Prager is a reasonably bright man. He’s made a number of pithy observations over the years. Yet it’s taken him a lot of those years to realize something that I’ve been harping on for three decades:
Those of us who appreciate Western civilization and wish to preserve it (while, of course, correcting its flaws) cannot understand why anyone would want to destroy it. That is a major reason it is so difficult for non-leftists to understand the Left.
After decades of mulling this over, I think I have discovered one answer that is not obvious even to all leftists.
What opened my eyes are the Left’s beliefs that men can become women and women can become men; men give birth; there are more than two genders/sexes; men who say they are women should be placed in women’s prisons, women’s colleges and women’s shelters; men who say they are women should be allowed to compete in women’s sports; and children should be taken to drag queen shows.
All these positions represent … chaos.
Great God in heaven! Can anyone with an IQ above room temperature not be fully aware that a man cannot become a woman, nor the reverse? Prager knows it. I’m sure he’s known it all his adult life. And the strategists and tacticians of the Left know it too. They’re not stupid; they’re merely hungry for power.
Chaos is the setting in which the opportunities for a dictator to rise to power are maximized. The creation of chaos – as Prager notes in the cited article – requires the destruction of the supports of order: in the American case, family, religion, love of country, and above all fidelity to the concepts of objective facts and truth. The Left has been busily gnawing at those supports for at least a century.
Even patriotic conservatives will welcome a dictatorship if it can plausibly promise to restore order:
“Even the iron hand of a national dictator is preferable to a paralytic stroke.” – Alf Landon, governor of Kansas and 1936 candidate for President, in a letter to newly elected president Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933
“If this nation ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now.” – David Reed, United States Senator of Pennsylvania, on the floor of the Senate, 1933
Those two gentlemen were Republicans. One of them ran against FDR in 1936. Ponder that in your spare moments.
There’s also this to ponder:
When I asked another feminist to debate me on abortion she said that she didn’t discuss such personal topics publicly. But then I read her biography. After talking about losing her virginity (including details about how she cleaned the blood off the couch afterwards) she dedicated countless pages to the issue of abortion and how a “lack of choice” adversely affects young women. After reading on, I realized why she didn’t tell me the truth. She revealed that she was a postmodernist who didn’t like to use the word “truth.”
The next time I got into an argument with a feminist – over whether a female student who lied about a rape to get out of a test should be expelled – I understood the postmodern feminist position better. Feminists just can’t help but lie because there really is no such thing as the truth.
Since so many feminists cannot tell the truth – because it doesn’t even really exist – I simply cannot take them seriously.
It’s as plain as that.
Among the reasons such “obvious” realizations are less reported than they deserve is that they induce visceral horror in the observer. Our impulse is to “avert our eyes.” The reason is the terrible revelation beneath the realization: i.e., that there are evil people among us, striving to work their wills upon us:
“After all, people are basically good and well-meaning, aren’t they? I mean, I am! Surely they are as well!”
I’ve heard such a statement more than once, Gentle Reader – and from the mouths of fundamentally decent and intelligent people, at that. It’s not that the evidence is lacking, or unavailable to anyone who cares to look and actually see. It’s the horror, the recognition that there exists human evil, that we’d rather not accept. The knowledge that there are people and things against which we must defend ourselves and our society.
It’s tough even for a Certified Galactic Intellect.
I haven’t spoken of my friend Duyen lately. That’s largely because she’s become a very private person in recent years. She and her husband are still ensconced in Southern California; he runs a gun store and she’s doing her damnedest to raise bok choy in her back yard. They’re happy and secure, or were when I last spoke to her.
Duyen is a bulging brain of a particular kind: the kind that spots social patterns that elude others, and finds ways to turn them into big, beautiful heaps of cash. Yet even she took a while, after coming to the Land of the Formerly Free, to realize that there are evil people among us. If memory serves, the encounter that brought it home to her was with a couple of anti-fur activists who bullied her about her mink jacket. She spoke of it to me in tones of incredulity.
I’d known of Duyen’s genius-level intellect long before that. I’d also known how easy it is to overlook or dismiss that which is too unpleasant to admit, even for the brightest among us. It was a specimen of confirmation I added to a continuing collection. I’ve acquired quite a few over the years.
Don’t just look, then turn aside in revulsion. See. Don’t forget what you’ve seen. Register and record it, and do the necessary aggregation of data to form a conclusion. You’ll thank me later.
1 comment
One does not necessarily see if one looks. A blind eye simply wishes not to see.
Evil Franklin