Acknowledging that human fallibility is inevitable
Since the collapse of the IT marketplace in the US has made it impossible for me to find work in my field, I have been working as a retail clerk. Anybody who thinks that running a cash register is an easy job has never tried it. It has been a humbling experience in that it is so easy to make mistakes – entering or scanning codes incorrectly, misreading the display, forgetting to apply a discount that the customer is entitled to have, neglecting to ask for the customer’s loyalty account number, errors in counting change, dropping something on the floor, tearing a plastic bag, or just plain hitting the wrong key.
One time I happened to mention human fallibility in that regard, and the customer replied, “If it weren’t for human fallibility, I’d be out of business.” Well, there’s certainly no chance of that happening!
Of course, it turned out that the customer was a Protestant minister. Even though human fallibility will never go away, and human individuals and organizations will always err, it is always possible to move toward good. It is the pastor’s job to lead people to do so.
Perhaps the most valuable lesson that I learned while growing up in a society rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition is that we live in a fallen world. Human error, failure, and outright evil are part of the human condition, and we must deal with that. I am not suggesting that anyone has to like or condone evil in the world – only that we all must acknowledge that evil in the world is a fact. No person and no institution can ever be perfect. Expecting otherwise leads to bitterness and delusion, and eventually to disaster. Moreover, condemning and abandoning the good simply because it can never be perfect is just plain wrong.
This is the very lesson that liberals reject.
Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals “Think”
(h/t: Philip_Daniel)
…I assume that just about everybody in this room agrees that the Democrats are wrong on just about every issue. Well, I’m here to propose to you that it’s not “just about” every issue; it’s quite literally every issue. And it’s not just wrong; it’s as wrong as wrong can be; it’s 180 degrees from right; it is diametrically opposed to that which is good, right, and successful.
What I discovered is that this is not an accident. This is part of a philosophy that now dominates the whole of Western Europe and the Democratic Party today. I, like some others, call it Modern Liberalism. The Modern Liberal will invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Give the Modern Liberal the choice between Saddam Hussein and the United States, and he will not only side with Saddam Hussein; he will slander America and Americans in order to do so. Give him the choice between the vicious mass murderer corrupt terrorist dictator Yasser Arafat and the tiny and wonderful democracy of Israel, and he will plagiarize maps, forge documents, engage in blood libels – as did our former President Jimmy Carter – to side with the terrorist organizations and to attack the tiny democracy of Israel.
It’s not just foreign policy; it’s every policy. Given the choice between promoting teenage abstinence and teenage promiscuity–and believe me, I know this from my hometown of Hollywood–they will use their movies, their TV shows, their songs, even the schools to promote teenage promiscuity as if it’s cool: like the movie American Pie, in which you are a loser unless you’ve had sex with your best friend’s mother while you’re still a child. Conversely, NARAL, a pro-abortion group masquerading as a pro-choice group, will hold a fund-raiser called “‘F’ Abstinence.” (And it’s not just “F.” It’s the entire word, because promoting vulgarity is part of their agenda.)
So the question becomes: Why? How do they think they’re making a better world? The first thing that comes into your mind when trying to understand, as I’ve so desperately tried to understand, is that if they side always with evil, then they must be evil. But we have a problem with that, don’t we? We all know too many people who fit this category but who aren’t evil: many of my lifelong friends, the people I grew up with, relatives, close relatives.
If they’re not evil, then the next place your mind goes is that they must just be incredibly stupid. They don’t mean to always side with evil, the failed and wrong; they just don’t know what they’re doing. But we have a problem with this as well. You can’t say Bill Maher (my old boss) is a stupid man. You can’t say Ward Churchill is a stupid man. You can’t say all these academics are stupid people. Frankly, if it were just stupidity, they’d be right more often. What’s the expression? “Even a broken clock is right twice a day,” or “Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and again.”
[…]
What I discovered is that the Modern Liberal looks back on 50,000 years, 100,000 years of human civilization, and knows only one thing for sure: that none of the ideas that mankind has come up with–none of the religions, none of the philosophies, none of the ideologies, none of the forms of government–have succeeded in creating a world devoid of war, poverty, crime, and injustice. So they’re convinced that since all of these ideas of man have proved to be wrong, the real cause of war, poverty, crime, and injustice must be found–can only be found–in the attempt to be right.If nobody ever thought they were right, what would we disagree about? If we didn’t disagree, surely we wouldn’t fight. If we didn’t fight, of course we wouldn’t go to war. Without war, there would be no poverty; without poverty, there would be no crime; without crime, there would be no injustice. It’s a utopian vision, and all that’s required to usher in this utopia is the rejection of all fact, reason, evidence, logic, truth, morality, and decency–all the tools that you and I use in our attempts to be better people, to make the world more right by trying to be right, by siding with right, by recognizing what is right and moving toward it.
[…]
What you have is people who think that the best way to eliminate rational thought, the best way to eliminate the attempt to be right, is to work always to prove that right isn’t right and to prove that wrong isn’t wrong. You see this in John Lennon’s song “Imagine”: “Imagine there’s no countries.” Not imagine great countries, not imagine defeat the Nazis, but imagine no religions, and the key line is imagine a time when anything and everything that mankind values is devalued to the point where there’s nothing left to kill or die for…
I always despised that song, and wondered why anybody would willingly pay to listen to such tripe. I would even go so far as to say that the mad utopian delusion that John Lennon espoused in that song led to his death. Because Lennon denied the inevitability of human evil, he saw no need to take the security precautions appropriate to a world-famous public figure.
Indoctrination against discernment
The reason people listen to tripe such as “Imagine” is that, even back in the 1960s and 1970s, America’s youth had already been exposed to a great deal of leftist indoctrination. Otherwise, they would have voted with their wallets by refraining from purchasing that recording. Sayet explains how this indoctrination works:
What happens is, they [i.e., youth] are indoctrinated into what I call a “cult of indiscriminateness.” The way the elite does this is by teaching our children, starting with the very young, that rational and moral thought is an act of bigotry; that no matter how sincerely you may seek to gather the facts, no matter how earnestly you may look at the evidence, no matter how disciplined you may try to be in your reasoning, your conclusion is going to be so tainted by your personal bigotries, by your upbringing, by your religion, by the color of your skin, by the nation of your great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s birth; that no matter what your conclusion, it is useless. It is nothing other than the reflection of your bigotries, and the only way to eliminate bigotry is to eliminate rational thought.
There’s a brilliant book out there called The Closing of the American Mind by Professor Allan Bloom. Professor Bloom was trying to figure out in the 1980s why his students were suddenly so stupid, and what he came to was the realization, the recognition, that they’d been raised to believe that indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is the evil of having discriminated. I paraphrase this in my own works: “In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate.”
I’ll give you an example. At the airports, in order not to discriminate, we have to intentionally make ourselves stupid. We have to pretend we don’t know things we do know, and we have to pretend that the next person who is likely to blow up an airplane is as much the 87-year-old Swedish great-great-grandmother as those four 27-year-old imams newly arrived from Syria screaming “Allahu Akbar!” just before they board the plane. In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate.
The problem is, of course, that the ability to discriminate, to thoughtfully choose the better of the available options–as in “she’s a discriminating shopper”–is the essence of rational thought; thus, the whole of Western Europe and today’s Democratic Party, dominated as it is by this philosophy, rejects rational thought as a hate crime.
How the “cult of indiscriminateness” promotes evil over good
Later in the article, Sayet explains how this ideological corruption translates into real life. Modern liberals, and the many institutions that they control, indoctrinate and bully the public into supporting policies that reward failure and punish success.
Indiscriminateness of thought invariably leads the Modern Liberal to side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Why? Because in a world where you are indiscriminate, where no behavior is to be deemed better or worse than any other, your expectation is that all behavior should lead to equally good outcomes. When, in the real world, different behaviors lead to different outcomes, you and I know why–because we think. We know why communities that promote teenage promiscuity tend to fail at a greater rate than communities that promote teenage abstinence: Teenage promiscuity and teenage abstinence are not the same behaviors. Teenage abstinence is a better behavior.
…But to the Modern Liberal who cannot make that judgment–must not make that judgment–that would be discriminating. They have no explanation. Therefore, the only explanation for success has to be that somehow success has cheated. Success, simply by its existence, is proof positive to the Modern Liberal of some kind of chicanery and likely bigotry. Failure, simply by its existence–no other evidence needed, just the fact that it has failed–is enough proof to them that failure has been victimized.
So the mindless foot soldier, which is what I call the non-elite, will support the elite’s blueprint for utopia, will side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success, out of a sense of justice… [emphasis mine]
Why modern liberals mindlessly support the jihadis
Siding with evil against good inevitably leads to siding with the jihadis. Hence the tranzi-progressive/jihadi convergence:
Take an issue in the news and think like a Modern Liberal, and you will see how, once you’ve been indoctrinated into this mindset, there is no other choice. Remember, I said it was inevitable. Once you belong to this cult of indiscriminateness, there is no other conclusion you can come to than that good is evil and that evil is the victim of good.
We all know it’s official policy at the Leftist media outlets to never call Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Harakat ul-Mujahidin, or any of the other Islamic fascist terrorist groups around the world “terrorists,” and you know why. In fact, it’s even in official memos to reporters ordering them not to use the appropriate word. That reason is that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Who are we to employ critical, rational judgment?”
But, as a very minimum standard, can’t we at least agree that in order to be called a “freedom fighter,” you have to be fighting for freedom? We know what Osama bin Laden is fighting for; he’s told us. It’s not freedom; it’s an oppressive theocracy in which women are covered from head to toe and beaten if their ankles become exposed, and unless we all change to his religion, we are considered the offspring of pigs and monkeys to be decapitated. People like Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore will call Osama bin Laden a freedom fighter because being indiscriminate quite literally leaves them unable to tell the difference between freedom and having your head hacked off. That’s how sick this mentality is.
