Skip to main content

Trampling on precedents of great value

This is a revision of some ideas I originally published in July of 2019.

I was asking the Lord about a vision he recently gave me, and he explained to me that people today have incredibly little awareness of the benefits of the cultural foundations put in place by people better than them. He said we do not appreciate the sacrifice it cost for them to do what they did or the benefit we receive from it. 

One reason we fail to appreciate the contributions that make modern life possible is that we believe the false idea that the good of an idea or work cannot be evaluated absent everything else about its author.  We insist that in order for a person to do good, they must first be perfect. We insist that it is ok for a judge to hold others to standards they do not keep themselves. 

There is no end to the culling of culture when we insist that every source be perfectly pure from our current lens. MLK was a serial adulterer and Ghandi was a voracious racist. Does this invalidate their principles of nonviolent resistance, Indian independence, and black civil rights? Henry Ford was anti-Semitic, does that mean no one should use the assembly line or drive a car? Because Hitler was a Nazi, should we abandon the use of synthetic oil, which his regime created? The Greeks had slaves. Should we abandon logic, which they developed? Geometry? The atomic bomb killed people. Does this mean we shouldn't have nuclear power plants?

Interestingly, when we excommunicate someone from history, we don't seem to have any interest in exiling their contributions to our culture. Instead, we want to recreate reality in our modern image of what is good, attributing those contributions to who-knows-what instead of their actual founder.

We live in a world where the goodness of a thing depends on its ability to pass through the pseudo-moral outrage gauntlet instead of simply evaluating it on its costs and benefits. Of course, the only things that can are those where a different standard is applied. The only things that are perfect in the eyes of the neo-Marxists are those things they intentionally don't inspect. So long as you are carrying the flag of the cause, you are allowed to pass by the gatekeepers of the new morality.

Beyond this sufficiently stifling hypocrisy, modern society holds the terminally inconsistent belief that some people are better than others while proclaiming that all people are equal, depending on the convenience to the cause. One consequence of this belief is that we must minimize the contributions of truly great people when doing so would incriminate the demographics necessary to sustain the power of the Bolsheviks (the "useful idiots," as Lenin called them).

If all this weren't enough, society drinks deeply from the provably false ideas that all change is progress and that human history is an unbroken line of constant improvement. Most new ideas are terrible and represent a regression from the established norm. Any professional working in complex systems will tell you as much, and it certainly holds true in our society--the most complex system on earth, because it contains all others. The truth is that everything we know that is good came from an extremely small set of people with extremely good ideas--typically just one such idea over their entire lifetime. Improvement does not occur through the wholesale destruction of the best we know so far in hopes that something better will materialize on its rubble. Rather, it comes through careful consideration of possibilities held to the standard of what we already have. The masses do not possess the ability to accurate evaluate these decisions any more than they are capable of creating the ideas they so freely judge.

When you lose the capability of evaluating worth in ideas, you will lose the capability of generating them in any but the most random processes. Even then, you are more likely to discard them than use them. Great ideas are not generated at random. They are the result of hard work, sacrifice, deliberation, and generally risky investment. People do not do these things at random. They are contrary to human nature, and certainly not the easy road.

Ironically, the social justice warriors fail to realize that their very existence is possible only because of surpluses generated by men and women living according to the very higher principles they find offensive. Everything they think they understand is the product of a very tiny slice in time loaded with illusions and perversions that would be impossible to entertain except for massive surpluses of cheap energy. By eating the bread and fish Jesus provides while also sentencing him to death, they will shortly find themselves without either. As they tear down the institutions that make their own positions possible, they will find themselves in a society that reverts to historic means--a society where they cannot survive.

Separate yourself from their foolishness.