Optional Reality

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Optional Reality

Modern liberalism is a radical ideology. ( It is similar to a radical religion only it doesn’t believe in a God.) In a radical ideology, as in radical religious cults, people live in their own reality. They become self-deceived, detached from the truth. They have convinced themselves they are right and can’t see the truth. They live by a host of assumptions that are at odds with reality. One must be careful about what one is induced to believe. It can remake your mental makeup at the most fundamental level.

Egg-headed intellectuals have been known to lack in common sense. Too much study of abstruse philosophical ideas can have an effect on one’s good sense. The most profound truth is the simplest.

In the novel Don Quixote Cervantes tells us that Don Quixote’s mind had been muddled from reading too many novels on Chivalry. Reading the wrong things can affect ones’ common sense.

The most exquisite folly is made of wisdom spun too fine.

Franklin

Common sense is of all kinds the most uncommon. It implies

good judgment, sound discretion, and true and practical wisdom

applied to common life.

Tryon Edwards

The modern Left lacks something — something very vital. What is it? They lack understanding. They lack understanding of themselves, people, and life. They simply don’t have a correct understanding of human nature. The conservatives do. When your basic assumptions are wrong you get bad results. The Left doesn’t have an appreciation of the importance of faith in God and the value of the Christian moral standard to a good, well functioning society.

Behind it all: the Left has rejected God and Christianity. The West has lost its way and is reaping the consequences.

What is the cause of all of the problems and bad things that happen in life? Well, nature can be the source of many. You have floods, hurricanes, famines, diseases, etc. Life is filled with harsh realities and injustices. But the main source of most of the bad that occurs in this world is man himself. It is his basic nature, his natural tendencies toward hatred, anger, selfishness, temper, lust, lasciviousness, imprudent desires, deception, impatience, pride, jealousy, envy, greed, etc. Most of the evil in this world comes from man’s bad or unkind treatment of his fellow man. Consider the terrible things that were done to huge numbers of people under leaders like Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, etc. Consider all of the atrocities perpetrated by the Huns, Mongols, Vikings, etc. Man is a complicated creature. Man’s mind is abstruse, sophisticated, enigmatic, complex. He doesn’t know how to live life. He is subject to developing difficult mental problems that no one understands. Conservatives understand these basic facts of life. On the other hand, liberals live under a dogmatic ideology that denies this basic flawed nature of man causing them live in a false alternate world and causing them to try to do things that can’t be done.

The following is from The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell, Chapter 9, Optional Reality.

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Adopting as mascots all sorts of people who create high costs for their fellow human beings --- whether through crime, disease, or parasitic behavior --- clearly fulfills the requirement of flattering the anointed on their superior vision which allows them to see social issues in terms of how "society" has mistreated its "victims," who are to be rescued by the anointed. This vision requires that the mascots own behavior, choices, and performances be brushed aside as factors in unhappy outcomes, as is done by the preemptive phrase, "blaming the victim." Rejecting traditional morality likewise allows the anointed to believe that all over the world billions of people of every race, creed, and nationality have for thousands of years been hopelessly mistaken in thinking that moral codes are necessary for the survival of civilization --- a mistake to be corrected by the newly minted wisdom of the zeitgeist.

Insulation from feedback

The charge is often made against the intelligencia and other members of the anointed that their theories and the policies based on them lack common sense but the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than anyone else while agreeing with everyone else? And everything from avant-guard art, music, and drama to exotic animals and "radical chic" activities, the stress is on their own difference, their specialness. A chorus of public outcry against what they're doing or advocating is not a reason to reconsider but music to their ears. To disdain "public clamor" as it is called when court decisions are protested is a badge of distinction. All of this of course contributes to the sealing off of the vision from feedback from reality.

Consistent with this pattern of seeking differentiation at virtually all cost has been the adoption of a variety of antisocial individuals and groups as special objects of solicitude --- which is to say, special examples of the wider and loftier vision of the anointed. From multiple murderers to smelly vagrants, these anti-social elements have been adopted as mascots, much like exotic animals. The stigmas put on these mascots by the rest of society merely provide yet another occasion for the anointed to blame society itself for failing to "solve" these people's “problems”. Again, having committed themselves to this disdainful view of the benighted masses, the anointed have cut off their own path of retreat when evidence begins to pile up that their mascots have both richly deserved the stigmas they received and are unlikely to be magically transformed by any of the innumerable programs and projects that the anointed have created for their benefit. Another avenue to reality is sealed off.

One symptom of divorce from the constraints of reality is the tendency to treat numbers as if they had a life of their own — for example, to make extrapolations from statistics without any serious analysis of the actual processes from which these numbers were generated. This has been common, not only in “overpopulation” projections and exhaustion-of-resources projections, but even in the claim that it is wrong to criticize the courts for the soaring crime rates that followed the criminal law revolutions of the 1960s because of “the abnormally low base from which the crime of the 1960s and early ‘70s began.” In other words, these numbers were apparently due to go up anyway — not, for any specific, discernible reason, anchored in reality, but simply because they were “abnormally low.”

One could just as easily have said that the crime rate was abnormally high when the country was expanding, with a lawless frontier still being settled, and when its cities had an unprecedented growth of a crowded polyglot population of immigrants — and that when these and other adverse influences faded over time, crime rates likewise subsided. But to say this would be to say that the numbers did not have a life of their own, but reflected actual, social processes — and that in turn would suggest that the soaring crime rates which followed the judicial revolution in the criminal justice system were also a result of actual facts in the real world. But the reluctance to say that people are responsible for the consequences of their action — even in a causal sense, much less in a moral sense – is here extended to judges.

Such an approach is part of a more general pattern among those with the vision of the anointed, a pattern exemplified by the use of the word “epidemic” to describe chosen behavior, including drug use and such consequences of sexual behavior as pregnancy and AIDS. Without a sense of the tragedy of the human condition, and of the painful trade-offs implied by inherent constraints, the anointed are free to believe that the unhappiness they observe and the anomalies they encounter are due to the public’s not being as wise or as virtuous as themselves. Both their conceptions of social issues and the vocabulary in which they discuss them are pervaded by notions of “protecting” this group and ”liberating” that one — in both cases, obviously from the benighted or malign actions of other people. It is a world of victims, villains, and rescuers, with the anointed cast in the last and most heroic of these roles. Thus, in this vision, the Third World is poor because the more prosperous nations have made them so, and problems with the black community are caused by the white community, women are less represented in given occupations because men keep them out — and so on and on. Alternative explanations of all of these phenomena are neither lacking nor without evidence, but alternatives to the vision of the anointed are sweepingly and sneeringly dismissed.

Those with the vision of the anointed are especially reluctant to see human nature as a source of the evils they wish to eradicate. Instead, they seek special causes of particular evils. Nothing so exemplifies this approach as the perennial attempts to get at the causes — the “root causes,” as it is phrased — of crime. There seems to be no awareness that people commit crimes because they are human beings. That is, people’s natural impulses are to favor themselves over others and to disregard the harm they create in trying to satisfy their own desires in the easiest way. If most people do not behave this way with complete shamelessness in most things, it is because they have been through a long process of becoming civilized — and because this process is buttressed by law enforcement. Civilization has been aptly called, “a thin crust over a volcano.” The anointed are constantly picking at that crust.

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It is the intertwining of the intellect and the ego which is so dangerous in making the vision highly resistant to any facts that threaten the existing framework of beliefs and assumptions. Cultural wars are so desperate because they are not simply about the merits or demerits of particular policies. They are about the anointed’s whole conception of themselves — about whether they are in the heady role of a vanguard or in the pathetic role of pretentious and self-infatuated people.

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For the anointed, it is desperately important to win, not simply because they believe that one policy or set of beliefs and values is better for society, but because their whole sense of themselves is at stake. Given the high stakes, it is not hard to understand the all-out attacks of the anointed on those who differ from them and their attempts to stifle alternative sources of values and beliefs, with campus speech codes and “political correctness” being prime examples of spreading taboos. Here they are not content to squelch contemporary voices, they must also silence history and traditions — the national memory — as well. This too is a larger danger than the dangers flowing from particular policies.

PAST CONSEQUENCES AND FUTURE DANGERS

After the vision of the anointed was given increasing scope in the education and public policy of the United States and other Western societies during the 1960s, the social degeneration became palpable, documented beyond issue, and immense across a wide range of social phenomena — declining educational standards, rising crime rates, broken homes, soaring rates of teenage pregnancy, growing drug usage, and unprecedented levels of suicide among adolescents. This social devastation was not due to poverty, for the material standard of living was rising substantially during this time. It was not due to repression, for an unprecedented variety of “new” rights emerged from the courts and legislatures to liberate people from the constraints of the law while they were being liberated from social constraints by the spread of “nonjudgmental” attitudes. Neither was this social degeneration due to the disruptions of war or natural catastrophes, for it was an unusually long period of peace, and science conquered many diseases that had plagued the human race for centuries, as well as providing better ways of protecting people from earthquakes and other destructive acts of nature. It was instead an era of self-inflicted wounds.

The full dangers of the vision of the anointed cannot reveal themselves immediately. Even the anointed themselves are currently under at least the residual influence of traditional philosophical, religious, and moral inhibitions. To the extent that their vision prevails and endures, however, successive generations of the anointed will be less and less under the influence of these eroding traditional constraints, and the pure logic of their vision can operate more fully. Conversely, among those not convinced of this vision’s virtues, the spirit of resistance may well erode and the sense of outrage at its consequences become dulled by the accumulation of precedents for policies and actions that might once have been considered intolerable.

In the anointed we find a whole class of supposedly “thinking people” who do remarkably little thinking about substance and a great deal of verbal expression. In order that this relatively small group of people can believe themselves wiser and nobler than the common herd, we have adopted policies which impose heavy costs on millions of other human beings, not only in taxes but also in lost jobs, social disintegration, and a loss of personal safety. Seldom have so few cost so much to so many.

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20 Nov 2023