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Why is Evil and Stupid Winning?
How do we explain the sudden love of terrorist thugs by American college students and recent grads?
We conservatives tend to lump a wide variety of stupid ideas and ideological monstrosities into some notion of “the left.” This characterization is often inapt because it creates an expectation that there is some common attachment to socialist political ideology when, in fact, that is not what these various unhappy intellectual and moral mutations ultimately have in common.
If we look back at the modern roots of modern progressive/liberal/leftist ideas and movements, at figures from H.G. Wells up to Barack Obama, what they have in common is a loathing for middle-class American values and culture and any system of government that defers to or gives a voice to such people. [An indispensable and brilliant work on this can be found in The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class by Fred Siegal (2013).]
Whether it is the absurdly idealized vision of Stalinism or Castro’s Cuba, admiration for Mussolini and Woodrow Wilson, the drifty fantasy of Obama the Light Worker, the brain-dead nihilism of Antifa, the simplistic and procrustean categories of “colonialism” or “whiteness” or the sheer insanity of “women” with testicles what is really in play is an ongoing attack on the normal and the traditional and on any moral or personal duties that might accrue from willing membership in country, family or church.
A theological take might be that this rejectionist disposition is a non serviam, a moral refusal to join traditions and practices informed by higher truths, the sin of pride in the fullest sense. A psychological approach might be that this is the result of a socially cultivated narcissism [See, for example, the still relevant The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Returns (1979) by Christopher Lasch]. In any event, our entire education establishment and much else in our culture is now devoted to dissolving moral and cognitive attachments to our culture. The ultimate lie in that effort is that Western culture can be eliminated but that selected fruits of that rich and wonderful heritage will somehow be left behind.
The kneejerk oikophobic/xenophilic impulses of so many malformed American youths seen cheering Hamas atrocities and supporting the Palestinian death cult (the most depraved, malformed culture on earth despite serious competition from North Korea and Iran) is diagnostic but still depressing.
In contrast to the centrifugal nature of modern Western academic institutions, Islam has a long tradition of movements to drag itself back into fundamentalist religiosity whenever diversity, secularism, or the need for change and reform rears its ugly head. At the peak of Islamic high culture in the 11th century, when the scholarship in Baghdad was the finest in the world in mathematics, medicine, and philosophy, Al Gazzali appeared on the scene to eloquently reject science and the Greeks with The Incoherence of the Philosophers to put Islam back on a path away from progress or change. Bernard Lewis noted that as the European powers grew in strength as a result of science and technology, the Ottoman army generals had to request a fatwa for officers to have permission to study Isaac Newton and Western physics for artillery design and use. That is how quickly and vastly the science gap emerged.
The Saudis have spent a large chunk of their oil revenues setting up schools to preach the Wahabi old-time religion to keep the influence of secular global influences at bay. (I recommend Hatred’s Kingdom by Dore Gold.) In Egypt, when Britain and France had divvied up the Ottoman empire, the Muslim Brotherhood emerged as the cutting edge of a new Islamism and the rejection of Western culture. Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were direct descendants of that intellectual movement.
So we now see the weird union of privileged Western kids rebelling against their parents’ culture, joining with Muslim youths who are trying to appear more Islamic than their grandparents with jihadi theater. The former are caught up in the tiresome and sterile yet persistent pseudo-elitist fantasies that plague the West, and the latter drawn into yet another round of militant cultural inversion by a culture and religion increasingly unable to take stock of its own horrific deficiencies.
It is a triumph of raw stupidity that no futurists saw coming. Hopefully, it is too far too stupid to persist. Then again, in a rational world, Hitler would have been an obscure footnote.
Published in General
Best thing I’ve read in a while. Anywhere.
Outstanding.
So, so true.
I really don’t understand the left. As you point out, I don’t even know what it is, or what to call it.
It seems insane to suggest that we have people who are in favor of Western Civilization and we also have those who are opposed. But that seems to be where we are.
Bonkers. But apparently true. Wow.
I have a friend who grew up in Communist Poland. She made the comment that it was the American middle class that served as the bulwark against the infiltration of communist ideology. People who own homes in stable communities that allow them to build businesses and wealth, take care of their families and live a reasonably comfortable existence embedded in a larger community tend to be grateful for what they have, particularly if they practice some sort of religion. The middle class does not search for meaning because they find it in providing for their families, being active in their communities and in their spiritual practices. They derive satisfaction from building things and tend to be committed to the community in which they live, because they don’t have houses scattered all around and go to boarding schools.
The elites turn their wrath on the middle class because it is essential to their identity that they look down on someone else. You can only be elite if there are non-elite and they are only too happy to define them. But in truth, they are also just the useful idiots used in the long game to get the schools, our entertainment, our institutions, the environmentalists to assault the middle class from all sides. It allows the middle class to be infected through its children and cause them to doubt whether the existence we have is good. It is. Once it is destroyed, there will only be rich and poor. Why this is what they want, I have no idea, but that is what will be.
It is an excellent essay.
There are two ways I would explain why we put them all together on the Left. Weak character in followers and evil in leaders.
The exercise of free agency (consciousness, awareness, thinking) is the capability that sets humanity apart but a failure to use that to its fullest leaves us subjected to our nature which is based on animal instincts and evil deeds.
Socialism, formal religions beyond Judaism and Christianity that I aware of, secular humanism and atheism all fail to teach fulfillment of a person’s free agency as the highest human trait and the most evil of humanity then lead them. They constitute the Left and the evil leaders want followers to follow, the dumber the better.
Opposing them are Christians, Jews, Atheists and Agnostics who choose the right. I suspect there are many of the followers and some aiding the evil leaders who see the error of their ways but have not yet taken the path to liberty.
Most people aren’t really all that smart, but it’s easy to not notice that if you mostly associate with other smart people: at work, etc.
And not-smart people are pretty easily convinced to go along with evil, or just other stupid people.
A lot of non-smart people engage with the evil while seeing and knowing it is wrong because that discernment does not require that one be smart.
Amen. Every year a handful of articles of this caliber suddenly appear on Ricochet. Their quality places them in a class by themselves.
(I regret that they aren’t archived annually as identified and securable volumes. Or even routinely searchable, thanks to the pestilence of modern software engineering standards, which have afflicted us more acutely than average tech customers. Many other Rico’s will regret it if and when Ricochet falls victim to the encircling deep State, forever closed to the free expression of new ideas, and with its past erased or falsified.)
I hope someone(s) keep an archives preserved somewhere.
It’s science.
I can’t recall the pundit whom I heard pointing out that the IQ score of 100 is the average, so roughly half the test takers fall below average. Some two-thirds score in the range from 85 to 115. That leaves a lot off people of well below average intelligence.
Yes well the problem I see is that “average” IQ doesn’t seem adequate especially these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if all/most Ricochet members, for example, are 115 or above. Many of us probably assume most other people – even non-Ricochet members – are reasonably intelligent people like ourselves.
But it’s just not true.
And it probably makes more of a difference now than in the past.
Consider also, for example, that it’s not allowed to admit anyone into the US military if they have an IQ of less than 83. Because they found that it’s impossible to train them to do anything actually useful, justifying their pay and feeding etc.
That’s about 12% of the total population, which is bad enough, and as John Derbyshire got fired from NR for reminding, 40% of black people (at least in the US) have an IQ that low.
“The line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The post title may be misleading in the sense that sometimes the difference between prevailing in a specific conflict is determined by what each side is willing to do in the process. Was Hitler winning when sending Jews to be gassed? He and his aides probably thought they were winning. And it looks as if the good guys must sometimes do things they don’t really approve of doing.
Speaking of stupidity: the German anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about Stupidity and the Public Sphere.
Hope that clear it up
Wow. That nailed it.
I like this comment as much as the main post. And the main post is very good.
Many supporters of Hamas on college campuses are smart, as measured by IQ. This is particularly true in the ivy leagues. Successive generations have marinated for several decades in the victim/oppressor critical theory narrative. They have not learned to critically think. They are so hopelessly steeped in it that they can no longer determine right from wrong.
I know many people like this were i live. It doesnt help that in todays social media environment we see what we want to see. There are a lot of pro Palestinian arab videos out there that are quite pursuasive with the caveat that you know nothing of the history in the region and conflict and view everything from that simple marxist lens.
I know good people who completely support the Palestinians because of this moral blindness brought on by critical theory. In my view we’ve got to purge critical theory thinking from our education system, or at a bear minimum get a balance against it or we will lose western civ. That’s why i really support local efforts to do this. It’s an enormous challenge because most our educators (certainly true in my area) are now all indoctrinated in this stuff and its reinforced by the administrators and elected representatives.
Who would have no problem were we dissenters all sent to the “camps.” Scary shyte.
I’m actually pretty amazed there are all these protests.
This isn’t 1968 with 500,000 troops in Vietnam, a draft, assassinations of public figures and riots in major cities. This is 2023 and the US is at peace, relatively prosperous and while we seem to have a rising crime rate I think it has more to do with deliberate choices made by cowardly politicians.
I’m at a loss to understand what motivates a bunch of people who are not Palestinians, who likely don’t know more than a handful of practicing Muslims, to march against long overdue military action by a nation whose existence is challenged by most of their neighboring states.
It’s almost like this is some sort of test. And a rather vocal portion of our citizens are failing.
And then of course there are all the smart people who are evil and worship intelligence above all else. I sometimes think they outnumber those who are less smart. And of course it’s the smart people who make the best intellectual argument that it’s the stupid people who are so evil. But then again, they themselves may likely be the most evil. There are few ways to intellectually believe in an extrinsic universal moral law, but many ways to intellectually argue against it.
I think it’s the natural result of students for the past post-Vietnam decades “educated” under overly ignorant “educators,” roughly three generations falling under and promulgating the Marxist delusion/lie/fantasy that all of life is explained as the “oppressed” vs the “oppressors,” the former being all good and the latter all evil. Everything else flows from that central tenet.
I’d warn strongly against the Greek error of conflating intelligence and morality. The holocaust and other cruelties of the Nazi regime here in Germany, the depravities and butchery of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, the oppression of Xi’s China right now, these were/are all evils brought to you by and cheered on by “the smartest people in the room”. Evil, malevolent, highly-intelligent people are however deft at manipulating the less intelligent and not just by appealing to baser instincts like revenge or ethnic hatred, but by making the broad masses dependent on the largesse of the political organisations they build and operate.
Thanks. You and I are making a similar point here.
A while back I saw a meme that really resonated with me “We live at a time when the learned are silenced so the stupid dont have their feelings hurt.” …
Honestly, I think cultural phenomenon began in 1977 – when Luke Skywalker turned off his targeting computer and trusted his feelings… Ever since then, they’ve been turning off their reason and trusting their feelings…
You omitted America’s present institutional and government leadership!
Until you write your next post . . .
As a guy in his 20s, I should chime in with a pithy observation: The only thing everyone in my generation can agree on is that America stinks. The rah-rah attitude popular among older Americans on both the left and right isn’t gone, but it’s getting there.
I don’t think older conservatives have fully grasped this, but the desire to reflexively root against America, its allies, or the west in general is strong.
Well, that’s clear, but why? @kephalithos
Tell ’em they’re gonna miss it when it’s gone.
I still think the better term, in English at least, is not stupidity but foolishness. This does away with the misconception of it having anything to do with intelligence.