The Great Skedaddle, July 1861. Union troops flee in panic from the Bull Run battlefield and won’t stop till they get to Washington, DC.The Great Skedaddle II.
This is something to drive our steel pipe, hand laser, and match wielding rioter/protester into shrieks of hysterical comparisons with the Wehrmacht conquest of Europe … for the halfwit semi-literate on our college campuses capable of making the comparison. In July of 1861, Union forces in their first major confrontation with Southern troops fled in a panic from the battlefield on Bull Run Creek all the way back to Washington, DC. It was called The Great Skedaddle. A similar Skedaddle is taking place as many are fleeing the violence and totalitarianism on the west coast for the safer environs of the mountain time zone.
The evidence of it is all around, especially if you live in the epicenter of the destination of the teeming hordes, as I do. My sons are trying to buy a house in our corner of the country and are facing a feverish market. Real estate agents, based on the statements of buyers, say it’s due to the rampaging disorder and totalitarian shutdowns throughout the Pacific time zone. Yes, low interest rates play a role, but they say that an unusually high spike is occurring right now. It seems that freedom and safety have a quality all their own.
The prevalence of the totalitarian shutdowns is indeed taking a toll. Many in the market say that the shutdowns and particularly the school closings have lasted way too long. The prospect of their kids falling further behind by the mandated “distance learning” is intolerable. In contrast, Hellgate School District in the Missoula area has announced a full-open of 5-day in-person instruction in the fall, with an in-home option. Try that in California as sunshine state dwellers face the opposition of the teacher and public employee unions and the trendy and despotic cultural leftism in Sacramento. Good luck with that.
Many have mentioned the blue/red divide in the country. Me too. We are sorting each other out by belief and geography. But its more than that now. The current atmosphere has taken on the character of a panicked flight for safety. The more accurate dichotomy might be blue/sanctuary (by “sanctuary” I don’t mean the silly boilerplate used to disguise the effort to nullify federal immigration law). More and more people see the pyrotechnics, beatings, shootings, shuttered businesses, and empty schools as a Mad Max movie set that they happen to live in. So, for many, off to the next time zone over.
Is it time to pack up and head East? Some small companies in Southern California are moving logistics operations to Texas and other neighboring states to reduce overhead. (iStockphoto)
As a refugee myself, I understand. I have a greater appreciation for the predicament of the Sonoran resident fleeing the cartels. And, now, so do the nervous denizens of Seattle-to-LA. Welcome to The Great Skedaddle II.
The word “callous” comes from the Latin “callum”, hardened skin. The idea of a nice pair of Nikes was unknown for most of human existence. A lifetime of barefoot travel means hardened skin and “callouses” on the feet. See the connection? So, can a lifetime of committed political zealotry lead to an emotionally hardened personality, one with a furtive substratum of acceptance of wrecked lives to achieve long-sought ends? “To chop down a forest splinters will fly” was famously invoked by Lenin to signal his desire to build a socialist utopia on a corduroy road of corpses. I’m wondering that somewhere deep down in the psyche of your average Left/Democrat officeholder lies a little Lenin.
Maybe the thought shouldn’t be so surprising given their affection for Lenin’s ends, just without the holocaust … or, then again, I might be too optimistic. There’s no doubt that avowed socialists are piloting the Biden campaign bus in more ways than one. Assisting them along the way are a cadre of public executives at the state and local levels. I can’t think of a better way for them to reach their socio-political nirvana and upend a detested incumbent cruising to reelection than to create the stench of failure around him by fabricating an economic depression and lawlessness in the streets. Instilling a sense of fear and dread in the public works wonders for those seeking power over the body of Donald Trump.
I’m loathed to think that people could be so cruel, but there they sit in their little local soviets. They create their own banners to hide the reality, like Cuomo’s “New York on Pause”. California’s Newsom was the first to jump at closing down 14.6% of the US economy. The others followed suit. Soon 44 million Americans were out of work. Thousands of small businesses were shuttered as “nonessential” while the big boys – supermarkets, big-box stores, etc. – were allowed to reinforce their near-monopoly because they were labeled “essential”. Economic feudalism engineered by government dictat.
The media picks up on the drumbeat. Indeed, they are the drumbeat. The incessant dark message of doom about a virus whose ill-effects were egregiously overstated and whose lethality was highly targeted on a narrow segment of the elderly was churned into an apocalypse … and an excuse for statewide and local totalitarianism.
No wonder that in a recent Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Index poll 51% of parents were stricken with fear about sending their kids back to school in the fall. Forget about any conception of risk, about any conception that risk is chronologically uneven, that risk follows their kids the moment that they leave the house at any time. Applied consistently, helicopter parents should morph into gulag superintendents.
Soon, a sixth-grader becomes a fourth-grader after “distance learning” under the tutelage of distracted and overwhelmed adults and the ever-present allure of the nearby Xbox. Some parents are wealthy enough to keep the learning spigot flowing with hired help. Economic feudalism will be followed by education feudalism.
Then we have the same culprits in many cases – already experienced at the nullification of federal immigration law – thumbing their noses at the White House by allowing their streets and downtowns to be turned into playgrounds of violent anarchy. Remember Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s “We could have a summer of love!” in CHAZ? In-between the arrests of unmasked joggers in Central Park and the painting of Marxist Black Lives Matter graffiti on New York City’s avenues, Mayor Bill de Blasio slashes the police force, mutes his constitutional role as guardian of public safety, and pronounces justifications for mayhem. The scene is repeated throughout the country in any deep blue bastion.
The economic misery and violence are quietly sanctioned, or at least seems to be. These lefty poobahs don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to quell the disorder, or bring the kids back to school, or get the adults back to work. Oh, I forgot, it’s the virus and “race justice”, they say.
And, by the way, if it ain’t “race justice”, it’s “science”. They have tried to corner the market on “science”. Yes, “science” is helpful in decision making, but these politicos have choices to make. That’s why we elect people: to make choices. Recognizing relevant scientific information, though, isn’t a green light to the Disneyland of Bernie/AOC’s dreams. “Science” can give you the nature of the virus but it can’t tell you the choice to make among competing risks. Socialists like those who run the Democratic Party always think that “science” is their personal handmaiden and, funny, always ends up with them being ensconced in the catbird seat of some all-powerful commissariat. Hogwash! “Science” and despotism aren’t peas in the same pod.
In the end, if polls are any indication, the Lefties have proven successful in creating the stench of failure around Trump, even though, remarkably, they are wholly responsible for the anguish. Which brings to mind the state of education in America. What else could explain the easily-achieved bamboozlement of the American public? The Democrats discovered that enough blue state governors and mayors exist to put American society into a tailspin. Are they calloused enough to do it? Are they cunning enough? I don’t know, but I’m suspicious given the wide lane of misinformation and ignorance open to them.
I am a retired California teacher (since 2015) after 29+ years in California high schools. The state has become a zoo, and now so will the classrooms. AB 493 would require teacher training in LGBTQ ideology. SB 419 will make suspensions for, among other things, unruly behavior almost non-existent. For teachers, it’s like being wheeled into the operating room and seeing the medical staff armed with sledge hammers. There won’t be much improvement in your condition but there will be a big mess to clean up.
493 takes teachers out of the classroom to be indoctrinated in all things sex-related. The propaganda line is as follows: Forget the Bible and millennias of understanding and accept the idea that a person can will themselves into another sex. Transgenderism is an important part of the coursework. Of course, we can’t do the same thing with race or ethnicity. Remember cultural appropriation? We can’t do the same thing in regards to height or long fingers. But teachers will learn that genitalia and chromosomes don’t matter.
I know; I know. The ideologues have a chest full of rhetoric and vocabulary to make others well-versed in the pseudo-science. Just remember, this isn’t the first time “experts” were enthralled by intellectual mumbo jumbo. Remember phrenology? Remember eugenics? If you do a deeper dive, you’ll find more bunk.
If that isn’t enough, 419 moves the schools further down the road to a suspension-free utopia … or maybe dystopia is more accurate. A school is commanded by the ideologues in Sacramento to jump through more hoops before a kid can be suspended for unruly behavior. It’s not as if schools already don’t do this. They do, and a lot. In some cases, too much. Nikolas Cruz of Parkland fame benefited from this bend-yourself-into-pretzels disciplinary regime. Last year, California’s Kern High School District teachers rebelled against the imposition of the “restorative justice” flim-flam.
So, the not-so-golden state will have boys-now-girls in the girls’ bathroom, locker room, track team, soccer team, …. Chaos in sex and gender will be supplemented by classrooms that more resemble prison riots. Teachers might begin to act like the Lloyd Bridges air traffic control character in “Airplane”: “Looks like I took the wrong week to quit ….”
“Steve” (Lloyd Bridges) sniffing glue in “Airplane”.
The whole situation will drive teachers to more than the bottle. It’ll drive many out of the state … if they remain sober enough to operate a U-haul.
Below is a video from Mearns Academy, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, which went viral in June of 2019, of a teacher who removed a student for stating that there are only two genders.
In my mind, the remarkable thing about the incident was the teacher’s frequent reference to “policy”, as in the school’s and government’s policy of recognizing more than two genders settles the issue enough to squash dissent. It’s an approach that seems to be seeping into most areas of public life. In other words, be silent if you disagree with the powers-that-be on an issue that is inherently open to dispute.
Yes, open to dispute. Elementary logic makes it easy to challenge this most modern of contentions. Yet, the enthusiasts for 40 or so genders try to swamp opposing voices with, in essence, a politicized résumé. The tactic is to prepare a list of gullible Ph.D.’s – ones with prejudicial sympathies for the claims – make sure that they occupy powerful positions in the relevant professional associations who have an instinct for political adventurism, and have a fervent activist base – size doesn’t matter, approximation to political power does. In that way, logic and facts get overwhelmed by the loud volume of an intense few. Education is bedeviled by the technique, as I can attest from personal experience.
For an alternative view of transgenderism, go here.
What it comes down to is a person’s self-assertion that he or she (or whatever) is the opposite of his or her (or whatever) chromosomes. Rhetoric, verbal distinctions, and analytical procedures to identify “legitimate” claims are invented to bolster the new “science”. If the purpose of the process is to winnow out the dubious from the genuine, the filter has holes the size of railroad tunnels. If this is science, it is of the sham variety.
We’ve been down this road before with eugenics and racial purity. And we might have to add overwrought “climate change” to the list. So-called “science” is just as vulnerable to fanciful popular trends as hemlines and music.
At the end of the day, what have we done? As is usual in these kinds of things, it’s the young who pay the price for our impulsiveness. They are injected with pharmaceuticals at a young age in preparation for surgery later. The drugs will stunt their development and the surgery is irreversible. But by then, it’s too late. A change of heart just became meaningless. With transgenderism, you might as well repeal the Hippocratic oath.
The problems don’t stop there. Girls’ track, swimming, soccer, etc., or girl’s anything, will have been made nonsensical. The inherent advantage of the transgendered girl over those whose mental state aligns with their chromosomes means that past-boys will dominate present-girls. I wonder about the survival of the longstanding feminist push for sports equity when the boys-now-girls are harvesting the majority of girls’ sports scholarships and dominating the record books. We don’t have to much worry about the process working the other way.
This is what happens when government wades into a controversy in favor of the side obviously lacking in merit but nonetheless having proximity to power. Government diktat overwhelms debate and discourse, and helps to produce viral videos of public employees shaming dissenters even though the dissenters have the stronger case. Is this any way to run a citizen republic?
Why are we experiencing mass shootings and a spike in suicides, up 30% since 1999? I can’t help but wonder that a deep dissatisfaction is running like an undertow in our times. Are we quickly approaching a dystopia rather than a utopia? If so, our modern life has undermined a key tenet of progressivism. No longer can it be said that life is getting better, also known as “progress”. In some ways, our times may be beginning to stink up the place.
Why the decline? Well, something called solipsism has taken the place of knowledge of our past and a grounding in our civilization. Solipsism is the philosophical core of radical individualism. All reality is interpreted through the individual. Subjectivism runs rampant, and any notion of moderation and objective standards takes a back seat. We are encouraged to have no historical and social understanding and are free to create our own “truth”, not unusual among the fringe who are intertwined in cloistered social media hubs. All-too-often, it is the alienated tutoring the alienated.
How did we get so atomized? How did solipsism take root? Part of the blame can be laid at the feet of our media and schools. Both spread the secular gospel. Radical individualism is hard to avoid in the movies and tv, but it’s reinforced by the schools. C.S. Lewis saw it happening in British schools in the 1950’s. He wrote about it in his book, The Abolition of Man. In a chapter entitled “Men Without Chests”, he reviewed a British textbook teaching literary interpretation:
“I do not mean, of course, that he [the student] will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective and trivial. The very power of Gaius and Titius [pseudonyms for the authors] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.”
The problem lies in the fact that the student will unknowingly possess assumptions that “will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.”
A continuous pounding of the bias will set the stage for a desperate loneliness as we become more unhinged from the roots of family, church, and our cultural inheritance. The social setting is lost, and young people find themselves disconnected in a miasma of their thoughts.
And thus we have Al Qaeda, Nikolas Cruz, the El Paso and Dayton shooters. Are we sowing the seeds of our own destruction?
The El Paso shooter at the Walmart.
The Dayton shooter in a bar on the evening of the killings.
One evening I received a call from one of my students in my community college Physical Geography class. He was disappointed in his grade and begged for a higher one. This was his second time around but couldn’t show much improvement. I told him that I couldn’t in good conscience raise his grade as it would be unfair to the other students. He pleaded, “If I don’t get a higher grade, I won’t graduate and I won’t rise to anything in my life.” My heart sank after hearing this. I proceeded to dispel him of the crazy notion. It may be crazy but it is instilled in the young from pre-school on. How did we get to this place?
Somehow, going to college has become our society’s default path to personal advancement. Call it degree inflation. The relentless drumbeat of “college, college, college” has warped public policy with its plethora of taxpayer subsidized financial aid, degraded entry and instructional standards, and produced new “soft science” degree fields that have little bearing on real learning and improved abilities and does much to produce alienated and disgruntled students with a bent for political activism.
Oberlin College students protest a bakery for alleged racism. Later, the college incurred a $44 million judgment for defaming the owners and an employee.
And it fabricates a raft of “disparate impacts”, that old bugbear of civil rights warriors since the 1960’s. College degrees aren’t distributed evenly among social groups, and some groups have protected status in law and court decisions (the Civil Rights Acts and the Griggs decision). As the college degree becomes a de facto test for employment, the brunt will fall disproportionately upon these groups. A new college-industrial complex has taken shape to provide new barriers to job entry and advancement, whose relevance to work performance is more hypothetical than real. The case is laid out beautifully by Frederick M. Hess and J. Grant Addison in National Affairs, “Busting the College-Industrial Complex” (see here).
I suspect that a social bias is at work in this call of “college for all”. Most people making the push come from social strata who predominate in college admissions. It’s how they did it; it’s how their parents did it; it’s how everyone in their well-to-do neighborhood does it. When they get into positions of influence, it’s their preferred prescription for everyone to reach elevated levels of esteem. For them, anything else is for the hoi polloi.
Pres. Obama with daughter Malia, who attends Harvard, and Pres. and Mrs. Clinton with Chelsea who attended Stanford.
Illogic abounds in the process. On the one hand, they complain about the escalating cost of college; on the other, they push as many people as possible into it. It’s as if college advocates want to suspend the relationship between demand and price. You can’t, and when you try, the disjunction will show in other damaging ways.
To put it bluntly, college isn’t for everybody. Nor should it be. Anyway, the heralded thing is debased beyond recognition. Many of our young would be better served if they looked elsewhere for personal growth.
Former deputy Scot Peterson being led away in cuffs.
Scot Peterson is being charged with felony child neglect and 11 other counts. He’s the sheriff’s deputy who was assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He stayed out of the line of fire as staff and students were cut down by a murderous teen.
The lesson is clear. If the leading lights of the Democratic Party have their way, certain legal gun owners of today will find themselves criminals. In the end, after we are disarmed, we may find ourselves one government worker’s emotional disposition away from death.
The Peterson episode illustrates the danger of a disarmed public and the threat posed by dependency on government employees for your simple right to breathe. That’s the promise of Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, the bulk of the Democratic Party’s presidential field, and the rest of the party’s shoguns (no pun intended).
Who knew that politics would come to have such threatening implications?
This has happened more than a few times in my 30-year teaching career. As part of a broader discussion, a kid will define a “conservative” as one who opposes change. That’s not the end of it. What follows is a train wreck of logic. Diving deeper, we find that the kid is hung up on the root “conserve”, which to the student means to stand athwart “change”. And “change” is synonymous with “reform”. And “reform” is “good”. That’s etymology, or a loose rendering of it. When did etymology become a substitute for philosophical reasoning? Somehow it has for the masses of the young passing through our schools into adulthood.
To set the record straight, “conservative” is one of many philosophies – in common usage, call them ideologies – that have bounced around our world for the past few centuries. Other modern examples would be “liberal”, “progressive”, and “Salafist Islam”. A philosophy/ideology is a simple set of judgments on how the world works.
The terms are also labels. What fits under the label can change over time. A “conservative” of 16th century England would support the aristocracy and a Catholic-style Church of England (High Churchmen in the parlance of the day). However, by the 19th into the 20th centuries, “conservative” came to be defined by the liberty agenda of Locke, Burke, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, the now-defunct British Whig Party, and our founding fathers. Amazing as to what a few centuries can do.
If “conservative” can be defined by a liberty agenda, what of “liberal” and “progressive”? It’s easy to knock these two things out since they have morphed into the same thing. A “progressive” (or modern liberal) begins with an unexamined, unacknowledged, and unstated assumption about history. For them, the past is deficient, the present is an improvement, and the future is an advance on an inferior present. An appropriate progressive metaphor for the human experience would be a chairlift up a ski slope. It’s the unstated view of History curriculums in our schools, and part and parcel of the Obama rhetoric of being “on the right side of history”.
Some serious implications soon follow. For instance, who is the most capable of ferreting out the trajectory? Academics, of course. They, the knowledgeable, have the wherewithal to peer into the past and present and guide us onto the true path of human betterment. It’s the dawn of the administrative state and diminishment of the rough-and-tumble politics of popular sovereignty. Now, the way is laid open for an academically-trained civil service to guide and direct us. Say goodbye to the citizen republic, guns, and the spontaneous order of free markets. Life is reduced to the prescriptions of empowered social technicians.
The administrative state.
The Soviets tried to do the same thing on meth. It was called central planning.
“Science” is the buzzword. Science is, indeed, a great thing … but not when a little bit of it is extrapolated into airy historical predictions and social abstractions. Take for instance Marx’s “scientific socialism” and “dialectical materialism”. Take for instance the Green New Deal. At this point, “science” is no different from religious mysticism. The conclusions are no longer tethered to Earth’s gravity but have zoomed past the asteroid belt.
So, what do we have? We have one line of thought rooted in a firm grasp of human nature with all its flaws. Does the Old Testament sound familiar? Out of the idea comes the rule of law and constitutional republics as checks on the evil men and women can do. By contrast, the other reasoning means reform, reform, and more reform. Everything is turned topsy-turvy forever, and all under the direction of a set of planners with the latest zeitgeisty truths-of-the-moment. Be prepared to constantly queue up for shortages will be the afterbirth.
The Soviet Union in its latter days suffered from a birth dearth (and still does) and plague of alcoholism. I don’t think that the rule of dogmatic, degreed social managers comports well with our nature. The planners, as it turns out, have the same flaws as the rest of us. A social miasma will descend on life.
Steve Forbes in “Forbes” (April 30, 2019) reviewed Rich Karlgaard’s book, “Late Bloomers”. In the book, Karlgaard makes the point that there is no hard timetable for human flourishing. When we act as if there is one, we disfigure our kids and their future. We go further in creating a cult of youth and shuffling the old out to pasture. In the end, I can’t help but think that we are fashioning our young into future clients of the therapy and counseling industry, and increasingly dragging in the government as financier. Taxpayers, watch out, for the taxman cometh.
Evidence of the mauling is all around. Parents will stretch themselves into bankruptcy court to move into a “nicer” neighborhood for the so-called “good” schools. The schools aren’t better; the student body is just better dressed with better cars in the parking lot.
And the kids are more likely to do the homework. But what’s in the homework? It’s the same deficient curriculum for the most part.
Guess what? This is all about cosmetic resume-building. Make sure to get the AP on your high school transcripts; go to the right summer camp; crowd your kid into as many organized sports as possible; do a charity for the way it’ll look to the college admissions officer. When does the kid have the breathing space to simply be a kid?
The college entrance cheating scandals are a sign of the trend. Do all of the above, and if that doesn’t work, or if the kid hasn’t done it, cheat. We’re creating a world of facile and sterile expectations.
But where does wisdom fit into the grand plan? It doesn’t. In a world of only looking good, wisdom has no place. Wisdom doesn’t arise from a mad race to fill a resume. Life, family, and faith have a much greater bearing on personal resilience and true happiness. And for some, maybe most, that takes awhile.
A Stanford prof is quoted as saying that the incoming freshman are increasingly “brittle”. Indeed.
Students in Los Angeles protest the November 2016 election result.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) pegged. Yes he did, without ever laying eyes on the spirited millennial.
Solzhenitsyn in his 3-volume novel on Russia in the runup to the Bolshevik Revolution (August 1914, November 1916, and March 1917) sought to explain how Russia could turn into the 74-year nightmare called the Soviet Union. In so doing, he spends much time on the fashionable currents of thought among college students in the few years before the Revolution. His account is fascinating for its parallel with our own youth’s growing affection for socialism and a host of chic causes. In both generations, the enthusiasm for their infatuations is matched by an unwarranted confidence in their judgment.
Some might rightly use the word “arrogant” in describing the mental disposition of more than a few of our most hearty firebrands, then and now. Humility would require something other than an absolute faith in their youthful “answers” to life’s real or imaginary problems. Sounds like AOC. Combine the cock-suredness with a prescription that centers around the empowerment of the state and we have all the makings for disaster.
First, let’s take a look at an MSNBC townhall with AOC from April 1, 2019. Watch the whole thing to have a feel for the march of unexamined assumptions and faulty reasoning.
Now, compare the above with the book. In a scene from August 1914 (pp. 334-348), two university students on a Moscow holiday before they were to report to artillery school run into an elderly college acquaintance and professor on the street. The three agree to go to a pub for beer, food, and conversation. The back-and-forth is enlightening.
The two university students in the story are Sanya and Kotya and the elder sage is Varsonofiev. Here’s Varsonofiev making one of the young minds realize their affection for the state.
Varsonofiev: “But if you are a Hegelian you must take a positive view of the state.”
Kotya: “Well, I … I suppose I do.”
Kotya was unaware of this basic assumption in his thinking till the old guy brought it to his attention. He would have to embrace the state as savior for his reasoning to make any sense.
Does AOC show any evidence of a similar “Oh, I see” moment? Nowhere in her unchallenged comments on MSNBC does she say anything like, “We must give government more power”. Instead, it’s left unstated and abstract. Her favorite word is “mobilize” – a verb – as in mobilize everyone to the cause (her climate-change cure). Who’s doing the mobilizing? It won’t be AOC and her merry band of climate-change barkers who’ll convince the nation’s entire populace to voluntarily jump on board the train to the carbon-free utopia. If she’s relying on that, the growing number of dissenters will exercise an early-term abortion on the scheme. Clearly, she’s not telling the audience that an omni-competent state will have to be created to manage the people’s lives in the minutest detail. And, of course, AOC and kindred spirits will do the managing. It’s sooooo unstated.
What’s the historical experience of activists who created such all-powerful governments? The 20th century showed that the supposed failures of the marketplace were pale next to the ensuing government failures. Such a thought will never grace the mind of the youthful zealot. That would require the humility of recognizing the possibility of being wrong. Don’t expect it from AOC.
Another aspect of these conversations – whether in a Solzhenitsyn novel or AOC interview – is the prevalence of the procrustean fallacy. To be “procrustean” (adj.) is to enforce “uniformity or conformity without regard to natural variation or individuality”. For instance, activists frequently use “people” as if the people are an undifferentiated mass. The same would be true with the litany of ethnic, gender, and racial groups: all African-Americans, Hispanics, women, and evangelical white Christians think this or that. AOC does it with “all scientists”, along with the rest of the demography in tow. It’s how she tries to make her opinions incontestable.
Varsonofiev catches Kotya in the same falsehood. Here they are talking about the “people”.
Kotya: “What we need is a strict scientific definition of the people.”
Varsonofiev reminds him of the foolishness of attempting to know “the people” as a uniform whole: “Yes, we all like to look scientific, but nobody has ever defined what, precisely, is meant by the ‘the people’. In any case ‘the people’ don’t just comprise the peasant mass. For one thing, you can’t exclude the intelligentsia.”
Kotya responds by compounding the error: “The intelligentsia also has to be defined.”
Varsonofiev counters: “Nobody seems capable of that either. We would never think of the clergy, for instance, as part of the intelligentsia, would we?”
Trying to make Kotya understand the problematic nature of his thinking is doubly difficult when his answers are so obviously true … to him! Ditto AOC. Her responses to her self-defined prediction of environmental doom are festooned with “We’ve got to do ….” Our young congressional zealot gets away with it when MSNBC lines up on the stage (see the above video) fellow travelers in the climate-change apocalypse movement and create the false impression that all questions are settled and now all that’s left is building the omni-competent state … on the q.t. of course.
The scene wasn’t an exchange of views but more like the mutual reinforcement of the like-minded. The program had all the atmospherics of an evangelist’s tent-meeting revival.
More to the point on the arrogance of the young, in an exchange on the proper form of social organization, the old master set the record straight for our young interlocutors on our ability to make the best form of government.
Kotya: “So you don’t think that the rule of the people is the best form of government?”
Varsonofiev: “No, I do not.”
Kotya: “What form of government do you propose then?”
Varsonofiev: “Propose? I wouldn’t presume to do that. Who is so rash as to believe that he can invent ideal institutions? Only those who suppose that nothing valuable existed until the present generation came along, who imagined that whatever matters is only just beginning, that the truth is known only to our idols and ourselves, and that anyone who doesn’t agree with us is a fool or a scoundrel.”
I’ll get to the direct reference of youthful arrogance in a moment. It’s coming. But here Sozhenitsyn goes after another favorite gambit of people like AOC. It’s the “right side of history” thing. AOC is symptomatic of a kind of person who sees that their views are especially ordained since history, in their adolescent reasoning, leads to the present moment and their opinions. They are therefore justified in dismissing and silencing opposing views. Now that’s arrogance!
Varsonofiev continues: “Still, we mustn’t blame our Russian youngsters in particular, it’s a universal law: arrogance is the main symptom of immaturity. The immature are arrogant, the fully mature become humble.”
Pow! The eight-ball is sunk in the corner pocket. In AOC’s mind, the answers are so simple, and she won’t hesitate to bull rush her solutions down the throats of any who disagree. She has all the arrogance of the immature.
The presence of AOC on the national stage gives us a chance to peel back the scab on the festering wound that is the intellectual bankruptcy generated by our failed schools. AOC throws out terms from a textbook as if their presence in a textbook is all one needs to know of their veracity. She uses “market failure”, “externalities”, and “social cost” as if their use is ipso facto proof of any claim that utilizes them. Her understanding is that of a textbook and not the workings of a critical mind. She throws out the terms to impress her audience. It’s another form of arrogance recognizable to Solzhenitsyn.
A truly thoughtful mind would be more skeptical. Completely absent from her thought process was a limiting principle, the simple idea that there are other concerns to limit their application. If “market failure” condemns free markets, then its replacement, government, also elicits “government failure”. If “externalities” (effects on those not a party to an action) condemns capitalism, then what of government’s “externalities” of illegitimacy and crime stemming from the Great Society programs? If “social costs” (the costs that befall society as a whole) condemns free markets, do such negatives accrue to government actions, and are the alleged social costs a sufficient excuse to ignore the benefits of the action in question? For AOC, she appears to be ignorant.
Maybe Varsonofiev’s maxim should be altered. Instead of limiting the adage to the factors of maturity and arrogance, we need to add ignorance. Thus, immaturity leads to arrogance because it is based on ignorance.
The making of the omni-competent state democratic can’t paper over the hot mess. There are certain things that shouldn’t be a matter of democracy. Democracy can’t make the immoral moral. Democracy oughtn’t willy-nilly confiscate my property or invade my freedom of conscience. Democracy isn’t a license to trample on my God-given rights. Indeed, they come from God (or Nature according to Locke and Jefferson) and not the state.
If all this is true, we’ve just laid the foundation for free markets. Are you listening AOC?
