That title was inspired by a great line from Walter Russell Mead:
As I've said before, this movement is anarchistic in spirit: it is driven by a magical belief that if we destroy the thing we don't like something we will like will most wonderfully grow in its place. All we have to do is care enough. The global warming crowd are no different. Mention nuclear power—which is pretty much the only viable way to produce lots of power without CO2—and they protest even louder. Virtually all contemporary leftist protest movements work on this sort of irresponsible logic.
It's not an accident. For generations now, well-meaning people have taught kids that imagination and will are all it takes. Do you remember the adult who told you that, "You can be anything you want to be, you just have to set your mind to it". Imagine there's no problems, it's easier than working for a living. Students go to university intending to learn job skills but their professors teach them that it is more important to learn to question authority and be critical of social values than to learn how to write well. After several generations of this, we have hit the point where many university professors couldn't teach students how to write well even if they wanted to for the simple reason that no one taught them in the first place.
I remember, way back in the 1980s, hearing gay activists say that the only reason a cure for AIDS had not been found was that governments didn't care about gay men. Similar arguments are made about breast cancer and women. The implication being that all we have to do is care enough and we'll cure these diseases. With it goes the corollary that any failure proves ill will.
The protestors have no intention of fixing anything themselves or even of indicating what they think will solve the problem. Someone else who is somewhere else is supposed to already know how to solve the problem. This has to be the case because, in the protestors' view, the problems only exist because of ill will.
And thus the reason why these protests always end in violence and disorder. That's not an accident but the intended result. The point is to keep attacking and tearing down until someone else makes all the things you don't like go away. Oh yeah, just one more thing, the solution, whatever it is, will not involve nuclear power, corporations, pesticides, guns, non-organic foods or men.
As you were.
... greens shrieked hysterically and furiously that the world’s house was on fire. That may be true, but the greens were suggesting that all we had to do was collect enough unicorn sweat and then we could use that to put out the fire.He's writing about global warming but the line applies to all sorts of political issues. To take just the great protest of the day, think of how the Occupy protestors resisted putting up any coherent list of demands. They thought it was enough to point at a problem.
As I've said before, this movement is anarchistic in spirit: it is driven by a magical belief that if we destroy the thing we don't like something we will like will most wonderfully grow in its place. All we have to do is care enough. The global warming crowd are no different. Mention nuclear power—which is pretty much the only viable way to produce lots of power without CO2—and they protest even louder. Virtually all contemporary leftist protest movements work on this sort of irresponsible logic.
It's not an accident. For generations now, well-meaning people have taught kids that imagination and will are all it takes. Do you remember the adult who told you that, "You can be anything you want to be, you just have to set your mind to it". Imagine there's no problems, it's easier than working for a living. Students go to university intending to learn job skills but their professors teach them that it is more important to learn to question authority and be critical of social values than to learn how to write well. After several generations of this, we have hit the point where many university professors couldn't teach students how to write well even if they wanted to for the simple reason that no one taught them in the first place.
I remember, way back in the 1980s, hearing gay activists say that the only reason a cure for AIDS had not been found was that governments didn't care about gay men. Similar arguments are made about breast cancer and women. The implication being that all we have to do is care enough and we'll cure these diseases. With it goes the corollary that any failure proves ill will.
The protestors have no intention of fixing anything themselves or even of indicating what they think will solve the problem. Someone else who is somewhere else is supposed to already know how to solve the problem. This has to be the case because, in the protestors' view, the problems only exist because of ill will.
And thus the reason why these protests always end in violence and disorder. That's not an accident but the intended result. The point is to keep attacking and tearing down until someone else makes all the things you don't like go away. Oh yeah, just one more thing, the solution, whatever it is, will not involve nuclear power, corporations, pesticides, guns, non-organic foods or men.
As you were.
I don't think WRM gives an accurate assessment of the situation (some greens have come out in favor of nuclear power and are not really comparable to platform-free OWSers), but here's a much earlier post on the same idea.
ReplyDeleteGood point. I think mistake that Mead and I have made here is to focus too much on the particular ideologies. I'd still bet there are more greens and Occupy people susceptible to this sort of thinking than, to pick a couple of examples from opposite ends of the political spectrum, pure Marxists or libertarians. And there are probably at least some people in every camp susceptible to this. And it is probably also true that we all have fallen into this pattern of thinking at least once in our lives (most probably between the ages of 17 and 24).
ReplyDeleteThe legitimate point is that it isn't a function of what people believe so much as of how we believe it.