Shelby Steele wonders about the left and hate in the Wall Street Journal. What's it all about, Alfie?
Allow me to differ.
You are going to find hate wherever you find politics. The whole point of politics is to rally your people and mobilize them against some existential threat. This is the basic situation of every hunter-gatherer band. It must mobilize its people, particularly its men, to fight against the neighboring tribe whenever necessary. The way this mobilization is achieved is through the hate of the "other."
The existential threat may be human or animal of vegetable or mineral. The same principle applies.
Now, it is my belief that the need for politics in our modern age is much diminished, due to the remarkable characteristics of what we call the price system, a notion of social cooperation that peacefully adjudicates the vast majority of differences between people.
(Of course, the "price system" is not in fact a system, which implies Newtonian mechanism, but an emerging phenomenon by which people adjust their expectations about products and services offered by humans to other humans.)
But our lefty friends believe that peace and justice can only be achieved through politics; it requires lefties to organize and mobilize the wretched of the earth, seize the levers of political power, and impose a system of justice, wresting power away from the ruling class, and bestowing it upon the said wretched of the earth, and bending the arc of history towards justice.
In order to organize and mobilize the wretched of the earth it is necessary to teach them to hate the perpetrators of injustice, exploitation, and oppression. Because that is how you organize and mobilize humans to struggle against an existential peril. People do not have to be "carefully taught / To hate and to fear." They don't really need to be taught at all. Hate and hear come naturally to humans once they have been introduced to an existential peril.
So of course the left is always ginning up hate.
The left believes that whatever injustice or whatever problem there might be in the world at this instant, the solution is organizing or activism or political action to force a change through a government program.
But that means teaching people to hate, because otherwise you won't get them riled up enough to vote for you, protest for you, and get in the face of the hated people that are standing in the way of peace and justice and emancipation and liberation.
Do you see the problem here? We are seeing it right now with the Kavanaugh nomination.
And this is something that I don't think the left thinks about too much. They get themselves all hated up and mobilized and the activists get out in the street and protest and get in the faces of GOP politicians and maybe shoot up the odd congressional baseball game.
But what if the rest of the community feels threatened by all the protest and the activism? What if they return the hate and the fear of the noble activists and protesters? What if they rally and organize politically against the lefty activists and community organizers?
This is something that I think our lefty friends don't think about. Probably because their activism and their protest is really a religion. And in a religion you don't think that, gee, maybe we should take it easy and not frighten the horses. Your faith is your truth, and the only way to save the world is to propagate the faith and bring everyone into the faith.
Well. I've been wondering for a while whether this latest evolution of the left is going to follow the arc of The Sixties. The Kidz and the activists and the media all thought they were going to change the world, but first thing that happened, the American people elected Richard Nixon to be president with a vice-president that purported to represent the Silent Majority and had speechwriters that composed speeches about "nattering nabobs of negativity."
Is that happening right now, with the Cold Anger being felt by chaps like Conservative Treehouse? Who knows? That's why we have elections.
But the bigger issue is my notion that -- with the advance of the price system and market relationships to negotiate differences and disagreements and lubricate human social cooperation -- we moderns need a lot less politics and a lot less force.
Maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe politics and government and force and activism and protest really are the way to make the world work.
But I have a dream. That humans can and will submit their pride and conceit and rage to the market and its prices. And we will all live happily ever after.
How did the American left--conceived to bring more compassion and justice to the world--become so given to hate?"It began in the 1960s," according to Steele, "when America finally decided that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings."
Allow me to differ.
You are going to find hate wherever you find politics. The whole point of politics is to rally your people and mobilize them against some existential threat. This is the basic situation of every hunter-gatherer band. It must mobilize its people, particularly its men, to fight against the neighboring tribe whenever necessary. The way this mobilization is achieved is through the hate of the "other."
The existential threat may be human or animal of vegetable or mineral. The same principle applies.
Now, it is my belief that the need for politics in our modern age is much diminished, due to the remarkable characteristics of what we call the price system, a notion of social cooperation that peacefully adjudicates the vast majority of differences between people.
(Of course, the "price system" is not in fact a system, which implies Newtonian mechanism, but an emerging phenomenon by which people adjust their expectations about products and services offered by humans to other humans.)
But our lefty friends believe that peace and justice can only be achieved through politics; it requires lefties to organize and mobilize the wretched of the earth, seize the levers of political power, and impose a system of justice, wresting power away from the ruling class, and bestowing it upon the said wretched of the earth, and bending the arc of history towards justice.
In order to organize and mobilize the wretched of the earth it is necessary to teach them to hate the perpetrators of injustice, exploitation, and oppression. Because that is how you organize and mobilize humans to struggle against an existential peril. People do not have to be "carefully taught / To hate and to fear." They don't really need to be taught at all. Hate and hear come naturally to humans once they have been introduced to an existential peril.
So of course the left is always ginning up hate.
The left believes that whatever injustice or whatever problem there might be in the world at this instant, the solution is organizing or activism or political action to force a change through a government program.
But that means teaching people to hate, because otherwise you won't get them riled up enough to vote for you, protest for you, and get in the face of the hated people that are standing in the way of peace and justice and emancipation and liberation.
Do you see the problem here? We are seeing it right now with the Kavanaugh nomination.
And this is something that I don't think the left thinks about too much. They get themselves all hated up and mobilized and the activists get out in the street and protest and get in the faces of GOP politicians and maybe shoot up the odd congressional baseball game.
But what if the rest of the community feels threatened by all the protest and the activism? What if they return the hate and the fear of the noble activists and protesters? What if they rally and organize politically against the lefty activists and community organizers?
This is something that I think our lefty friends don't think about. Probably because their activism and their protest is really a religion. And in a religion you don't think that, gee, maybe we should take it easy and not frighten the horses. Your faith is your truth, and the only way to save the world is to propagate the faith and bring everyone into the faith.
Well. I've been wondering for a while whether this latest evolution of the left is going to follow the arc of The Sixties. The Kidz and the activists and the media all thought they were going to change the world, but first thing that happened, the American people elected Richard Nixon to be president with a vice-president that purported to represent the Silent Majority and had speechwriters that composed speeches about "nattering nabobs of negativity."
Is that happening right now, with the Cold Anger being felt by chaps like Conservative Treehouse? Who knows? That's why we have elections.
But the bigger issue is my notion that -- with the advance of the price system and market relationships to negotiate differences and disagreements and lubricate human social cooperation -- we moderns need a lot less politics and a lot less force.
Maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe politics and government and force and activism and protest really are the way to make the world work.
But I have a dream. That humans can and will submit their pride and conceit and rage to the market and its prices. And we will all live happily ever after.
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