Flat Earth, Round Earth.
I was talking to a very good friend this weekend and of course our talk ventured into politics. We are very like minded, but what's interesting is that in high school he was four hours away from going to Chicago in 1968 to protest at the Democratic Convention. And now, well, reminds me of the Churchillian quote about heart and brains, youth and maturity.
We talk often, and usually we are quite close in our feelings and outlook. But, he and I are also clear that there is no dialogue with the anti-liberty,collectivist, socialist left. Their worldview is that the government is the answer to everything. That the solution to all the problems visited upon us by ourselves (which usually is a response to another intrusive government program) or problems visited upon us by the government is ANOTHER government program.
Well, the truth is that they see the earth as flat. We see it as round. And therefore there is no common ground. Their worldview is diametrically opposed to ours. And all the reason, logic, history, truth is useless in arguing with these people. They have to have a "living" Constitution to be able to pull off their programs based upon their worldview. "You can not reason a man out of a position that he didn't reason himself into in the first place." -Jonathon Swift
Dr. Thomas Sowell has written a superb tome on these elitists called "The Vision of the Anointed-Self Congratulation as A Basis for Social Policy".
A brief review:
Sowell analyzes these "anointed" people and finds that they have several characteristics in common:
- They are absolutely convinced of the righteousness of their views and policies even when mountains of empirical evidence point to the contrary.
- Instead of attempting to understand opposing views (much less debate them), they use verbal sleight-of-hand to evade such views - and even try to denigrate and publicly discredit those who espouse them.
- They have a tendency of hiding behind their "good intentions" when the policies put in place based on their vision blow up in their faces, asserting that things would have been "even worse" were it not for their "vision."
- They view certain aspects of reality that do not conform to their vision as "problems" or even "crises" in need of "solutions," as opposed to systemic processes involving normal human interactions and economic trade-offs.
- In explaining the rise of black single-parent homes since the 1960s, they refer to concepts such as "income distribution," crime, and the "legacy of slavery" in ways that fit ever-so-neatly with their vision, no matter what history, the real world, and opposing views say.
Compare what the anointed see the role of government as being as compared to what Bastiat wrote in the "The Law" ( http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html ) and you'll see that the left is flat earth, we are round earth.
As Dennis Prager said a few weeks back, the left sees the government as the instrument to ensure that life is fair and that outcomes are equal. We see the government is supposed to ensure liberty and justice.
Flat earth, round earth.
posted by Amendment X at 11:26 AM permalink
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