Beginnings and Endings

Sometimes things happen simply because they aren't stopped.

This morning in the Spanberger Paradox/Don Quixote essay, a commenter challenged the context and basically described how what begins with lies, deception (including the “self” variety), then comes the tilting at windmills, all ends in malevolence, malignancy and destruction.

He isn’t wrong.

I pointed out that the two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive, they are just different stages of the process.

Confusion on the right side of the fence rests in a few pretty common questions:

Why are they so angry? Why do they hate me? Why do they want chaos and violence?

Considering current and historical events, I think it is because they finally feel the futility of their failed ideology. Coercive collectivism has an unblemished record of 178 consecutive years of verified failure.

I can only begin to imagine devoting a large part of your life to believing in something like that, something that never works.

I don’t know because I’m not one, but it sounds a lot like being a New York Jets fan.

If you think about it, it is easy to understand why the anger, frustration, and lashing out set in.

And when that doesn’t work, the force and murder begin.

We’re not quite there yet, but we are as close as we were in the late 60’s when the communist radicals in the Democrat Party tried to get rid of the “olds” (ala Mao’s Great Leap Forward) at the Democrat National Convention in Chicago and started murdering cops and thought bombing military installations and police stations was a smart thing to do.

How does it stop?

It stops when we stop allowing it. I’m coming to believe that I have invented a corollary to Herb’s Stein’s Law, that says when something can’t continue, it will stop.

My corollary is that sometimes things happen simply because nobody stops them.

I think about that every time I see something happening that shouldn’t be allowed to happen (someone getting attacked, a mob fight, etc.), and the event or situation is surrounded by ten times more people with their phones out recording it (or simply sitting passively) than it would take to intervene and stop it.

It’s like the Abilene Paradox, just on a larger societal level.

The Abilene Paradox is a form of “group think” that results in the worst possible option being chosen and no member of the group getting anything that they want. The Abilene Paradox is an example of how, through lack of care or concern can trigger an event cascade where everybody ends up engaged in something to which they never really agreed. These situations are created through the lack of will to decide (or to just say “no”), how such a low level of concern or interest will allow things to just evolve toward some action that nobody anticipated or desires.

In short, the entirety of the world of progressive activists exists because nobody stopped it. Nobody spoke out about it because it seemed insignificant at the time, we just didn’t care, or we were afraid to care and as the stupid grew and began to move, and it dragged the rest of the uninterested and ambivalent along with it.

It is that way with these ridiculous and illogical ideas, beliefs, concepts and ideologies.

Too often they persist because the people who could, just didn’t call bullshit and stop them.

The left is trying to shut us down, the problem is they are the ones fighting reality with the illogical ideas, beliefs, concepts and ideology. While they may win a few small victories, they can’t win the war.

We can.

Reality bites.