Everybody Sucks Except Me

The contemporary left seems hell bent on starting the war of all against all.

Bellum omnium contra omnes.

It is a Latin phrase meaning "the war of all against all", a phrase used by both Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Jefferson to describe a state of mankind when, in Jefferson’s mind, deviation from principle has progressed to the point the principle is meaningless and there is noting left but “sinning and suffering.”

I haven't completely consolidated my thoughts on the matter but early this morning, somewhere between cups two and three of my coffee, I had a brief flash of realization that what passes for the left of the political spectrum ain’t your granddaddy's 60’s, Soviet style left.

Where the old left at least would proselytize about making life better for the proletariat, this fungal variant believes and acts in ways that is difficult to differentiate from misanthropy. The Soviets just wanted to kill non-Soviets, this branch of the collectivist tree wants to kill everybody.

Everybody sucks and should die.

In their belief system, everything a human does is bad, so we deserve to become extinct.

Perhaps more important than having developed the skill of critical thought is the ability to think of things philosophically. Will Durant, in his book “The Story of Philosophy” informs the reader of the historical role of philosophy and what has happened to that role over the centuries. He writes:

“…theology crumbled, and political theory cracked; invention complicated life and war, and economic creeds overturned governments and inflamed the world; philosophy itself, which had once summoned all sciences to its aid in making a coherent image of the world and an alluring picture of the good, found its task of coordination too stupendous for its courage, ran away from all these battlefronts of truth, and hid itself in recondite and narrow lanes, timidly secure from the issues and responsibilities of life. Human knowledge had become too great for the human mind.”

Critical thought helps us reveal the facts, but philosophy allows us to understand what those facts mean in human terms.

Critical analysis gives us all the pieces, philosophy gives us the box to put them in.

If it seems the absurdity of contemporary life is increasing, I will not argue. Life has always been absurd, and while several branches of philosophical thought evolved to try to explain and understand it, it does seem that forces are conspiring today to create absurdity for the sake of creating absurdity. It is my belief that this is not a random occurrence, rather it is a “movement” of sorts, one coincidental rather that coordinated and driven by a shared ignorance, a state of mental laziness and surrender to the seductive, easy desires of the emotional being that are often destructive over the often distasteful and difficult – and ultimately correct – rational choices.

If you want to cause chaos, you can do it politically – but if you want to create ABSOLUTE chaos – and I mean Marvel Cinematic Universe Avengers Infinity War level chaos – you can’t do that on a nation-to-nation basis – attacks on nations stimulate tribalism and nationalism and lead to a definitive winner. One country will defeat the other or an alliance of countries will defeat another alliance – the conflict becomes binary, antagonist vs. protagonist, good vs. evil, winners vs. losers. No, you can’t afford to do anything that binds people together, your objective is to break them apart. Like nuclear fission, you must attack and break the most basic individual bonds, in this case, not of atoms but those of humanity - and more than that, you must get individual humans to attack each other. You have to break down any commonality tying people together – common religion, national allegiance, race identity, marriage, family, even love…like a going out of business sale, everything must go.

A dislocation of human existence of this magnitude can only be accomplished by using the 3 M’s – misogyny, misandry, and misanthropy.

Men must despise women; women must despise men and humans must despise humanity.

These are the 3M’s of national, cultural, societal, and ultimately - individual - destruction.

And this is happening.

Institutions are being destroyed – the Boy Scouts, the Church, capitalism, our schools – all are examples of institutions under declining power and influence. Gays ally with transgenders to attack heterosexuals and then attack each other. Feminists attack men, the “men’s rights” movement attacks feminists. The rich are attacked by both progressive rich and the poor. Blacks attack whites while despising Hispanics and Asians. These are facts. Critical examination reveals that they are.

A few years back I noted that over 200 years ago, Thomas Robert Malthus proposed that catastrophes such as famine, disease and war are the manners in which Nature culls the population. Thankfully, Western Civilization has largely found ways to avoid such catastrophes – or at least to blunt them. That is a wonderful accomplishment – and if one is truly honest about it, the reason for this is that the ideas of individual social and economic freedom are what unleashed the power of the human mind in a scale never seen in world history.

I’ve said before, and it is demonstrably true, that we are undeniably the healthiest, most prosperous, most free, and most mobile world that has ever existed (and those things are distributed more widely than ever before) but I have to wonder if our very prosperity is our greatest enemy. I also must wonder if there is a valid Malthusian perspective where truth and reason are concerned. It seems that while painful catastrophes like the Great Depression and WWII do cull the population, they also serve to cull from society the irrationality, unseriousness and triviality that are so celebrated in our intellectually lazy society today.

Philosophy isn’t an end in itself – what it does do is allow us to see over the visible horizon. I wish that the writings of people like John Locke, Immanuel Kant, More, Aquinas and Hobbes were incorporated in our school’s curricula. That we don’t teach philosophy is a critical, and perhaps fatal, error.