- The pseudo science of the climate change cartel.
- The pseudo statesmanship of the leftist democrats.
- The pseudo conservatism of republicans.
- The pseudo philosophy of moderates.
- The pseudo intellectualism of the modern university.
- The pseudo religion of fundamentalism — pick your brand.
- The pseudo market of the nationalized no-fault economy.
- The pseudo news from the main stream media.
- The pseudo democracy of the nanny state.
- The pseudo security of the welfare state.
- The pseudo healthcare of socialized medicine.
- The pseudo stewardship of government planners.
- The pseudo sanity of mental health.
- And the pseudo natural born citizen who became president.
People talk about tipping points. I think Americans have reached a tipping point — one where the pretense of knowledge is piling up faster than factual and reasonable knowledge. To be sure, the accretion of factual and reasonable knowledge has greatly accelerated with improvements in technology, but it just looks like the poseurs are winning the day in America. If you read the Victor Davis Hanson piece in the previous entry, as Americans lose their understanding of the liberal arts, they lose their capacity to advance Western civilization. The barbarians in Mumbai last week and the imams who filled their heads with jihadi mush, acted on this weakness as Americans celebrated Thanksgiving with one eye on the TV. The slippery slope of cultural coarsening accelerated (again) as terrorists (again) reduced Western civilization to bloody chunks of body parts and (again) shifted our concept of normalcy toward a state of random violence. The causal thread running through and linking all of this — terrorism, the abrogation of history, the politicizing of all human endeavors — is enabled by disconnection and the interruption of reality feedback. These conditions are necessary precedents if you want people to stop thinking and acting in the interest of their own survival, and they work especially well for the growing segment of the population unburdened by a conscience. All that’s required of us is tolerance, and acceptance that the bounds of what must be tolerated continually expand toward the unthinkable, the horrible, the terrible, and whatever new fad the polity wants to try on for size. Ideals, outcomes, objective measures, standards, fixed points for evaluation, better and worse, good and evil, laws, constitutions, all of these concepts must give way to tolerance. God forbid we become narrow minded.
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.” H.L. Mencken
