Saturday, August 22, 2015
There are all sorts
of ideologies out there, and most of them are easily found to be
flawed. I will write about three obviously wrong ideologies that have
had – or now have – vastly more power than they deserve to have
had. These are neo-Nazism, Marxism and political correctness.
Of these, Nazism is
the easiest one to refute. There is no such thing as a master race.
For 1000 years that were the Dark Ages, the white man was at the
bottom of the world, and China was the world's greatest country. The
Jews are not a uniform entity; there are all sorts of differences
among the Jews, with Orthodox Jews behaving much like the Muslims,
the Conservative Jews much like the Americans, and the Reform Jews
much like the French. Finally, if Jews had, as Nazis claim, all the
power, and if Jews had been, as Nazis said, evil, then the Nazis
would be facing a firing squad. That they are instead free to spread
their rubbish shows either that Jews are not in control, or that the
Jews are so good as to tolerate even the people who want to kill
them. In either case, the claims of the Nazis are obviously false.
Marxism is also not
that difficult to refute. Central to Marxism is the obviously wrong
concept of historical inevitability – that the history is
inevitably working toward creation of worker's Utopia. This claim is
likewise easily refuted. There is no such thing as historical
inevitability; all sorts of orders rise and fall for all sorts of
reasons. The businessman is not a thief; he is someone who assumes
the financial risk for a project and gets things done. And class
struggle – a believable concept in rigidly stratified societies
such as Tsarist Russia and Confucian China – becomes much less
believable in places where there is social mobility, and where
someone can rise from humble upbringing to become a billionaire or
President of the United States. The problems that the Marxist wants
to solve through class struggle are solved much better through social
mobility; and this is the reason why America has resisted Marxism as
something that's inconsistent with American values.
Political
correctness, for its part, encourages a lazy-mindedness which shames
wrong ideas – as well as ideas that are not as wrong - instead of
refuting them. This is entirely against what academia is meant to be
about. University is meant to be a place of education, not a place of
indoctrination. Wrong ideas are meant to be confronted by better
ideas. And if it as easy as it has been for me to make effectual
refutations of two major hostile ideologies, then shame it be on the
academia to not be able to produce the same.
The real way to
refute stupidity is through intelligence; and that is the case with
all of these ideologies. Real intelligence should be cultivated, not
shamed or attacked. The smarter people are, the greater becomes their
ability to resist foolishness and evil. The better decisions made,
the better the life for everyone.
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