H. L. Mencken: Yet Another Idiot

H. L. Mencken stated that love is an illusion that a woman is different from all other women.

The implication here is that all women are the same. I ask Mr. Mencken, Are all men the same? Are you the same as Adolf Hitler?

A frequent claim about romantic types is that they have no rational intelligence. I can reason well enough, and I rejoice in taking apart attitudes that are stupid and cruel. This is the case with Third Wave feminism; this is the case with personality psychology; this is the case with most of what has come out of Adler and Freud; and this is also the case with Mr. Mencken.

So Mr. Mencken thought that all women were the same. This is completely wrong. There are ways to go between Brittney Spears and Phyllis Schaffly. Women are not all the same. There are good ones and bad ones, and most are good in some ways but not in others. The same is the case with men.

On the other side I have found the attitude that feminism seeks to celebrate the goodness of all women. Do feminists celebrate the goodness of all men? Most of them do not have much good to say about any number of women, especially women who are kinder and prettier than themselves. And many of them are driven by hatred, both of men and of kinder and prettier women.

Now I can see why a woman may be angry if she has a brilliant mind, but all that people care about is the size of her breasts. However a woman also has the right to be angry if she is kind and intelligent, and other women attack her because she is also pretty. The women in my family are all of the above, and I will not stand to see them attacked by either side.

And no, I do not lust after any of them.

On both sides we see both cruelty and stupidity. And that is a deadly combination. Any number of them have deluded themselves into thinking that they are the only intelligent people out there. They are not. In fact many of them have proven to be more stupid than the regular people whom they despise.

When you add cruelty to stupidity, you get something hideous. You get things such as Nazism. And it then becomes incumbent on everyone else to vigorously confront and overcome such things.

When Mencken died, he was described as a sage. No, he was not a sage. He was yet another idiot. So was Freud; so was Adler; so were Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon; so were any number of others. He was articulate enough, as were these others. However all of them were wrong. And their errors and their fallacies have made the world worse for everyone.

Women are not all the same; men are not all the same. We will always see the good and the bad in both. And it is time that more people confront such poisonous beliefs and practice attitudes that are truthful and not ones that are transparently and obviously false.