Socrates famously said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
In the Second Century A.D., Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius declared: “The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.”
Sixteen centuries later, Enlightenment thinker and American founding father Thomas Paine insisted: “To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”
In the Nineteenth Century, the apparently prescient Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky asserted: “Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to affront the imbeciles.”
More recently, the oft cited George Orwell, ironically a staunch supporter of the Collectivist Dementia that has led to the contemporary assault on the Rights of the Individual, decreed: “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.”
No Twentieth Century writer is more loathed by “liberals” than Ayn Rand who passionately believed that a civilization willing to sacrifice the integrity of Human Intelligence to the dictates of what is today called “inclusiveness,” must inevitably devolve into a condition of savagery. The Left’s surrender to the impulses of the least thoughtful among us, those who have abandoned the traditional moral imperative of Self-Knowledge for the convenient option of Victimization, has ended exactly as she predicted.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, the squalor of our contemporary Western Culture can be traced back to the 19th Century’s “intellectual” rebellion against the Enlightenment, a rebellion typified by William Blake’s assertion that “objective reality” ought not to keep Man from his heart’s desires. For Blake, apparently, should a man run into a brick wall [i.e., objective reality] and suffer serious injuries, it’s the wall’s fault and not his own. Energized by this recipe for self-indulgence, many of the 19th Century’s cultural icons were alcoholics or drug addicts, often afflicted with syphilis or gonorrhea by their early twenties.
Disdain for “objective reality,” both biological and historical, pervades the Left. Should the Truth be upsetting to any demographic, the Truth must be banished. In “Voltaire’s Bastards” the sanctimoniously “progressive” John Ralston Saul spends much energy demonizing Reason as a heartless tool of oppression. Hence the mainstream’s absurd propensity for attacking every issue in its purview with intentional superficiality, focusing only on those aspects of reality which fit its narrative while irrationally excluding all else…… i.e. George Floyd’s death had nothing to do with his lifetime of bad decisions and criminal behavior but was merely a result of the admittedly poor judgment of Derek Chauvin, who, by the way, is but one of those thousands of White racist cops that make life for America’s Blacks almost intolerable.
Truly profound! I ask once again, how do those who subscribe to such superficial crap sleep at night?