“Empowerment”

I have dozens of newspaper/magazine articles before me by Leftists championing the Empowerment of the Poor, of Women, of Blacks, of every demographic in the West deemed to be oppressed.

But the exercise of Power without Intelligence, Moral Integrity or indeed any concern for what is True and Right, is a recipe for a world given to self-interest, hatred and ultimately chaos.

Such is the world bequeathed us by the contemporary Left, a ludicrous world in which those who lack either wealth or power are championed by mindless simpletons whose devotion to Inclusiveness precludes them from considering either the Moral or Intellectual status of those they would empower.

Are the “oppressed” in many cases the victims of injustices, both past and present? Of course they are! But are they also often the products of their own distinctive attributes and/or failings? Absolutely! Rational, mainstream “conservatives” are therefore fully in favor of programs designed to help those in the lower socioeconomic echelons, while at the same time willing to admit that the failure of those programs to produce the statistical parity so sacred to the Left, may be the result of the simple, unequivocal diversity of the species.

The “moral” outrage that permeates the articles I have before me is based upon a perspective that is pathologically superficial. The assumption that Women, as they represent 50% of the species, ought therefore to occupy 50% of every board of governors, ludicrously assumes that Men and Women are psychologically, temperamentally and therefore intellectually indistinguishable. The assertion that they are not is neither an indictment or endorsement of either gender, yet a necessary response to the absurd failure of those who consider themselves “progressive” to acknowledge the obvious complexities of the human dynamic.

As Biology, while certainly not deterministic, has much to do with the roles Women choose to pursue, so their traditional Culture has much to do with the lifestyles of many of Canada’s Indigenous. That that Culture in no way incited the sort of aggressive, typically Western application of Reason to life’s various challenges, is at least in part responsible for the failure of many of today’s Indians to have escaped the poverty of their reservations. That many of those who have done so have thanked their Residential Schools for the education they received there, suggests those schools, while certainly less than perfect, were not perpetrators of cultural genocide but purveyors of legitimate, pragmatically essential information. Or course as pragmatism is now considered a Western value, this statement apparently smacks of White Supremacy. Such is the vacuity of the Left’s Gospel of Empowerment that it precludes any mention of those values, both Intellectual and Moral, which might lead the “disenfranchised” to a more meaningful and rewarding life. Yes, in keeping with Marx’s Materialistic Determinism, it excoriates the rich and powerful simply for being so, while otherwise ignoring the Inner Life of Man as a significant factor in the historical dynamic. Truly profound!