Posted on 03/25/2021 7:54:19 AM PDT by Heartlander
Are you secretly a white supremacist? Do you unknowingly hold racist views deep within your heart? And—dig deep now—Do you believe the earth is flat?
It's very likely that the number of flat-earthers in the United States is much higher than the number of white supremacists. The flat-earthers are certainly better organized. They hold meetings, conduct experiments, maintain web sites, and so on. But we don't require our politicians to regularly denounce flat-earthism. We don't make public policies designed to root out and re-educate suspected flat-earthers. HR departments don't hold employee seminars on recognizing signs of flat-earthism in ourselves and others. We don't hold school assemblies requiring students to recognize that they may have flat-earth tendencies despite how vehemently they deny it. We don't even censor flat-earth speech online.
No, we just recognize that some people have mistaken beliefs and we go on about our business. If we could do the same with "white supremacy," life in the United States, particularly in our schools, would be much less fraught with manufactured racial tension.
Some people are racist, it's true, just as some are sexist, impolite, unhygienic, or generally unpleasant to be around. Many hold mistaken or superstitious beliefs. This is a fact of life that cannot be changed. It would be terrific if absolutely everyone were pleasant, kind, and well-informed, but this will simply never be.
Once upon a time, schools focused on getting children to the well-informed part, along with socializing them to become pleasant and kind as well. Most children are reasonable enough to absorb these lessons and go on to become decent, productive citizens. Recognizing that this will happen is a sign of a confident society of adults who have faith that children acculturated with good values—provided by moral institutions like churches, families, and community-organized schools—will grow into responsible citizens.
Why would we continually force children and adults to denounce a view (such as flat-earthism, or, say, racism) that is universally thought to be mistaken and harmful, refusing to take their word that they do not hold it? It's a sign of deep distrust of both humanity and our own ability to transmit our values to the next generation. A confident culture transforms savage children (all children are born savages) into decent adults. A culture of anger, suspicion, guilt, and denunciation cultivates savagery and produces nasty adults.
When society is structured to reward those who are decent and reasonable, the benefits to being both are obvious. But our society now rewards the aggrieved, the aggressive, the indecent, the unreasonable, and the distrustful, obscuring the benefits of virtue. Even worse, those aggrieved, aggressive, distrustful people have been rewarded with positions of power. They are now running the show and claiming to have the magical ability to unearth the mistaken beliefs hiding deep in the hearts and minds of children and adults.
Susan C. OlmsteadSusan C. Olmstead is a freelance editor and preschool teacher in Cleveland, Ohio.
Nice piece. I do think our society is, on the whole, clinically insane right now. Hard to know if we will recover at all, but I do wonder what people might think 50 years from now, looking back what we’re doing to ourselves.
Some of the flat eathers are just trollin’
If our Earth was flat, it’d be sunny all the time with the moon out and no tides.
Yes, some of us, i mean them are just trollin.
Author Richard Dolan argues that we are heading into a 4th stage of Humanity.
From hunting and gathering, to settled agriculture, to industry & science, and now we are now about to enter something new: the transhumanist stage - and it’s horrifying.
Societies go through periods of insanity more often than we would like.
Unfortunately, when I tried to search the internet for examples, I did not find a lot. Clearly, I did not come up with the correct search terms. But I’ve read about cultural insanity before; I even have an ebook about a period of insanity that occurred in the 1800s.
“Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in 80 generations” for our civilization rather than the normal “Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in 3 generations” for families.
“Why would we continually force children and adults to denounce a view (such as flat-earthism, or, say, racism) that is universally thought to be mistaken and harmful, refusing to take their word that they do not hold it?”
Because they need scapegoats. Totalitarianism is the end game, and that never works without scapegoats.
Definitions are the problem.
Most ‘thinking’ people have only contempt for the subhuman scum that think race means one individual is more likely to have greater cognitive capacity or ethical reasoning than others.
I’m sure such exist, I’m equally sure the world would be a better place if they were expiring from a gaping chest wound or dangling from a lamp post. If that’s “White Supremacy” then sure, stamp it out, clean the gene pool.
But if the definition is something akin to having and acting on the belief that Western, rational culture, as epitomized by our Constitution, is the best implementation of civilization balancing personal freedom with the preservation of the rights of all, then obviously the person holding that definition is the problem, not our constitution or civilization.
Me too.
I weep.
Honestly..... I could give a flying frack at a rolling donut as to what anybody thinks on how I should think.
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