Seven Uncomfortable Truths For Liberals

The biggest problem with liberalism is that much of it is based on incorrect assumptions about human nature, the government, and how the world works. That's why liberal policies that seem so well-intentioned often have such disastrous results over the long-term. Until liberals start to understand these truths, their ideas will continue to be damaging to their country and the world.

Human beings are born selfish and badly behaved: You, me, your father, Mother Theresa, the Pope -- we were all savage, self-centered little animals when we were born and it was only through the socialization process that we became fit for other humans to live with. That's why people do need religion, rules, and social pressure to be convinced to behave. It's also why projects like communism, which assume that people can be brainwashed to completely disregard their own nature and love their fellow citizens every bit as much as they love themselves, are always doomed to fail.

Change is often a bad thing: It goes without saying that sometimes laws, traditions, and moral practices should be changed, but it shouldn't need to be said that change for its own sake is not a plus either.

Unfortunately, there are far too many people who treat massive changes, changes that have the potential to permanently impact our society in a negative way, very cavalierly. Sure, we'll change the definition of marriage, legalize drugs, weaken the Christian church, allow countless numbers of illegal aliens from a neighboring country to become citizens, etc., etc., etc. -- what could go wrong? A lot, actually.

In fact, if you look back through our history, for every positive change on a large scale, getting rid of slavery for example, you can find multiple significant changes for the worse: like killing children by the millions via abortion and massive increases in illegitimate births because of welfare. That doesn't mean we should avoid change. Let me repeat that: that doesn't mean we should avoid change. However, we should take great care before making massive changes to the way our society works.

People are different: This would seem to be a rather obvious point, but it's one liberals seem to have a great deal of difficulty digesting. In their mind, women and men should be treated as if they have exactly the same predilections and abilities. Different races should perform identically well, in precisely equal percentages, in every activity, and any difference between people must be explained by some sort of unfair societal constraint placed upon the less successful.

However, you must take the uniqueness of the person and the group he's a part of into account. People don't have the same backgrounds, interests, talents, or cultural experiences. Because of that, nothing could be more foolish than to treat every person as if he's an interchangeable widget that should fall into some statistical category to make a bunch of bean counters in D.C. happy.

Most nations are interested in what's good for them: The only thing liberals love better than big government is even bigger government. So, yes, they love using the power of the federal government, but they're even more in love with the idea of building up the United Nations or some other form of world government.

Setting aside the fact that the bigger government gets, the less efficient it becomes, there's another huge problem with the United Nations: it's comprised of individual nations that view the organization as little more than a way to further their own interests, which may oftentimes be in conflict with those of other nations.

The truth is that most people and most nations are primarily interested in taking care of Number One. Moreover, those that don't think that way and feel strongly enough about it to take action beyond a few platitudes or token contributions are few and far between. So since that is the case, any nation that doesn't have strong safeguards for its own national interests in any sort of deal it enters into with other nations or groups of nations, is extremely foolish indeed.

Most of the world operates by the law of the jungle except when they fear the consequences of doing so: Ann Coulter once said that, "the natural state of the world is Darfur. The freakish aberration is America and the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world." Throughout much of history, the idea that most of the world operated by the law of the jungle was so self-evident, that few people doubted it.

However, because the world's only Super Power is a benevolent force that has worked very hard to keep global conflicts to a minimum despite getting very little credit for its actions, many people allow themselves to believe that the world is a relatively ordered and civilized place. That's not so. The prosperous and democratic nations of the world may not have any designs upon their neighbors, but most nations are neither prosperous nor democratic, and the only thing stopping them from taking what they want by force is their inability to do so.

The federal government is by its very nature, slow, stupid, expensive, and inefficient: There are always politicians promising to "reform government" or "make government work," but the federal government always has been and always will be a poor, misshapen tool compared to the free market.

That's because their money isn't on the line and they don't go out of business when they fail. So, the more we keep the functions handled by the federal government at an absolute minimum, the better off we will tend to be as a nation.

Every problem is not fixable: The poor? They are always going to be with us. War? It's always going to exist. Inconveniences and annoyances? We're never going to live in Utopia -- not on this earth anyway.

That's not to say government should never try to help the poor, avoid war, or make a more perfect society. Again, let me repeat that: that's not to say government should never try to help the poor, avoid war, or make a more perfect society. However, there is also something to be said for letting sleeping dogs lie and just accepting that the government cannot and should not try to fix every problem.

That's because not only is it impossible to fix every problem, but because the government's efforts are usually ineffective and often as not, over time, it simply ends up creating a new set of problems to be solved.

Criticisms of liberals can be kept to a much simpler set of arguments:

Your philosophy tells you it is a good thing to hit your hand repeatedly and hard with a claw hammer. You see other people do it and severely injure their hands. But you insist that you have to do it, because you will do it differently, so that it somehow “works”. When you do it, you severely injure your hand, but you insist that it works, that it doesn’t hurt, and it achieves the goal your philosophy promised. It not only worked, but worked better than any alternative could work. Thus, you are a liberal.

When others point out that you have severely damaged your hand, you deny it, and curse at them as being evil for denying your philosophy. When even you cannot ignore the pain, you insist that it is only because you didn’t hit hard enough, or that a vast, right-wing conspiracy of doubters somehow sabotaged the hammer, or your swing, with their vicious and Nazi-like negative thoughts and dark conspiracies.

You demand more and more money, and that everyone’s hammer must be completely equal, as is their swing to hit their hands. Perhaps if everyone swings at the same time, it will finally achieve what your philosophy says it will.

The increasing derision of others to the entire hand banging philosophy you greet by insisting that you are an idealist and a dreamer, not burdened with the bourgeoisie and boring effort to work for a living or raise a healthy and happy family. For you know that all families will be happy, once hand banging with a claw hammer is perfected.

Most of the rest of mankind make you sick to your stomach, because they neither recognize the greater truth of banging their hand with a claw hammer, nor respect it. Fortunately you have many allies in other nations who know the truth as well, unlike the doubting and sinning non-hand bangers in your own country.

It would be a good thing if the vast majority of humanity was destroyed, so that hand banging would be the normal state of affairs. Because surely, those forces strong enough to wipe out the vast majority of humanity would respect the hand bangers as the superior survivors.

Because, in the final analysis, hand banging is what makes the sun rise in the East, what gives the world its seasons, what makes the oceans wet and the sky blue. And if we hand bangers want, we can change any of it.

Thus is the power of hand banging, saith the liberal.

“Religion inspires us to become better people, but I don’t think it is correct to say that without it, people will do anything.”

As a cynic I suspect most people are not really inspired, just working for the reward of heaven, or to avoid Hell.

“I saw a survey recently where people were asked what made them behave properly, and religion was far down on the list. The number one thing that made people behave was social pressure—the fear that their friends would find out what they did and look down on them for it.”

The survey makes my point. They behave because they are afraid of the consequences of getting caught. Not because they want to do the right thing. It would be interesting to compare the responses of believers with non believers. For believers I think religion would be much higher.

Religions teach us we will one day have a world where evil, sorrow and death is banished forever and every one will be happy and at peace with God and each other. That world doesn't now exist and when liberalism denies the task of fighting evil, it takes us all away from the realization of that world here on earth as the dream of mankind. We must be faithful to God, to our wives and children and our fellow men so the kingdom of God can be established within us and in the world. The reformation of the human heart is work we must do together with God. Man unaided cannot achieve a perfect world. Where liberalism goes astray is that denies it denies faith, family and the ideal of transcendent holiness. The very objects of liberalism are just the exact opposite. There is no easy fix for the condition of mankind. So we should ask ourselves how the world will be transformed. Our answer should be wherever we let God in. True change is hard and is the work of many generations. The end of that work is a world those alive then and all those gone before them is one that at that time we will all be privileged to be a part of. Let us then get to the work at hand.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

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