What creates relative resistance to the arsonists? Education. Historical knowledge. The ability to separate good logic from bad logic. Common sense. The willingness to stand out from a herd by saying things contrary to what is being promulgated by the lunatics who captured the podium and the loudspeakers.
So what promotes arson? The sort of indoctrination most of our kids have been getting for some decades now.
To take one obviously relevant example, when you teach kids to be nice and tolerant, what you are also teaching them is an inability to define and enforce boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable, the reasonable and unreasonable, the logical and the laughable.
The practical effect of teaching kids the creed of niceness uber alles is that you have disarmed them, intellectually and morally. They have no ground to stand on. You can say that men can become women simply by declaring themselves to be so, and they lack the words and the tools to say that is ridiculous, and we all know it. We can’t absorb limitless illegal immigrants with no cost. We cannot spend money we don’t have forever.
Nearly all of what Joe Biden is doing depends entirely, for its support–which thankfully is meager and growing smaller daily–on what amounts to the unilateral intellectual and moral disarmament of the West.
No society can be called a culture or even society in which the rules shift continually. That is how you brainwash people. That is how you create trained mice. And such mice live in continual fear and anxiety THEY CANNOT EVEN COMMUNICATE TO THOSE AROUND THEM. All the kids feel this, but very few–only the healthiest–feel able and empowered to talk about it. So most of this unprocessed trauma–and that is what it is, with the gates to society having been closed by the a priori demand each of us renounce our individual perceptions and emotions–comes out as rage.
Anger, remember, I have defined as our emotional immune system. It keeps out social toxins, or at least warns us of their possible presence. Rage, in contrast, is a mixture of fear and anger that arises, in my view, from a place utterly disconnected from our actual environment. It is a poison seeking avenues for expression, not a healthy reaction to a genuinely bad–or potentially bad–situation.
Boundaries equals anger at times. Boundaries equals saying to people “that is not acceptable to me.”
And obviously, it is a tricky business. As one obvious example, homosexuality used to generate feelings of revulsion, violence and anger in many people, men in particular relative to gay men, for whom there were any number of pejorative designations.
It is obvious to me that the Left is doing everything it can to generate as much sexual confusion as it can. This works further to prevent any coherent “boundary moment” as a culture, despite the fact that much of their work is making otherwise healthy kids emotionally ill, in ways that are completely unnecessary and counter-productive.
At the same time, some percentage of people, for reasons we don’t really understand, since the research is politically Verboten, do genuinely seem to be “born that way”. Not all. I personally think many young men are imprinted as gay only after having been seduced by an older man some time in their adolescent years; and that many lesbians have been molested or raped. Lesbianism also makes much more emotional sense for women, just as the promiscuity of gayness makes sense for men, who in their prime want to fuck everything and everyone they see, at least at some level.
The boundaries in all this consist, to me, in asking a simple question: what is healthy? What will lead to relative emotional stability, satisfaction, social connection, and the capacity for effective work and at least occasional feelings of joy, peace, love and compassion?
What will work to facilitate any random grouping of members of our society feeling at home in a room together; or is such a thing even desirable? Maybe we need countless small villages and tribes, even in our large cities, and just need the means to coexist peacefully. That is probably closer to the truth.
Our core problem is that many members of our society have been persuaded it is their LIFE’S PURPOSE to tear down everything, even though they have nothing to replace it with.
Returning to the arson metaphor, it is vastly easier to tear down than build. It might take ten years to build a building and ten minutes to gut it. That is another asymmetry.
And Nihilism is rooted in Nothing. You could not do better than to point out that where a something exists, these people are working to create nothing. Where a positive value exists, they want to destroy it. Where a physical building exists, they want to destroy it.
Destruction is truly “working for change”. A burned out church is different than an intact church. But it is the act of people who are themselves on fire, and leaving smoke everywhere they go, as they slowly burn down to shells of human beings, living spend shadows of lives.
And what is a shadow? It is what is left when light is shined on something real. It has no existence of its own. It depends entirely on something else; or in this case someone else. Without hate, these people are nothing. All of them are slow suicides.