Childhood Instinct Affirmed

SCANALYZER Context
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As a child, way before I ever heard the word ‘manichean’, that was how I saw the world. I simply believed that was how it worked - good versus evil; my own inner dialogue, writ large. Then, my professors showed me the many shades of moral uncertainty; things were many shades of gray, they said. For a time, as I focused on professional studies in medicine and law, I set aside such musings as I pursued excellence. Had the “centre held”, I might have let it go at that. But it hasn’t - “things are falling apart”. “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity”.

My own innocent understanding, to finish paraphrasing Yeats, submerged as a young adult - but not drowned - has resurfaced in old age. In childhood, I now see I had it right and today, the world can only be understood as a grand struggle between good and evil. If I tried to catalogue it all for you, my head would explode.

The ethos of our times literally reeks of Stygian vapors. These are pumped through the ubiquitous fire hoses of what was in the past, actually media; greatly augmented by (anti)-social media. Now, obviously to those whose reason has not been sufficiently corroded by the relentless poisoning of what passes for public discourse (and thought, if such a thing exists), the very cultural air we breathe is made intentionally toxic - especially so when a Republican enemy occupies the White House. The relentless leftist propagandists continually project their own utter malevolence on those who oppose them, those who are actually virtuous. Charlie Kirk was the apotheosis of such virtue, both personal and civic and you couldn’t miss what was said about him. Is there any more powerful evidence of evil at work than when leftists unabashedly celebrate the public murder of a peaceable man seeking dialogue?

This topic would be better served by one with more strength and endurance (and maybe less emotion) than I can muster. My wife and I spent the afternoon watching college football. Letting pass the collapse of amateur sports in favor of paid college athletes, I was worn out by just the commercials. They can’t leave anything unsaid or unseen. They describe a “culture” in free fall. More than half the time, I had no idea what product was being hawked. It was a witches brew of words, loud sounds, flashing lights/strobes, impossible bodies and tortured movements. Yup, our so-called culture in a series of 15 - 30 second ejaculations; signifying nothing (to borrow from another soon-to-be-forgotten - and likely censored - writer).

There’s much more to be said to call out the evil afoot in our world. I’m just not up to it, saddened as I am by the death of the optimism and ascendant good into which I was born in 1944. Perhaps fellow Scanalyst members might like to crowd source a list of the many emboldened evils we are facing?

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The Crazy Years
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In asking you to crowd source a list of evils, I will put forth some of what I see as the most active and dangerous:

  • “progressive” lust for raw power to force their “received wisdom”, their set of incoherent (and often bizarre) rules on everyone. They are explicitly doing so “by any means necessary”. It’s not like history has no obvious lessons showing how this inevitably turns out.
  • Islamic spokesmen (aided and abetted by Western leftists intent on destroying Western civilization) insist Islam is merely a personal belief system like Judaism and Christianity. They deny it is primarily a political system, a supremacist one, whose primary goal is world conquest. The Quran specifies requirement for killing or oppressing all infidels, everywhere. Today, in the UK, people are jailed for stating these obvious facts; this has been given the disingenuous name of “Islamophobia””. It should go without saying that phobias are imaginary. Fear of beheading by scimitar (or box cutter) is instinctive and real - not a mere “phobia”. It is based, in part, on many witness accounts (over centuries) and numerous instructive videos made public to show proper religious practice, complete with quoted Scriptural justifications.
  • Please contribute activities, persons or groups which you see as evil. You understand the “don’t be judgmental” dictum has been preached to inoculate the entire population (to obtain herd immunity) against seeing the truth, i.e., that all cultures are clearly NOT morally equal.
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For some reason, this topic dredged up a long forgotten (repressed?) memory from my childhood. Inspired by the WWII movies popular at the time, we kids invented our own game – “Best At Falling Dead”. We played this in a field bordered by a low wall. One kid would hunch down behind the low wall and be the “shooter” with a loud imaginary machine gun. The rest of us would charge across the field, screaming, pretending to shoot at him until we felt the urge to be shot and die in the most spectacular manner we could imagine. The “shooter” would choose whoever was best at falling dead, and that kid would take the place of the “shooter” for the next round. This game could go on for hours.

Looking back on it, we had no idea about who we were supposed to be playing. All we knew is that we were the Good Guys, whether playing the part of the “shooter” or of the troops trying and failing to reach the wall. There was no sense of good or evil in our world … only that we were good.

As time went on, this positive view started to fade. I began to see the world as shades of gray. Our history classes never mentioned England’s Opium Wars against China, or that country’s leading role in shipping slaves to the Americas. I learned that the Scandinavians (in those days seen as the peak of civilization) had given us the word “slave” by their practice of enslaving the Slavs of Russia and selling them in Byzantium.

I learned there had been no good reason for World War I that left graves scattered across France. Nor had there been any good reason for the US to send its citizens to die in that war between European colonialists. World War II had been started by England & France declaring war on Germany … not the other way around. And the peoples of the USSR had borne the brunt of the heavy cost of defeating Germany. England which went to war to preserve Poland ended up leaving Poland to the tender mercies of the USSR at the end. Millions of Germans were uprooted from their homes in what became expanded Poland, many of them remaining in refugee camps for a decade after the war ended … no Right of Return for them.

China invaded and occupied Tibet at about the same time Israel was founded, but those who shed tears over the “Palestinians” had no concerns about the cultural genocide going on in Tibet.

Yes, the message was that no-one had clean hands. Almost every group or nation could point to its glories … while turning its back on the darker parts of its history. We are not all equally bad, and some of us mean well and try to do good (as we see it) … but all of us have it in ourselves to do evil.

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I agree completely. We are all capable of evil but may also choose to not do it. My sense is that, beginning with the Enlightenment, the sum of those doing good began to exceed the impact of those doing evil. I’m not sure the function is linear, but an inflection point had been reached and the good began to win out. Somewhere around the 1960’s, I think that changed. Nihilist and arrogant leftist (redundant, I know) voices became louder and their stridency began to ascend. Who would have believed even as recently as 20 years ago socialists would be running for President, Senate, Congress, Mayor of NYC? These socialists now openly advocate Marxism. It is frighteningly clear to me another inflection point has been reached and we’re headed not toward the greater good, but back to feudal times, complete with religious inquisitions, excommunications (those are here already among the ‘woke’), soon guillotines and/or burning at the stake. Civilization is far more tenuous than most of us have believed (and that rosy scenario does not include the possibility of the next Caliphate taking hold in North America).

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