The problem with politics is that it never knows when to stop: especially the politics of our educated-class rulers.
Oh yeah! Let’s protect the workers from the dastardly robber barons. So we wrote labor legislation to privilege unions and set minimum wages and working conditions and everything worked fine until it didn’t and the workers priced themselves out of the market and started dying of despair.
It took about 30 years for the working class to realize that the Democrats don’t care about people like them.
Anyway, nowadays the ruling classes of the world aren’t much interested in workers. They have a planet to save.
Let’s protect and empower women so they can all become “independent women” like Simone de Beauvoir and have satisfying careers just like men. Oh yeah, and vote! That will change the world for sure. But now we have conceited women in corporate HR and education administration and Twitter Trust & Safety making things worse. Meanwhile, of course, in the lower regions women don’t marry much and their kids grow up without fathers. And anyway, who needs TERFs when the age-old oppression against transgenders is tearing the world apart.
I wonder how long it will take women to realize that big government and free healthcare and welfare and programs make things worse for women. I’d say we are at least 20 years away from the aha! moment.
Let’s end the oppression of blacks and teach the racist whites a lesson! Why, slavery was the worst thing since Genghis Kahn. And racist whites did it. So blacks now vote 90 percent for a party that floods with border with illegal immigrants that basically take jobs away from native-born lower-class Americans of every color. Why is it that in wokey North Seattle I see Spanish-speaking workers building homes and raking leaves and building retaining walls, but no blacks?
I’d say it will take 50 years before blacks realize they have been had. Because quotas and government jobs and mostly peaceful protests don’t get you a step towards the commoner middle class where you start to feel some self respect.
And then we come to LGBTs and gay marriage and gender transitions. Because! Gays have been oppressed since the dawn of time! (But did you know that Frederick the Great of Prussia was almost certainly gay?) My take on LGBT is that of actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell a century ago: do whatever you like but don’t frighten the horses in the street.
I don’t know when gays and lesbians will realize that they have been had. They have been so solidly indoctrinated that maybe they are beyond recall. But my take is anodyne. And it is that, if you decide to live your life off the main highway of marriage and children the chances are 97.2 percent that your life will be worse than if you stayed within the guardrails. I’m all in favor of risk and creativity and breaking the bounds of society. That’s what Nietzsche is talking about with his Übermensch and his notion of Überwindung or “self-overcoming.” But, if you aren’t a genuine Übermensch — and I know that I am not — your journey outside the guard-rails won’t end well.
And don’t get me started on climate change.
All these notions were conjured up and implemented by our educated class. Why? Because political and cultural transformation is their religion; it is their offer of redemption from the sin of oppression.
I think that all these educated-class enthusiasms and conceits Make Things Worse.
And the trouble is that in politics you never get a chance to fix things until it’s too late. There is another way, of course. And that is to limit the power of government and the cultural domination of ruling classes.
I know. Good luck with that.