"What World Do We Want To Live In?
There Is A Choice"
by John Wilder
"Every man dies. Not every man really lives."
- William Wallace
"It’s been said that every man dies in a strange country. It’s not original to me, but it does contain a lot of wisdom. As our country is aging, it is changing. I’m just hoping it has better knees than I do. But to illustrate the point, let’s take Pa Wilder:
When Pa Wilder was born, the income tax wasn’t even a decade old. The meaning of a “state” was stronger then than now, though it was subsidiary after the Civil War. Pa was born, grew up, and died living almost all of his time within a 30-mile radius, except for an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe from 1942-1945.
When Pa Wilder passed away, the world had gone from the biplanes of World War I to a fully inhabited space station and regular flights to orbit, and occasional flights to the Moon. The dollar had gone from gold to gimmick, and the question of freedom had gone from “why can’t I?” to “may I, please?”
The world Pa lived in growing up was one that was difficult. If you had a child and couldn’t afford it, you had to find someone to raise it for you. It is undoubtedly a fact that people died of starvation in the United States, and some certainly died because they didn’t have any money.
After the war, though, his generation had optimism. It looked like there was nothing that mankind couldn’t do. The atom had been split. Rockets had touched space. The largest rivers had been dammed and tamed and the only foe to be concerned about was the Soviet Union, and it looked like all of those people ate a diet of potatoes, onions, sawdust, and sadness. A 1950s Hungarian joke went something like this: “Definition of socialism: the incessant struggle against conditions that would not exist in any other system.”
The family had primacy. And culture was built on the idea of that family, and policies at the local, state, and national levels were built around supporting the family and keeping it strong. It worked pretty well. Was there a cultural prohibition against being a tool? Sure. Was there an upper limit on the things that women could do in society? Yeah, certainly there were few CEOs at the time that were women, and there were demarcations between jobs women would normally do, and jobs that men would normally do. Men got the jobs that had higher stress, higher danger, and sure, higher pay. Women got the jobs that conserved the culture, raised the young, and, yup, didn’t pay nearly as well. It was a bargain made not to punish women or men, but as a nod to societal stability based on family hierarchy.
This is the America that was, and more than a few people on the Right look to this as the model of a successful society that creates the ability for mankind to make good on the promise of individual freedom, individual responsibility, a role for religion and celebration of individual success. It is a world where equal chance based on merit is the goal, and winners of fair competition get the rewards.
This goal is soundly rejected by the Left. They look for a model of America that can never be. Their world is an entirely made-up concept of what they think the world should be. What do they think?
• Like Lake Woebegone, all children in their Leftist Utopia are above average.
• Diversity is actually a strength.
• Every deviance in sexuality is celebrated.
• Every outcome is equal, regardless of effort, talent, or merit.
• People have whatever they want, regardless of if they work or not.
• Society owes it to everyone to take from the successful and make them the same as anyone else – equity is the goal.
Whereas I can love the ideas they have as ideas, the truth is that the world cannot be that way. Some children are below average. People who live and work with people that aren’t from their culture typically have lower trust, disharmony, “cultural tension” and conflict.
Oops. Turns out that if you worship the Moon God Gorto and think child sacrifice is okay, Baptists might not be the best folks for the cubicle next to you. And most people won’t applaud if you have sex during Thanksgiving at the table – I won’t explain how I know this.
And outcomes aren’t equal. There are winners, and there are losers. Merit matters. Talent matters. Work matters. If we remove the competition between winning and losing, and celebrate every loser like a winner? You get a society of losers. You get a culture of losers. And who else but a loser would demand what Elon Musk has without doing what Elon Musk has done? It’s a culture that is built on envy of what others accomplish and greed for what others have.
It is a culture that celebrates and encourages failure. Even Leftists admit it. I had a discussion with an acquaintance. He’s a leftist. My conjecture was this, “So, should we wait a few years to start your socialist empire until we have a cancer cure and maybe some better technology? I mean, if you look at Socialist cultures, they aren’t really good at creating things.” “You’re right, it would be better to wait a few years.”
Sure, there’s been corruption since the first human, but not every society is the same. And societies like the 1950s in America had less corruption than any communist society, ever. And, I would argue that society was far less corrupt than society today. The outcomes were better – in most places, a locked door wasn’t required. The outcomes of society have drifted negatively in many ways. You could name them, so I won’t go into what would be a very, very long list.
There’s more to this, but now, the Left is attempting to drive this world towards a future that is based on nothing but a theory that is no more sophisticated than a three-year-old’s version of what the world should be. Is it any wonder that as we get closer to those fever dreams, things get worse? As that author I can’t remember who said, we all die in a strange country. I’m just hoping that it stops sucking."
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