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Title: The leftist failure of imagination drives most of the world’s current disasters
Source:
American Thinker
URL Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blo ... world_s_current_disasters.html
Published: Aug 3, 2024
Author: Andrea Widburg
Post Date: 2024-08-03 21:24:51 by Dakmar
Keywords: None
Views: 59
Comments: 3
It was fitting that the repugnant, anti-Western opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics closed with a rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” That’s because, while leftists are stars at imagining pie-in-the-sky fantasies, they’re complete failures when it comes to imagining reality—and that’s the cause of most of what’s anti-human and disastrous in today’s world. Leftists are often creative types, which is why they cluster in the arts and entertainment world. They’re visionaries who see grand ideas and, because of their artistic chops, can communicate them well. No wonder they love Lennon’s song about a perfect world free of human complications: Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion, too [snip] Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can But while fantasies can be lovely, and some can even become reality (isn’t it cool how our smartphones are like those imaginary Star Trek gadgets?), what leftists cannot see is the reality right beyond their personal experiences and dreams. Like the baby who believes that the world only exists to the extent he can see it (hence, his delight in peek-a-boo, as that world disappears and magically reappears), if leftists don’t experience something personally or have it created in their imaginations by master manipulators, it doesn’t exist. Image by Andrea Widburg, using AI. I first realized this when I read the Parable of the Broken Window, which the French economist Frédéric Bastiat wrote in 1850. The parable describes a shopkeeper whose window is broken, requiring him to pay to fix it. Some tell him that this is not a problem because the money will eventually come back to him: he’ll pay the glazier, who will use the money to buy something from the shop. As Bastiat notes, though, this is an utterly static view of the economy, which just sees money endlessly circulate. It doesn’t consider the fact that everyone who touches the money keeps some of it, shrinking the amount in circulation, nor does it envision creativity growing that same economic pie. Thus, if the shopkeeper must fix the window, he cannot spend the money on something more useful or necessary. (See, for more, Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics.) And then comes what was, for me, a magical phrase. Bastiat writes that when someone foolishly praises that broken window for allowing cash to circulate, the correct response should be, “Stop there! Your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.” To illustrate the profundity of this, consider the leftist push for gun control. At the top, the movers and shakers want a disarmed population that cannot stop a government that, at least in America, should be the servant, not the master. But the leftist establishment controls the troops by constantly waving in front of them the bodies of those in America who die from gun crimes (a growing number under Biden). In America in 2023, guns were used to kill 20,958 people.* That’s only 0.006% of the population, but leftists can see the bodies and the grieving friends and relatives. The victims are “that which is seen.” What they cannot see, because the left plays information peek-a-boo with them, is the roughly 500,000 to 3,000,000 lives that guns save annually through defensive gun use. The average leftist ” “takes no account of that which is not seen.” The same was true with Obamacare. Middle-class people embraced Obamacare because it promised middle-class-quality healthcare to non-middle-class people. I had an advantage here, though. I have a dear friend who lives among those non-middle-class people. Their concerns are not a nice home, good schools for their children, and a good insurance policy. What they want is shelter, food, and, most of all, drugs—and their standards are minimal when it comes to shelter and food. Many of these (people I’ve met) were outraged that they might be charged $25 a month to pay for medical care they were getting for free at the ER. And they certainly had no intention of changing their habits to live a clean, healthy, and insurance-friendly life. And again, the leftist movers and shakers knew this, but controlling healthcare, like controlling CO2 and guns, is about controlling people. And what they also knew is that their college-educated followers could be made to imagine their own lives without insurance, but would be unable to imagine the lives of those who didn’t care about insurance. And that brings me to Israel and a common point among both leftist Israelis and American Jews—they cannot imagine that the people in Gaza and the West Bank have goals other than peaceful coexistence (although reality has finally intruded on many leftists in Israel). In this powerful video, Gadi Taub explains the leftist reverence for the two-state solution and why it’s finally dying in Israel. I urge you to listen to the whole thing, but these are the key points for the purpose of this post: After Taub speaks about the Israeli reverence for self-determination and human rights, he gets to the meat of the matter at 7:40: It’s a complete fantasy, and it stems from our inability to imagine the otherness of the other. We imagine the Palestinian national movement as we see ourselves, and we know that Zionism was about self-determination. It was about political Independence. It was about making the Jews masters of their own fate. And so we believed that the Palestinians are aiming for the same goal—and they are not and never have. And eliminating the Jewish state is more important to them than their own lives, as you can see in the idea of suicide bomber and in the behavior of Palestinian leadership. Note that Gaza was never built as a home, no matter how much aid the international community (for whatever that term means) has been pouring into Gaza. It all went into terror tunnels and weapons, and they [Hamas] never for a minute told their population that they’re going to take care of their well-being. In other words, says Taub, a failure of imagination has kept alive the ridiculous two-state myth—even in Israel right until the moment that the slaughter began. It was only those who saw earlier the import of reality (i.e., the true motives behind the suicide attacks and the method of Hamas governance) who understood the lunacy of the two-state idea. In America, the cynical leftists at the top of the political heap have always understood that Hamas is dedicated to Israel’s destruction. But American Jews, like the baby playing peek-a-boo, were shocked to see this annihilationist policy play out openly among huge numbers of fellow Democrats after October 7. This week, the cynical leftists are probably going to select Josh Shapiro to herd America’s Jews back into the Democrat camps, where they will again confine themselves only to which they can most easily see—a Jewish Veep. Leftists may be academically gifted (especially when the academics are propaganda), and they may have elegantly fantastic imaginations, but their inability to imagine the world as it is rather than as they want it to be is leading the West steadily toward total destruction.
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#1. To: Dakmar (#0)
To expect Sowell to matter under an anti- white system is just silly.
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