Over at The Catholic Weekly, we take a look at some utter nonsense from Prager U:
Recently, PragerU sent out a tweet that is worth considering since it demonstrates for those still capable of thought the degrading effect that living in an ideological bubble has on the human heart and mind. It read:
“Since the Left is so much more interested in fixing society than in fixing the individual, politics inevitably becomes the vehicle for societal improvement.”
***
What can it possibly mean?
That societal improvement is bad? That’s idiotic.
That politics (which is about absolutely nothing other than rightly ordering our common life) should not be a vehicle for societal improvement? That’s idiotic too, as everybody from Aristotle to Aquinas to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church will tell you.
That politics should be about “fixing the individual”? That’s not just idiotic, but deadly dangerous and the polar opposite of anything any conservative of the past has ever believed. Precisely what nobody in their right mind should ever want is a political regime obsessed with “fixing” individual human beings. The state was made for man, not man for the state.
Advertisement
4 Responses
Translation of the tweet: “Leftists and poor people and minorities, and all those other, lesser, instead of repenting of their own sins as individuals which rightly place them in their lower position, seek instead to remove the privileged, from their deserved position in society by force, so when permitted to participate in government they inevitably try and abuse this privilege to achieve this aim.”
The right’s position is that they are rich because of their individual merit and deserve it, and the poor are poor because they are detective and inferior, so that the only valid and effective way of helping them is to “fix” the poor as individuals to make them more like the more meritorious rich (if it were possible, which it isn’t).
The left foolishly refuse to accept this aelf evident truth (/s) and try and help the poor by removing social inequality and by actually helping them, which cannot work as it’s the poors’ own fault they are poor, and attempts at “societal improvement” are obviously wrong because they take away the rich’s (deserved) wealth or have the effect of inconveniencing the rich, which is messing with God’s anointed. Politics for the right is a zero sum game, its only legitimate function being to preserve “our” people against the rest trying to take their property and privileges away.
Critiquing the crap published by Prager U is pretty much dumpster diving.
Mark spent a couple days here rightly excoriating The American Conservative for their recent quackery, but that’s because TAC used to have (a little) journalistic integrity. Prager never did – it’s been pure blinkered right-wing propaganda from the very beginning.
We shouldn’t waste our time.
– joel
@ Iain
Bang on.
Another way to put it is what I have been writing about for years: DESPITE.
I am better than you, and I will make sure that you know it.
jj