“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)
Exposing the falsehood of egalitarianism has been a persistent theme here. Americans have been so miseducated for so long that many people seem to think that the document promulgated by the patriot Congress at Philadelphia in 1776 was the Declaration of Equality, rather than the Declaration of Independence.
It is self-evident that universal liberty must result in vast inequality, and that a coercive program to impose equality can only be attempted at the expense of infringing liberty. Notice I said “attempted” — equality can never actually be achieved, and the radical fanatics who urge us to pursue equality (or “social justice”) as a goal are only leading doomed fools down a Road to Nowhere.
Minds hypnotized by the repetition of glittering generalities — Progress! Rights! Democracy! — cannot think clearly about facts, and find themselves incapable of refuting sophistry, a point I sought to make in a November 2008 American Spectator column:
If homosexuality is a right, and denying legal recognition to same-sex marriage is a violation of that right, then the rage of gay activists against their opponents is entirely justified. Proposition 8 does not deny tolerance, safety and freedom to gays and lesbians, whose right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is as secure in California as anywhere in the world.
Tolerance, safety and freedom are not the same as equality, however, and equality is the freight that liberals seek to smuggle into arguments via “rights talk.” Gay activists do not construe their “rights” in terms of liberty, but in terms of radical and absolute equality. They insist that same-sex relationships are identical to — entirely analogous to and fungible with — traditional marriage.
Common sense resists this assertion, perceiving something fundamentally false in the gay marriage argument. Yet it seems common-sense resistance can only be justified by resort to religious faith, through the understanding that men are “endowed by their Creator” with rights. Eliminate the Creator from discussion, and it becomes impossible to refute the activists’ indignant demand for equality.
Egalitarianism is a ravenous monster. We cannot feed it and keep it as a pet. Bob Belvedere perceives the fundamental problem:
We have to face the very uncomfortable fact that most of what we have been told and what we were taught our whole lives is simply not true. We have spent our whole lives absorbing and processing knowledge that has been filtered through the funhouse mirror of Leftist Ideology.
Read the whole thing.
