The Danger Of A Successful Society: Absurdity

I spend a lot of time talking about how western civilization – in particular as driven by the United States – is easily the greatest that mankind has yet created.  If one looks at it objectively, it’s not even close.  The list of things that are part of the everyday life of people around the world is basically a list of things that were invented or developed in the west.  From cars to planes to advanced agriculture to elevators to plastic and mobile phones and computers and DNA and much, much more. 

But every now and then something happens that makes me question that.  A couple of years ago I watched Matt Walsh’s “What is a Woman” where he spends most of the movie talking to leftists and doctors trying to get a definitive answer to the question of the title.  Most of the time he’s unsuccessful.  The most interesting part of the movie however didn’t take place at a feminist conference or in a studio, but rather in Africa when he was speaking with Maasai tribesmen.  When asked a simple question about whether a man can become a woman, he was quickly given a definitive “No”.  Straightforward, no debate, no hedging. Essentially 180 degrees from the insanity that Matt encountered in the United States.

This was brought back to me last week when reading about Justice Thomas’ destruction of the “expert class” in Skrmetti.  The Justice took direct aim at the notion that Americans must ignore their common sense, relinquish their lives and give up their Constitutional rights to those the elites have pronounced as “experts”.  As we all learned during COVID, with the Hunter Biden letter, and have been seeing with climate scares for decades, “experts” are rarely that, and often are simply shills for this or that monied interest. 

Justice Thomas stated clearly that the government can no longer use such “experts” to manipulate and control the lives of citizens.  Although the specific case had to do with the butchering or harming confused or coerced minors, it applies everywhere else as well.

Which is a very good thing. Because there’s a danger in success – as in a successful civilization.  It breeds complacency, entitlement and most importantly, the loss of a functional memory of how things work and how they became successful in the first place… which leads to an over reliance on “experts”. 

I frequently mention Cyrus McCormick as the man most responsible for the rapid advance of western civilization.  Of course people can argue that others, like Isaac Newton, Jethro Tull, James Watt, J.D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford or any number of others could wear that badge.  I choose to award it to McCormick because he almost single handedly helped 85% of Americans and substantial numbers of others around the world, escape the farm.  Not that there’s anything wrong with farming, obviously, but because of the efficiencies McCormick brought about, 95% of Americans work at something other than farming while in his day that number was in the mid-teens.

So basically he freed up 80% of the nation to go out and be everything from baseball players to scientists to doctors to entrepreneurs to inventors to, sadly, social media “influencers”.  It’s basically division of labor on steroids, where people focus on what they want to do, are good at, or can make a living at, while paying others do the things they can’t or don’t want to do.

That works well when the choices of options are shoemaker, baker, blacksmith, farmer, soldier, etc., i.e. things society actually needs.  It even works when options include things that society wants, like literature or sport or art.  Baseball may not be as critical to the continuation of society as say, electricity generation or infrastructure maintenance, but there’s a demand and people are willing to work for money to pay for it out of their own pockets.

Where it breaks down is when options include things that no one actually wants or needs, yet they get produced nonetheless, or get produced in quantities that make no sense. Things like gender studies graduates, therapists and lawyers. Shakespeare talked about lawyers (as a bulwark against the masses) so we don’t need to.

The fact that gender studies even exist in the first place tells you how far America has moved from the fundamentals of a successful society.  In a normal, functioning universe such things wouldn’t even exist.  While one can at least make an argument that being gay is at least theoretically natural – if still deviant – a universe where men are women, women are men and the difference between the two is “fluid” is a fiction created by people who have too much time on their hands and no connection to how the real world functions.  We’ve strayed so far from the time when 85% of the people worked on farms and did things that actually helped society that we now have people who create an illusion and then set about trying to force society to accept it as normal. 

Another example of this a disconnect between actual demand and supply is therapists. Before the late 19^th century therapists didn’t exist. (Well, they sort of did, but they were your friends.) Today tens of millions of Americans go to “therapists”, mostly women, and white women at that.   Essentially 40% of white women receive mental health treatment in the form of anti-depressants and or therapy.  If you look deeper you’ll see that the numbers skew towards college educated, as in liberal, white women.  Has our ostensibly successful society somehow become so bad that fully 40% of the women of the majority population are now sufficiently damaged that they need mental health treatment? Or are they suffering from a mass psychosis of grievance and guilt created by people being too prosperous and having too much time and money on their hands?  They say that idleness is the devil’s workshop and there is perhaps no better example of the truth than that. While there are certainly people who are in need of mental help, the fact that 40% of any ostensibly normal demographic needs either anti-depressants or therapy is absurd. 

But that’s what happens when society veers so far from the fundamentals of society and common sense that many see a future in pursuing nonsensical fields like gender studies, political science (my major…) and countless others where there is no real demand in society beyond that generated by government fiat. More importantly, without the individual feeling of accomplishment that goes with doing something that actually benefits society, not the least of which is raising good children, people create the absurd in order to fill the void, and then demand society congratulate them for their “courage”.   

Thankfully, we may slowly be coming to the point where the larger society recognizes that absurdity is no longer acceptable, or worse, compelled.  Justice Thomas and Matt Walsh are actually addressing the same thing. Common sense should have to be discarded just because “experts” say it must.

The world is a challenging place with dangers of all sorts around every corner, the sooner America gets back to being a place ruled by common sense rather than absurdity, the better we will be prepared to deal with them…