“Thank you, Kim” is not precisely what I want to say but I needed to read The Frivolity of Evil. I think everybody needs to read this piece, and discuss it, because it’s overwhelmingly important. With the question of “moral values” raised by the pollsters here after the election, and the sneering reaction of the Left to the response, it’s especially timely. Theodore Dalrymple writes in City Journal of what he most accurately terms “the frivolity of evil,” echoing things I’ve seen and read literally for decades.
It does not do this piece justice to excerpt, but I must. A couple of weeks ago I reprised a much older fisk I’d done long before I started blogging. The author of the piece I fisked was a self-professed utopist liberal. Among the characteristics he attributed to Liberals was the following:
“Liberals have a fundamental faith in the ability of humans to better themselves and act appropriately when the situation calls for it.”
Read Dr. Dalrymple’s take:
My work has caused me to become perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with the problem of evil. Why do people commit evil? What conditions allow it to flourish? How is it best prevented and, when necessary, suppressed? Each time I listen to a patient recounting the cruelty to which he or she has been subjected, or has committed (and I have listened to several such patients every day for 14 years), these questions revolve endlessly in my mind.
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Intellectuals propounded the idea that man should be freed from the shackles of social convention and self-control, and the government, without any demand from below, enacted laws that promoted unrestrained behavior and created a welfare system that protected people from some of its economic consequences. When the barriers to evil are brought down, it flourishes; and never again will I be tempted to believe in the fundamental goodness of man, or that evil is something exceptional or alien to human nature.
That’s the difference between theoretical and experimental. Yet, as we’ve all seen, while the experimental evidence overwhelmingly disproves Liberal belief, they go on believing it. Or acting as if they do.
Dalrymple goes on, in damning detail, to illustrate his fundamental points. Please, please read this. Think on it long and hard. Pass it around to friends and relatives. Get into arguments over it. Make Liberals defend their positions regarding what he illustrates.
Thank you, Kim, for pointing me to that post. I think I’ll go be ill now.