Sultan Knish
There isn't very much progress in the progressive movement. Progress is
the expansion of possibilities. Progressives however have a Malthusian
obsession with the scarcity of all things. They believe that we are
about to run out of everything from energy to water to wealth and
education and that like starving survivors on a lifeboat we have to
redistribute everything.
The
progressive outlook predates the notion of progress. Its ideal is a
static society, sustainable in its material practices and so utterly
moral in its social attributes that it becomes immune to change. It is
founded on the intertwining of the material and the moral through the
insistence that the scarcity of material things makes their
redistribution mandatory by an activist moral elite.
There is
nothing as reactionary as utopia and no group as reactionary as
utopians. A perfect society is a place that is immune to change. The
search for such a society is the quest for an absolute way of living.
Both the quest and the way of living become as unchallengeable as any
theological utopia founded not on bad economics and political
parochialism, but on a deeply spiritual faith.
The progress of
progressives is not a rocket to the stars, but a slow elevator climbing
up a constricted shaft to their ideal society. It's only progressive in
the same sense that a television channel that moves from one show to the
next within the confines of its programming is. It's programmed
progress, not the progress of exploring infinitely expanding
possibilities.
The left is actually deeply conservative. It is
difficult for people in countries being contested by the left to see
this because they observe the left as revolutionary and destructive. But
every attempted conquest is accompanied by violent disruptions. The
domestic left destroys everything it does not control as part of a
cultural war; not because it seeks an open society of perpetual creative
ferment.
Once the left achieves its dream of absolute power in a
nation, that nation becomes socially backward, technologically backward
and culturally backward. There is a reason that the USSR, Cuba and
North Korea were not producing compelling new cultural products for
export the way that their sympathizers in Hollywood did and do. It's the
same reason that they don't keep having revolutions.
The
creative energies harnessed by the left are a revolutionary tool for
achieving an ideal society. Once that miserably ideal society is
achieved, everything is regimented and unplanned change is locked out of
the equation because reactionary progressive utopias have to be
relentlessly planned. Science and culture are forcibly slowed down.
Individuality is discouraged. Conformity produces mediocrity in all
fields. Time slows down and utopia sinks into its own progressive muck.
Americans
had trouble believing that the left of the counterculture had much in
common with the conformist cultural factory of the USSR until the flower
children became professional activists and politicians and ran a system
of stale conformity interspersed with tedious displays of traditionally
transgressive arts. The very slogan, Keep Berkeley Weird, is not
revolutionary. It's traditionalist.
Nothing is more conservative than keeping things the way that they used to be.
On
the opposite coast, the old radical artists and poets complain that the
East Village isn't what it used to be and landmark everything in sight.
Men and women who once did mountains of cocaine fight every bar liquor
license with the outraged spleen of suburbanites threatened with a
landfill.
The paradox of keeping weird things weird is that weird
then just becomes another tradition and another proprietarian cultural
impulse to avert a changing world by clinging to the way things used to
be when you were young and everything made sense. It's not really
keeping things weird, it's keeping the weird things that come from a
changing outside world, out.
Utopians always carry that
narrow-minded fragility with them. Their perfect society is always
doomed by the rising tide of morality in the affairs of men. The more
they try to hold on to it, the more it breaks apart right in front of
their eyes. The left only believes in change when it moves in their
direction. But once change has been achieved, then their ideal is a
static changeless society.
Progress is confidence in human
capabilities. The progressive movement however is tragic. It depends on
the egocentric tantrums of individuals for its philosophy, its art and
its activism; but it firmly believes that only the collective can make
society work. And only the collective can lock it in.
Progressive
utopians project their sense of fragility onto all material things.
Fuel, water and even the atmosphere are all on the verge of running out.
Everything must be safeguarded, counted and put in a locked box where
qualified personnel will only distribute it at need. And that includes
any and all human activities which might cause the warming of the
planet.
Socially they are just as bad. Not only is wealth finite
(except when they're spending it) but so is everything from education to
employment.
The left doesn't think in terms of making more, but
of redistributing what is available. Its goal is a static society in
which everything is "fair", rather than a rapidly progressing society
society that is unfairly distributed, but that focuses on creating,
rather than sharing, and produces more for all.
Progressives
equate progress to redistribution. They view the planet and every
microcosmic society within it as a lifeboat with a finite amount of
supplies to pass around for survival's sake. Their idea of progress is
achieved when the redistribution achieves their ideal of fairness and no
further bouts of redistribution are needed. Since that day will never
come, utopia becomes an economic police state.
The progressive
idea of progress is a sack race with a hundred feet in one sack.
Progress must be communal. It must meet the needs of all stakeholders.
It must comply with every detail of the plan. And so it is no wonder
that we hardly build big things anymore or dream great dreams. Vision is
individual and it's deeply disruptive. It changes the way that everyone
lives.
Visions lead to utopias, but once utopia is achieved,
there is no more room for vision. Visions, like viruses, are competitive
creatures. When a Vision achieves a static order by killing all other
visions, then vision dies, but that Vision remains with its dead hand on
the wheel of history.
The vision of the left is a dead utopia, a
tradition of weirdness and a hoarder's obsession with storing
everything from the economy to the atmosphere in one lockbox before the
sky falls. The utopian is really a cynic, certain that individualism
will unleash everyone's worst impulses, and offering instead the iron
order of his vision.
Utopia believes the worst of everyone and
everything. It fears its own mortality and scents the taste of death on
everything. It is convinced that the sky will fall, that everyone will
starve and that the utter undoing of humanity is only a land use
resolution or unrecycled plastic bottle away.
Progressives lock
everyone into their narrow regimented and regulated idea of progress
because they distrust people and they even distrust the universe. They
are children certain that everything they love is about to be taken away
from them and closet fascists obsessed with their moment of heroism
when they rush out of the phone booth, biodegradable cape blowing in the
wind, and save humanity from itself through a benevolent police state
that extends into absolutely every area of human activity.
There
is no progress in progressivism. There is instead a deep fear of
progress. Utopians fear the unregulated and unplanned and they replace
the true expansive progress of the human spirit with the false progress
of social controls. Human genius is sold on the block in exchange for
bureaucracy.
Progressives view every element of the world, from
the grand vistas of oceans and skies to the minute intersections of
human society as too fragile and limited for unregulated progress. Under
their rule, progress in this country, once its secular faith, has
slowed to a crawl outside of a few select industries that are able to
move faster than the speed of progressive regulations.
The only way to resume progress is to fight the progressive movement.
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