Tuesday, October 8, 2013

What's Wrong With This Picture?


A friend of mine sent me a shot of this poster, which he found hanging on the wall of an exclusive Connecticut private school. I have a suspicion that it can be found in lots of classrooms across the country. Seldom has progessivism been so neatly captured.

Oh, c'mon. It's nice that the short boy can now watch the ballgame. What problem could anyone have with that? 

Well, let's imagine this was a real situation, and the boys, hoping for a better view of the game, scamper around and find three boxes. The tallest boy, realizing that his short friend still won't be able to see, gives him his box. Anything wrong here? Absolutely not. It's civil society in action, where people help others of their own volition. 

The problem is that that's not what the creators of this poster meant, not at all. The words don't read, "It's nice to help your friends." Rather, they speak of "justice," clearly meant as an imperative. You see, liberalism never trusts people to do the right thing, so the force of law is deployed to guarantee a desired outcome. Coercion is always the first and last answer, in this case spoiling the opportunity for the tall boy to do something nice for the short boy - not because he had to, but because he wanted to. The civil society is undermined.

Let's imagine further. HUD issues a federal regulation that boxes must be provided for short boys at all sporting events. Further, the boxes must meet various federal safety codes, lest a boy fall from one that was sub-standard. Come the inevitable box shortage, it happens that at some ballparks there aren't enough boxes to go around. Protests ensue, with angry demands for "fairness." Realizing they may have a federal lawsuit on their hands, but unable to procure enough compliant boxes, the ballpark owners consult their lawyers and decide to raise the fences high enough such that no one can see over them, tall or not. Problem solved.

And there is progressivism, in a nutshell. Equality created through coercion by dragging those at the top down. It never works out like the poster, where all are raised to the highest level, and it isn't supposed to. In real life it is so much easier to bring people down than raise them up. Just ask Bill de Blasio, New York's radical mayor-in-waiting.

The poster also suggests that justice and equal results are the same thing. This is a dangerous concept that has justified more tyranny, mostly of the Marxist variety, than just about anything over the last century. Looking again, the tall boy definitely has an advantage when faced with a tall fence, but what of other contexts? Perhaps the short boy is a brilliant student. What measures will be suggested then to even that score? 

Don't laugh. At a school one of my children (briefly) attended, parents were told not let their kids study anything above and beyond the curriculum, lest they get ahead and damage the self-esteem of the other, less motivated kids. Can't make this up.

Despite decades of evidence as to its disastrous effects, the intellectual left has never abandoned its Marxist longings. They won't call it by its name, of course, but the primal urge is still there, and the agenda still being pushed. Sometimes even in cute posters for our kids.

16 comments:

  1. Very well said. No matter the mountains of evidence that Marxism is a brutalist, murderous, elitist and repugnant ideology/sociology, the intellectual left is relentless in actively pursuing the dream of a communist/Marxist society worldwide.

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  2. The crux of the entire piece, which is brilliant, is here: "Liberalism never trusts people to do the right thing.... The civil society is undermined." I have heard more than one liberal use the "people are bad" theory as justification for all kinds of power-plays.

    Well done Scott.

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  3. Yes Scott. All correct. "You can't force equality without destroying liberty" I always say and I'm sure you would agree with me. What is equality any way? Different people want different things. If you were able to force equal wages, who would decide what jobs we all did. Hence the loss of liberty... Onward Scott!

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  4. The Left wants equality of results, rather than of opportunity, and is much more focused on leveling down (which is easier) than leveling up. I read that a school in Berkeley stopped teaching certain science courses because minority students did less well than whites.

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  5. I encourage a watching of this interview with Thomas Sowell. He was a marxist for 10 years before he turned free-market capitalist. He explains why this type of thinking is doomed to fail. http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/uncommon-knowledge/98376

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  6. Good essay

    The other point that is not at all understood, is that you cannot have Freedom and Equality. A society tightly controlled by govt can be ‘made’ equal, but not then free. The second order effect beyond the capacity of the less informed voter to understand is that when the govt forces equality in a thousand direct and indirect ways, it takes away freedom, MOSTLY from those given equality.

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  7. Excellent - and you can extend the logic even further. The philosophy of lowest common denominator equality for everyone betrays basic human biology and the fact that individuals [by definition] will always have significant differences - not to mention the reality that humans are made happy and fulfilled through personal accomplishment and not through hand-outs. Liberals never want to concede these basic truths, despite the fact that they're fundamental to evolution and the development of the species throughout all of history. I consider liberals to be arrogantly ignorant to think they've uniquely reached a magical level of enlightenment, different from anyone else in history. It's too bad that they have superficial/shortsighted "niceness" on their side, because everything else about their philosophies is empirically dumb.

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  8. Justice vs. equality is a new one for me, Scott. The left usually holds up equality as the ultimate civic virtue—i.e., one that is superior to freedom.

    Given a choice between equality of result, which requires government coercion, and equality of opportunity, which only requires equal rights before the law, progressives will chose equality of result every time. Why? Isn’t freedom good? We want fairness!

    Justice brings in a whole new angle. Is it just semantics? Well, everyone already knows that conservatives are against fairness. Now it can be shown that we are against justice!

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  9. Spot on as usual, Mr. J.
    I must say, as we plunge deeper into this nanny state I am turning my back on some of my core beliefs -- I am trusting people less to do the right thing... because many don't want to or don't know what that is b/c they're waiting for someone from the government to do it for them. We have wide swaths of the populous who are no longer self-reliant --or have never been at all. This is our undoing as a republic. I admit I'm a fatalist, but a realist too.
    And reality bites (these days).

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  10. @Joe I guess part of my point here is exactly what you say: big government removes incentives for people to behave well, so they don't. The tall boy is conditioned to know that the government will take care of the boxes, so he doesn't even have to think about it. Worse, big gov can incentivize BAD behavior. Witness the Aid to Independent Mothers program, passed as part of the Great Society, which did nothing but produce more fatherless children.

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  11. It is always interesting to see how liberal views are distorted by people who think they know better.

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  12. Your entire argument is based on what I think is the mistaken idea that Justice is something that is per se meted out by government. That is not true. I can create justice in my own world without government involvement.

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  13. @Dorothy While you are technically correct, that's not how the left uses the word at all, and it's not the message of the artist or those who hang it at schools. The left is all about using the government (i.e. coercion) to solve all of life's problems, large and small. It is their first, second, and last reflex. You almost never hear the left argue for civil solutions to things. The "social justice" movement, for instance, is entirely predicated on using the government to knock the rich down a few levels. It has nothing to do with asking the rich to, say, donate more to charity. "No justice, no peace," does not mean let's work things out amicably among ourselves.

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  14. I'm very interested in the origins of this picture itself. You said a friend of yours sent you a shot of this poster, which he found hanging on the wall of an exclusive Connecticut private school. Would it be possible for you to inform on this page, or to contact me as regards this school? Thanks.

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  15. @abdul - I'd rather not say the name as I have friends with kids there and I'd catch no end of grief, but you can find many references to the image if you google it. I imagine the original artist could be tracked down with ease. Lord knows why anyone would want to do that.

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