Heraclitus was correct, character is destiny. The universe is more concerned with means than ends. Only human vanity justifies willful wickedness in service to fine ambitions.
Today, I patronized a local baker whose forthright honesty earned the ire of local zealots. As I ordered his fine fare, he told me of the ongoing wrath his establishment has endured because he had the nerve to freely express an original thought.
His shop windows have been battered upon by passersby who shouted obscene invective at him and his wife. A series of bizarrely nasty encounters with vicious fanatics who freely lashed out at him and his have left him disappointed.
How can people be like that, he wondered? How can they, indeed!
Thanks to the intellectual Gulags that pass themselves off as today’s colleges and schools, generations of Americans have been raised without ever learning what it means to be a real American.
No doubt, these caustic true believers consider themselves paragons of tolerance. The professor at the lectern, the post-modernist at the keyboard, and the Diversity-Equity-Inclusion expert in the committee room have together redefined tolerance in a most Orwellian fashion.
Just as “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength”, so on today’s campuses “Censorship is Tolerance”. The ideological monoculture that permeates most K-12 and college faculties and administrations openly damns all contrarian expression as hateful misinformation.
These deconstructivists have betrayed their legitimate mission of acculturating young people into our American variant of Judeo-Christian civilization. In place of intellectual curiosity, they offer terrible certainty.
These false prophets assert that they have the one and only truth; one truth to rule them all, one truth to find them, one truth to bring them all, and in its dogma bind them. Like the Dark Lord who made Tolkien’s One Ring, their cult does not share power.
The seductive power of such self-evident and unquestionable certainty is that it shifts the universal inner struggle between right and wrong outward. Instead of self-critically reflecting upon one’s own personal motivations and choices with the intent to become a better person through humble self-discipline, today’s secular Puritans judge others.
And, how they relish judgment! Every halting pause, furtive glance, uninhibited gesture, and careless word is scrutinized for the slightest hint of thought crime. Taking as their model the public shaming Black Sabbaths of Mao Tse-Tung’s Cultural Revolutionary Red Guards, campus-created Social Justice Warriors “cancel” the impure.
This is where such shockingly un-American intolerance comes from; a politically correct school system which deals with genuine intellectual diversity like Torquemada’s Spanish Inquisition dealt with Heretics and Jews.
Ostensibly to protect their “self-esteem”, generations of American youth have been coddled and overprotected by their schools to keep them fragile and dependent. So very many young people have been robbed of their God-given right to struggle and grow up strong enough to earn objective successes in the wider world. Their weakness is inescapable, and well known to each spiritually stunted young man or woman.
The brittle ideologies taught by totalitarian schools offer an easy way forward without the need to face and overcome this weakness. Instead of grappling with how each might identify and overcome the emotional infantilization that has been perpetrated upon them, today’s youth can make of the wider world their campus safe space.
In school, mouthing the approved slogans, conforming to appropriate speech codes, avoiding problematic creativity, and punishing discordant dissent brought safety and success. If enough of them stick together on script, they can live easily within the comforting security from reality that is their group.
These non-entities make themselves into human locusts, eager to slough off their individuality to surge together as one and scour reality of everything at variance with themselves. Such people cannot abide anything or anyone that threatens their desperate grip on what they call reality.
It is for every well-intentioned person to try to break such young people free from such programming. The ways we can do this are as diverse as we each really are. Scrupulous integrity must be at the heart of any such effort.
We must live each ideal we espouse as best our flawed natures will permit. We must not be hypocrites whose base deeds belie our noble words. We must be unflaggingly honest, even if that means we must say that we do not know or understand; even if we must lose an argument.
Such moral suasions as must be involved as we try to save legions of indoctrinated cultists are not the product of won arguments. One at a time, with humility, and with sincerity, we can demonstrate that there is genuine hope from their learned doctrine of despair.
There are things more precious than safety. Loyalty is better than logic. Hope is better than despair. Creation is better than destruction. Freedom is better than Utopia. Life is better than death.
Most of all, as we are each our own worst problem, every step towards fixing our lives start with us, ourselves. If we each are responsible for the mess we might have made of our life, we are capable of changing our ways. We are each rarely doomed by anything stronger than our own despair.
These sound like platitudes to the cynic, and today’s youth have been programmed to be ruthlessly cynical. Sneering pseudo-intellectualism cannot fathom such simple truths.
Such matters must be lived. Every troubled spirit must be given the space and time to see things as they really are. Only when each wants to change will they ask you how.
Epiphanies happen in those moments. We will not through an act of will break their programming. But, our honestly, integrity, and example might be what God uses to help liberate these lost souls. Pray to be worthy of such a moment.
