Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
It is always dangerous to equate objective reality with subjective judgments. The first step towards becoming a fanatic is to assume that only stupid or evil people could possibly disagree with what seems to be so self-evident.
Since we are not omniscient, each of us can only perceive existence from our own unique perspective. Our mentality, background, emotional composition, and values combine with our limited perceptions to produce that supreme product of the human mind: an opinion, a value judgment, or our best guess.
Human judgment is not mathematical. We are not characterized by logic. The contemporary psychological philosopher Jonathan Haidt describes our minds as being composed of an elephant and a rider. Our rational capacities, the rider, strives to guide massively more powerful primal passions and visceral drives.
The very first thing that most people must do in a crisis is to bridle their adrenalized instincts and struggle to think clearly. This is about as easy as a Mahout employing all of his skills to keep a panicked Indian elephant from stampeding. While possible, such an urgent task is always fraught with danger.
Faith does not merely come from experiencing some kind of revelation. It is a choice to accept a particular revelation.
Our convictions derive from pre-existing values, prior decisions, and earlier understandings of meaning within our subconscious. Together, these elements of our intuitive mind assess any new evidence brought before it in relation to what it has already concluded about life.
If the new evidence is in harmony with previously established convictions, then well and good. If new data runs counter to prior wisdom, then either it will be discounted as irrelevant or we will face a challenge to our guiding assumptions.
Will we be intellectually honest and mentally fit enough to put in the required time, energy, and cogitation to really wrestle with these new implications? Are we willing to entertain the possibility that our previous convictions are now insufficient? Are we prepared to develop “new and improved” convictions in their place?
None of this is easy, and it is certainly not merely rational. Being a believer in anything is one of the biggest things that we choose in our lives. Faith is precious, and it is not always religious. For some, political philosophy supplants religion as their fundamentally essential belief.
All of this explains just how difficult it is for any person to reconsider their guiding faith. Many liberals, progressives, social democrats, anarcho-syndicalists, socialists, and communists all came to their convictions through sincere hard work and serious reflection. Their political philosophies are as deeply held as are my own Christian faith and Conservative convictions.
Even so, given their stances on so many issues, how can anyone in good conscience support today’s Democrat Party?
Preferring illegal aliens to legal immigrants and American citizens, supporting citywide riotous insurrections that persist for days or weeks, encouraging a medical mutilation of children and teens worse than African female circumcision, accepting as normal injuries to girls and women perpetrated by transvestite male athletes, opposing reasonable policing, actively undermining
law and order, cheering when rogue judges exceed all precedent and perniciously interfere with executive governance, prioritizing an extreme vision of planetary ecology over the pressing needs of countless human beings, abiding breathtaking levels of personal corruption in leaders so long as they adhere to the party line, encouraging economic collapse to increase widespread dependence on the government, opposing victory in war to bring about a crisis that leads to revolution, dividing all human beings into mutually antagonistic interest groups based upon birth-characteristics or sexual preferences, and thoughtlessly decrying all opponents as being evil thought criminals: these are but a few things that today’s Democratic Party supports.
Precisely how can any intelligent and well-meaning person give support to such nightmarish positions? Do millenarian utopian ends justify these most wicked of means? How can anyone other than the most monomaniacal zealot ignore the human costs of such positions? How could anyone be a Democrat, today?
