Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Outsourcing and Totalitarianism
I recently had a very enlightening discussion with a liberal acquaintance.
He was telling me that he used to be a hard-line liberal, but that recently he has moderated his tone somewhat due to discussions with people like myself. He still believes that we as a society have a duty to help the poor through welfare and the like, but he now believes it is important to have an armed populace so as to prevent too much power accumulating in the hands of the government. He is a decent guy, and admittedly he’s made big steps in the right direction.
I asked him what he personally was doing to help the poor. Oh no, he is not nearly wealthy enough to do anything of significance on his own. Besides, he has a high-maintenance girlfriend to care for.
I pointed out that his time and labor are free, outside of work hours, and that he could find a way to make a difference that way if he wanted to. Oh no, his free time is much too important.
Clearly he has chosen to put his personal needs, in both money and time, above those of the people he says our society has a duty to protect. In itself, I don’t have a problem with that. The problem comes in saying that we have a duty to the poor, but wanting to outsource that responsibility to someone else - both the money and the time commitment. Someone has to do it, and someone has to pay for it, but it’s not important enough to take even baby steps toward doing something on his own.
It is impossible to draw conclusions about individuals from aggregate statistics. On the other hand, those statistics don’t lie. Conservatives give more money and time to charitable causes than liberals do. They even donate blood more frequently. It’s not someone else’s problem, it’s our problem. Solving our problem requires my participation, not merely my desire for someone to do it. Conservatives don’t outsource the solutions to our problems, we tackle them ourselves.
The opposite of the outsourcer is the do-gooder activist, the stereotypical missionary liberal out to save the world from the evil neo-cons/corporations/racists/conservatives. We all know the type. They devote large amounts of time and money to their causes, and feel irate that the rest of the world doesn’t see those causes to be as important as they do. To them, the power of government is to be used to force other people to give higher priority to their causes, or at the very least, to coerce money out of them, which really is good enough for now as long as we can teach their children the right way to do things.
While this is a more consistent and noble approach, it is also profoundly totalitarian. You will participate, whether you like it or not. If these people were actually wise, like Plato’s philosopher-kings, this might be tolerable. However, for some reason, they seem to insist on clinging to political and economic theories that have been discredited over and over again. They stubbornly refuse to let reality intrude on their idealism. It would be cute, if it were not so dangerous.
I think amongst the populace, there are far more outsourcing liberals than there are totalitarian liberals. The problem comes in that the totalitarians are the ones that take leadership positions, but they are the ones that are most motivated. Due to the fact that the totalitarians are an ideal that the outsourcers wish they could live up to, the outsourcers are very happy to enthusiastically vote for the totalitarians.
That is exactly the dynamic I see taking shape with Barack Obama and his minions. A man with a mission - hope, change, and a better life - if only we all work together. He’s inspiring, and he admittedly has a gift for appealing to the idealistic nature of the outsourcers. He’s gotten them motivated to try to change this country for the better, and anyone who gets in their way had better watch out. I’m already seeing reasonable people being turned into zombie-like groupies, stunned at the possibility that anyone could be anything other than head-over-heels about this guy. I suspect it is only going to get worse.
History has proven over and over that a charismatic fool can win over multitudes of people to his foolishness. The only question that remains is how many people will be able to see through the rhetoric to get at the underlying principles of what Obama is selling. They are not hard to see, if people are willing to look.
My acquaintance, by the way, will be rather enthusiastically voting for Obama.
Comments
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Connie: You really oughta read “Liberal Fascism” by Jonah Goldberg.
Perhaps there’s not so much a difference between the outsourcers and totalitarians as one might want to think...what is an outsourcer other than someone who would use the power of government to collect tax dollars at gunpoint for charity? And how is that to be discriminated from a totalitarian?
geekWithA.45 | 2/24/2008 09:20 AM CDT
