where are the mammoths...

...when we need them?

It was probably a lot easier back in ancient times to figure out who the stupid people were. They were the ones who did things like taunt the mammoths. And they were pretty easy to identify because their heads had been crushed by mammoths. No one ever even contemplated putting them in charge. Then again, back in that time, there wasn’t really any need for Stephen Hawking-level intelligence either, since there was no such thing as theoretical mammoth hunting studies.

Eventually civilization arose, and intelligence became more treasured. Ironically, this created opportunities for morons to thrive. No longer threatened by mammoth crushings, idiots survived and eventually evolved, developing a form of camouflage. Basically, they learned to appear to be smart while in fact being completely useless to society. We know these idiots today as intellectuals.

read the rest, and a few of the comments are interesting too, like this one:

Complex civilizations such as ours typically don’t respond well to the ideas of the Wishful Thinkers and Coercive Utopians who comprise the bulk of the modern American Left. Real trouble begins when the former two sort enable the Lord of the Flies types. Then civilization collapses in a “spread of ruin and slaughter” as Ayn Rand once put it.

We forget that the Western civilization we currently enjoy came to us at great cost, and that most of human history has been one of conflict and misery for all but an elite few.

The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within.

–Will Durant, The Story of Civilization

Durant’s quote applies to us, and to America in particular. We need to recognize the enemies of civilization for who and what they are. Our failure to do so and to act accordingly presents the greatest danger to all that we hold dear. Our latter day barbarians – Islam from without and the anti-intellectual, cruel and sadistic will-to-power driven monsters from within – are the enemies of Western civilization. And neither peace nor copmpromise can ever be made with them – that’s precisely the point of Lee Harris’ Civilization and Its Enemies. This is a ‘must read’ for anyone who cars about the fate of the West. Harris concludes his work with this:

...we must all struggle to overcome the collective tendency of civilized men and women to forgetfulness. For that, in truth, is the ultimate question facing us today. Can the West overcome the forgetfulness that is the nemesis of every successful civilization? If it can, then there is hope that mankind will be able to move forward to a higher stage of historical development. If it cannot, then the next stage of history will be one that we once hoped never to see again.

Unfortunately, I do believe that we will see it again. In this last century – and now, in this one – socialism, communism and all of the various totalitarian ‘isms’ provide nothing more than the framework for the exercise of power – absolute power. Absolute, murderous power, as history has so clearly shown. So, no – they don’t work, and they were never intended to ‘work’ – outside of the minds of fairy-dust wishful thinkers and coercive utopians. The ideologies represented by the totalist ‘isms’ are... responsible for the slaughter of over 200 million people over the last 100 years or so – and the impoverishment and enslavement of hundreds of millions more.

Those driven by the will to power have never given up and the very bad ideas that have animated them have never gone away. And they’re not going to shrug their shoulders and quietly walk away once a few of them are removed from positions of power.