August 27, 2023

Whoever swerves from the path of reality is irrevocably lost in the emptiness of illusions.

– Zoltan Kodaly

Radical progressives – not all of them are leftists – can’t admit, even to themselves, that beneath their professed ambition to improve the world is a passionate loathing of reality and grudge against nature.

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How, according to an argument they would agree with, can anyone tolerate such a cruel and unpredictable master as nature, doling out pain and pleasure with equal indifference and treating health, the means of livelihood, life itself, as playthings?

The answer becomes clear when it is discovered and acknowledged that the givens of reality, including nature, are in fact the beginning of any journey toward progress, a beginning that triggers a release of freedom of action and of creative ener­gy that swings open doors of possibility perhaps never dreamed of.

For if life were free of friction, conflict, risk, constant challenge (conditions laid down by utopians), people would not be fully human but in a sense synthetic copies of humanhood – in other words, fake. Overcoming adversity makes people grow in strength and in health of body and mind. How can being committed to “a perfect future” – undeniably a good motivation for progress – help that goal by ignoring the world we actually live in? How can making mind and muscle grow flabby ever serve a good and noble purpose?

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Human experience over millennia has shown that living in an uncertain world is best conducted when reality and its challenges are embraced, unintimidated by the difficulties. This very human response to the nature of the world and to the nature of being human yields rewards toward progress that are beyond calculation. This may be called the credo of the realist.

As with the marriage vow, realists take nature “for better or worse,” the thorns with the roses, the ups with the downs, the pains with the pleasures, eager to start from there. Pressed to explain why, realists could argue that expecting success without guarantees is like expecting water never to flood or fire never to destroy or people never to lie. That in essence is the attitude of those who do not recognize, let alone accept, the givens of human life that by default keeps their minds in cages.

Regarding such virtual dropouts from life as is – variously called “leftists,” “liberals,” “progressives,” “Marxists,” and other dissidents of human life – have they not noticed that keeping their minds locked up in their unnatural obsessions prevents them from finding ways of making reality serve human progress, not oppose it? If so, they have forfeited the power and the freedom of human imagination and ability to improve the world. This is a terrible price to pay for avoiding or eradicating all challenges that come with living – the dream of closed-minded ideologues that march like zombies to their dystopian future.

The polar differences in attitude toward reality between those who accept and those who do not accept its conditions have been bending minds long before Enlightenment thinkers mixed science and reason in anticipation of outwitting nature and correcting its “defects.” From the looks of the results in our age, I am guessing that if nature has the last laugh, it is now inhaling for an enormous guffaw.

My joke is not intended to spur cynicism or slight the value and importance of making the powers of nature benefit humanity but to underscore the folly of interfering with those powers instead of cooperating with them. For it really is not in anyone’s interest to “change reality,” as many have attempted and failed, causing massive death and destruction in the process. Today we are witnessing transhumanists engaged in the same folly, plotting the greatest change in all history: the elimination of human life.

This is ultimate insanity, not ultimate progress.