by baldilocks
Dennis Prager:
Our age loves scientific equations. Here’s one you weren’t taught at college but which affects you as much as the law of gravity:
GI – W = E
Good Intentions (GI) minus Wisdom (W) leads to Evil (E)
Prager uses an example that’s obvious — at least to the sane.
Communism, the greatest mass murder ideology in history, was for almost all its rank-and-file supporters rooted in their desire to do good. (This was rarely true for its leaders, whose greatest desire was power.)
The many millions of people all over the world who supported communism did not think they were supporting unprecedented levels of mass murder and torture or an equally unprecedented deprivation of the most fundamental human rights of a substantial percentage of humanity. They thought they were moral, building a beautiful future for humanity — eliminating inequality, enabling people to work as hard or as little as they wanted, providing their fellow citizens “free” education and “free” health care. They were convinced that the moral arc of history was bending in their direction and that they were good because their motives were good.
That’s why leftists have such moral contempt for those who differ with them. Because those on the left are so good, only bad human beings could possibly oppose them. (…)
The problem with communists and with leftists who don’t consider themselves communists is not that none of them mean well. It’s that they lack wisdom.
As Thomas Sowell would put it, such people fail to ask this question: “And then what happens?” Should someone ask question, the wisdom-less doer of good will give a rainbow and unicorns answer, and that answer will be a revelation.
Take Robert “Beto” O’Rourke and his promise to institute mandatory “buyback” of AR-15s and other firearms should he become president.
“No. I don’t see the law enforcement going door to door. I see Americans complying with the law. I see us working with gun owners, non-gun owners, local, county, state, federal law enforcement to come up with the best possible solution. I have yet to meet an owner of an AR-15 who thinks it’s OK that we have these kind of mass killings in this country,” O’Rourke said when asked by the Washington Examiner about specifics of his plan.
When pressed further about how he plans to enforce his proposal for those who would not comply, he responded, “How do you — how do we enforce any law? There’s a significant reliance on people complying with the law. You know that a law is not created in a vacuum.”
Got that? He won’t use the enforcers to enforce such a law, but the law will be enforced.
Magically.
Beta Male is an easy target — if you’ll pardon the expression — but it’s clear that his “plan” is a perfect example of Prager’s equation. Does O’Rourke want to do good? I doubt it and think that he and other politicians who would forcibly disarm law-abiding Americans have tyranny as their ultimate goal.
O’Rourke knows that his proposal would lead to lots of dead bodies but he’s too big of a coward to admit it, much less admit that the body bags would be a feature rather than a bug, from his point of view.
President O’Rourke presiding over a disarmed America would have enormous power.
It’s certain, however, there are some voters who do want to do good and who would vote for him or for one of the other Democrat candidates who are promising — as president — to confiscate private firearm property. Such voters want there to be no more mass shooters ever and believe that if the government just takes the tools away, mass shootings will simply stop happening.
Magically.
And it is here where the dearth of wisdom is most glaring among all good-faith advocates of gun confiscation: they think that government can fix humans. This notion has remained pervasive over centuries.
On the contrary, we human beings cannot change our flawed and sinful nature. Politicians can’t. Laws can’t. We can only be mindful of our individual natures and attempt to protect ourselves against those who abandon themselves to their sinful natures, mass shooters being among this number.
Those who are without wisdom believe that humankind is innately good — in spite of the evidence to the contrary that each one of us observes every day.
The perfect sinless, gun-less world that the doers of good say they want is promised by God, But He has conditions which a lot of them aren’t willing to meet. They’d rather let politicians like O’Rourke do the dirty work for them.
And that road will end in the same place it has all the other times.
O’Rourke has no chance of becoming president in 2020, but the front-running Democrats want to take the guns, too.
P minus G equals D. I’ll let you figure out what the variables indicate.
(Thanks to Bearing Arms)
Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here. She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.
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