The antics of leftists, labeled progressive, seem to be increasingly pushing for something entirely different from the “progression” of mankind – a future that values falsehood and willful blindness over truth and genuine attempts to reconcile the irrationality of the world with our own lives.
How often have you heard beautiful music at a concert, or witnessed an incredibly artistic figure skating performance? What about watching an athlete that just seems natural at what she does? Have you read a heartwrenching novel that tugs at some string deep inside you, the experience of which can’t be expressed in words? How often have you heard the creators of these things referred to as “talented”?
“Talent” is widely accepted as a complement that seems to explain one’s performance in worldly endeavors while validating their strengths. But in its use, there’s the implicit suggestion that certain people are born with skills that help them achieve things beyond those of others – in other words, that certain people are predisposed to perform in a manner which is valued more highly by the world. And that should be obvious; hardly any two people are the same, possessing discrepant abilities – which inevitably means that there will be some difference in value between the two. (I’m not talking about quantitative value, as that’s impossible to assign to different types of competence, since nature – the chaos which surrounds our hierarchies of order – is always shifting, so the rubric by which our evolutionary essay is “marked” is itself changing.)
In modern liberal politics, one of the tenets of “progressing” is accepting the notion that all humans are equal. Why do we accept a concept that is so self-evidently false? It seems ethically “correct”; all the more reason to look at it critically. People won’t start out in life the same, no matter how hard we try to create such a world, because Nature doesn’t bend its will to fairness. People are born different. We value the uniqueness of the individual spirit, and yet declare that everyone is equal: are we not creating artificial hierarchies of value? We can force this farce of a moral parade all we want, but our the complexities of our basic biology won’t be fooled. We choose certain individuals to be our friends, and there’s a reason we’re attracted to certain people more than others. Sexual selection is a discrimination against equality. So is the act of choosing employees from a pool, or selecting students to study at an educational institution. Selection is what Nature does, and it’s a process that innately favors more valuable traits, where the value is determined by the demands of the environment – whether physical, social, or economic.
The façade we throw over Nature’s form is arguably the result of the harshness of reality. It’s difficult – maybe even impossible – to fathom the notion that our success in the world can be orchestrated by things beyond our control, which the efforts of hard work cannot hope to unseat. That’s the absurdity of the human condition: the existence of a world in which labors can be fruitless is a disparagement of the human spirit, which voluntarily shoulders suffering and walks forward in spite of that. And maybe it’s our unconscious rejection of this terrible truth that is responsible for our predicament – the wearing of the mask of compassion for those who possess traits that the world deems less valuable, through no fault of their own. But therein exists a paradox: a world where everyone is truly equal, or exactly the same, is the savior from the anguish of Nature’s reality, and simultaneously the worst purgatory for anyone to exist in.
We must have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value or the horror of existence rapidly becomes paramount. Then, nihilism beckons, with its hopelessness and despair.
–12 Rules for Life (2018) Jordan B. Peterson; Overture Pg. xxxi
In the 20th century, radical leftists who pushed for the notion of universal equality – the rejection of the selection of value – also advocated a system in which the predications of Nature’s selection existed, to an almost brutal extent. Denying the notion that some things could not be changed by human efforts, like genetic predisposition, and instead assuming total equality led to the creation of states which would (supposedly) redistribute wealth. All your possessions would be taken from you regardless of how hard you work, which labels the human struggle as meaningless – which Nature sometimes does, and ironically the very thing that leftist ideologues seek to avoid through dramatic measures.
Willful blindness towards the nearly infinite evidence that people aren’t the same can be found in modern trendy movements, such as the rejection of men and women being different. (For instance, men are generally more muscular, and women possess higher degrees of trait agreeableness and neuroticism, on average. Recent scientific studies are making more progress into mapping these kinds of differences into interpretable systems.) Similar denials of the structure of reality for one’s own benefit does everyone a disservice, rather than a favor. And that brings me to my final point: before developing aspirations for what’s perceived as a “better world”, it’s necessary to look at what’s right in front of us – because sometimes, the best hiding place is in plain sight.
