While the liberal-left establishment finds the sort of conspiracy theories believed by right-wingers hilarious, Locklin points out that the left believes some pretty damned weird things itself – for instance, that the reason there are so few female physicists is due to a conspiracy organised by male academics; that the relative failure of some races and cultures is the fault of the predominant tribe – i.e. us white folk: that “sexual continence occurs in virtually all urban civilizations because the patriarchal conspiracy has a malignant wish to make everyone sad and sexually frustrated”. As Locklin points out, he has never been invited to take part in any of these conspiracies, and there are myriad reasons for believing that everyone rooting like rattle-snakes and changing sexual partners whenever the fancy takes them might not be a recipe for a successful (or decent) society. Besides, the people who are directly accused of keeping other people down seem hell-bent on redressing any perceived unfairness through bizarre and often offensively intrusive legislation.
Anyhow, Locklin's article is well worth a gander (as is my own list of 77 extraordinary left-wing beliefs, which can be found here, here and here).
When it comes to right-wing conspiracy theories, I tend to agree with the establishment – no one sat down and planned any of the stuff that many rightists (including myself) routinely describe as conspiracies. The EU wasn’t set up purely in order to subsidise France’s inefficient farmers or to destroy democracy; the mania for allowing the mass immigration of unassimilable Muslims into European societies wasn’t necessarily designed to punish indigenous European whites; the almost universal acceptance of the deranged AGW theory by national governments and supra-national organisations isn't intended to keep poor people in poor countries poor in perpetuity; the seeming determination of the world’s liberal media to undermine Israel at every turn wasn’t the result of left-wing broadcasters getting together and deciding to punish Jews by supporting murderous, kleptocrat Arab dictators.
I know this is hard to accept. Read the New York Times or watch BBC TV News and it's hard not to imagine the day kicking off with an editorial conference (attended, respectively, by representatives of the Democratic Party and Labour) where the main aim is to ensure that the day's news is given as left-wing a slant as possible. But there's really no need - the people at those meetings are so politically joined at the hip that they almost invariably view the world from the same left-liberal angle. Of course Israel is wicked - hell, they probably fired those rockets at themselves! Of course women are being kept down - even if the editorial conference is being bossed by a woman. Of course Muslims who hate the West are perfectly entitled to come and settle here. Of course climate change sceptics are in the pockets of Big Oil - even though AGW enthusiasts are the ones making out like bandits.
Their view of the world is the result of a liberal mind-set which simply can’t accept that there are huge natural differences between races and regions and religions and men and women and individuals, and that those differences have nothing to do with fairness, and that attempts to override those differences by hobbling the “lucky” ones will inevitably lead to the horrors that result from deliberate “planned” unfairness – i.e. self-important, poltically correct little bureaucrat gauleiters deciding who wins and who loses. The 20th Century is packed with examples of where that leads.
Where man-made unfairness results in talented, worthwhile people being deliberately held back, it seems reasonable to reverse the legislation or traditions that created a frustrating and undesirable state of affairs – the Jim Crow laws, apartheid, laws criminalising homosexuality, laws debarring women from voting (or, in the case of some Islamic states, even attending school).
But when those laws and traditions – or, in non-democratic societies, arbitrary diktats - have been reversed and measures have been introduced to ensure they can’t be reintroduced covertly, it’s time for legislators to step back, shrug their shoulders and accept that there’s little more to be done: ultimately, it’s useless applying rules aimed at nullifying the effects of nurture when nature’s the cause of inequality.
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