House of Eratosthenes

I finally found it. Kinda-sorta. See, this comedy bit has been kicking around for many years now, about how the human species began to be split between conservatives and liberals while we were still living in caves. It’s funny because there’s no way it could all literally be true, and yet — well, it isn’t entirely false either, is it.

The version I finally found, and I knew I had read this before I just couldn’t find the link…the part that draws my attention goes like this (emphasis added):

Some men tried to conserve remnants of the old way of life (hence the term “conservative”) by spending their days in the open field in the dangerous pursuit of big game animals. At night they would roast their prey at a big barbecue, and afterwards sat around the fire drinking beer, passing wind and telling off-color jokes.

Other, more timid, souls stayed closer to home. They are responsible for the domestication of cats and the invention of group therapy. Mostly, they sat around worrying about how life wasn’t fair and concocting elaborate schemes to “liberate” themselves from inequity (thus their designation as “liberals”). From this came the concept of Democratic voting, to decide how to divide the meat and beer that conservatives provided.

The thing that still puzzles me is, it bears a copyright date of 2012. But I know I saw it worded this way, before that other version I took the time to blog (before the link to that version was lost, evidently forever), which says…

Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to barbeque at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as “the Conservative movement.”

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the Conservatives by showing up for the nightly barbeques and doing the sewing, fetching and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement. Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women. The rest became known as girlymen.

As far as making-a-funny, this is a distinction without a difference. The difference is in the other mission, the more serious social commentary: Liberals love to make rules, rules about how goods should be divided up, goods that they did not capture, or harvest, or invent, or find. Others do the real work, they do the “work” of figuring out who should get what. You might say these rules are what they bring to the table — that’s their contribution. The version I found eight years ago doesn’t mention this at that key part, where the split occurs, although it does go on to say:

Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to “govern” the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the Liberals remained in Europe when Conservatives were coming to America. They crept in after the Wild West was tame and created a business of trying to get MORE for nothing.

And that nails it very, very plainly. Just not elegantly. I think it’s important to mention that, after that first kill, there must have been an abundance of meat and an abundance of people to consume it, along with an assortment of cave pussies who…

The first time man ate cooked meat, the kill was dragged to the campfire by — who else? — the first conservatives. It would have to be that way, wouldn’t it; throughout antiquity, liberals have been opposed by principle to learning any of the skills needed in a hunt. So the liberals, having contributed nothing to the feast at all, in fact having ridiculed the conservatives as they gathered their ropes and knives and spears to go out on the hunt that morning, quickly came up with some rules about how the food should be divided. And one or two of them maybe brought some hummus; but mostly, they contributed rules.

Why am I so fixated on this? Because it’s important. It was almost certainly true, in some way or another, back then; we look all around and see it’s true today. It’s been true throughout all of our lives, in all of the history we can read, and so it has to have been true every day in between. Conservatives come up with something that can help people, that they can sell and thus selfishly hoard the profits; liberals scold them and ridicule them for engaging these enterprises, and learning and teaching the skills needed; conservatives haul in the bounty, and the liberals make a bunch of rules about how that’s to be divided up. Liberals claim credit for all the results that happen to be favorable, and blame conservatives for anything that could be regretted. It’s never played out any differently.

That’s why liberals insist on absolute and final victory with anything that has to do with rhetoric. Defining things, re-telling history, getting the last word, guiding narratives. That’s their game, that’s what they do: They dictate how goods are to be divided, and tell others what to think. ALL the time. This is all necessary, because their ideas are bad and can’t survive a more reasonable but uncontrolled forum of discussion.

That’s true in general, by the way. If you have to hover over any & all discussion of an idea, guiding narratives to make the idea look like a good one, like a helicopter-mom hovering over her under-achieving whelp when he’s getting detention or a lousy report card, that’s a tip-off that the idea sucks ass. If you want to understand as much as you can about the modern liberal movement in America in just one single sentence, that’s the one. That is a key point to the lasting difference between what we call conservatives and what we call liberals: When something is failing, do we sneak a finger onto a scale and change the measurements so failure can become success; or, do we let the thing go ahead and fail (hat tip to The Barrister at Maggie’s Farm) so that the learning can take place.

A fixed mindset tends to make one not only less resilient, but also more risk-averse; the two qualities go hand-in-hand. Society, of course, benefits from both resilient and risk-taking individuals. Learning from failure is essential for developing toughness, prudence, and humility, yet Americans have developed a societal sorting mechanism that encourages precisely the opposite.

Take the putatively meritocratic system of college admissions, which (despite that college application writing prompt) has evolved to punish all evidence of failure…Those with the time and wherewithal have rationally responded to this tournament with a parental investment arms race…parents strenuously protect their children from failure, resulting in adults who are under-equipped to deal with the inevitable challenges of life. Although these kids could probably use more failure in preparation for the independence of adulthood the failure they do experience is not catastrophic, and very often it serves an instructive function.

Biggest lie about American politics over the last hundred years — or a contender for that spot, anyhow — is the claim that liberals are for “progress.” Second-biggest would be that they are somehow more accepting of, or are accepting at all of, what we are supposed to be calling “science.” Progress and real science would have to have something to do with learning, and we assess learning according to non-instinctive change in behavior. Liberals, as liberals, do not change their behavior. Not even a little tiny bit. A truly dedicated liberal who might have told you of the wonderful things President Carter was about to do back in 1976, if you were to look him up today and he hadn’t renounced the movement, would swear up & down that these were & are the correct policies. That’s all you need to measure, right there; they don’t learn. Even when the circumstances make it most necessary and urgent, they don’t modify their behavior because modifying their behavior would be intolerable apostasy.

Failure has a lot to do with learning. Barrister makes a great point about this:

As we say here, you learn little from success but much from failures. I’ve had my share. In general, I won’t blame anyone but myself for them. When a lad, when I was prone to blame failures on external circumstances, jerky teachers, annoying coaches, rejecting girls, unappreciative people in general, etc., my Yankee Mom would always say in her Yankee way “Cut out that talk, sonny boy, and look to what you mishandled.”

I blew something pretty huge about three years ago. The consequences were devastating, and humbling, since this was central not only to my successes, but to my whole reason for existing, for over twenty years previous to that. It gives me no pleasure to admit it, but I learned a great deal more over the next year or two, than I learned out of what came before or since. Today, I am succeeding. And, not learning quite as much as I learned in the wake of my failure. And although I’m ashamed of that failure, that shame is insignificant to the shame I have about learning so very, very little over that prior, vast, stretch of time — during which, I was successful. That’s just how it goes. You succeed, you get to go on to bigger and better things, but without learning too much. You get a smack-down, you admit that you don’t know something, because you have to; the alternative is to just give up altogether. That’s your clue that something you thought would work, doesn’t work. You’re not going to get it any other way. Failure is the purifying fire. It is nature’s “don’t do that” signal. Or, in my case, “You’re too cocky.” There really isn’t any other one available, not in this universe.

Liberals do have one, and only one, understanding of failure, and they’re extremely energetic and enthused about it. A meaningful failure, in their world, is the failure to show proper fidelity to their liberalism. And, being prerational by nature or by choice, they’re constantly ready to banish whoever doesn’t succeed this way. You’re not sufficiently liberal, so begone and take your fail with you. No one is safe.

That’s why Cliven Bundy is a racist now. It’s not because that one clip makes him look like one — although that’s the evidence we’re given. But see, that’s just the lightning-rod effect. What people miss is that had it not been for the “better off in slavery,” but all the other remarks in the longer commentary remained, liberals would still be condemning him as a racist. Because he pointed to a liberal plan, assessed the results, and took note that they fell short of success; how they hurt the people they were supposed to have helped. That is how you get called a racist by liberals.

Image shamelessly swiped from American Digest

Again, the prerational thinking. When everything you know about something is based on feelings and not on thought, it’s hard to learn because the edifying stuff mentioned above has something to do with failure, and therefore with pain. They evaluate everything — with feelings. They recruit other liberals — by way of feeling. They assess the “progress” of their agenda items — by way of feeling. We just saw it with ObamaCare. It was supposed to make insurance markets more competitive and affordable, but now our friends the liberals proclaim it a huge success because of some number of signups. The law requires coverage, it invalidates existing policies; people who think their way through problems, rather than feel their way around them, immediately understand what’s wrong with evaluating the law’s success according to signup numbers. It’s like bragging about selling and installing windshields by day, while you’re going out and smashing them at night. Would the owner of such a business be able to brag about “helping” the motorists who need their windshields? Certainly yes, but not to anyone who is informed about the situation and willing to invest some quality thought about it.

But to the prerational, that’s too harsh, too critical. It doesn’t feel good to entertain such thoughts. The person embarking on such a train of thought, must therefore be a…racist. There ya go, that’s how it works. That’s our modern village-banishment. If we were living back in the olden days, our liberals would escort Cliven Bundy to the big heavy village gates, compel him to walk outside of them, and slam them shut behind him. Along with everyone else criticizing ObamaCare. But it’s not then, it’s now, we have no gates — so we’re plied with stories about yet one more person being a racist.

It’s just one more “rule about dividing up the vittles” job for them. These people are in, those people are out. More rules. Their one contribution to the feast. Across the millennia, nothing has changed.

[…] Made a New Word LXIX Memo For File CLXXXVI Doing Everything Wrong Where Is… Kate Upton’s Butt Deserves More Attention Metric […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 05/04/2014 @ 09:25

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