Reformer, Heal Thyself
Sam Aurelius Milam III
 Fundamental
to any democracy is the people's right to be wrong. No democracy
has ever survived the abolishment of this principle.
—from The World Menders
by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. |
Some
time ago, I watched Mr. Monk and the Marathon Man, Season 1, Episode
9 of Monk. For the benefit of people who aren't familiar with
him, Mr. Monk is obsessive-compulsive. One of his difficulties is
a reluctance to touch another person. He compulsively cleans his
hand if he has to shake hands with somebody.
In
the referenced episode, Mr. Monk had to shake hands with the members of
the staff of a small office. By coincidence, the last person with
whom he shook hands was a black man. When Mr. Monk cleaned his hand
with a wet wipe, everybody on the staff, and especially the black man,
bristled with resentment. They all believed that Mr. Monk had cleaned
his hand because of touching a black man.
Those
people were intolerant of Mr. Monk's attitude, as they perceived it, to
the point of hostility. The black man actually declared that he had
to leave immediately, before he did something that he'd regret. It
was a thinly veiled threat of violence, and it had the enthusiastic approval
of the other members of the staff. They remained openly hostile to
Mr. Monk, throughout the ensuing discussion.
Fiction
sometimes reveals truth. That episode of Monk was a good example.
Those people pretended to a high degree of tolerance. In fact, they
were just as intolerant of Mr. Monk as they thought he was of black people,
and they were more prone to violence than he was. That made them
just as much bigots as they presumed him to be. People like that
should take a look at themselves. If they want to reduce racial intolerance,
then they need to learn that the problem isn't race. The problem
is intolerance. Failing to tolerate someone who is intolerant
is, itself, an instance of intolerance. Indeed, it's the worst kind
of intolerance because it creates in the reformers a holier-than-thou attitude,
encouraging them to self-righteousness.
It's
important to note that such enforcers of racial tolerance are lying to
themselves. To clarify that, not once in my entire life have I ever
tolerated a pecan pie. That's because I like pecan pie. When
somebody is required, against his will, to tolerate somebody that he doesn't
like, that's an unspoken acknowledgment that he doesn't like the person.
If he liked the person, then tolerating him wouldn't be necessary.
To pretend that enforced tolerance is the same thing as approval, or that
it somehow creates approval, is delusional, the irrational self-deception
of a fool.
Actually,
it's even worse than that. When the reformers enforce tolerance while
implicitly requiring approval, they end up punishing people not for their
behavior, but for their beliefs. Tolerance becomes tantamount to
mind control, a euphemism for the reformer's particular brand of Orwellian
thought control. Such attempts to control people's attitudes are
unacceptable. If a man doesn't like somebody due to religion, race,
gender, ethnicity, creed, occupation, sexual preferences, hair style, eye
color, poor table manners, odor, or anything else, however trivial or irrational
the idiotic reasons might be, then that's his business, and nobody else's.
Courtesy might be expected of him, but not approval. A bigot has
just as much right to his attitudes, right or wrong, as the reformers have
to theirs. The only alternative is that nobody has any right at all
to his own attitude but, instead, must have whatever attitudes are approved
by the thought police. If we are to have freedom of thought, then
we must tolerate freedom of thought.
The
reformers who have taken it upon themselves to be the enforcers of political
correctness have stepped way over the line of what's acceptable.
They've tried to make themselves into the arbiters of everybody else's
attitudes. That makes them more dangerous than the bigots that they
claim to oppose, because they hide their own bigotry behind a facade of
phony virtue. At least an honest bigot calls a spade a spade.
The reformers impose their evangelism onto us and hide their hypocrisy
from us, making them unworthy of their cause. Learning to tolerate
intolerant people is the only service that they might belatedly make to
that cause. Minding their own business, and mending their own behavior,
would be a good way to start.
| February 2018 | Frontiersman,0c/o
4984 Peach Mountain Drive, Gainesville, Georgia 30507
http://frontiersman.org.uk/ |
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