Barrel Strength

How many big stupid ideas have marched through our institutions in our lifetimes, wrecking as they go?

Let us define what we mean. A Big Stupid Idea is any idea which, though it may once have been true, or is partly true, is pushed to such an extreme that it lasts beynd its time, or worse, is pushed to the exclusion of its necessary qualifications. a truth can become an untruth when it is claimed to be the Whole Truth.

I invite anyone to add their own Big Stupid Ideas to the list.

And pardon the offence to my market-oriented friends, but the latest big stupid idea is:

1) The market is the solution.

Uh, no. The market is a restricted sand-box whose rules and dimensions are determined by non-market institutions such as courts and parliaments, the rule of law, and the guardian forces of the state which protect the sandbox, and the tolerance of the public for its outcomes.

When those who play in this sandbox load the ordinary joes of this life, including you and me, with their failures, but privatize the winnings, society reacts negatively. The social contract between those who play in the sandbox and the rest of us is a real fact, which the Ayn Randists ignore at their peril.

2) Genetics has no (legitimate) role to play in the determination of social outcomes.

I can never figure out whether this is an “is” argument or an “ought” argument, but in either case it is wrong. The abundant new evidence accruing daily about the role of the genetic in every social outcome (viz. The Bell Curve, Before the Dawn, The Ten Thousand Year Explosion) and in the fundamental composition and success rate of various humans is so overwhelming that only an ideologist could be blind to it. As to the “ought” portion of the argument, I rely on the immortal words of Eric Voegelin:

“All men are equal, and all men are unequal. And the ways in which they are equal are as interesting and important as the ways in which they are unequal. Any society which forgets the truth of either fo these two propositions will end in violence.”

Thus, recent findings include the facts that: race is not a social construction, but a real biological fact; intelligence is distributed differently among ethnic and and racial groups; evolution has not stopped, but is in fact accelerating; a great deal of the different outcomes among nations and peoples is not therefore the result only of unfair exploitation, but of genetic factors. How to make outcomes fair in such as situation is not a trivial exercize in forced redistribution.

From the failure to provide for the genetic factors of life proceeds many further errors and false ideas.

On a smaller scale, here are few more:

3) Isreal is an apartheid state: the Palestinians are the blacks; the Israelis, the Afrikaners.

From this narrative, everything flows. ThePalestinians are the virtuous underdog, the Israelis the white supremacist masters. The role of Islam in making this inter-ethnic and religious issue intractable is ignored. Apparently intelligent people believe this. It has the effect of letting them know they are on the right side, which is its main function. No further thought required.

4) Islam

God has commanded you to obey God’s ravings, accurately recorded verbatim in the Koran, to tyrannize and subdue every other person in the universe, and the female sex especially. Jews are to be exterminated on the Day of Judgment. And so forth.

Need I say more?

5) Man is causing irreversible damage to the environment through burning fossil fuels, and only a concerted, coordinated global campaign to reduce carbon emissions can save the planet.

This is the latest emanation of leftist control fantasies, after the failure of Marxism. It is just the zombie of state socialism with an another compelling pseudo-scientific justification, rising from the grave of Communism.

The fact that we can and should take better care of resources (fish, forests, air, soils) than we do has nothing to do with the spiritual impulse to control every living thing which lies at the core of ecologism. Making the production of carbon dioxide as sin is about as sensible as making lust a sin. If it worked for the Christians, then why not for the Greens?

What are your candidates for Big Stupid Ideas? At best they should not be restricted to Canada or North America. They should be working through the culture more or less around the world, or the english-speaking portion of it that we are familiar with.