Clarice Feldman outlines the reasons why progressives are bound and determined to debilitate and decapitate progress.
The point to be made for JunkScience.com is that progressives are pessimistic about resources, and the economy.
They operate in a zero sum game where the pie doesn’t grow, and the human race never really progresses, just hunkers down and splits up the pie.
Why would progressives oppose progress, because they are statists and egalitarian utopians and that means they are in a redistribution of limited resources mode.
Feldman quotes Daniel Greenfield, who says that at the heart of progressivism” is a deep fear of progress [and people].” In order to progress we need to fight progressivism.
Greenfield is further favorably quoted in his essay “The Universalist Holocaust” . . . in it Greenfield argues that faced with assault, a person or a nation can fight back or spin dreams of universal peace, and choosing the latter course leads to holocausts. His example is Israel and the contrast between those who defend it and those who hate its “nationalist” focus, but I think it applies to all peoples and places, including the U.S. right now where Obama’s “universalist” impulses have led us to foreswear our allies and embrace our enemies.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/02/the_state_of_the_static_union_and_universalist_claptrap.html
Feldman says, “Did you ever imagine you would hear the leader of Russia utter these words?”
Vlad Putin said, in public on the video that Feldman links:
The Moral Code of the Builder of Communism, if you read it, is just a pathetic copy of the Bible: Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. The Code of the Builder of Communism has the same commandments, just that they are written in a simple language shortened drastically. This code has passed on, it does not exist any more. A new generation of Russian citizens, young people don’t even know what it is. But the only thing that can replace it is those traditional values that you mentioned. Society falls apart without these values. Clearly, we must come back to them, understand their importance and move forward on the basis of these values. I want to reiterate something I said in the Address to the Federal Assembly: yes, this is a conservative approach, but let me remind you of Berdyaev’s words that the point of conservatism is not that it obstructs movement forward and upward, but that it prevents the movement backward and downward. That, in my opinion, is a very good formula, and it is the formula that I propose. There’s nothing unusual for us here. Russia is a country with a very profound ancient culture, and if we want to feel strong and grow with confidence, we must draw on this culture and these traditions, and not just focus on the future.
Compounding those issues in a quasi-democratic government is the fact that people who don’t like to be told how to live often find telling other people how to live equally distasteful. The innovators, inventors, and creators are rarely the joiners and thus deny themselves the strength in numbers enjoyed by the statists.
I think Robert Heinlein identified the nucleus of the problem: “The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” – from “Time Enough for Love ” (1973). The former group thinks ‘inside the box’, without imagination, and can only understand closed systems. They include the ‘sheep’ as well as the elitist Controllers (currently calling themselves ‘Progressives’). They believe in their own right to rule ‘for the best interests of all’, and find it incomprehensibel that rational people could disagree with them.
History shows us that the innovators, the inventors, and those who generally make creative contributions to improve the status of humanity as a whole are almost exclusively members of the latter group. They possess true creativity because they have the courage to think things they have not been told to think.
A classic case of psychological projection. Like a selfish person calling you selfish for not putting their needs before your own, or a lazy person accusing you of laziness for not doing something they’ve asked you to do for them. What’s truly amazing is that they can do so without a trace of irony. Their total lack of introspection is dumbfounding.
The reason progressives only see a zero-sum game when it comes to society and economics is because (a) they do not create or make anything of value, so they don’t believe or can’t understand that others actually do so, and (b) they are always takers (governmental or otherwise), and they know they hurt others by taking, so they assume that everyone who has anything took it away from someone else – just like the progressives.
And the point of progressivism is not that it obstructs movement backward and downward, but that it prevents movement forward and upward? That sounds right looking at junkscience issues – not to mention Obmacare and the aforementioned universalist impulses. I think the best a progressive can point to is the TSA, which proves the preventing movement point in more ways than one.