Musings from almost three years ago

190308 Ed’s musings

I keep reading that “they” want a civil war. The term keeps cropping up on teh interwebz. The definition of “they” depends on who’s talking, but generally it is “the left”, the political left, the progressives—the progs—the democrats, the socialists, the commies, the reds, the LGBLTQQetc community, the Muslims, Antifa, the globohomo crowd, the Deep State: it’s quite a line-up. They want to divide us, so the right insists; they want us to be in conflict on the basis of gender lines, the race divide, ethnic differences, class disparities; they weaponize human nature, using our natural selfishness, covetousness, greed, envy, pride, ego, and so on against us so that we fall into squabbling factions, pushing mere “squabble” into sheer war.

I wonder about that. My observation is otherwise: the left seeks to unify all of us; they seek to heal what they see as natural fractures in the body civitas, and they are ready to do it by legislative fiat, executive order, by cultural coercion, by police-state force, by street violence, and given the coercive nature of all those efforts, it is not really a leap of intellectual paranoia (or a right-wing conspiracy) to suppose that the next step will be not persuasion but more force, this time hauling people like me on trains to the re-education camps or the lime pits. Hence, the talk of civil war--because some observers are not going to put up with the train scenario.

Well, I wonder. My basic philosophy, which applies to nearly everything from cosmology and astronomy to medicine to history to human nature to politics to math to space flight to cooking to gardening to marriage to monetary policy is this: There’s more to this than meets the eye.

Or to put this in other words, those who presage a civil war and endeavor to trace its possible shapes, to suggest what the prudent person might do to prepare, to list all the gear, to outline the best plans, to illustrate the many possible outcomes, are barking at the moon: what comes will surprise them all; what comes will come out of left field and smack them hard in an unprepared spot. Down they’ll go, head spinning in a deepening state of fatal surprise.

In any case, this conclusion to Robert Gore’s March 2019 essay on the deliberate destruction of the middle class, and the consequences which will flow from that, make my case:

There’s no way to predict or control the consequences. The only certainty is that anyone who thinks they can do so will be proven disastrously wrong.

https://straightlinelogic.com/2019/03/08/the-experiment-by-robert-gore/#more-35009