‘The Right are Furious that Abuse Doesn’t Work’
(By Sapphi of Sapphi’s Substack)
We must have sympathy for the right.
After all, it’s difficult being a conservative these days. Progressive politics are proceeding at a rapid pace. World leaders preaching kindness and compassion are lavished with praise and acclamations. You can’t hit your kids anymore, you can’t hit your dog, you can’t hit your horse, you can’t hit each other, you definitely can’t hit your wife, you can’t fire your workers whenever you like — you can’t even rock up to work and do your self-employed job without wearing statistically-lifesaving safety equipment.
And almost every idea that you come up with keeps getting debunked by universities, academics, and researchers, who are, regrettably and terribly, correct. Cruelty doesn’t work.
At the end of the day, Conservatives are somad that the abuse they want to dish out isn’t sanctioned by statistics and they are running out of excuses for wanting things to be this way.
That raises an interesting hypothetical dilemma as a “leftist”.
Would we still drive ourselves towards these goals of tolerance and empathy if the results suggested otherwise?
If there was proof that physically punishing kids installed discipline and not trauma, would we still pursue it so hard? If beneficiaries statistically did benefit from “tough love”, would that make it more moral? If treating addictions as illnesses and/or supporting people with their issues was less effective than harsh punishment and incarceration? If communication and consultation with communities and groups wasn’t a markedly better tool than suppression and force?
Over and over again, the worldview that the left espouse is compassion and empathy with others around us. And the right hate it.
The radical demonstrations of compassion from Adern propelled her onto the world stage, and have been mocked by much of the right ever since.
These are a people with ingrained beliefs that there is or( should be) a set social order of some kind; that personal responsibility trumps the collective causes and cures of poor decision-making; that suffering is good for you; and that most of all — and most consistently — that the status quo is the correct one.
And evidence will continue to show that it is not true. Conservatism by definition is anti-progress. They are the sticking point that keeps us from moving forward every time.
That is the role they play and it is not without purpose; progress and leftism can go too far, can produce bad results, and there can be some stupid and ineffective leftist ideas and schemes deployed as a result of leftist philosophy. In theory, conservatism is the force against that, the social segment keeping us from going “too far”.
But if you look at where conservatives have positioned themselves in the recent past and where we find ourselves today, it paints a bit of different picture of their views as a a collective. Slavery, segregation, sexism and strict gender roles, sexual persecution, capital punishment, imperialism… all ideals with poisoned roots that were and still are championed by conservatives.
And now, neoliberalism is the latest to be added to that list. The latest ideology to fail the burden of proof test that we should be applying to the policies we implement and philosophies we follow. The latest philosophy based on self-responsibility and maintaining the conservative quo — the rich get richer, remember?
Neoliberalism does not seek to redistribute wealth, it seeks to improve the lot of all by adding to our collective wealth. Which as we’ve discovered, can defeat much of the purpose of us all gaining wealth because the widening of wealth gaps creates a class divide which causes and contributes to all manner of social ills.
“A rising tide lifts all boats” is not limited to conservatives, however. In fact, one of the most successful Marxist regimes we’ve ever seen used it to eliminate extreme poverty, lifting 100 million people out of the worst economic circumstances we can classify in the modern world.
I am, of course, talking about China, who implemented guaranteed social security at the same time they transformed their economy into a highly-productive and fast-growing machine capable of competing in a neoliberal world and that provided the government the money they needed to support this scheme.
This was not without its drawbacks or it’s costs. This economic triumph is the direct cause of China’s one-child policy and all resulting implications.
Economic expansion required rapid urbanisation, and this came with genuine risks of an exploding, unsupportable urban population. It’s hard to convince people to stay rural and do the hard labour with less opportunity when all these lovely, wealthy cities are springing up. It became imperative for social order that the divide between urban and rural be strictly controlled. It’s also important that a population can be able to sustain itself; adding more per-capita numbers to it waters down your wealth and makes lifting people out of poverty harder (in the immediate future, at least).
We can disagree for the rest of time about the moral and practical implications of China’s policies, but one thing can’t be understated, and that’s it’s overall effectiveness as a poverty reduction measure. China’s driven economic upheaval, combined with its social support and population-control measures (and I’m referring to immigration/urbanisation here, not just the one child policy) is probably the most successful anti-poverty campaign of all time.
In 2021, it was announced that China had eliminated extreme poverty nationwide., That means it lifted 1/4 of the world out of extreme material deprivation of the kind we can barely imagine in the first world.
Not bad going for a bunch of commies, I guess.
Such is the power of collectivism. What has neoliberalism achieved for us, by comparison?
Well, it also lifted people from poverty. Right?
(By Sapphi of Sapphi’s Substack)
We must have sympathy for the right.
After all, it’s difficult being a conservative these days. Progressive politics are proceeding at a rapid pace. World leaders preaching kindness and compassion are lavished with praise and acclamations. You can’t hit your kids anymore, you can’t hit your dog, you can’t hit your horse, you can’t hit each other, you definitely can’t hit your wife, you can’t fire your workers whenever you like — you can’t even rock up to work and do your self-employed job without wearing statistically-lifesaving safety equipment.
And almost every idea that you come up with keeps getting debunked by universities, academics, and researchers, who are, regrettably and terribly, correct. Cruelty doesn’t work.
At the end of the day, Conservatives are somad that the abuse they want to dish out isn’t sanctioned by statistics and they are running out of excuses for wanting things to be this way.
That raises an interesting hypothetical dilemma as a “leftist”.
Would we still drive ourselves towards these goals of tolerance and empathy if the results suggested otherwise?
If there was proof that physically punishing kids installed discipline and not trauma, would we still pursue it so hard? If beneficiaries statistically did benefit from “tough love”, would that make it more moral? If treating addictions as illnesses and/or supporting people with their issues was less effective than harsh punishment and incarceration? If communication and consultation with communities and groups wasn’t a markedly better tool than suppression and force?
Over and over again, the worldview that the left espouse is compassion and empathy with others around us. And the right hate it.
 |
These are a people with ingrained beliefs that there is or( should be) a set social order of some kind; that personal responsibility trumps the collective causes and cures of poor decision-making; that suffering is good for you; and that most of all — and most consistently — that the status quo is the correct one.
And evidence will continue to show that it is not true. Conservatism by definition is anti-progress. They are the sticking point that keeps us from moving forward every time.
That is the role they play and it is not without purpose; progress and leftism can go too far, can produce bad results, and there can be some stupid and ineffective leftist ideas and schemes deployed as a result of leftist philosophy. In theory, conservatism is the force against that, the social segment keeping us from going “too far”.
But if you look at where conservatives have positioned themselves in the recent past and where we find ourselves today, it paints a bit of different picture of their views as a a collective. Slavery, segregation, sexism and strict gender roles, sexual persecution, capital punishment, imperialism… all ideals with poisoned roots that were and still are championed by conservatives.
And now, neoliberalism is the latest to be added to that list. The latest ideology to fail the burden of proof test that we should be applying to the policies we implement and philosophies we follow. The latest philosophy based on self-responsibility and maintaining the conservative quo — the rich get richer, remember?
Neoliberalism does not seek to redistribute wealth, it seeks to improve the lot of all by adding to our collective wealth. Which as we’ve discovered, can defeat much of the purpose of us all gaining wealth because the widening of wealth gaps creates a class divide which causes and contributes to all manner of social ills.
“A rising tide lifts all boats” is not limited to conservatives, however. In fact, one of the most successful Marxist regimes we’ve ever seen used it to eliminate extreme poverty, lifting 100 million people out of the worst economic circumstances we can classify in the modern world.
I am, of course, talking about China, who implemented guaranteed social security at the same time they transformed their economy into a highly-productive and fast-growing machine capable of competing in a neoliberal world and that provided the government the money they needed to support this scheme.
This was not without its drawbacks or it’s costs. This economic triumph is the direct cause of China’s one-child policy and all resulting implications.
Economic expansion required rapid urbanisation, and this came with genuine risks of an exploding, unsupportable urban population. It’s hard to convince people to stay rural and do the hard labour with less opportunity when all these lovely, wealthy cities are springing up. It became imperative for social order that the divide between urban and rural be strictly controlled. It’s also important that a population can be able to sustain itself; adding more per-capita numbers to it waters down your wealth and makes lifting people out of poverty harder (in the immediate future, at least).
We can disagree for the rest of time about the moral and practical implications of China’s policies, but one thing can’t be understated, and that’s it’s overall effectiveness as a poverty reduction measure. China’s driven economic upheaval, combined with its social support and population-control measures (and I’m referring to immigration/urbanisation here, not just the one child policy) is probably the most successful anti-poverty campaign of all time.
In 2021, it was announced that China had eliminated extreme poverty nationwide., That means it lifted 1/4 of the world out of extreme material deprivation of the kind we can barely imagine in the first world.
Not bad going for a bunch of commies, I guess.
Such is the power of collectivism. What has neoliberalism achieved for us, by comparison?
Well, it also lifted people from poverty. Right?
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