A Better Way Dumb

Someone posted this at PI, and over at Democratic Underground, a piece by Ms. Norberg-Hodge, or her book I believe, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, or humans are not greedy by nature.

Helena Norberg-Hodge, another one of those cultural gurus/ecovillagers who flit around the globe and report back to followers that there is a better way. "The Better Way" is typically a remote culture where half the citizens are illiterate and usually blood related - and often dependent on government subsidies and tourism. Affectionately known as cloth or basket weaving village folk, the go-to dark skin cultures where white gurus mingle at outdoor markets and let the natives touch their blond hair.

I stumble upon such pabulum every day, and don't have the heart or stomach to read all the comments anymore, they are maudlin reruns anyway, or inflammatory rhetoric, even if PI is more left/socialist and DU are Democrat party apologists, they all have fashionable warm fuzzies and rose eyeglasses. But here are a couple of comments, one from PI and one from DU:

Commenter: "Hurt and distressed people can be greedy. But I don't think that humans are inherently selfish and greedy. I believe that we are born to love and connect with each other in wonderful and caring ways." --Hmmm ... so, according to this logic, and the Left believes the super rich are greedy, then the rich are in a lot of pain and distress?

Commenter: "If anything, humans are cooperative and charitable by nature, or the human species would never have survived."

Born to love and connect, yes. But what the immediate village (family) teaches can be something else. Man is not cooperative and charitable by nature - it's nurture, example. Do progressive/socialists not have children? Of course they do, some of the most dangerously manipulative children I've met are parented by progressives. Some children are more easy going by nature - but all are greedy and self-centered to a degree.

Crediting the survival of the species on an innate cooperative, charitable nature is silliness. Does he/she not understand survival of the fittest? That one tribe survived over another by wit and strength? Or perhaps you're more comfortable calling it culture or community rather than tribal. The "community" or culture, establishes desired behavior for individuals and enforces it. Everyone has their role to benefit and ensure survival of the tribe/community/culture.

Some roles earn more respect and rewards, the best of food, animal hides, and spot by the fire, an early form of capitalism? Some roles require more self-sacrifice - an unworthy trait in certain scoffing circles today. Community members who fall outside established behavior rules are punished, usually severely - well, not so much today because we have been given a huge list of excuses to choose from when we behave badly. Divergent behavior from community norm is now called "diversity." Some bad behavior today, or divergence, is a "disease" and some is just "human nature." Depends on which community has it and which excuse you give preference, and since survival of the species is not threatened as a whole - you can diverge all you want.

For hundreds of thousands of years it has also been community against community for survival - for the best caves, hunting grounds, land, etc. Life was brutal, short, and not all that "loving." Not much different than it is for millions today - although today, ideologues are more eloquent in who or what to blame, i.e. capitalism. Personally, capitalism today seems more a socialist perversion of capital.

Millions of years of self-determination and honed survival instincts embedded in our DNA assured existence of the species - and now socialist dogma claims greed and self-preservation is not in our nature. We should all join hands in one big loving world commune, even if half the commune indulges in behavior you find abhorrent and ghastly - just cooperate, keep your eyes down and follow "The Better Way" herd.

What socialist dogma has accomplished in the last couple of hundred years is to replace the fleetest and smartest with the weakest and dumbest. The founding fathers, even with all their faults and wrongs they could think and reason, have now been replaced with the weakest and lamest links in the chain.

Socialism itself is a disease, replacing the behavioral rules of evolution where man learned to live within his culture to one of man destroying his culture. The irony is, had socialists left well enough alone, man would evolve to the community they envision. Trying to rush nature, they have only created weaker physical and mental mutants. We are witnessing the results - evolutionary degeneration. Survival of the dumbest. If you ask politely, I bet the better way leaders will let you touch their hair.