Why The Left’s Battles Are Always Uphill
--
The Dark Side really is quicker, easier, and more seductive.
Keeping people ignorant and outraged is easy. Educating and inspiring them is hard.
Speaking a self serving lie takes a lot less effort than disproving one.
Leaping to declare premature certainty isn’t nearly as challenging as being intellectually honest about navigating complexities.
“You are right to be selfish and don’t owe anyone else anything” is an easier message to sell than “You should share that thing you worked hard for with other people, even including people that you dislike.”
That becomes more true the harder it becomes to get ahead, to pay your bills, to even secure the merest crust of bread to feed your family in the first place.
It’s a million times easier to burn a house down than it is to build one.
The same is true of institutions, social safety nets, or public safety. Of civilizations themselves. Keeping trains running and lights on and grocery store shelves full is a complex juggling act of careful coordinated effort. Monkey wrenching and tearing things down is not.
It takes years of hard study to become a doctor and learn to heal. Pulling the trigger takes but an instant and even a toddler can do it.
It’s entropy in action.
In any contest between the builders and the demolishers, the latter will always have an inherent advantage.
They’re counting on it.
The right has chosen the easier strategy.
Of course their way works. Their perpetual grievance collector narrative literally aims at more primal parts of the brain than ours. Fear, disgust, rage — those things are instinctual. Instincts are the primary driver of behaviour for life forms on Earth. But sometimes, instinct leads us in the wrong direction, because the world we evolved in and the world we turned it into are very different places. Suppressing our instincts to utilize reason instead is an only recently evolved phenomenon. Under pressure, we commonly revert to simpler, low-effort thinking.
