I spend a lot of time talking about how Western civilization, particularly as driven by the United States, is easily the greatest that mankind has yet created. If one looks at it objectively, it’s not even close. The list of things that are part of the everyday life of people around the world is basically a list of things that the West invented or developed. From cars to planes to advanced agriculture to elevators to plastic and mobile phones and computers and DNA and much, much more.
But every now and then, something happens that makes me question that. A couple of years ago, I watched Matt Walsh’s What Is A Woman, in which he spends most of the movie talking to leftists and doctors as he tries to get a definitive answer to the question in the title. Most of the time, he’s unsuccessful.
The most interesting part of the movie, however, didn’t take place at a feminist conference or in a studio, but rather in Africa when Walsh was speaking with Maasai tribesmen. When asked a simple question about whether a man can become a woman, he was quickly given a definitive “No.” Straightforward, no debate, no hedging. Essentially 180 degrees from the insanity that Matt encountered in the United States.
This was brought back to me last week when reading about how Justice Thomas destroyed the “expert class” in United States v. Skrmetti. The Justice took direct aim at the notion that Americans must ignore their common sense, relinquish their lives, and give up their constitutional rights to those the elites have pronounced as “experts.” As we all learned during COVID and with “expert” analysis of the Hunter Biden hard drive, and as we’ve been seeing with climate scares for decades, “experts” are rarely that, and often are simply shills for this or that monied interest.
Image created using ChatGPT.
Justice Thomas stated clearly that the government can no longer use such “experts” to manipulate and control the lives of citizens. Although the specific case had to do with butchering or harming confused or coerced minors, it applies everywhere else as well.
This is a very good thing because there’s a danger in success, as in a successful civilization. It breeds complacency, entitlement, and most importantly, the loss of a functional memory of how things work and how they became successful in the first place...which leads to an over-reliance on “experts”.
I frequently mention Cyrus McCormick as the man most responsible for the rapid advance of Western civilization. Of course, people can argue that others, like Isaac Newton, Jethro Tull, James Watt, J.D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, or any number of others could wear that badge. I choose to award it to McCormick because he almost single-handedly helped 85% of Americans and substantial numbers of others worldwide escape the farm. Not that there’s anything wrong with farming, obviously, but because of the efficiencies McCormick brought about, 95% of Americans work at something other than farming. In his day, that number was in the mid-teens.
Basically, McCormick freed up 80% of the nation to go out and be everything from baseball players to scientists to doctors to entrepreneurs to inventors to, sadly, social media “influencers.” It’s basically division of labor on steroids, where people focus on what they want to do, are good at, or can make a living at, while paying others to do the things they can’t or don’t want to do.
That works well when the choices of options are shoemaker, baker, blacksmith, farmer, soldier, etc., i.e., things society actually needs. It even works when options include things that society wants, like literature, sports, or art. Baseball may not be as critical to the continuation of society as, say, electricity generation or infrastructure maintenance, but there’s a demand, and people are willing to work for money to pay for it out of their own pockets.
Where it breaks down is when options include things that no one actually wants or needs, yet they get produced nonetheless, or get produced in quantities that make no sense. Things like gender studies graduates, therapists, and lawyers. Shakespeare talked about lawyers (as a bulwark against the masses), so we don’t need to.
The fact that gender studies even exist in the first place tells you how far America has moved from the fundamentals of a successful society. In a normal, functioning universe, such things wouldn’t even exist.
While one can at least make an argument that being gay is at least theoretically natural—if still deviant—a universe where men are women, women are men, and the difference between the two is “fluid” is a fiction created by people who have too much time on their hands and no connection to how the real world functions. We’ve strayed so far from the time when 85% of the people worked on farms and did things that actually helped society that we now have people who create an illusion and then set about trying to force society to accept it as normal.
Another example of this disconnect between actual demand and supply is therapists. Before the late 19th century, therapists didn’t exist. (Well, they sort of did, but they were your friends.) Today, tens of millions of Americans, mostly women, and white women at that, go to therapists. Essentially, 40% of white women receive mental health treatment in the form of antidepressants and or therapy. If you look deeper, you’ll see that the numbers skew towards college-educated, as in liberal, white women.
Has our ostensibly successful society somehow become so bad that fully 40% of the women of the majority population are now sufficiently damaged that they need mental health treatment? Or are they suffering from a mass psychosis of grievance and guilt created by people being too prosperous and having too much time and money on their hands? They say that idleness is the devil’s workshop, and there is perhaps no better example of the truth than these sad white women. While there are certainly people who need mental help, the fact that 40% of any ostensibly normal demographic needs either antidepressants or therapy is absurd.
But that’s what happens when society veers so far from the fundamentals of society and common sense that many see a future in pursuing nonsensical fields like gender studies, political science (my major), and countless others “studies” for which there is no real demand in society beyond that generated by government fiat. More importantly, they do so without the individual feeling of accomplishment that goes with doing something that actually benefits society, not the least of which is raising good children. Instead, people create the absurd in order to fill the void, and then demand that society congratulate them for their “courage.”
Thankfully, we may slowly be coming to the point where the larger society recognizes that absurdity is no longer acceptable, or worse, compelled. Justice Thomas and Matt Walsh are actually addressing the same thing. Common sense should not have to be discarded just because “experts” say it must.
The world is a challenging place with dangers of all sorts around every corner, the sooner America gets back to being a place ruled by common sense rather than absurdity, the better we will be prepared to deal with them...