The country of the willfully blind

If you want to find a causal factor for the UK’s descent into idiocy, and you’re feeling recklessly uncaring regarding the difference between causation and correlation, then you could do worse than look at today’s figures on growth in cocaine use. Look back over the years and there’s that matching line, dumber and dumber, doped and dopier… And the connection is not entirely fanciful – if you assume that the media has a great deal to do with the level of public discourse, then the use of charlie in the media must have an impact. “Hey sniff, I’ve just this great idea for a show. It’s just like Britain’s got fuck-all talent, but this time, on ice! One hour, Saturday night – Graham Norton, yeah? Yeah! Sniff”  That’s an actual transcript from a BBC development meeting.

But there is worse. As reaction to George Monbiot’s coke article today indicates, cocaine not only turns you into, in his words, an egocentric tosser it also firmly applies the blinkers of willful ignorance. I have many disagreements with George, but in this area we’re 100% agreed. I’ve written on this several times in the past, he’s also returning to the subject again – it’s a very simple thesis; that regardless of cocaine use’s harm or otherwise to the individual user, it undoubtedly causes harm in the country of origin, chiefly Colombia. Civil war, atrocities, environmental destruction, corruption. Very simple. Yet the cokeheads can’t seem to grasp it. You say it again and again. Nope. Doesn’t get through. Their gleefully embraced ignorance won’t let them look past their own noses. “But,” they bleat, and you can read their comments on George’s CiF article, “if it was legal, it would do no harm. It’s illegality that’s the problem!” This is rather like Wile E Coyote complaining that if only gravity was 1 m s−2 that canyon floor wouldn’t hurt so darned much. The point is fellers that it is illegal, globally, and while we can all argue about that, we can’t argue with the harm being done, by your habit, right now. If you don’t want to do harm, stop using it. Now. Till it’s legal.

But this argument doesn’t get picked up – they can’t win, so it slides by, to either side of the blinkers, only that which bolsters their argument, their choices, their chosen lifestyle and ideology is ever publically acknowledged. In this, they demonstrate the greatest failing of mankind – the corollary of believing your own bullshit, denying the reality of others. In personal life this puts the user in a dull little solipsistic bubble. In public life it tends to turn them into a  socialist… Yeah. You didn’t think this was about drugs did you? It’s about Polly. It’s always about fucking Polly.

There is no political ideology more founded on willful ignorance than socialism. The blindness of those who refuse to see the crashing errors of their creed is perfect and all-encompassing. Their refusal to learn from history, their rejection of  everyday experience, their passionate embrace of illusory historical forces that they claim make their victory inevitable… some say this marks them out as mentally ill. Others that they’re plain stupid. No, I think they’re just hiding nine tenths of the world from their gaze – fearful of truth disrupting the daydreams. And it isn’t just fear. Polly Toynbee speaks of socialism being founded on optimism, of the positive yearning she has. Well as I always say, Pol Pot thought he was the good guy too. Get this understood. The facile explanations we hear from Lefties regarding the positivity they feel, the blind unreasoning hope, the emotional tug they feel for socialism – this is a shield. They’re getting their affidavits in early. “Well, chairman of the ICC, I meant well. I was hoping for the best. Of course, the re-education camps and mass graves were a mistake, with hindsight, but I really though it was a good idea….” Any child could tell you this daffy idea cannot work without coercing millions into supporting it, without monstrous controls on family life, on language, on education, on free movement, free expression, free association. But then no child is a socialist.

That malicious anti-human ideology is often sold as a sugary lovey dovey can’t we all just get along opposition to right wing politics, to free markets and free choices. But in reality it simply opposes freedom. For all except the Dear Leaders of course. The Browns, the Ceausescus, the Toynbees. We see the blistering jaw-dropping hypocrisy of our own politicians, our own commentators, attacking private schools, while sending their kids to private schools, attacking privilege, from a position of extraordinary privilege, attacking the environmental harm of travel, while jetting off to Tuscany every other weekend. Sorry, meant to put in a string of supporting links there but, well, it’s all fucking Polly again.

Socialism is perhaps the biggest con ever put over on mankind – this supposed ideology of liberty and equality finds itself marked out again and again, in practice, as featuring desperate authoritarianism, and rigid party hierarchy. Only those who refuse to see can escape this vision. Only those who refuse to think can escape the doctrine’s internal paradoxes, and inevitable failure. Only those who truly despise their fellow man could ever adopt a politics that guarantees his certain hunger.

But with their blinkers, and with our good-natured assumption that they mean well, that they’re deluded but well-intentioned, the socialists refuse to give up, refuse to go away. Our misguided tolerance of this wicked ideology allows the pernicious propaganda to feed through every channel; that the right is hard headed, but hard hearted, that the left is woolly, but kind. Fuck that. Fuck that. Kind? Tell that to the mass graves. There is no kindness in enforced equality.

So stop giving them the benefit of the doubt – they’re wrong, tell them. Stop assuming a heart of gold – their ideology kills, tell them. Stop assuming they mean well when every implementation ends in horror – they ally themselves with monsters, tell them.

I’ll start; Polly, you’re an arrogant, deceitful, ignorant, treasonous hypocritical bitch. And I’m watching you.

Pikey’s back. BOORAH!