An
Open Letter to
Our Rousseauist Counterparts
from
the Sadean Liberals of The 1585
November
2006
There
are doubtless many among you
who will accuse we 1585ers of
being “closet Conservatives.”
Who else,
you might think, but a
Conservative, talks so endlessly about logic, or is so sure that their
opinions
are the only acceptable ones, or is so fond of calling people stupid?
We would
respond by saying that, while we are certainly no Conservatives, we
talk about logic because logic is good, and
that we
believe our opinions to be superior because they are
superior, and that
we only call people stupid when they are
in fact
stupid — but we have
tried these explanations on you before, and you didn’t
listen. So instead we
will respond by saying that we have tried it your way, and it
didn’t work.
After
twelve years of
profound assclownery under Reagan
and Bush the Elder,
we elected a Democrat in 1992, and reelected him in 1996.
Under Bill
Clinton,
things were almost miraculously good: crime and unemployment
went down,
the
economy soared, and Democrats felt that they had pretty much
conclusively
proven that they were way better at all the stuff people agree the
government
should be good at. Then, for some reason, they lost in 2000
(okay, they
didn’t
actually lose, Bush the Younger cheated — but like our
high-school
football
coach used to say, a bad call wouldn’t matter if you had been
winning 56-7; it
shouldn’t have mattered
that he cheated,
because it should have been a slaughter).
So why did the Democrats lose?
Many
people will tell you
that they lost because of the Clinton
sex scandal. But from what we could tell, the average
American
wasn’t as pissed
off about that as the Republicans pretended. We have never met a single
person
in our lives who changed parties because of the Clinton
sex-thing, have you? What we have
met are
people
who switched sides
because of PC. Growing up in the ’90s, we knew
lots of young
people who didn’t
particularly like being bombarded with endless lists of words they
couldn’t say
anymore, or being lectured by radical feminists who were apparently
trying even
harder to keep everyone from having sex than the Christian Right was.
We knew
lots of attractive women who were tired of being called sell-outs and
accused
of having eating disorders, and we certainly knew buttloads of
heterosexual
white males who didn’t particularly appreciate being told
that they were evil
every ten seconds even though they hadn’t done anything.
(NOTE: 1585s love gay
people, ethnic minorities, and women; we just don’t do the
“straight white
males are the cause of all the world’s problems”
thing, because it is
oversimplified and unproductive, and just makes the very people you are
trying to get to stop
being dicks act like even bigger dicks.)
But
mainly, we knew
people who didn't like the way that
the concept of fairness
got all screwed up. When it got to the point where elementary
schools
were
banning the game of tag because it lowered the self-esteem of the kids
who
couldn’t run fast, tons of people became embarrassed to call
themselves
Liberals — and all this started happening before
the Clinton sex
scandal.
Trying
to eliminate all
traces of competition — all dynamics where some
people win
and others lose — from
life is a mad, impossible
quest; it is the very essence of tilting at windmills.
Camille Paglia (back when she was good) wrote that the Left
is bisected into the Rousseauist
and Sadean
philosophies. Rousseauists
believe
that life in its
natural state is completely fair, and that if anyone ever has to feel
bad about
themselves, then something must be wrong, and that something needs to
be fixed
somehow
(and that it must therefore be possible
to fix it,
even if it isn’t).
Sadeans,
on the other hand, recognize that all human
existence is
predicated on
competition, that most human motivation is self-interested, and that
some
people are just clearly better at some things than other people
are — Sadeans
are still Liberals; we are just Liberals who
refuse to deny reality.
At
this point, after
several paragraphs of slamming our
fellow Liberals, we 1585ers would like to make it clear that
the vast majority of our
disagreements are with the Conservatives — it’s
just that, well… you’re getting
in our way. In fact, you are not only making it harder for us
to oppose
the
Conservatives, you are helping
the Conservatives.
You see, amid all your
ban-sports-because-they-make-the-slow-kids-sad,
ban-magazines-because-they-make-the-ugly-kids-sad,
ban-tests-because-they-make-the-dumb-kids-sad frenzy, you forgot
something...
The
Conservatives are
the fucking slow, ugly, dumb kids!
If
you
can’t ever tell people
they’re wrong, or tell dumb people that they’re
dumb, or acknowledge that some
people are simply smarter than others and that the opinions of those
people
count for more, then there is no longer any way to fight the
Conservatives. Nice
going, dipshits.
Now, to affirm our status
as part of the Left, we will
introduce a quotation from someone with whom academic Liberals are
categorically incapable of disagreeing, Oscar
Wilde:
“As long as war
is
regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination.
When
it is looked
upon as vulgar, it will cease to be
popular.”
As Wilde is using the
terms, the modern equivalent of
“wicked” would be
something like sinful
or nasty,
and the modern equivalent of
“vulgar” would be something like dumb, boring
and outdated.
In a nutshell, this is exactly where PC went wrong.
Its core
philosophy was
to promote a dynamic of nice
vs. mean over a
dynamic of true vs.
false or smart
vs. dumb — and
when you are trying to persuade a
bunch of people who are avowedly assholes, and in many cases quite proud
of the fact that they are assholes, calling them mean
isn’t going to cut
the mustard. Know why? Because assholes enjoy
being
called “mean” by
nerds — that’s
why they are assholes in
the first place! On
the other
hand, nobody
likes being called stupid.
Sure, some
people may pretend
not to care — but when a stupid person gets called stupid by
someone they know
is way
smarter than they are, in front of a bunch
of people? Believe us,
they care. Now, you’re probably going to say that
this will
just make them
angry, and that then they will be an even bigger asshole just for
spite, right?
Okay, great, except for two things. First of all,
these people are already
being the biggest assholes they can possibly be, and it’s already
just
for spite. Secondly, the key is to make examples of people.
Target the
biggest
douchebag chump you know and make a complete fool of him when the
maximum
possible number of other people are watching. Do you think
any of the
fence-riders will be lining up with the chump after that? On
the other
hand, if
you just call him mean
over and over while he gets
to look like a badass
in front of everyone because he’s being
“brave” enough to be “politically
incorrect,” and you just keep standing there going
“I am a nerd; please walk
all over me,” the fence-riders are just going to
bolt to wherever it
is you go to sign up for asshole lessons.
We tried it your way for
fifteen years, and the result
was Bush the Younger
getting (sort of) elected twice. If we lived in a society
where more
than 50%
of the people were masochists, then we heartily admit that PC would
be the
way to go — but we don’t.
The
1585 is here. Join
us, or we’ll call
you stupid. And you will
care.
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