In my recent series of columns on happiness, I discussed the many ways in which living in opposition to truth or reality necessarily causes great unhappiness. Examples include a male trying to become a female when that is not possible, or people believing that they are powerless to control their lives (i.e. adopting an external locus of control, rather than an internal one).
Chemically or literally castrating yourself will make you many things, but “happy” is not one of them. And behaving as if you can’t control your own life is a self-destructive lie ending in a grimly self-fulfilling prophecy. (If at the end of many years of bad choices you find yourself in a bad place, but still look in the mirror and blame racism, capitalism, the patriarchy, or your astrological sign for all of your problems, you have created your own unhappiness.)
Ultimately, this principle of swimming against the tide of reality very often co-exists with a dysfunctional ideology of one sort or another. Anybody can have a wrong idea, and then test it, and when it fails, abandon it. But it takes ideology to convince someone that dozens of failed tests do not mean that the idea is wrong.
Absent ideology, a male who feels himself to somehow be a female would likely realize that there is something wrong with those feelings, and try to address that. But he’s much more likely to act on those disordered feelings in disastrous ways if an influential sexual ideology tells him that he really IS a woman, and that denying his real gender is actually “gender affirming.”
In a real-world context without ideological pressures, wrong/dysfunctional/false ideas tend to be rejected when they fail, and be replaced by better ones. When medieval architects tried to build taller buildings without super-thick bases and walls, they collapsed; when somebody came up with the idea of supporting the walls with flying buttresses, the result was beautiful cathedrals that stand to this day.
Ideology often perversely provides immunity from accountability when the ideas in question fail. Car makers whose cars constantly break down go out of business, as do rocket makers whose rockets consistently explode on the launching pad, and restaurateurs whose food makes people sick.
But you can be a Marxist professor in the Year of our Lord 2026 – after over a century going 0-fer in experiments with socialist governance all over the world – and still get tenure. You can call yourself a socialist and win Democrat primaries and even general elections in many areas of the country, despite socialism’s horrific record of failure. You can be wrong about nearly every political and financial prediction you’ve ever made, and still have a high-paying gig in the MSM. (I’m looking at you, Paul Krugman. And nearly everybody else on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC.)
Of course, ideology is not necessarily tied to dysfunction, failure and unhappiness…as long as that ideology is not grounded in fundamental error. Hence the documented happiness gap between liberals and conservatives.
Let’s look at two instructive ideological constants, one on the left – DEI (aka affirmative action, or compensatory discrimination) – and one on the right – free market reforms.
The initial idea behind affirmative action was well-intentioned: if a group was disadvantaged and their progress thereby retarded, it’s only fair to give them compensatory advantages, to allow them to catch up. But when that idea was tested in the real world, it quickly revealed several fatal flaws which fell under the heading of “unintended consequences.”
First, self-interested grifters quickly elbowed aside the intended beneficiaries of the compensation, taking advantage of largesse to benefit themselves. Second, the policies created a perverse disincentive to work hard to improve, since recipients could claim rewards without doing so. Third, they created a sense of entitlement and resentment, as if limited, temporary help was a limitless, eternal obligation. Fourth, discrimination in favor of one group required discrimination against other groups.
Finally, as the policy failed, it required a heavier thumb on the scale and more blatant discrimination to achieve its goals. Founders envisioned a scenario where two applicants for a job or college admission were nearly identically qualified, so that the policy preference would be basically just a tie breaker. But that very rarely happened in the real world, and soon well qualified majority applicants were being rejected in favor of dramatically less qualified minority applicants.
Ultimately, such policies were a disaster for everyone, creating resentment in those being discriminated against, and stigmatizing and angering those who received the “benefits.”
This is a very familiar story, but two perfect examples just came up in the last week. First, a DOJ probe found that Duke law school has still been intentionally discriminating against whites and Asians and in favor of blacks and Hispanics, despite SCOTUS ruling in 2023 that universities can no longer do that.
Duke’s lawlessness is clear. They have been using short answers to “diversity” questions to make an end-run around anti-discrimination law. Oddly enough, the result is the same as it ever was: black and Hispanic applicants with similar academic records as whites and Asians had “a substantially higher likelihood of admission” – 350% higher! – than did those whites and Asians.
In fact, the median LSAT scores of ACCEPTED black and Hispanic applicants were lower than those of REJECTED white and Asian applicants!
Reality – and black letter law, plus the threat of ruinous litigation and reputational harm – should have prevented Duke from continuing to discriminate. But the pull of ideology was too strong to resist.
The second story is a specific anecdote that stands in for a general pattern: the fall of DEI fraudster Jason Arday from his position at Cambridge. You’ve probably heard of this one. The youngest ever black prof at Cambridge (founded in 1206!), Arday was a professor of sociology, despite having no degree in sociology. His degrees were in education, with a focus on physical education.
That’s correct. He was a glorified PE teacher. Which has to make at least one person happy in the wake of this debacle. Because Jill Biden can now relax, knowing that she is no longer the most obviously fraudulent “doctor” on the world stage!
Like DEI President of Harvard Claudine Gay, Arday had plagiarized in his dissertation. Like racial grifter Ibram X. Kendi (aka Henry Rogers), Arday talked only and always about racism. (If you haven’t read his paper, “The White Colonialist Origins of Dodge Ball,” you’re missing out.) (Okay, I made that up. But just barely.) Like many an extreme left whacko, he’s got himself a primo set of crazy eyes. (Really, look at any picture of him, anywhere. Cambridge should have seen him coming a mile away.)
But he went above and beyond his peers in elite fraud circles, by incorporating a heavy dose of George Santos-style tall tales. He claimed to have had professional careers in both soccer and snooker, to have run 600 miles of marathons in 6 days, to have been the subject of a famous, decades-long UK documentary series that began 20 years before he was born! He had autism, and was illiterate until age 18, and had a brain tumor, too. Oh, and did I mention that he ran the last several of his marathons on a broken leg?
Ugh. The abandonment of all standards and integrity can be seen in the vast disproportion between his paper-thin resume – even if it had been true – and the unmerited heights to which he rose. Because Arday wasn’t hired as a part-time lecturer or lowly assistant prof at a third-tier local college. Despite his total lack of accomplishments and his utterly shameless and obvious ongoing grift, he was given a prestigious position at one of the (allegedly) most prestigious universities in the West!
This is the burden the left has voluntarily chosen to bear, all because they can’t alternatively bear to lay down the comforting, self-flattering lies promoted by their dysfunctional ideology.
Contrast the well-deserved humiliations of the leftist battlers against truth with the equally well-deserved plaudits being heaped on my favorite South American politician, and the owner of the wackiest sideburns since the Civil War: Javier Milei.
When Milei was elected president of Argentina in late 2023, he inherited a nation with a troubled history and in an economic meltdown. The month-over-month inflation rate was 25%, and the Argentinian peso was one of the world’s worst-performing currencies. Milei’s solution was a plan to roll back socialism in favor of conservative free-market reforms: slash government spending, deregulate the economy, embrace free trade, balance the budget.
Liberal wise men said it would never work. Over 100 leading economists from around the world – including progressive hero Thomas Piketty – signed a letter warning that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.
No. Sorry. Their letter branded Milei as “far right” (because of course it did), and said his “lassez-faire” plan would cause “devastation.” Political scientist Ian Bremmer (I’ve never heard of him either) warned, “Economic collapse is coming imminently.” Felix Salmon, chief financial correspondent at Axios, said that Milei’s “wrecking ball” policies would produce “a deep recession.”
And NYT columnist and always-wrong Nobel winner Paul Krugman argued that there’s “no plausible scenario in which even $20 billion in US loans will save Milei’s failing economic strategy.”
Annnndddd… Milei’s policies have succeeded wildly.
For the first time in nearly 20 years, Argentina ran a budget surplus in 2024, and monthly inflation has dropped from 25% to less than 2%. The poverty rate has plunged, and in July the country got its third credit upgrade in three months. To top it all off, Milei has now proposed a plan to make sure that the Argentine government stays in check. Called the “fiscal shackle” plan, it requires that if the government runs a deficit for two months in a row, all non-essential government functions will be automatically suspended (no new spending, contracts or hiring) until the budget is returned to balance.
The best part? While the “shackle” is in place, no top politicians from the president on down will be paid until the budget is again balanced.
As I finished typing that, I’ve realized that I will need to call my doctor if this condition persists for more than 4 hours.
Could the lesson be any clearer? We should listen to Marcus Aurelius, and take reality on reality’s terms. Why would we want to keep swimming upstream against reality and truth?
We don’t need to come up with new, esoteric theories. We know what works (socialism and DEI policies, for example), and we know what doesn’t (free minds and free markets).
Can we please just do what works, in this midterm, and beyond?
Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!
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Martin Simpson 