As I try to wrap up the thoughts that I’ve discussed in this series, I’ve arrived at two main conclusions, at least for now. The first is that it’s much easier to be happy if you take reality on reality’s terms rather than trying to swim upstream against truth in all its forms.
The second is that while I can’t answer the chicken-and-egg question about leftism and unhappiness – i.e. does leftism cause unhappiness, or are already-unhappy people naturally drawn to leftism – there are enough connections between leftism and unhappiness to establish a strong correlation, regardless of which direction the causation arrow is pointing.
“Take reality on reality’s terms” is a very loose paraphrase of a key principle of stoicism, as found in (among other places) the writings of badass Roman emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “Accept everything which happens, even if it seems disagreeable.”
So much of what has gone wrong in recent decades seems to boil down to our inability to face disagreeable realities and adjust to them. Many people want to get rich quickly, or without a lot of hard work and persistence, but that’s not how reality works. Many people want to be thin and ripped, but don’t want to be extremely disciplined about exercise and diet. Some people want to change their gender, and to make everyone else accept their “new” gender. (Spoiler alert: You can’t, and they won’t.)
Life is so much harder – and your unhappiness so much greater – when you are constantly beating your head against the wall of reality.
While many of the realities of life are biological, or psychological, or financial, or demographic, all of those play themselves out in our national life through politics. And many Americans (especially those on the left) want to get things through politics that reality will not allow.
They want all of the material blessings produced by free market capitalism… without free market capitalism.
They want low gas prices… without any oil exploration, drilling and refining.
They want citizens to be unable to own guns, so that the only ones with guns and the ability to protect citizens will be the police…but they want to abolish the police.
They want to prevent big developers from building more, and increasing the supply of housing…but they also want lower home and rent prices that can only come with an increased supply of housing.
They want to keep spending more than we collect in taxes…without the broken economy that eventually results from spending more than we collect in taxes. And they want the government to collect billions more in taxes…without paying one dime more in taxes themselves.
In short, they want a free lunch. But as you should learn by grade school, there’s no such thing.
All of us are susceptible to these kinds of fantasies, and we all have to discipline and restrain ourselves, and get over our outrage when the facts of life don’t conform to our wishes. Because as Marcus Aurelius says, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”
Or was that Ben Shapiro? Either way, it’s true, and there’s no getting around it.
Unfortunately for the Left, their entire political worldview and program depends on making reality conform to their feelings. And that’s an endless source of unhappiness for them.
Which brings me back to where I started this series, when I was struck by how happy and appreciative so many America conservatives and European visitors here for the World Cup were about our 250th birthday – especially by comparison to how sour and unhappy the American Left was, and how most leftists don’t love the country as much as conservatives do. (That’s not an insult from me, but the results of many polls over decades, in their own words.) Some of that feeling can obviously be ascribed to their unhappiness with Trump being in the White House.
But many polls over many years have shown a consistent pattern: on average, conservatives identify as more patriotic/proud of America than liberals do. And while there is some fluctuation for both groups when the opposition controls the White House, the difference is stark. Conservatives’ love of country drops a few points when Dems are in control, but liberals’ patriotism plummets when the Nazis – er, I mean the conservatives – are in power.
And here is where I turn to the wisdom of the great Thomas Sowell (peace be upon him). In his book The Vision of the Anointed (1995), he summarized the worldviews of the left and the right. He called the left’s approach the titular “vision of the anointed,” because they saw themselves as the experts who know how to run society, if they could just get enough political power to do so.
He called the right’s view “the tragic vision,” which doesn’t sound like great marketing for our side. But it’s shot through with stoicism, and has the advantage of being true. I quoted John Nolte previously about how conservatives have come to peace with flawed human nature, which is what Sowell is getting at when he calls our outlook “tragic.” One of his most famous arguments is that “there are no solutions, only trade-offs.”
That line could have come straight out of Marcus Aurelius. Or Ben Shapiro, for that matter.
Since the Left’s view is utopian, it brings with it constant disappointment. Leftists look out at the hicks and deplorables – in their eyes, we put the “lump” in the “lumpen proletariat” – and are infuriated when we don’t recognize their anointed status, and follow their orders. We are the human manifestation of “facts don’t care about your feelings,” and they can only take so much of our stubborn resistance before they are driven to despair.
That’s what I think explains much of their pessimism. How great can this country be if it’s filled with the likes of us? They’ve gone to the right schools and come out with the right grievance-studies degrees (and six figures of debt), only to watch a bunch of blue-collar rubes start their own businesses and out-earn them. They post signs in their lawn to lecture us that “science is real” and that “trans women are women,” and we drive by and laugh at their signs. It’s infuriating!
They look at us the way Cornwallis looked at our continental militias during the Revolution. They were a cultured, sophisticated empire, and we were a provincial, untutored rabble. So how can we be beating them as often as we do?
Their pessimism has created a self-reinforcing psychological death spiral as real as the economic death spiral that their sanctuary city policies have created. They can’t even recognize the many good things going on in America, and they wildly over-estimate the negative.
I’ll cite one example. It’s a truism among leftists that Americans are extremely racist, and they often point to crime statistics to suggest that blacks are treated disproportionately badly by police. Several years ago Americans were surveyed about how many unarmed black men they thought are killed by the police every year, and the average responses were way off.
The average guess was around a thousand, and many people thought the number was 10,000 or more. In reality, the number was between 12 and 30 per year in recent years. I researched this, and found a comprehensive compilation of these deaths for every year since 2014, with a paragraph-long summary of each such killing. The results were eye-opening, and showed how much of an over-estimate even those small numbers are.
The biggest problem is the misleading use of “unarmed.” That term calls to mind a defenseless man, possibly with his hands raised, being gunned down by heartless cops. But even a quick skim through the summaries of the deaths in any given year destroys that narrative. Sometimes the dead guys had been driving a car directly at cops when they were shot; sometimes they were physically fighting with the cops – trying to beat or strangle them with their bare hands, often trying to get their guns or tasers – when they were shot.
Many times they weren’t even shot at all, but died after getting tased, or falling as they fled on foot, or dying in a wreck as they fled in a car. Many perps were drunk or high, and died of overdoses or heart attacks. In some cases cops tried various non-lethal tactics first – bean bag rounds or tasers – before finally shooting someone who kept coming at them. A handful of cases involved “suicide by cop,” with the perp brandishing a fake gun or air rifle – in one case an air pressure gauge! – so that a cop would shoot them. Many times mental health crises resulted in erratic and violent behavior absent any weapon.
After accounting for all of those, I’d guess that the accurate number of black people WRONGLY killed by cops probably doesn’t amount to more than half a dozen per year, in a nation of a third of a billion people, in which millions of cop-citizen encounters occur annually. And in those few cases, the cops are almost always fired at the least, and most of them are criminally charged and tried.
I think this example is typical of so many erroneous ideas that leftists hold about America. Even a very short time spent researching one issue after another would disabuse them of many of their most depressing beliefs. But it seems like they are not interested, and would rather remain willfully ignorant, if the alternative is embracing a more positive vision of their own country.
Finally, I’m reminded of one more fact about our recent European visitors, specifically the Brits who were here. Within the last month it came out that Mississippi’s per-capita income had risen enough that the average Mississippian now earns more than the average Brit. And since Mississippi ranks 50th in per capita income of all American states, that means that the Brits are poorer on average than the residents of all 50 American states!
During the World Cup games, British journalists surveyed British visitors here, asking them where the UK would rank in terms of per capita income if it joined America as our 51st state. Their average guess was #7, and the lowest I saw was somebody who guessed #30. They were shocked when told that they’d be dead last, right behind Mississippi.
Seeing that, it occurred to me that the pro-America Brits are almost the polar opposite of our own pessimistic, anti-American leftists. Not only do the Brits appreciate America, they optimistically overestimate their own nation’s wealth in comparison to our own. Meanwhile, our own leftists don’t rightly appreciate America, and they are (incorrectly) pessimistic and negative about her.
I know which position I’d rather be in, and which group I’d rather hang out with. I think our leftist elites might be beyond help, but I do want better for the everyday, well-intentioned lefties who have been taken in by the dour representation of America in our universities and our media.
I hope that they can be brought around to see the truth, especially because the saddest part of the patriotism gap and happiness gap is that they are both unnecessary! Their dark view of America is based on wildly inaccurate and false beliefs, which then inevitably create a self-fulfilling prophecy which leads to needless suffering.
Honestly, that is a shame.
So let’s not participate in it, and let’s do whatever we can to help our lefty fellow citizens to reject it too.
Have a great weekend!
Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!
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Martin Simpson 