Creating The Beasts

A friend and I had dinner the other night, and as is our norm, we had about a dozen conversations, three or four at a time. It being shortly after the 10/7 anniversary, we of course discussed all that. One question we touched on was what Hamas hoped to achieve via the barbarism its terrorists embraced, and my friend put forth the theory that the organizers lost control of the monsters they created.

The 10/7 attack was most likely intended to derail the normalization of economic ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a move that would have tipped the long-running conflict between the House of Saud and the mad mullahs in Iran in a decidedly anti-Iran direction. Provoke a response from Israel, and Mohammed Bin Salman et al would have to criticize and reconsider. Other motives were certainly in play as well, but we saw no logical reason to direct the invaders to kill children, wantonly rape, burn families alive, and the like. Big picture, such behavior, if planned, could, would, and did backfire, eliciting a response far more severe and comprehensive than what might have been chosen were the barbarians less so.

Problem is, when you inculcate fanaticism, it's hard to know what you'll get when you let the fanatics loose.

Dial the moral depravity down a few orders of magnitude, and consider that problem domestically.

I was absolutely tickled pink by the giant sky-screaming kerfuffle in the wake of an interview of author (and race-baiter) Ta-Nehisi Coates by CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil.

As reported at The Free Press, Dokoupil asked Coates some challenging questions. In other words, he did journalism. This popped some heads at CBS. Coates, who freely admits his book is one-sided in favor of the Palestinians, was, we might infer from the fallout, supposed to get the velvet glove treatment.

Much gnashing of teeth amongst the young, earnest, and woker-than-thou denizens of the newsroom ensued. The CBS brass bent the knee, and Dokoupil was promptly under-bussed. The canceler's veto reigned supreme, again.

Oh, but it went further.

An all-hands meeting was organized. Per one source, it was a "shit show" with much shouting and many tears shed. All because one journalist dared challenge one proudly partisan Hamas lover about his one-sidedness. It's also reported that many in the meeting thought it fair to question whether Israel should even exist.

I point you at my recent post.

Our political sandbox is full of woke-monsterlings created by the Best-and-Brightest that are so extreme they damage the causes they are supposed to advance. Examples are myriad, but I'll throw a special shout-out to Dylan Mulvaney and the Bud Light ad exec. Oh, and of course, the OG sky screamer, whose bout of self-indulgent virtue-signal spawned a million memes and the cliche "sky-screamer" itself.

She certainly didn't help others' perception of the Left.

It's also full of similar beasts over on the Right. Whether it be the conspiracists that see nefarious New World Order Machiavellians behind everything, the "government is targeting Red states with man-made hurricanes," or the January 6th rioters, people who agitate the masses via emotion rather than fact or logic sometimes produce loons that rather than advance the Right's goals. Whether you peg the sorts of Andrew Tate, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Alex Jones as producers or product of this phenomenon, it remains that they harm rather than help the Right's case.

Thomas Sowell has commented on the disparity between those who want to do stuff and those who trust passive mechanisms to produce the best outcomes. As in, those who want to actively shape society vs those who trust market forces. The former find concentrated reward in the act of doing, which incentivizes doing more, even if the acts don't work as intended.

This is the "good intentions" feedback loop, where insufficient outcomes are a signal for more action rather than introspection and undoing what didn't work.

This is the incentive that leads to creating the uncontrollables and the untamables.

And, this is motivates deflection, where bad outcomes get blamed on others rather than being acknowledged, a la Frankenstein's monster, as "the mess we made."

What's the point of this? To address a problem, one should first understand it. Part of that understanding lies in the old aphorism about good intentions and roads to hell. As usual, the remedy includes a healthy dose of humility. Those who would shape our society should dial back their arrogance and egos, look at history, and come to terms with the reality that bending others to their will is rarely a good idea.