Our World of Myths and Nonsensical Nostrums

Our world, the world of an American, is now a world of nostrums that we all repeat fervently, vehemently, loudly, even religiously... nostrums that we all know are wrong. But we dasn't say we know they're wrong, for fear of a whole array of social punishments that are crushingly severe and difficult to assimilate into our lives. Unless, that is, we're Elon Musk, or Bill Gates, or Bill Clinton.

It's an adult Santa Claus world. A world in which we all repeat, and more importantly live according to, myths – myths that we all know are myths; myths that are obviously myths – and we don't deviate from mouthing these myths, even in close-knit social circles, or parties at the homes of friends we've known for decades. Exactly as if we're discussing Santa Claus in those social situations, but in the presence of small children who still believe.

What are some of those myths? First: they’re easy to classify. They pertain mostly to women and minorities of some kind or other: Racial, ethnic, sexual, or “gender” minorities.

You know what they are. Every time you say something, then internally you make sure that you edit what you say to ensure that it’s sufficiently bland, or contains adequate disclaimers, so that you can’t possibly fall afoul of any Social Credit Goons who might be listening in. Those myths.

What’s remarkable is the restraint, the discipline, that we Americans – nearly all 330 million of us – display in our adherence to this regime of increasingly rigid social conformity. Not only that, all this comes at a time when scientific advancement is accelerating at a dizzying pace.

Science: the realm of hard-headed, cold-eyed truth; the world of “data,” where “facts” rule and actually: one plus one does equal two. Except…

Except, in the land of myths, where we must all mouth the mystical, magical myths, where 1+1=2 must fall under suspicion, because it has the acrid stink of ineluctable truth. There can, obviously, be no ineluctable truth in a land where we’re all supposed to trumpet what we all know are lies. Because, if you think it through, all lies inevitably perish before any one absolute truth. In the honest mind, out of any such truth, only pure truth can emerge. If, indeed, 1+1=2, then, eventually: a2+b2=c2, and e=mc2, Riemann can formulate his hypothesis, and men can’t be women and vice versa.

That’s right. A truth that we all know is true, but that we dasn’t say: Men can’t be women and vice versa. And yet, within very recent memory, if you were to say that, you’d receive not only a respectful hearing, but most people would nod and say something like, “Obviously.”

At that point, though, also come the flood of disclaimers: “But, if someone wants to ‘transition,’ I have no problem with that.” And, “But, of course, we need to be aware of, and deal fairly with, and be kind and compassionate with those people who think they’re the ‘opposite sex.’” And, while those disclaimers were certainly the camel’s nose under the tent flap, as a society we could have allowed that selfsame nose no further advance into our tent, and been just fine.

But we didn’t.

And now, not only do we, in the cool kids’ society, say that men can be women, and women can be men, we must say it, else suffer potentially severe consequences. We must say also that boys can be girls and girls can be boys.

Incredibly, we’re now fighting a fight in which the other side insists that it’s just fine for, say, a three-year old boy to say, carelessly and unthinkingly, as is any young child’s wont, “Mommy, I think I should be a girl.” At which point, Mommy can then unleash a devastatingly damaging, a grotesquely mutilating, a Nazi death camp experimentation-like process on her son that we all are now supposed to call: “stunning and brave.” Instead of the truth. The truth that such a process, performed on a child, is a ghoulish crime; child abuse writ very large.

It’s bad enough when a doctor willingly mutilates an adult, but a child?

We mouth these extraordinary, astonishing, cruel lies all the time, and not only in the realm of men and women, boys and girls, but also and especially in the area of race.

How do we know that we’re mouthing lies about race? Easy: the major metropolitan areas of America are killing fields for predominantly young black men… almost exclusively at the hands of other young black men. Tens of thousands of young lives snuffed out in the past decades, and yet, the Democratic Party, which has presided almost exclusively over these killing fields, continues to reign there, unchecked, and they will for the foreseeable future. How else could such a situation continue on, year after year, decade after decade, if not for an entrenched complex of lies and myths perpetuated by this selfsame Democratic Party?

And… something that almost never happens anywhere – even in the American urban slaughter-zones – is the following: A white police officer shoots and kills an unarmed black man. That happens maybe a dozen times a year or so. Still, what is the dominant narrative in our nation? What do we wail about, gnash our teeth for, furrow our brows and agonize over? Police reform so that we stop (especially) white police officers from shooting and killing unarmed black men.

The first myths – the ones about “transgender kids” – mutilate young people, scarring them for life, often rendering them infertile, unable to experience intimacy with anyone, and emotionally wounded – again for life. The second myths – the ones about black people in America – kill thousands each year.

We have more myths and nonsensical nostrums too. More lies that we outwardly believe and inwardly know are nothing but tommyrot.

Here’s one: We’re living with “the legacy of slavery,” and we must acknowledge that fact, and base much public policy on it. Nope. Here is a very simple truth: We live exclusively and only with the legacy with which we choose to live as a society. Simple as that. And no society in the history of the world has rejected slavery, and all it represents, with greater vociferousness than America, and secondarily, Western Civilization as a whole. Western Civilization continues to be the onlyrecognizable civilization to have rejected slavery completely and comprehensively.

Slavery’s been gone, and vehemently rejected, for more than a century and a half. Yes, as with a cancer patient being fully cured, there were necessary recovery and eradication periods, and our nation passed through the paroxysms and throes necessary to show that we were well and truly rid of the thing, until: few institutions are more reviled anywhere in the world today, than slavery in America and in the Western world.

We’re actually living with the legacy of the last major society-wide, society-shaking event: the decade of the 1960’s. And that upheaval has given us the path on which the lies of today were strewn, such that they could be plucked and, like deadly Queen Anne’s Lace, fed into American society, to give it the new bondage of the 21st Century. The new lies that bedevil the American people, slashing at and harassing us the people, like a pack of hyenas relentlessly hounding a wounded elephant to its death.

Want some more examples of the deadly lies we all repeat endlessly, that we all know are simply not true? Sure:

• Women can do anything men can do.

• Problems and pathologies more commonly among black Americans are exclusively white people’s fault.

• Rich people want a society in which they get richer, while poor people get poorer.

• Women don’t need men, but men need women.

• Men are stupid, brutish, sex-crazed creatures, endlessly and mindlessly preying on women.

• If women are in poverty, it’s men’s fault; if men are in poverty, it’s men’s fault.

• If black people are in poverty, it’s white people’s fault. Especially rich white people.

• If white people are in poverty, it’s white people’s fault. Especially rich white people.

• Black people can’t be racists, while white people can only be racists.

• White privilege, white supremacy, institutional racism, systemic racism, social justice. These last are simple: What cannot be defined and persuasively demonstrated must be a myth. There have been attempts to define and demonstrate these things. All have failed.

And many more.

It should be noted that these myths harm society as a whole, but do the most damage by far to the populations whose interests they’re supposed to advance. The notion that black people are held back mostly by the malice of white people harms black people immensely. The lie that women can do anything that men can do, and don’t need men’s protection, harms women the most, as they try to live up to impossible expectations, then suffer the constant bruises to their self-esteem when they fail. The notion that black Americans’ problems are white Americans’ fault harms black Americans the most, when black Americans choose not even to try to succeed, deeming the goal impossible to achieve. And so on.

Another way to identify a debilitating myth is the requirement that people who are guiltless of abuse, make restitution to people whom they have not abused.

The myth that the legacy of some abuse morally shackles the descendants of the abusers – or all members of a group regardless of whether they participated in the abuse – to a process of restitution for people whom they did not abuse, is one of the most destructive myths of all. Yet, it’s widely believed in American society today. Imagine if your grandfather murdered in cold blood the grandfather of someone else in your town, and got clean away with it. Imagine, then if the murdered man’s grandson were to pursue you for restitution sixty years after the crime. What would be your reaction?

A healthy society must adhere to some simple truths – absolute, ineluctable truths if you prefer. One of these is: Society shall not punish the guiltless. America’s Founders recognized this and believed deeply in it. So deeply that they built countless protections into the Constitution and subsequent Amendments, such that America would be organized around the notion that it’s better to let a guilty man go free than to punish an innocent man.

Slowly, but at an accelerating pace, our society is eroding away the sacred truths we once held to be self-evident, and on which any healthy society must be based; and all in favor of myths and nonsensical nostrums.

You can lie only so much, before you begin to do irrevocable damage to the deepest part of who and what you are. How many times, for example, can you lie to a loved one about something deeply important, before you come to understand that your loved one esteems not you, but some false image of you that your lies have built up in her head?

That happens on a society-wide level as well, and it’s a recipe for the breakdown of society, into feuding and possibly warring, camps. These are frequently camps hellbent on the destruction of the “other,” whom they don’t understand at all, because they’ve both spent all their time lying to them, and hearing lies right back. While all that was needed the whole time was for each to look at the other, with wide-open eyes, and… tell the truth.

It's what American society needs the most now. The great writer and thinker Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said,

You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.

He also said something else about lies, and it aptly describes what we see clearly in American society today:

We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.

I might add:

And we’re still letting them get away with it.

No healthy society can long survive a condition in which human relations are overwhelmingly built on a tissue of lies. Soon enough, the very notion of what it is to be an American – a citizen of the greatest nation the world has ever seen – disappears in a miasma of rancor, bitterness, suspicion and despair, and all because people refused to fulfill the most basic responsibility of one person to another: honesty.

We’re still letting them get away with it. We can stop.

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