If you've ever wondered how in the world liberals can believe the things they do, and live under the tortured logic they spout, this is a VERY good video.
It features Evan Sayet speaking at the Heritage Foundation. It touches on some concepts I wrote about a few years ago when I was doing a column at Toogood Reports, and blogged on again a couple of months ago: liberals are very child-like in their thinking.
It's about an hour long, so it won't be a quick lesson. But if you have time to play the video and kick back on the couch, or do some tasks around the house that don't require a lot of mental energy, you can play this in the background as you go about those tasks. But it's worth it.
Pay close attention around 27:00 into it, as this really gets to the heart of "how modern liberals think." Here's an excerpt from the transcript:
So the mindless foot soldier, which is what I call the non-elite, will support the elite's blueprint for utopia, will side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success, out of a sense of justice. As I said at the beginning, they're not evil. It's just a mindless acceptance without any true Socratic desire to talk about the real consequences. It's meaningless to them, and it's why John Lennon said utopia was all the people living for today...
The same is true of good and evil. Since nothing can deemed good, nothing can be deemed evil. That which society does recognize as good must be the beneficiary of some sort of prejudice. That which society recognizes as evil must be the victim of that prejudice. So, again, the mindless foot soldier will invariably side with whatever policy, mindlessly accept whatever policy seeks to tear down what is good--America, Israel, Wal-Mart--and elevate what is evil until everything meets in the middle and there is nothing left to fight about.
I think the only area where I would substantively disagree with Sayet would be that he says that he's not calling some liberals "evil" because they think they are doing good. I do not dispute that even if they embrace Islamic terrorists, abortion, homosexuality and other things that God clearly says are wrong, they still believe they are doing good--I know that almost all if not all do believe this.
But what we believe has no bearing whatsoever on the morality of our actions. You're speeding whether you feel you're justified or not. You're raping that girl whether you feel justified in forcing her to have sex with you or not. I was doing evil several years ago back when I was drinking and whoring and living like a reprobate, even though I felt justified in living that way. In an extreme example, even Hitler probably thought he was doing a good thing for the people of Germany.
What we believe about our actions (or delude ourselves into believing about our actions) has no bearing on how they actually come down when God weighs the morality of our actions and the things we advocate.
Still, I understand what Sayet is getting at, in that the bulk of our actions may not be evil and thus it wouldn't be fair to say that we are an "evil person." Yet we can do and advocate evil things while falling short of being "an evil person.
My perhaps technical disagreement with Sayet in this area in no way diminishes how insightful this lecture is. I hope you'll take the time to watch/listen.
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