The Death of Nuance

America has been thrown into a tyrannical nightmare.  This tyranny has seized control of our Federal Government by way of the bureaucracy and more recently, an overzealous executive branch that oversteps the authority that it is allowed according to the supreme law of the land, our US Constitution.  You may say that tyranny is a strong word, so how do we define tyranny in this particular sense?  Albert Maysles (1926-2015), an influential cinematographer and director, eloquently stated that tyranny is “the deliberate removal of nuance”.  I think that one can argue, that the world has seen the death of nuance.  We see this absence of nuance in our current political climate as activists organize and protest for the cause or causes that they believe are most noble.  Politicians, media, educators in academia, and the like use a gaslighting strategy to keep these activists foaming at the mouth, as most of these causes that the useful idiots advocate for are much more complex than a simple, “tax the rich”, “end fossil fuels”, or “save the children/whales/trees/baby seals/Bambi” etc.  The term that I referenced above, “useful idiots”, was a term used by Vladimir Lenin to describe the group of people that advocate for a cause that they do not fully understand.  Lenin knew that this gullible group was instrumental in achieving the control that he wanted to have over the population. 

These useful idiots exist today, operating on 100% emotion and “feeling” their way through life.  The climate change crowd is a great example here.  There is a reason why most of these climate activists are much younger, many in their teens or twenty somethings.  They hear, the world is going to end if we don’t do X, so they are terrified and they are led to believe that eliminating the use of fossil fuel will prevent the climate apocalypse.  I am in my early 40’s, and they have been selling the “world is coming to an end” narrative since before I was in grade school.  They called it the “greenhouse effect”.  But after you are warned of certain doom, multiple times throughout your life, you start to become quite skeptical that you will see this certain doom anywhere close to your lifetime.    Young people tend to fall into this trap because they lack life experience.  This prevents them from having the proper perspective when presented with these narratives. 

This oversimplification of the issues of the day makes it easy for the useful idiots to belong to a group, without having to rub two brain cells together to form a thought.  There is no thought because it’s all about the narrative.  There is also a degree of comfort because all the major institutions push these narratives giving cover to the useful idiots and shielding them from any real questions, or having to defend their positions with an actual argument.  There is no logic, calculation, or any other metric that is necessary to be part of the useful idiot brigade.  These movements tend to solidify a specific voting bloc for the Democrat Party but they also achieve the neo-Marxist goal of dividing the population and keeping us all at war with each other.  Conservatives, Libertarians, or just moderate voters with common sense are much better equipped to win an argument or debate with these leftists because anyone that challenges this institutional narrative is met with much resistance, forcing Conservatives and the like to know the issues and the relevant facts to respond to the resistance.  Let’s look at poverty for example, or as the left likes to call it, income inequality.  There is equality, then there is equity.  Equality is defined as equal opportunity, but equity refers to equal outcome.  The argument is that it is not fair for employee A to make more money than employee B.  This is where the oversimplification is made by the simple brain.  They think that if a millionaire exists, that a number of people have to be poor for that person to be rich.  This is incorrect, as the market is not a zero-sum game.   99 times out of 100, the wealth lies with the person that has put in the work.  If one has less money, it is usually because that person has not contributed something useful or sought after, to the market.  There is also a different perspective that frowns upon materialism and recognizes that one can has less and still live a fulfilling, satisfying life. 

The point that I’m trying to make here is that we have perpetuated the death of nuance as we have become lazy, and lost the desire to seek facts and speak truth.   An informed citizenry is dangerous, and government fears a dangerous citizenry as it is harder to manipulate the educated.   Education does not necessarily require that you have a piece of paper from academia.  Education is knowing how to think, not what to think.  This is something that out institutions have forgotten.  To defeat this tyranny, we must get back to promoting free thought, and not be concerned with hurting the feelings of snowflakes.  That is the only way back.