TruthHate

Bad Is What We Want So Bad.

It is amazing how often people want what is bad for them. This extends from the baby wanting candy to the old man wanting to live more than anything else. Of course babies want to be Conceived and Born, and to Grow up, and such, and old men, and women, want to do what is right, but their “gimme” nature gets in the way. They are tempted by everything imaginable, to overturn their sense of duty and good sense and, in consequence, do themselves, and others, in. And don’t think there are not plenty of “pimps” to make money off of serving their baser instincts. The merchants begging for the privilege of helping you do yourself in, are legion, and outnumber by far any of those who are trying to safeguard you. Christ was trying to tell us that “all that glitters is not gold,” but who would listen, and who listens today?

Now comes the hard part, when I have to name names, and step on toes, and break some icons. This is where people begin to hate what I say, but if I just dealt in generalities, no one would learn a thing from what I write. I have the knack of driving right to the heart of the matter and it drives people up the wall.

In the matter of “pimping” people, and enabling their wrongness, it helps to be able to “make the worser case appear the better.” A couple of such charlatans jump to mind, darling rogues, if I must say so. On of them is Victor Hugo, and the other is Charles Dickens. No more lovable and popular figures could be found to play the role of evil doers. But, the facts fit the case. Hugo’s most popular work, Les Miserables, is an enormously long novel that has a very simple idea to express, and it is an evil idea, indeed. In this idea, Hugo attempts to prove that stealing is OK, if, and I say IF, it can be should that it is justified. He believes he succeeded, and they world largely agrees with him. The central idea is that there is this perfectly sympathetic father who has this starving daughter and he steals a loaf of bread to feed her. He is caught and they want to hang him. Mind you this is a totally fictional, made up yarn, sculpted in exquisite detail to milk the last ounce of pity from the reader, and force him, in the end, to intellectually agree that theft is justified in some situations. Fact is, it is never justified, but Hugo is a sort of communist who believes in forcible redistribution of wealth, at any cost. And thus he will spare not effort to make his case believable.

The other “pimp” and enabler of wrong doing is Dickens. He wrote any number of books and stories that glorified and justified wrong behavior. Dicken’s Christmas Carol, is case in point. Here we have a businessman who is creating jobs other people, paying taxes, and in general supporting the world on his tired shoulders. Along comes Dickens and turns this admirable man into a villain, and his sloppy, lazy employee Bob Crachet into a victim and a hero. Talk about turning the values of the world upside down, no one is better and making “the worser case appear the better” than Hugo and Dickens.

These kinds of writers and thousands like them make good livings pandering to the basest instincts and ignoble lusts of the population. In the long run they do a lot of harm and very little good. Entertaining? Yes! But at what price is our entertainment provided? That is the question.

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Bad Is What We Want So Bad

It is amazing how often people want what is bad for them. This extends from the baby wanting candy to the old man wanting to live more than anything else. Of course babies want to be Conceived and Born, and to Grow up, and such, and old men, and women, want to do what is right, but their “gimme” nature gets in the way. They are tempted by everything imaginable, to overturn their sense of duty and good sense and, in consequence, do themselves, and others, in. And don’t think there are not plenty of “pimps” to make money off of serving their baser instincts. The merchants begging for the privilege of helping you do yourself in, are legion, and outnumber by far any of those who are trying to safeguard you. Christ was trying to tell us that “all that glitters is not gold,” but who would listen, and who listens today?

Now comes the hard part, when I have to name names, and step on toes, and break some icons. This is where people begin to hate what I say, but if I just dealt in generalities, no one would learn a thing from what I write. I have the knack of driving right to the heart of the matter and it drives people up the wall. (more…)