Feels to me like a case of, "this is overstated and simplified, but yeah, you've got a point".
We have enough conviction to participate in a hashtag campaign, or to hurl a snarky gif at our cowering adversaries, but civil war? We need not worry our silly heads about that. We spend literally billions of dollars on iPhone upgrades, porn, video games, tickets to superhero films, and accessories for our pets. How many people would be willing to jeopardize a life of such insane, stifling luxury for the sake of fighting a gruesome battle out in the street? Not many. Not nearly enough to get even a halfway respectable war together.
I don’t say this with disappointment, by the way. I say it because it leads me to an important point: hatred is not destroying our society. Hatred could destroy a society, and has destroyed many in the past, but our case is different. The cancer in our blood is indifference. Our moral and intellectual apathy is the thing that will prevent our country from breaking apart or exploding into civil war, but it’s also the thing that will drag our nation, as one whole piece, into ruin and decay.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/30618/walsh-only-thing-preventing-us-descending-civil-matt-walsh
I got as far as they had convictions and they died for them and had a good laugh. Men and nations go to war because the politicians won't do their jobs. There's a terrible inevitability to war, trust me on this, I've seen three and fought in one.
ReplyDeleteConvictions my ass. People convince themselves of many things, that a chip of cracker has been miraculously transformed into a fragment of the body of Christ - and they'll die for it. A third of Europe died in religious wars over just such insanity as transubstantiation. I watched a church bitterly divide over the issue of infant baptism. Grown men, Christian men, shouting at each other in the aisles of the church of a Sunday evening.
No, men do not go to war for ideas. They go to war out of a sense of belonging, a sense of threat. They are easily convinced - should someone think this Facebook-addicted crowd incapable of war, that Americans have somehow evolved a bit beyond their hateful forebears of St. Bartholomew's Day and the Massacre at Béziers, that would be a serious mistake.
You see, people aren't sheep. They're baboons. Baboons run in tribes. Their societies are hierarchical, they rule by bullying. They abuse their females. They wage wars. They are, aside from humans, the only sentient beings which will destroy food and not eat it, destroying it so others can't have it.
All it takes to rouse people to war is a well-told lie and an eloquent liar to tell it. That hasn't changed in thousands of years.