2. The Pain of Uncomfortable Truth

When I say that we are on the verge of becoming People of the Lie, I don't mean it in a malicious or insulting way.  By that statement, I mean two things. 

First, as humans, we are naturally liars.   Above all, we are programmed to lie to ourselves about things that cause us pain.  This makes us dysfunctional.   The first step to becoming whole is confronting painful truths about ourselves.  Some never do that and spend lives being much less than they could be.  They perpetually find self-congratulatory fault with the universe, society, western civilization, dead white men, their parents, their bosses, their ex-spouses, their children, people of a particular color, gender, or status, corporations, bankers, oil companies, fat-cat bankers, the 1%, the dominant paradigm, God, anybody but themselves. To rephrase Mr. Obama, they cling bitterly to their comfortable delusions with antipathy for the truth that the fault most likely lies not with their stars but with themselves.  This is not helpful.  

Second , I have come to the conclusion that there is something unique about modern liberalism that taps into this natural human propensity to lie in order to avoid pain, ours or someone else's.  However, this well intentioned desire often does damage to people.  Time and again, this desire to eliminate pain has harmed the people it purports to help:  Tragically, the most vulnerable and least among us.  Conversely, I have found that there is something about conservatism that challenges me to embrace uncomfortable truths - most importantly, about myself.  Because of this, although conservatism takes effort, courage, and maturity, it offers me the opportunity to become more as an individual. I would argue that as we teeter on the verge of national bankruptcy... for the first time in recent history, confronting the possibility of national insolvency, it is time to start confronting painful truths.

I came to this conclusion over many years as a consequence of understanding both philosophies and having at different times in my life embraced both philosophies.  As I grew up and gained wisdom, I reflected on the liberal beliefs of my young adulthood, the beliefs espoused by people like Mr. Obama.  I came to the conclusion that once one drilled down beneath abstractions about poverty, capitalism, fundamental fairness, and blood-for-oil, in order to believe what liberals believe, I usually had to believe things that simply weren't true.  In the coming entries, I want to explore such things.  I invite you to contradict me if I am wrong.

Nothing exemplifies this more than those painful and unintentionally embarrassing interviews with members of the Occupy movement.  I don't like watching them because I don't like seeing (probably nice) people make fools of themselves.  It is uncomfortable.  Still, it is instructive.  Typically, these interviews reveal a juxtaposition of sophisticated abstractions straight from Sociology 101 about corporate greed, exploitation, racism and imperialism mixed with a lack of coherence and concrete understanding of those things about which they speak.  Nice and well intentioned though these people might be, they are classic fools in the Socratic sense.  Pumped full of bracing academic knowledge and an impressive vocabulary, they  truly do not know what they do not know, much like Obama himself, and this is dangerous.  I argue it is why we are where we are.