At least that seems to be the conclusion (albeit somewhat simplified by yours truly) in this post from IB The Jawa Report as well as elsewhere among “infiltrators” who attended the over-hyped event in hopes of actual, you know, debate. For example, the series run at the IB Hot Air (this is just one link, but read all of them if you haven’t already done so, links are at the bottom of each post).

I’m not surprised, however.

I can certainly understand why so many people were taken aback by the lack of actual debate and critical questions. You only have to read a random post at the Daily Kotz along with its comments to get the impression that you’re dealing with a bunch of opinionated, fire-breathing idealists willing to take on any idea in brutal mouth-to-mouth combat (OK, so that might not have been the best way of putting it, but you understand what I mean), but that’s just their online personas speaking. Not that conservatives don’t have online personas as well, online personas that differ a lot from their real life cuddly selves, even I have been accused of being “nice” and “polite” in real life (but don’t believe a word of that nonsense), but what we don’t have is the group-think so prominent among liberals/socialists/progressives. Conservatism isn’t a religion. Liberalism, on the other hand, is. Yes, there are exceptions, and I always enjoy running into them, but there aren’t nearly enough.

Gather two or more conservatives in the same place and you’ll have furious debate about politics from the moment that you’re done shaking hands and introducing yourselves, sometimes it won’t even last that long, your main problem will be to get people to shut up for long enough to replenish the supplies of good eats and copious drink.

In your typical gathering of conservatives, nothing is sacred. Sure, there are issues more volatile than others, but everything’s open to discussion if whoever offering the challenge actually wants to discuss it. If you want to take it to extremes, Devil’s Advocate is a game that conservatives play better than any other group of people and it’s just about as much fun as you can legally have without taking your clothes off. And once you’re done tearing each other to shreds verbally, depending on how far you want to take it, you shake hands, agree to disagree and tear into somebody else. Once you’ve figured out where the heck the beers are hidden.

Am I stereotyping here? Oh yes I am, but my personal politics have been firmly anchored on both sides of the political divide, and I’m here to tell you that it’s not nearly as much of a stereotype as you might think.

So why weren’t the halls and corridors filled with furious debate at the Yearly Kotzfest? Forget about it being because it was a gathering of like-minded people. Again, try gathering a few “like-minded” conservatives and see just how long it takes before people are citing sources, splitting hairs and quoting literature while making snide remarks about each other’s intelligence. We don’t agree on anything. That’s our strength, it’s not a weakness. We don’t accept anything as catechism, unchallengeable and true just because it’s been decided that it’s true. There are issues that we rarely ever debate because they’ve been debated to death already and it’s not all that much fun repeating yourself, but if anybody feels like it, bring it on. And do make sure that the beer cooler is well-stocked first. It’ll be fun.

It’s because liberalism/socialism/progressivism (and I’ll call it “socialism” from here on out because I’m getting tired of typing it all out every time. Just substitute the whole mess if you feel that I’m being unfair, I couldn’t care less) is an ideology for young people who are looking for an anchor, a set of established “truths” that they can learn by heart and cling to for dear life. It’s also an ideology built on a desire for a utopian paradise that we’d all love to live in but, once reality smacks us in the face and we learn how the world really works, is impossible to achieve. Again, this is a religion for young, well-meaning people who just want everybody to be happy and content. Who could possibly see anything wrong with that? I can’t. I was one of them. I still don’t see anything wrong with the ideal that they’re striving for, but I’ve learned enough from studying the real world and the history of it to know that it’s not merely an impossible dream, the only way you can even hope to get there is by denying human nature and trying to force humans to be something that they’re incapable of being. And that’s why it inevitably leads to the horrors of the concentration camps, the gulags, the purges and G-d knows what else socialism is responsible for.

The only thing it can’t and won’t ever claim responsibility for is success. You might as well try to reverse the law of gravity.

And since it’s inherently a religion based on an impossible ideal, dissent and questioning is not allowed. When people start questioning it because the “brilliant” theory of it doesn’t seem to work all that well, they eventually become conservative (or libertarian, or neo-conservative, or whatever. I’m trying to save space here). That’s what happened to me. I don’t regret my youthful idealism, I still stand by my adolescent desire for a world in which everybody had what they needed and contributed what they could, but it just doesn’t work that way. There’s nothing “dumb” in wanting a world like that, it’s a laudable desire to create Heaven on Earth and, like most daydreams, it’s utterly undoable. But hey, you’re young. You’re supposed to dream. As a matter of fact, you’re supposed to dream all of your life, because that way true progress lies. Just don’t do it to the point where you’re denying reality and sleepwalking through life.

You’ve got to work with what you’ve got. I’d love to be able to fly without mechanical assistance, but I don’t have wings. So I build a plane.

That’s the conservative way. I can’t change my physiology to the point where I grow wings, so I find another way of doing it, taking into account the limitations that I cannot escape. Hello Real World™. I hate you, but I have to work with you because you’re all that I have. That’s called “growing up” and that’s what is the difference between socialists and conservatives. The socialists are either still in Phase One or just decided never to leave it because they liked it better there. I can’t blame them. The real world is an uncompromising, heartless bitch. I just can’t waste my life in a fantasy world that doesn’t, that can’t exist.

So how does this tie into the lack of dissent and debate at a gathering of socialists? It ties in perfectly.

If your entire world view is a house of cards built on well-meaning falsehoods and “gee I wish it was that way”s, you can’t afford anybody questioning it for any reason. If you allow that camel to poke its nose under the tent, you’ll have to start re-examining everything that your utopia is based on and, since it is logically impossible for it to exist in the real world (it’s been tried more than enough times, with predictable and tragic results), you’ll soon end up being faced with the choice of either losing your safety blanket and facing the real world on its own terms or just nodding like a moron in order to avoid upsetting the apple cart upon which you’ve built your fantasy world.

Just ask Christopher Hitchens what happens when you challenge the catechism of socialism. Ask me. I’ve been there, I have done that, I have the T-shirt and the scars of ripping off the umbilical cord to a world that exists only in the fantasy of well-meaning idiots.

No, I’m not in the least surprised that the Yearly Kotz turned out to be a gathering of nodding robots boring everybody who’d hoped for signs of intelligence and individual thought to tears, because I was once one of them. I couldn’t turn off my brain and accept the religion of socialism at face value, so I had to leave. Not easy, because I felt quite comfortable in the womb of wishful thinking, but I’m glad that I did.

But I would no more expect individualism and passionate debate from a bunch of socialists than I’d expect a beaver to come up with the Grand Unified Theory.

Individualism is anti-thetical to socialism. You get a set of pre-approved talking points decided upon by your “betters” and you’d damn well better stick to them or you’ll be ostracized as being anti-social.

Too harsh? An example:

Right to life. How much debate have you witnessed among the left regarding abortion? How much debate have you witnessed among the right regarding Terri Schiavo?

On the right, we took up a difficult and immensely divisive issue, getting quite angry and passionate about it and calling each other names in the process. I know I did. Yet we’re still here. I still don’t agree with the outcome, but it’s water under the bridge now. What’s done is done and each side had their say. Time to move on. We’re still friends as far as I’m concerned. If the issue comes up again in some other future case, we’ll jump back in the trenches and have another go at it but, for now, it’s over. We both had our say, we knew that we couldn’t both have our way at the same time, but we spoke out, no holds barred, and that’s what it’s all about, in my opinion. We can’t always, all of us, agree, but we owe it to ourselves and those who come after us to face the discussion, to say what we need to say, even if it puts us at logger-heads with people we normally agree with. Let it never be said that we held our tongues for the sake of convenience, for the sake of keeping the peace for peace’s sake.

Do you see the same thing happening if half of the left were to question NARAL?

I’m an individualist and I’m proud of it. I’m an individualist and I’m a conservative because of it. I know what I believe, I know that I believe it because I think that I’m right, not because somebody else has told me that I’m right, but I also know that I don’t know that I’m right, which is why I so much enjoy people challenging my beliefs. It makes me smarter, and it helps me understand the very REAL world that we live in.

Challenge my beliefs all you want, as long as you present an argument based on real life observations and actual facts. I may not agree with you, I may say things to you that are decidedly uncharitable and you may return the favor as much as you like, but at the end of the day I’ll know that I had a debate with an individual instead of an insecure, helpless drone and, on top of that, we’ll still have an awful lot of beer that needs drinking and I need your help.

If you end up agreeing with me that’s great, but it’s worthless unless you know why you agree with me rather than just bobbing your head like one of those idiotic dog dolls that were all the rage in cars years ago.

We’re individualists, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. It’s not worth a damn if there’s no price involved.

That’s what makes us different, and that’s why looking for independent thought at a festival of fools like the Daily Kotz is like looking for diamonds in a dog turd.

Thatisall.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 2:23 am and is filed under Imperial Thoughts, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.