Wisdom and Good Intentions

A column from a few years ago by Dennis Prager contains a lot that's worth pondering.

For instance in the column he offers the reader six rules of life that we'd all do well to memorize:

• Ingratitude makes happiness impossible.
• Corrupt people think everyone else is as corrupt as they are.
• Human nature is not basically good.
• Feelings are far less important than actions.
• Most men need a woman to mature.
• Most women need a man to mature.

Each of these deserves a column of its own, but Prager has other fish to fry. He writes that there's another rule that accounts for many of the horrors of the 20th century. It's this:

GI - W = E (Good Intentions minus Wisdom leads to Evil).

Prager explains what he's getting at as follows:

Communism, the greatest mass murder ideology in history, was for almost all its rank-and-file supporters rooted in their desire to do good. (This was rarely true for its leaders, whose greatest desire was power.)

The many millions of people all over the world who supported communism did not think they were supporting unprecedented levels of mass murder and torture or an equally unprecedented deprivation of the most fundamental human rights of a substantial percentage of humanity.

They thought they were moral, building a beautiful future for humanity -- eliminating inequality, enabling people to work as hard or as little as they wanted, providing their fellow citizens "free" education and "free" health care.

They were convinced that the moral arc of history was bending in their direction and that they were good because their motives were good.

Convinced of their own goodness such folk often have nothing but contempt for those who oppose them. After all, to oppose the good requires that the opponent must be bad ab defino.

That's why Hillary Clinton could condemn those who could not bring themselves to vote for her as "deplorables," and it is, Prager makes bold to assert, the position of virtually every editor and columnist at The New York Times.

Be that as it may, he goes on:

The problem with communists and with leftists who don't consider themselves communists is not that none of them mean well. It's that they lack wisdom. There are wise and foolish liberals, wise and foolish conservatives; but all leftists are fools.

....This is not, however, a description of their totality as a human being. Fools may be personally kind and generous, may be loyal friends and devoted spouses, and of course, they may be well-intentioned. But in terms of making the world worse, there is little difference between a well-meaning fool and an evil human being.

Why does he call them "fools"? That language seems unnecessarily strong and insulting, and causes those of us who wish for a more civil public discourse to cringe, but Prager explains his meaning:

Tens of millions of well-intentioned Westerners supported Stalin. The Westerners who supplied Stalin the secrets to the atom bomb were not motivated by evil. They were simply fools. But few evil people did as much to hurt the world as they did.

They are fools partly because they believe good intentions are all that matter. Therefore, they never ask perhaps the most important moral question one can ask: What will happen if my policy is enacted? Leftist supporters of communism never asked.

I'd prefer he had said that they were "foolish" rather than call them "fools," but admittedly that will probably seem to most readers to be a distinction without a difference. In any case, Prager elaborates:

Democrats who push the country-bankrupting Green New Deal provide a contemporary example. They not only deny the economy and society-crushing consequences of the Green New Deal, they deny any price will be paid. Every home, office, hospital, school and business will be forced to stop using fossil fuels, yet only good [they say] will come from that.

Giving that amount of coercive power to the state is of no consequence to leftists. In their make-believe world, no one will suffer.

On the contrary, America will become richer, and millions of jobs will be created while we destroy our economy. Poor Africans trying to electrify their countries will be told not to -- yet they, too, will somehow become rich using only wind and sun.

If the Green New Deal is enacted, the American economy will tank -- and with it, much of the rest of the world. Tyrannies like China and Iran will be emboldened, as will dictatorships like Russia.

About all of this he's surely correct. The Green New Deal would be a disaster which is why even Democrats who said they supported it withheld their support when it came up for a vote in the Senate.

Prager concludes with this:

The left pushes for a Palestinian state although even Israelis on the left know this would mean a Hamas-Hezbollah state on the Israeli border. But they know they mean well.

They routinely label the beacon of freedom on Earth [U.S.A.] racist, misogynistic, homophobic, imperialistic, genocidal; cheapen the label "Nazi"; promote all-black dorms and graduations; promote preteen boys' performing drag shows; tell young women career is more important to happiness than marriage; believe a country can remain a distinct nation with open borders; condemn parents who try to reassure their 3-year-old son that he is a boy; and ruin the university, the arts, late-night comedy, pro football and religion.

But they mean well.

That's quite an indictment. Is he right or does he overstate his case? What do you think?