Have you ever heard of Stein’s Law? It’s a simple “law” made famous by Herbert Stein, but it’s amazing how often we human beings often lose sight of it:
Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that as creatures that spend our whole lives blocking out the fact that we’re going to die one day, we so often remain stubbornly dedicated to ignoring the long-term consequences of our actions. That’s why something as simple as Stein’s law is also profound because it steers our minds back to reality.
Radio host Jesse Kelly recently did something similar with this tweet:
Because a lot of people online don’t get sarcasm, like to misinterpret what people say for clout, or just don’t have the intellectual capacity to understand what Kelly was saying, there were a few breathless articles and tweets claiming he wants a dictatorship:
Of course, you don’t have to read between the lines to know that wasn’t what he was driving at:
So, what is Jesse Kelly really talking about there? He’s talking about the first principles of a nation. Freedom and democracy are not the natural state of the world. This is the natural state of the world.
It’s survival of the fittest, barbarism, and “might makes right.” You do what I tell you because if you don’t, I will inflict violence on you until you die or comply and then give the person next to you the same choice.
Democracy changed the game. It allowed people to make their own decisions and vote on the rules they lived by.
But democracy has never been a panacea – it has its downsides.
For one, as the famous saying goes:
Put another way, if a large group of citizens wants to take advantage of a small group of citizens, they can – and they often do. It’s also worth noting that freedom also comes with a hefty amount of responsibility, which a lot of people hate far more than they’ll ever admit. Being truly free means being a strong, capable, informed, and yes, moral person that is responsible for providing for yourself and handling your own problems. That’s the price of being truly free and increasingly, we have a population that isn’t willing to pay it. The Founding Fathers understood the importance of this:
Why do you need strong, responsible people that can take care of themselves to have a successful society? Because dogs don’t need fleas, worms, and ticks. They can carry a certain number of them if they have to do it, but they’d be better off if they didn’t exist at all. It’s the same principle in society. We can carry a certain amount of dead weight, but we’d be better off without them.
This is where morals start to come into the picture. Good, decent, and moral people don’t want to be a burden on their neighbors. They want to carry their own weight. They want to support their children. They want to contribute to society – and they put effort into doing it.
These are people with a good work ethic. The good neighbors. The good parents. The sort of people that make living in a society particularly rewarding. It’s nice to have someone to keep an eye on your house when you go out of town. Who can let you borrow a lawn mower. Who might actually bring you a plate of food if a relative dies. These are people whose kids you might coach on your son’s baseball team. These are people you may say a kind word to when you run into them at the diner. These are people who you’ll take a package to if the post office accidentally delivers it to your house. It’s a real community – and it can scale up, at least to a degree, as long as you have the right kind of people in it. A city with a million people in it is still going to be a great place to live if the right sort of people are there.
The thing is people, communities, and whole societies can also change for the worse over time.
People can become godless, selfish, and lazy. They can break into your car or steal things off your porch. They can sell drugs to your kids, pull out a gun because someone steps on their shoe, or scream threats at strangers on the subway. Suddenly, you’re asking questions like, “Why is my school system teaching my kids things that are against my values? Why does this welfare mom whipping out food stamps have a nicer phone than me? Why can’t I trust anyone in my neighborhood? Why do the people reporting the news lie to me? Why is our government full of sociopaths?”
You’ve heard of Newton’s first law, right? The most famous part of it is, “An object in motion stays in motion.” Well, that’s also true of people, communities, and whole societies. A society that’s falling apart tends to keep falling apart, keeps getting worse, and keeps getting more degenerate.
We’ve seen that happen in America. The biggest example of it is our national debt, which goes up as we put more emphasis on our own selfish needs and put less emphasis on our children’s future and the future of our country.
Look at school shootings, the explosion of mental illness, pro-crime cities, teachers focused on turning kids gay and trans, outright hatred on both sides in politics, endless race baiting, satanism, drag queen story hours, the corrupt propaganda pushing “free press,” and the completely dysfunctional government we have.
We live in a society that’s a mixture of old-school American values, people keeping their heads down and going through the motions, and freeloading degenerates who’d fit right in at Sodom and Gomorrah. If you were picking which of those segments was getting bigger, it’s the last one and it’s full of people that most of us don’t want to share a neighborhood, community, or even country with. If, as expected, their numbers continue to increase, decisions will have to be made that are going to have a great deal of bearing on what America is going to look like in the future, IF there’s going to be an America at all.
Maybe we’ll all become garbage people in the future, in which case a dictatorship is a good bet. Maybe the sound parts of society that are still left will secede and leave the degenerate ones to feast on the festering corpse of a once great nation until they deservedly starve in their own squalor. Maybe, we’ll end up with a civil war, some kind of revolution, or perhaps in the most surprising twist of all, maybe the degenerates will somehow be inspired to change course and become good people.
What we can say with certainty is that things won’t continue going in the direction they are today without drastic changes because THEY CAN’T. Economically, morally, and culturally, our nation is in much more trouble than most people realize. Our nation is in a STEEP decline that is likely to end in a dictatorship, revolution, secession, or civil war unless we change course. It’s not something any of us should wish for, it’s just the direction we’re headed in because we’ve taken our free society and good lives for granted.
This is a hard-hitting, truth-laden message and one that must be heard or we will be witness to the crushing of what was once the greatest country ever founded. Jeffrey Tucker's editorial today at the Epoch Times echos and buttresses every point you've made. To employ an old bromide, it is always darkest before the dawn, but if every citizen who has not joined Satan's army stands up and roars "No More" we may yet see the dawning of a great new day. If we remain cowed and complacent we can only hope that the dictator who steps up will be a benevolent Ceasar, not a Stalinist, Maoist or puppet like Biden.
We do not have Blue States Red States. We have Blue Cities trying to exercise dominion over the rest of the country. Making America Great Locally Again is key. Otherwise we will end up with a Bolsonaro/Peron type of figure.