Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 139th episode. In this episode I want to ask a few questions of everyone who considers themselves activists. My main question is this: if you succeed in destroying the supposedly corrupt system, what do you plan to replace it with? The activists who are raging across the country are centered around a movement which is predicated on life being horrible in the western world. This is a movement that is built on lies. If you’re listening to this in the future, I’m referencing the riots which are springing up all across the United States in the name of George Floyd. What happened to George Floyd was an absolute atrocity. But this movement has been commandeered by bad actors who do not care about equality or the black community. At the time of this podcast I think there are protests in more than one hundred cities.
I’m alarmed by how many individuals and institutions are failing to see past the cheap virtue signaling that’s concealing a full-scale rebellion against anything that smacks of competence, hierarchy, or authority. In my estimation, this virtue signaling and these “movements” are like an easy drug which masks the pain of examining your own flaws and pursuing self-improvement by way of real sacrifice. It’s likely that fMRI scans would even show this brain activity coursing through people in the midst of protest. They’re getting high off protesting. Peddlers of propaganda have successfully deceived large segments of the population into believing the U.S. system of governance is primarily characterized by oppression. This plight of historical ignorance has resulted in a phantom narrative of black versus white.
A combination of ignorance and deception has blinded many citizens to the truth that America is the most prosperous, most free, least racist society on earth and in all of human history. History is in fact humanity’s bloody struggle against entropy and scarcity. Nature is constantly trying to kill us. Prior to 1895 most people lived on less than $1.00 per day – and that figure is adjusted for inflation. It didn’t matter whether you were black, white, or yellow – everyone was poor. The painstaking sacrifices of our ancestors managed to produce the western world. The western world is curing poverty faster than any society that’s ever existed. Since 1950 the number of people living in poverty around the world has been cut in half. The measure of prosperity we’ve been able to produce by way of free market capitalism is nothing short of miraculous. For those of you who have your eyes shut to this reality – I suggest you familiarize yourself with the data. Steven Pinker, professor of Psychology at Harvard University, did a heroic job laying out this data in his book titled Enlightenment Now. He gave a Ted Talk in 2018 explaining why the world has never been better than it is right now. Listen to his data from that talk:
“In 2017, Americans killed each other at a rate of 5.3 per hundred thousand, had seven percent of their citizens in poverty and emitted 21 million tons of particulate matter and four million tons of sulfur dioxide. But 30 years ago, the homicide rate was 8.5 per hundred thousand, poverty rate was 12 percent and we emitted 35 million tons of particulate matter and 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide.”
“In 2017, the world had 12 ongoing wars, 60 autocracies, 10 percent of the world population in extreme poverty and more than 10,000 nuclear weapons. But 30 years ago, there were 23 wars, 85 autocracies, 37 percent of the world population in extreme poverty and more than 60,000 nuclear weapons.”
“In 2017 there were 238 deaths attributed to terrorism in Western Europe, but 1988 was worse with 440 deaths.”
“For most of human history, life expectancy at birth was around 30. Today, worldwide, it is more than 70, and in the developed parts of the world, more than 80.”
“250 years ago, in the richest countries of the world, a third of the children did not live to see their fifth birthday, before the risk was brought down a hundredfold. Today, that fate befalls less than six percent of children in the poorest countries of the world.”
“Famine is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It could bring devastation to any part of the world. Today, famine has been banished to the most remote and war-ravaged regions.”
“200 years ago, 90 percent of the world’s population subsisted in extreme poverty. Today, fewer than 10 percent of people do.”
“For most of human history, the powerful states and empires were pretty much always at war with each other, and peace was a mere interlude between wars. Today, they are never at war with each other. The last great power war pitted the United States against China 67 years ago.”
“More recently, wars of all kinds have become fewer and less deadly. The annual rate of war has fallen from about 22 per hundred thousand per year in the early ’50s to 1.2 today.”
“Democracy has suffered obvious setbacks in Venezuela, in Russia, in Turkey and is threatened by the rise of authoritarian populism in Eastern Europe and the United States. Yet the world has never been more democratic than it has been in the past decade, with two-thirds of the world’s people living in democracies.”
“Homicide rates plunge whenever anarchy and the code of vendetta are replaced by the rule of law. It happened when feudal Europe was brought under the control of centralized kingdoms, so that today a Western European has 1/35th the chance of being murdered compared to his medieval ancestors. It happened again in colonial New England, [again] in the American Wild West when the sheriffs moved to town, and [again] in Mexico.”
“Over the last century, we’ve become 96 percent less likely to be killed in a car crash, 88 percent less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk, 99 percent less likely to die in a plane crash, 95 percent less likely to be killed on the job, 89 percent less likely to be killed by a drought, flood, wildfire, storm, volcano, landslide, earthquake or meteor strike because of improvements in the resilience of our infrastructure. We are also 97 percent less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning.”
“Before the 17th century, no more than 15 percent of Europeans could read or write. Europe and the United States achieved universal literacy by the middle of the 20th century, and the rest of the world is catching up. Today, more than 90 percent of the world’s population under the age of 25 can read and write.”
“In the 19th century, Westerners worked more than 60 hours per week. Today, they work fewer than 40.”
“Thanks to the universal penetration of running water and electricity in the developed world and the widespread adoption of washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, dishwashers, stoves and microwaves, the amount of our lives that we forfeit to housework has fallen from 60 hours per week to fewer than 15 hours per week.”
“According to the IZA Institute for the Study of Labor, the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, the Washington Pew Research Center, Social Indicators Research, and Perspectives in Psychological Science: In 86 percent of the world’s countries, happiness has increased in recent decades.”
“A tabulation of positive and negative emotion words in news stories has shown that during the decades in which humanity has gotten healthier, wealthier, wiser, safer and happier, the New York Times has become increasingly morose and the world’s broadcasts have gotten steadily glummer.”
“Why don’t people appreciate progress? Part of the answer comes from our cognitive psychology. We estimate risk using a mental shortcut called the “availability heuristic.” The easier it is to recall something from memory, the more probable we judge it to be.”
Our cognitive psychology makes us predisposed to prioritize our attention toward outrage rather than hallmarks of prosperity. This has made us incredibly vulnerable to the deceptive propaganda fronted by those bad actors who commandeered the very real injustice of George Floyd’s death. They’ve spun it out of control to make us believe our police force is hunting black men. They took a real crime and used it to promote the false idea of systemic racism. They’ve used this false narrative of racist police as justification to rebel against all authority – local, state, and federal. Not only are they lying to you about prosperity in the United States, but their rhetoric completely disregards the truth about police brutality as well. The truth is since 2017 three times more white men have been killed in police custody than black men. If you don’t believe me, just listen to the data presented by Heather Mac Donald from the Wall Street Journal:
In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.
If that’s not enough for you, I invite you to research police brutality yourself. The most egregious display of police brutality in recent memory occurred on January 18th, 2016 in a hotel hallway in Mesa, Arizona. A man wearing gym shorts and a t-shirt crawled on his knees while he begged and sobbed for his life before being summarily executed. You can watch the body-cam footage online. His name was Daniel Shaver, and he was white. This movement is built on lies. As Pinker explained with devastating clarity – the world, especially the United States, has never been better than it is right now. And yet cities are burning all across the country because enough people have been tricked into thinking they’re oppressed. The only system of governance in history that’s been able to produce unprecedented prosperity, equality, and freedom is the same system these unthinking people are revolting against. Instead of humble gratitude for the civilization others have sacrificed to build, mobs of angry rioters are possessed by ideological arrogance.
It is the height of human hubris to ascend the throne of judgment and declare existence as unworthy of being. This is the evil which possessed Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two men who attacked Columbine High School. You can read about it in their manifesto. To be possessed by arrogance means to blatantly disregard what God has given you because you think you can destroy what’s there and create perfection in its place. It’s what the Soviets did in Russia. It’s what Hitler did in Germany. It’s what Mao did in China. And it’s what Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. Here we are about to try it again today. This kind of ideological possession reduces you to a blind rage which causes you to burn it all down without any strategy as to what you will do in the aftermath. If we fail to identify and correct these deceptions, we will be left sitting in a pile of ashes – with no other option but to beg for God’s pardon of our sinful stupidity.
Allowing social justice activists fresh out of college with a degree in the humanities to restructure social order is like allowing someone who made a paper airplane once do mechanical work on a 737. The “system” is WAY more complicated (and works far better) than any of these “activists” realize. How exactly are you going to build a better one in its place after you burn it down? Confused silence. Not being able to answer this question is not optional because without the “system” nature is going to feast on all of us including you and including those who claim to be oppressed. Oppression is not the only predator that is hunting you. Entropy, scarcity, and disease do not care about your “white privilege” or your lived experience. History, in its broadest scope, is not a tale of socially constructed white patriarchal tyranny. History is a bloody struggle against a fallen creation where all of humanity has had to scratch and claw against the environment and against their own sins in order to produce somewhat functional communities where they could refrain from killing each other long enough to avoid starving to death. Despite back-breaking efforts life was still nasty, brutish, and short for almost everyone until about 1895. If you live in the western world today and you’re not an heir or an heiress, it’s extremely likely your grandparents had a harder life than you do – regardless of your color.
If you want to change the world, your answers and your solutions must be far more specific than vacuous, ideological talking points painted on protest signs concerning vaguely defined racism. A definition of racism which, by the way, will continue to expand until it includes you who are listening to this podcast. You are not safe from the mob. If the activists cannot provide specific answers and specific solutions then we can’t even begin to objectively test them let alone implement them. Ethereal symbols of solidarity will not solve real, concrete issues. Protesting in solidarity is a cheap substitute for real sacrifice and is primarily motivated by a desire to make yourself appear morally superior. This past week should have been a conversation about specific police brutality at specific precincts with specific strategies on how to move forward at those particular locations. This movement is built on lies and the people who pushed these lies have failed the memory George Floyd.
Identifying problems is not equal to providing solutions. If a system functions at 80% efficiency then you might be able to bump it up to 82% efficiency if you dedicate your entire life to study, hard work, and self-sacrifice. Even then you likely won’t be acknowledged for your work until long after you’re gone. If you want to make a better world, stop being a virtue signaling, social media hero who wants to “change the system” and instead start changing yourself. The world is dangerous and replete with malevolence. It’s been that way from the beginning and nothing short of dizzying arrogance can deceive you into thinking you’re the one to perfect it by shaping it into your own image. The best way to make the world safer is to humble yourself and adopt the personal responsibility of making yourself wiser and more resilient to dangerous things. After a lifetime of self-sacrifice and personal development, perhaps you will find that your efforts made a modicum of improvement to the lives of those around you.
In the end I’m not even sure how to engage these people in conversation because their Marxism is nicely mixed with enough postmodernism to reject the notion of objective reality. They’ll see all of the evidence I presented here and dismiss it as my efforts to promote my own interests. It’s like any time I speak I’m simply a mouthpiece for my group identity whose sole interest is advancement on power. I’m concerned this battle has already been lost through the past 50 years inside of our churches and universities. Do our countrymen have ears to hear and eyes to see anymore? Sometimes entire nations must collapse before hubris turns into humility. This was the case for Israel and for Rome, among countless others. I pray it’s not the case for the United States of America.
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