David Mamet: The Secret Knowledge

All the old canards can be found, as if new-discovered, today on the nearby Volvo: “The Population Explosion: It’s Your Baby”; “Wind Power”; “War Is Not the Answer”; “Coexist.”

No wonder the Left embraces Socialism, the largest myth of modern times and the most easily debunked; for it is a religion, and the tests of actual membership in any religion are likely to include an endorsement of their Foundation Myths: God in the Burning Bush, Joseph Smith’s discovery of the Tablets; the Resurrection of Jesus. This is not to denigrate religions, merely to say that they are all based upon myth and symbol, which is to say that they proclaim at the outset their intention to approach toward the unknowable, and toward that over which we have no power. This is, however, necessary in religion, a rather unfortunate basis for a political philosophy.

Observe that to propitiate an unknowable power, the Left, ignorant or dismissive of any society or history but its own, insists upon the primacy of Trees and Soil, Oceans and Animals—theirs is a return to the nature worship of the Savage. To see that this nature worship is not quite the good simple-heartedness they believe it is, but rather a religion, observe its imperviousness to information: polar bears are not , in fact, decreasing but increasing in population; 24the earth is not , in fact, warming. 25

The philosophy of the Left is not, in fact, a love of , but a rejection of wisdom. And it is contrary to common sense.

For where is the wealth to come from? If we are no longer to explore, to drill, to develop or to use the world around us, and those things fashioned from that world; if we are to “cap and trade,” that which is, essentially, an imaginary commodity (carbon emissions do not in any way affect the temperature of the planet); 26if we are to tax and limit growth in service of a fantasy, who is to chance his time and treasure to produce the wealth, and how?

Carbon dioxide is not harmful to the atmosphere. There have, in the past, been periods, much colder than today, when the CO 2in the atmosphere was twenty-five times what it is today. Carbon emissions offer no threat whatever to the planet. And, as the Left is opposed to nuclear energy, how are we to provide power?

Where is the power to come from? Where is the wealth to come from? From nowhere. For the Left, this new tribe, self-sufficient in its knowledge, ignorant of history, and unwilling to observe, does not understand economics—that man produces, that man consumes, that man trades—and that the necessary consumption drives trade and its attendant invention and exploration, which produce a civilization’s wealth.

The Left (as Thomas Sowell points out in Intellectuals and Society ) believing in what it calls “social justice,” believes that wealth should be “shared,” but enters the discussion in its middle. For wealth may or may not be shared (in fact, it is shared, as efficiently as possible, through trade), but the a priori question, to the Left, is unasked and unanswered: Where did it come from?

It was not, again, quoting Professor Sowell, descended from heaven, like manna, and spread evenly over the ground. It was created by individual expenditure of effort and individual willingness to undertake risk. The Liberals see wealth as manna from Heaven, falling equally upon all; which, being to them the case, means that for any one to have more of any thing than another, it must have been gotten by cheating—the possessor of “more” must be a thief. To the Left, in spite of one hundred and fifty years of the most extensive and tragic disprovals of Marxism, property = theft.

Rejecting both science and industry, the Left is fearful of man’s ability to survive, so it sees scarcity everywhere, and its one answer is to stop .

As my generation did not live through the Depression, World War II, and the agony of the immigrants who are our grandparents or great-grandparents; as we were raised in the greatest plenty the world has ever known and in the most just of societies, we have grown lazy and entitled (not unlike Marx, who lived as a parasite upon Engels, and never worked a day in his life). The baby boomer generation, my own, is content, if of the Left, to live out our remaining years upon the work and upon the entitlements created by our parents, and to entail the costs upon our children—to tax industry out of the country, to tax wealth away from its historical role and use as the funder of innovation. The religion of the Left is to leave untilled that world whose operations it does not understand and, failing to investigate, fears.

It, therefore, mythologizes uselessness, and praises it.

We have all seen this phenomenon as schoolchildren, in the insecure and self-hating child, raised to think himself weak, who will shrink from effort and from communal activity, attach himself to authorities—the tattletale and the spoilsport, who cannot take the rigors and tests of the schoolyard—the complainer and sanctimonious prig, forever calling out about supposed slights and injustices—his is the all-purpose complaint of the preadolescent “it’s not fair .”

For mine is a generation which never grew up. And we have, in our short lives, dismantled that necessarily imperfect system of industry and government for which our parents lived and died. We have awarded ourselves for realizing its imperfections—as if any human act or combination were perfect—and have created a culture of guilt and shame—corrosively and compulsively shaming where any human act of individuality may be indicted as wrong (which is to say, destructive of equality or equanimity).

But it is the free individual who alone can provide sustenance for the group. For if there is no effort, no use (called “exploitation”), no reward for initiative (called “greed”), where will the food come from? Malthus, before the invention of the improved plow and before scientific agriculture, “proved” that the world must soon starve.

Socialist Europe is held up as a model of “just behavior”; but the Left forgets that for seventy-five years America defended Europe from the Communist threat, and bore the cost, which would have bankrupted Europe, and which, in the event, bankrupted Communism. The Left looks at the peace of Europe since World War II and forgets that it was not only ensured, but created by American military strength and determination. 27And now the Left has elected a President who thinks it good to go to Europe and apologize for our “arrogance,” who proclaims the benefits of appeasement both at home and around the world.

This appeasement, called the antiwar movement, the antinuclear movement, One-Worldism, Code Pink, “the end to American Exceptionalism,” is, to the Left, another example of the Correct Thinking of the never-involved. They believe that our enemies, like the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are , will be so moved by some unnamable but real excellence on our part, that they will forswear their desire for our destruction (recognizing it, now, as an unnecessary expenditure of effort) and beat their swords into plowshares.

But the Left does not stop to consider that if we, the most prosperous country in the history of the world, choose neither to exploit nor to defend our property, someone else will take it, and if we announce, indeed, proclaim our passivity, we will only advance that bad day.

The Left insisted that we abandon, in 1973, a war we had just won in Vietnam, and go on home, as the Left today insists we withdraw from Afghanistan and withdraw from Iraq. Leaving to one side legitimate legislative differences over the strategic worth of any one conflict, what real or potential enemy could possibly misinterpret its possibilities of gain in the light of our absolutely predictable absence of resolve?