Quite a long time ago, I read a semi-humorous article written by a man who was left-handed. The thrust of the article was that “it’s a right-handed world:” i.e., that commonplace devices and the conventions of the world cater to right-handed persons, and that left-handers must cope as best they can. Being rather young at that time, I was somewhat intrigued by this revelation. It set me on a kind of quest: I went looking for ways in which ordinary things embedded the assumption that their users would be righties rather than lefties. As you can imagine, I found a multitude of them.
However, the discovery did not cause me to infer that the world is prejudiced against lefties, nor that lefties are treated unfairly. It did accentuate the importance of normality – conformance to the most common patterns – in easing one’s journey through life.
Left-handedness is not normal. That’s not to say that it’s “unnatural,” or “perverse,” or bad in any other sense. It’s merely uncommon. Lefties constitute about 15% of the population of the United States, according to recent surveys. Thus, one who is pursuing a “mass market” for his new device will more likely orient it toward righties, if handedness matters to its use.
This is not wrong or evil; it’s merely good sense. It does mean that lefties will have to cope with burdens righties don’t. But that’s also the case with persons distant from the norms for height, weight, and general intelligence. More, there are specific occupations in which left-handedness is a valued asset; pitching and orthopedic surgery are two examples.
This highlights the difference between normality and hegemony.
In our time, attempts to conflate normality and hegemony are rife. It’s normal:
- To be right-handed (~85%);
- To be heterosexual (~97%);
- To have two arms and two legs (~99%);
- To have the “normal” five senses (~99%);
- To prefer the company of those who share one’s race, religion, or ethnic heritage (~100%).
None of these conformances to various norms confer privileges beyond a degree of convenience. Yet they matter. The lefty, the homosexual, the amputee, the blind and the deaf, and the member of a minority race, creed, or heritage must all find ways to cope with their minority standing. It’s no one’s “fault;” it’s merely the way things are. Yet there are activists determined to impose those minorities’ preferences upon the rest of us by political means, as if not Nature but the State had decreed their disadvantages.
And far too many of us let them get away with it, most commonly in the name of “compassion.”
It’s not that long ago that the overwhelming majority of Americans would have known how wrong that is without needing time for reflection. But the conflation of normality with hegemony has penetrated so deeply into the public consciousness that many of us react in precisely the opposite fashion – by reflex conditioned in by the relentless propagandization of those aforementioned activists.
This is on my mind this fine July morning due to a phrase I first encountered quite recently: “sundown segregation.” It refers to the natural human tendency to prefer the company of others like oneself when there are no overriding considerations (e.g., one’s occupation). That tendency is why America has “Chinatowns,” “Germantowns,” “Little Italys,” and the like. It’s also the main reason why American Negroes tend to concentrate geographically, despite racialists’ claims that they’ve been “herded into ghettoes.”
Political initiatives to combat that wholly natural tendency are, in a word, unnatural. It takes no more than ordinary intelligence to realize and deplore this, just as it would take no more than that to condemn a State decree that 50% of all marketed devices be oriented toward the convenience of the left-handed. Yet such initiatives have multiplied. They receive a truly unnatural degree of acquiescence.
What too many good-hearted persons fail to realize is that the overt rationale for such initiatives is nothing more than a cover for the all-important covert motive: the desire of the power-hungry to assert absolute hegemony over every aspect of human life.
In some cases, it starts innocently. Just as it’s normal to have two arms, two legs, and five senses, it’s normal for a person so equipped to feel sympathy for the plight of the amputee, the blind, and the deaf. Just as it’s normal for an American to be self-supporting (or a member of a family with an adequately functioning “breadwinner”), it’s normal to feel sympathy for those who aren’t, whether by reason of incapacity or tender age. Power-mongers have learned how to latch onto such sentiments and politicize them. Thus “programs” are born to redress such “iniquities,” so the “afflicted” can feel “included.” Note that such programs tend to be eternal, by reason of the natural existence of such persons...and that they swell in a fashion detached from the prevalence of the “afflictions” they purport to relieve.
In other cases, there’s nothing innocent about it. I hardly need to tell any Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch about the inroads black racialist mouthpieces, homosexual activists, and flacksters for “undocumented immigrants” have made into America’s politics. The salient thing here is that those inroads were paved with propaganda: ceaseless beratings of the majority about supposed “injustices” done to those minorities. Power-mongers and members in good standing of the political class have exploited them to the hilt.
Were we to stipulate that some true injustices have been inflicted on members of minority demographics, wouldn’t it still be a far greater injustice for the State to penalize the overwhelming (and wholly innocent) majority of us to redress them? Wouldn’t that constitute a perversion of the very idea of justice: the punishment of the guilty without penalty to the innocent?
You know the answer full well.
The above might seem too obvious to emphasize...which is why I repeat so frequently that obvious means overlooked. The gulf between the claims of “rights” and “injustices” and the cupidity and malice of the grievance-mongers that make them should be highlighted, yet it’s far more often ignored. Given the Main Stream Media’s swiftness to seize on exploitable occurrences to feed the grievance-mongers’ furnaces, coupled to politicians’ readiness to leap onto podia and trumpet “causes” in which we should all be compulsorily enrolled, the importance of reversing the tide has never been greater.
A final thought: normal does not imply good or better. Majorities have no rights nor privileges as such, all pseudo-democratic notions notwithstanding. Assertions of hegemony through demography ought always to be resisted and refuted, no matter what demographic might claim it. It’s merely the irony of our place and time that minorities – groups outside the norm and distinct from it – should be waging a largely successful campaign to wield hegemony over the rest of us.
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