Quickies: Outriders And Final Victories

     One who has learned enough history – it’s practically impossible to know it all, of course, but it’s possible to know enough to reach some useful, trustworthy conclusions – can be sure of one thing above all others:

Things Will Change.

     There is absolutely no possibility of reaching “the end of history,” the complete extinction of Mankind excepted. No social structure, no philosophy of right and justice, no attitude toward individuals and aggregates thereof can plausibly posture as the last word about such things. Given time enough, everything will change, including our most fervently maintained postulates.

     But they won’t change because they were wrong. Not necessarily, anyway.

     The grand dream of every ideologue of every kind, no matter where he may be situated in space, time, and circumstance, is of the “final victory:” the event which vanquishes the adversary co completely that he cannot rise again. After that, the ideologue dreams, his utopia is at hand, and will endure forever. There’ll be no dissent, because there’ll be no dissenters. There’ll be no further need to argue, because there’ll be no one to argue with.

     It’s a total fantasy. Mankind has a better chance of colonizing Pluto by next Tuesday at Noon. But to realize that – i.e., to accept that there will always be dissenters, devil’s advocates, and rebels regardless of how overwhelming the consensus of the “right thinking” — requires that one make peace with the essentially cranky nature of the human creature.

     I wrote three novels about this. I thought it might be possible to demonstrate the essential instability of every form of social organization by starting from the totalitarian state, depicting a reversion all the way to sociopolitical bedrock – absolute anarchism – and then illustrating how the state could and would rise again. Either I failed, or the books weren’t read widely enough. Hard to tell.

     If you’re wondering what brought this to mind at the close of a fairly ordinary Friday, have a gander at this. It takes brass balls for anyone to walk into an openly hostile interviewer’s lion’s den. Jordan Peterson did so and prevailed. He is an outrider: a man willing to defy what “everyone knows,” and sure enough of his ground and his ability to express himself that he did not fear a hostile forum. But equally so – and it surprised me greatly, believe me – interviewer Cathy Newman is an outrider: an opinionated person willing to confront someone she completely disagrees with and to take him seriously.

     Many in the Right have lamented that our final defeat is near at hand...that the forces of the Left, particularly its “social justice warriors,” are about to achieve unchallengeable hegemony over the culture of the West. I disagree. The emergence of outriders such as Peterson and Newman makes my case for me. Nor would it change my position were Newman the classical liberal and Peterson the SJW.

     As long as there are outriders in our ideological universe, there can be no final victory for anyone.