I read Will Smith’s recent “quote” about Hitler with interest – not least because the headline at PageSix.com included a phrase in quotes in the headline which Smith had not actually said. What Smith did say:
Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today’,” said Will. “I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good’.
Roger Kimball has an interesting response to this concept, along with a roundup of other responses. He notes that “the capacity for evil so easily cohabits and feeds upon the emotion of virtue.”
In The Social Contract, Rousseau warned that “Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people must feel themselves capable … of changing human nature, … of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.” Robespierre & Co. thought themselves just the chaps for the job. The fact that they measured the extent of their success by the frequency that the guillotines around Paris operated highlights the connection between the imperatives of political correctness and tyranny—between what Robespierre candidly described as “virtue and its emanation, terror.”
That is the conjunction that should give us pause, especially when we contemplate the good intentions of the politically correct bureaucrats who preside over more and more of life in Western societies today. They mean well. They seek to boost all mankind up to their own plane of enlightenment. Inequality outrages their sense of justice. They regard conventional habits of behavior as so many obstacles to be overcome on the path to perfection. They see tradition as the enemy of innovation, which they embrace as a lifeline to moral progress. They cannot encounter a wrong without seeking to right it. The idea that some evils may be ineradicable is anathema to them. Likewise the traditional notion that the best is the enemy of the good, that many choices we face are to some extent choices among evils—such proverbial wisdom outrages their sense of moral perfectibility.
Those bureaucrats are at best ignorant followers of the willfully malicious Ellsworth M. Tooheys of the world. But more often – like the Canadian bureaucrats of a “Human Rights” tribunal currently going after Mark Steyn, for example – they know exactly what they’re doing. They find nothing inherently wrong with statements like this:
The basic trouble with the modern world … is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one. Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is forced upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom.
The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
Rand wrote that over seventy years ago when people enjoyed a great deal more personal freedom than we do today. She died in 1982. I can’t imagine what she would say if she were here today. Well, maybe I can:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc7oZ9yWqO4[/youtube]
Update: What are the odds? Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost also posted on Roark today, but in a completely different context – Howard Roark vs. George Bailey.
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