A story has been circulating around the conservative blog/Breitbart scene of two American middle class whites who chucked their cushy jobs and began a cycle trip through Africa and the Muslim world. Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, both 29, set of on their big adventure and updated a blog as they went.
According to Jay at his blog:
“You read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,”
“People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil.”
“I don’t buy it,” he continued. “Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own… By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind.''
And I bet you can't imagine what happened next, yep, Jay, Lauren and their two friends were rammed off their bikes in Tajikistan then knifed and shot to death by Muslims.
It's easy to scoff at Jay's hippy idealism, and many on the soft Right certainly are. But the problem is Jay's way of thinking is the dominant ideology in the West today, indeed, we're all on that bike ride, and not just you, but your woman and your kids and your old granny are on that bike ride whether they want to be or not.
And what wonders of warmth and humanity we've witnessed from our saddles this week. We saw an African Muslim attempt a terror attack outside the Houses of Parliament, another 31 Pakistanis/Muslims went to jail for sexually enslaving English girls, and in London we witnessed a black kid being disemboweled by six other black kids.
Jay and Lauren made a conscious decision to cycle across the Third World and Jay had developed a moral code to live by as they did it, and it killed them both. But the English girls in Huddersfield had no choice, they live in a world in which Jay's idealism is promoted as an unquestionable moral truth and enforced with totalitarian force, it ''tolerates'' no contradiction and severely punishes dissenters.
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| ''Liberalism, multiculturalism and diversity: I love it!'' |
Reading Jay's blog and his odes to the essential goodness of humanity brings to mind Voltaire's satire ''Candide'' and Candide's maxim ''All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds''. Jay understood that there are people who carry out acts of cruelty but that cruelty was outweighed by acts of kindness and so the scales of happiness in the world are always in favour of the kind. Muslims may well carry out acts of barbarism but they also show warmth and kindness so the karmic scales of ''humanity'' are always tilted in favour Jay's idealism.
Viewed from this perspective people acting out of self interest must seem like a true scourge, a genuine pox which throws the scales of karmic happiness into chaos by rigging the game in favour of themselves or their group. For example, if I could enact policies regarding the ''grooming'' of English girls the Muslim/Pakistani portion of happiness would decrease exponentially and the happiness and safety of English girls would increase drastically.
I'm not interested in allowing the ''equality'' of human happiness to simply work itself out, but Jay was.
When Jay saw ISIS shoot his woman did he then still believe in the essential goodness of humanity? or would he have swapped their places with anyone else on earth out sheer self interest ? We will never know, but I'm willing to bet that Jay would have instantly preferred to have had a million African kids under that blade than Lauren, they would have cravenly and desperately dumped that portion of misery and violence elsewhere to save themselves.
I just wish the rest of us weren't forced to go along on the ride....
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