Bad people

I have been amusing myself by making a list of people who are now considered ‘bad’ by majority opinion, almost worldwide.

Men.

Religious people.

Those who keep telling us that ‘truth’, including scientific truth, is not to be based on how many people think it is the truth. In Copernicus’ time, most people, including the most ‘educated’ people, thought that the sun went round the earth, and lepers had been cursed by God, so they deserved to be stoned to death.

Those who insist that everyone should take some responsibility for their own lives instead of perennially expecting to be ‘compensated’ for one kind of unfair treatment or the other, often only to remote ancestors.

Those who ask for courtesy and decency and reasonableness in public discourse, and accuracy and precision and beauty (or at least absence of ugliness) in the use of language.

Those who say that some women are bad people, just like some men.

Those who insist that childhood should not be endlessly prolonged – it harms both the individual and society.

Those who teach that you are not the most wonderful person ever born, nor does the world exist to please you; that the vast majority of people are destined to live and die as perfectly ordinary and forgettable people: the sooner everybody accepts this the better for all concerned.

Those who say that there is much good and nobility, even greatness, to be admired in very ‘ordinary’ people, but worshipping money and fame and power makes us blind to all that.

Those who say democracy cannot long survive without education, and discipline, and limitations on individual whims hiding behind a narrative of ‘rights’.

Those who say that patriotism is a very different thing from ignorant, intolerant, majoritarian jingoism.

Those who insist that you cannot become civilized, indeed even human, without reading a lot of literature and history – that is precisely why they are called the humanities, and no degree of expertise in any technical vocation, be it surgery or rocketry, can substitute for that.

Those who warn that a world dominated by robots and artificial ‘intelligence’, however safe and comfortable it might be for the majority, will be a world fit only for pigs and slaves.

Those who remind us that all kinds of wishy-washy ‘environmentalism’ is stupid; for while it is very important to learn to live more in harmony with Nature (including the nature that makes up our own bodies and minds), it is also very important to remember that Nature lives by the dictum of kill and be killed, that Nature kills swiftly, mercilessly, relentlessly, and the long march of civilization has been a story of man’s endless, defiant fight against Nature’s mindless, devastating cruelty, from disease to man eating animals to extreme heat and cold to tsunamis and earthquakes.

Let me see whether I want to extend this list… meanwhile, questions, doubts, arguments, alternative views, as long as they are decently and coherently expressed, are welcome.