Dear Friends,
It seems to me, all philosophies that have as a premise, that human beings are anything less than human beings, is evil and should be exposed as such. What do I mean by that? A Human being is of incalculable value. To hold that a person can be disposed of for whatever arbitrary reason, is to burn the Mona Lisa, to light the room. It is a crime of immense proportions. The various ideologies consider the person different in value. Intersectionalism, groupism and ESG hold the human being as less than human, a cog, equal among cogs, but not equal to the politically favored. While traditional western liberalism inherited from Christianity the idea that the individual human being is infinitely valuable. Since comparing the magnitudes of infinities is absurd, therefore, we are all equal.
Western liberalism is one of the very few ideologies that has ever held that all men are created equal. That was not some a priori rationally derived idea, it came from the Christian theology that we are all the children of God, and so are equal in his eyes, a postiori. The Enlightenment, the structure of Western liberalism, exposed several fallacies that we had been subject to, that people existed to serve the government, the Rights of kings, appeal to authority and agreed with Aristotle that arbitrary rule is the worst kind of government. From these realizations, the Enlightenment philosophers concluded, the individual was the correct way to understand human beings. Enlightenment individualism ushered in the industrial revolution, constitutionalism and the scientific method, and Groupism… Hitler.
Pragmatism also demands we treat everyone as individuals, with agency and irreplaceable. Pragmatism is about outcomes, not intentions, philosophy or metaphysics… it is only about consequence. Will this action or that action achieve the desired outcome? The pragmatist expunges emotion from his or her thinking and dwells on results. What if we treat people as members of groups instead of individuals, the outcome would be the same as every other time it has happened, wouldn’t it? On the other hand, if we treat everyone as an individual, wouldn’t that result in the same outcome as it always has before? Why would suddenly the laws of societal interaction change for the Woke ESG groupist ideology? It would not. So we have Enlightenment principles, the Christian ethos and pragmatism, on the same side.
Those who hold others as less equal, or alternatively, some are more equal, otherwise called elitists, don’t diminish people to elevate them, they diminish people to diminish people… to elevate themselves. The malevolent perpetually claim the moral high ground as they enact the most immoral policies, based on group politics. You are not an individual to them but a member of a group, since groups can be herded and prodded to move, anyway the elite want. It is easy to tell when someone holds people as members of groups, or individuals, by how they interact with others. Watch if they pander to someone’s group affiliation, taking on a southern drawl when talking with southerners or a Yankee twine when talking with northerners. Do they, or we, see a human being’s color, politics, or their humanity?
Failure has no cost to the groupist, because they could care less about the human suffering it produces, while failure to someone who esteems his fellow man is a terrible burden. When the elite that visit such horrors on us as inflation, economic disaster and nuclear war, are flippant about the suffering, you know they care nothing about us crowding cows. The groupist Woke ideology is not about reducing human suffering, it is about increasing it, to punish those groups that are less equal. They would take us back to pre-Enlightenment times. Judging by Enlightenment principles, Christian morality and pragmatically, the groupist ESG ideology must create suffering. As have all other groupist ideologies that preceded it. Groupism, or individualism, which shall we embrace?
Sincerely,
John Pepin
