Dear Liberals: Introduction

Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave. - Captain Malcolm Reynolds - Serenity

Dear Liberals,

I am not one of you.

While I have difficulty categorizing myself as conservative, libertarian, anarchist, egalitarian, aristocrat or oligarch, I am certain of what I am not.

I am not a Liberal.

I intend, over the next several months or years, to explain to you why I this is the case. On every topic, I will seek to explain my position and why it conflicts with the Liberal philosophy that is currently dominant in the bulk of Western Civilization.

Before I can do this, however, I feel it is important to describe who I am. I am a 28year old computer programmer that has, over the last 10 years, struggled to transform himself from a shiftless, lazy, whiny, unrealistic child into a successful, hard-working man and father. Over that time, and in the pursuit of training to be a programmer, I have felt the despair of having strongly-held beliefs of how things should be crushed beneath the pestle of hard reality. But, like the phoenix, this experiences only serves to raise you up and clarify what the nature of life really is. The truth of the matter is that when reality and your beliefs conflict, it is you who must yield. It is you who is wrong.

I suffered greatly at the hands of my own beliefs. I thought I was owed things. I felt I was entitled. Grimly, the world owes you precisely nothing and reality will do it's level best to provide you exactly that unless you fight back. This is neither a good thing or a bad thing. This is a true thing. This is a fact.

Yes, there are such things and they are not relative or open to appeal.

Honestly, this is the most basic explanation for why I am not a Liberal. Liberals often apply the word "should" to matters of empirical observation. "People shouldn't be greedy." But they are. "People should be generous to each other." But they are not. Well, not always, but it is beside the point what should be. We need to deal with what exists and try to make the best of it.

As a programmer, I am constantly forced to adjudicate the decision between the ideal and the possible and I can guarantee: the perfect is the worst enemy of the good. There are no perfect solutions to human society because there are no perfect humans and any attempt to build such a monstrosity is doomed to result in totalitarianism and terror.

Nothing in the long, amazing history of mankind lends any credibility whatsoever to the Utopian ideals of the Liberal mindset. Any philosophy that is based on what should be rather than what is can never succeed. It is doomed to failure.

So, I am not one of you because I am not only forced but choose to live in the really real world.

I hope one day you'll join me.

Sincerely,
Moron Pundit