No country for good men

The following post on Rod Dreher's website is from a homosexual man named Matt in VA who makes makes a number of insightful observations about homosexual culture: "The Wild West Of Male Sexual Desire".

Matt in VA's post is well worth reading in its own right. However, in my post here, I simply use it as a jumping off point to discuss different matters. Also, my thoughts don't have an entirely cohesive theme, just a loosely connected one at best.

1. I suspect what Matt in VA says is likely shocking to the average American who thinks of LGBTQ individuals as people just like the rest of us except they're attracted to the same-sex. Of course, as Matt in VA details, that couldn't be further from the truth.

2. Many people (such as police officers, detectives, border patrol, ranchers, nurses, physicians) know there are cesspools of evil beneath the thin veneer of civilization. That's due to their own firsthand experience.

3. Specifically, there are evil people. Evil people exist. This is despite society's best attempts to explain and excuse their evil. That is, after all the explanations have been said and done - explanations based on parenting, upbringing, socialization, education, medical health, psychiatric health, culture, and so on - the evil of some people is still inexplicable.

4. My impression is no one finds the existence of evil people more baffling than the modern political and social progressive. I think that's in part because the progressive has no recourse to deal with evil. They can't educate evil. They can't rehabilitate evil. They can't medically treat evil. They don't know what to do with evil. They don't know what to make of evil.

5. Again, there are simply evil people in the world. Some men just want to watch the world burn à la The Dark Knight. Some people might as well come straight out of the pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel like Blood Meridian or a television series like Game of Thrones. The psychopath next door.

6. A slight digression, progressives are like a Cthulhu cult or similar. Cultic priests who call upon the name of the Great Old Ones to awake from their deep slumber through strange and eerie ceremonies involving blood rituals and the like. They believe when the protean beast arises, the world will be ushered into a new age, but in truth they're blind to the real horror they've unleashed.

It's not unimaginable (not all slippery slopes are necessarily fallacious) that progressivism may strip away our civilization's protective layers that keep what lies beneath at bay. For example, it's not unimaginable that a kind of modern pagan amorality may come to the fore. We already see this happening in the most vocal and committed drivers of the LGBTQ movement, for example, as Matt in VA describes.

And in the end it's not unimaginable that civilization devolves into something like the tragic refrain echoed throughout the pages of the book of Judges: every man did what was right in his own eyes.

7. As I say, progressives typically have little idea what to do with evil people. They prefer banning guns and letting the authorities deal with criminals. They prefer rehabilitation over punishment. They prefer life imprisonment over the death penalty. And so on.

I guess it's in part because progressives feel as if things like punishment instead of rehabilitation and the death penalty are themselves immoral or at least morally murky.

However, there are some people who can't be rehabilitated or remediated or the like. Consider someone like Ted Bundy. Bundy was more intelligent and cunning than many if not most of the people who met him, and he was masterful in manipulating people, or at least duping people, including psychologists who tried to help him.

That's the challenge and perhaps paradox of dealing with evil and evil people. Sometimes it may require good men and women to get their hands dirty in order to stem evil and evil people. Sometimes one may have to be something of a monster to stop monsters. I suspect many if not most people know this instinctively. Simply consider the resonance of the anti-hero in popular culture.

Also, for example, take Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's oft-quoted passage (albeit it's a bit simplistic but it suffices well enough here):

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath—a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path.