Why power mongers love impossible goals

JRM Blue jacket Mary SweetenedThis is the text of Day 4, Week 2 of Dr. J’s Daily Chats, recorded on May 7, 2020: “Why power mongers love impossible goals.”

Last time, we talked about modest, attainable goals and utopian impossible goals.

It is Utopian thinking to believe we can prevent all deaths from the Wuhan virus. Why would the public authorities take on the responsibility to prevent all deaths? Why would the news media goad them into assuming such a goal?

Doing the impossible requires a lot of power. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a person or group has the goal of accumulating as much power as possible. Convincing everyone that an impossible task is a high moral duty would be quite useful. The people would willingly grant the public authorities all sorts of powers they wouldn’t ordinarily surrender.

Let me give an example that has nothing to do with the Wuhan virus. Let’s suppose you wanted to create equality between boys and girls. Let’s say, just to keep it simple, that all you wanted to do was to make equal numbers of girls and boys participating in sports, say in college or high school.

This is an impossible goal. You can encourage, welcome and support girls’ participation in sports all day long. That might be a very fine thing to do. Girls need exercise. Girls can benefit from learning teamwork and competition and all the other things that go along with participating in sport.

But the girls are never going to be as interested in sports as the boys are. Boys enjoy sports more. I will go even further and say, boys need sports in a way that girls do not.

So, the goal of “let’s encourage more girls to participate in sports,” is a fine and doable thing. The goal of “we must have equal numbers of boys and girls in sports” is not possible.

Unless you are willing to use a lot of power and force and compulsion by the government. And that is exactly what happened. During the Clinton administration, Title IX of the Civil Rights Act was interpreted to require equal numbers of boys’ and girls’ sports teams and participants. To achieve this, the federal government went around shutting down boys’ wrestling programs and swimming teams. Boys who had worked hard, hoping to go to college on a wrestling scholarship had that swept out from under them overnight.

And that, I submit, was the real motivation of creating “equality” in sports. Power for the ideologues. Power for the government.

By the way, you do realize that allowing boys who say they are girls to compete against actual girls will mean the end of girls in sports, don’t you? And guess what legal authority the Obama Administration used for allowing boys to compete against girls? They interpreted Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to require schools to allow students compete according to their perceived gender identity.

The Federal Equality Police did not really care about girls in sports. They cared about power.

That is why we so often hear politicians and journalists and ideologues demand the impossible. It takes a lot of force to do the impossible. These people are not crazy. They are power-hungry. You can easily see this process at work in dealing with the Wuhan virus.

But doing the impossible requires more than raw naked power. I’ll tell you more about that next time.

In the meantime, don’t forget. Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself.

This is the text of Day 4, Week 2 of Dr. J’s Daily Chats, recorded on May 7, 2020: “Why power mongers love impossible goals.”

 

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