Brave or what?

Ah, the wondrous world of the terminally offended is a cornucopia of schadenfreude and is truly hilarious to behold. At any suggestion you could take some responsibility for our own life prepare for a flurry of indignation as folks of a certain political persuasion accuse you of monstrous motives. I heard on the radio a few days ago a teenage girl, newly back out of care and living with her mother, saying without a hint of awareness that she had had no other choice but to fly into a rage and strike out. Her mother agreed; it was the stress of being a teenager, it wasn’t her fault and society was to blame or some such crap.

One of the unintended consequences of universal welfare is this idea that, not only will the state provide, it will also step in and absolve you of any responsibility for your own actions. “He just lost it!” say the onlookers, “He flew into a rage. She provoked him. The government must do something.” And on and on it goes. Pleas of insanity are lodged and a ‘crime of passion’ is somehow at least partly excused by the animal inability to control an instinct for destruction. Anger management, ADHD, despair, abandonment, dereliction of duty; all symptoms or causes of a great malaise in western society leading to  greater demand than ever for ‘behavioural support’ in the classroom and beyond.

And then there’s all the whining over this ‘glass floor’ nonsense; how dare responsible parents who can provide for their children, er, provide for their children? How very dare they? Another LSE ‘study’ revealing the bleeding obvious that responsible people, paying virtually all the tax and thus propping up the whole of society are ‘unfairly’ preventing their own from sliding down to the arse-end. “The research suggests there is a clear correlation between the social background of a child's grandfather and eventual labour market success.” I should bloody well hope so, too, otherwise what’s the point? The predictable response from the caring left? Unfair! They shriek, as if the excuses they use for their own failings – they can’t help behaving that way – are somehow not applicable to those of better circumstances, who also instinctively defend their own.

And then of course the Brave New Worlders wade in, crying ‘eugenics’ at the suggestions that, in the future, genetic screening could identify the less academically capable. In this piece by Brendan O’Neill he concludes, as should anybody with an ounce of perspective: “Let’s not tell schoolkids their genes made them fail their GCSEs. Instead let’s introduce them to Renaissance through the idea that everyone has it within their power to be as great as they want to be. We aren’t born this way; we make ourselves.” The horror! And yet and yet... genetic screening is routinely used to detect physical conditions, why not mental ones as well? (I've been doing my bit, by the way: here)

Leftism... in a picture.

But apart from all that it strikes me we have a simple choice in life, really: We can accept the facts that life is hard, not naturally equitable and that it favours those born into advantage and then determine that we will seek out such advantages for ourselves, the hard way. Or we can bitch and moan and insist that those who have built the foundations for the future success of their own should undermine that very possibility by simply giving it away to those who see it as a right. Once again, the blinkered left simply cannot see that ‘equal rights’ does not equate to equal outcomes. If only we could genetically screen for leftism.