Eternally Year Zero
For the poor deceived and self-deceived souls of the Left, it is always Year Zero, that is, the first year of the Revolution. All past history and tradition is rejected with disgust, all knowledge and learning painfully accumulated over centuries.
Current knowledge of the facts of reality is rejected as well — we are, as one fuddle headed politician so repetitively put it recently, “unburdened by what has been.”
As soon as we abolish history, civilization, economics, and reality, Utopia descends from the clouds adorned as a bride for her wedding, and Eden is restored.
Such is the delusion of the Progressive. In reality, the path to Progressive paradise is paved with skulls.
Old leaders are guillotined, law books and churches burned, kulak farmers starved to death, intellectuals sent to toil and die on state-run communal farms without tools. Anyone with eyeglasses is killed. All monuments are torn down, all stained-glass windows smashed, all flags are burned, all crosses trampled.
The Revolution is freed from the past! The calendar restarts at Year Zero.
The Year Zero mentality is rooted in optimism, in malingering, and in the need for amnesia.
Some part of “Year Zero” thinking is rooting in sophomoric optimism. The sad wisdom of Ecclesiastes is put aside, and the gay delusion of Quixote embraced instead.
The optimistic sophomore, having read the first chapter in his schoolbooks, and convinced of his own omniscience, sees the long tragic history of man. In a spasm of indignation, he concludes that no previous institution nor prior practice of religion, law or economics has abolished all sin, all crime, and all poverty.
He feels all world problems can be solved with simple solutions, provided the will of well-intentioned people is pure.
He therefore concludes three things, which he holds to be self evident:
(1) All prior institutions have failed, and must be abolished to the root. Hence he becomes a radical.
(2) Opposition to this radical program is dismissed as due to fear, ignorance, self-interest, malice. Opposition in good faith being unimaginable, his sole argument is ad hominem. Hence, he need only point out the mental or moral failings prompting his opponents. Hence, he becomes an irrationalist, that is, one who disregards reason as a fit umpire to settle disputes.
(3) He is never opposed by good arguments, only by bad people. He sees the world in the simple Manichaean binary of the enlightened elect on the right side of history, versus the benighted deplorables on the wrong side, clinging bitterly to failed ideas and failed institutions. Everything has a simple answer: hence, he becomes a simpleton.
Being radical, he need not take the time and care to separate the wheat from the tares, so to speak, good from bad, failure from success. Experience has nothing to teach; no prior case has any binding precedent.
Being an irrationalist, no reasoning, no debate, no specific program need be articulated. Policies, their costs and side-effects, need not be contemplated.
Being a simpleton, only the simplest and stupidest ideas need be promoted. Abolish poverty by paying to the poor to be poor. Create abundance by decree. Create demand by printing currency. Create world peace by outlawing war. Teach men not to rape. Abolish gun crime by abolishing guns. There are no side effects to these policies, no costs, no trade-offs, no perverse incentives, no grifters eager to game the system, no enemies eager to strike the unwary at the first sign of weakness. There are no facts.
Prior wisdom failed to solve all sin, crime, war, and poverty. Attention to facts is one more failed institution to be overturned. Facts do not matter. Only intentions matter.
And when the radicalism fails, as it always does, this becomes merely one more lesson from history to be dismissed when all history is dismissed. Paying attention to the lessons of history has not, after all, abolished all sin, crime, war and poverty, has it not? Therefore wisdom, that is, attention to the lessons of history, is merely one more institution to be abolished when all institutions are abolished.
This is why the past can and must be ignored, or, rather be abolished. This is why it is always Year Zero.
Let us not be too generous to the optimism of our Quixotic friends. For it is not truly optimism, but hubris: man thinking himself able to solve problems all prior ages failed to solve, including problems built into the limits of moral life, and the nature of reality.
Even the sternest soul at first might find it hard to condemn such charming delirium: there is something noble about tilting at windmills, thinking them giants. The charm wears thin, however, if the mad crusader fells the mill in his folly, no grain is ground, no bread is baked, and we all starve. This is not Don Quixote, but Don Juan, murderer and rapist, screaming defiance as he is dragged to hell.
The past is part of reality, and reality is the enemy of hubris, even as humility is the friend of truth. Hence, the Quixotic nature of thinking insoluble problems easily fixed is actually a revolt against reason, and against reality.
Hence the Progressive does not take lessons from the past, nor heed the past. He is at war with the past. He wants civilization destroyed, Church and state alike abolished, tribes and nations, clans and families ground into faceless uniformity, male and female equalized, or, rather homogenized. He wants the law of supply and demand abolished by fiat, the scarcity of resources, the disutility of labor, the accumulation of wealth and power in some nations and not others, in some families and not other: all of it. All of it. He wants all reality abolished. For him to set the perfect future as he likes, the past must no longer have ever had existed. The optimism, or, rather, the overweening pride of the Progressive demands it ever be Year One.
Malingering, in the military, is when a soldier fakes illness or injury to stay on the sick roster as long as possible, and excused from duty. Likewise, a quack doctor wishes never for his hypochondriac patient to be cured, lest he lose his fee.
So Malingering is another reason for the Year One ever to remain. The future Utopia is never here. The problems can never be solved.
When, of course, mere facts show that something else is actually causing the problem (such as the immutable reality of economics, history, biology, theology or the shortcomings of oneself or one’s ancestors) the cult-members “invisibilize” the explanation of the cause.
To invisibilize means to reform or re-word the theory of what is causing the world’s woes, so that, without admitting one’s mistake, one asserts that a deeper root cause is present, one which cannot be disproven to exist, because no evidence of this root cause is possible. The visible and obvious cause is ignored, and an invisible cause is invented as needed.
When the misogyny and racism needed as scapegoats for progressive theory in reality does not exist, it must be invented.
A glass ceiling is needed to explain why women, who work shorter hours less diligently than men, do not get promoted as often as men. The idea that women prioritize different things than men is badthink, a fact which, being obvious, cannot be admitted. Glass is, of course, invisible. Likewise, dog-whistles, needed to explain a racism that is nowhere in evidence, and to make innocent remarks seems sinister, are inaudible, and micro-aggressions are likewise impalpable.
No evidence of the invisible cause, direct or indirect, is or can be offered, and, being invisible, no disproof is possible. This is a perfectly unscientific and perfectly irrational formulation: if one cannot see invisible fairies cursing you, one can never disprove the theory that fairies cursed you. It is never your fault. Blame fairies.
An example might make this clear. Forgive the length of the digression.
The Black Man in America trail behind the White Man by several key measures of low wages and high crime rates, and far behind the Yellow Man and the Jew.
The radical blames this on the legacy of slavery and of institutional racism. However, when Jim Crow laws are abolished, segregation in schools and the military ended, discrimination illegalized, and when, more to the point, race-quotas are adopted by businesses, school admissions, government contractors, so that the Black receive a system of legal benefits based on race, the institutional racism is, by any visible measure, quite abolished and reversed.
The social system is racist in favor of Blacks; and yet the Black trails behind the White and far behind the Yellow in wage rates and crime rates.
The idea is anathema that Black failure is due to the perverse incentives of the Great Society, such as public welfare encouraging absentee fatherhood; or due to the cultural legacy unsuccessful work-habits, such as were inherited from Southern rednecks, who inherited Scottish border-clan habits; or due to the genetic inferiority as reflected in IQ scores. By decree, these ideas are badthink, and cannot be discussed, not even to refute them.
Hence, racism must be the cause of Black failure even though, by all visible evidence, racism has been abolished as an institution, and reverse-racist institutions erected instead.
It is socially unacceptable, even to the point of ostracization, unemployment, lawful arrest and unlawful violence, to express hatred or contempt for the Black race. City blocks are burned with arson, and stores smashed and looted by angry mobs, but all these crimes and more are excused and even lauded, if done in jihad against anti-black racism. (Anti-white racism is, of course, socially acceptable, if not required by law).
So there is no visible racism in America, and very obviously so, and quite of bit of antiracism, including legal privileges awarded to Blacks and granted no other race.
And yet the theory holds that racism must be the cause for any social or economic failure of Blacks, or even for any underrepresentation, especially in fields of endeavor in which few Blacks express any interest or expend any efforts.
Orientals have studied books and lauded scholarship since the time of the Mandarins, if not earlier, and Chinese mother have forced children to study relentlessly for centuries. Likewise, from the Middle Ages onward, Jews, require by their religion to be literate, have likewise been force by mothers for centuries to study, hence Jews make immense efforts to prosper as bankers and money-lenders, scholars, lawyers, and other bookish professions. Black tribesmen from the hinterlands captured and sold to Arabs or Spaniards by civilized Blacks in walled cities, on the other hand, had no such tradition, or lacked written language or coin money.
Therefore an invisible form of racism, institutional racism, also called White Privilege, is invented into existence out of nothing. This is the form of racism that only exists in White minds, but only unconsciously, that Whites shed without noticing. Racism hence can be attributed to Whites regardless of what any one of them does, thinks or says. Whites are racist by definition, since invisible racism cannot be seen.
This must be so: Otherwise, Blacks would be present in greater numbers in fields of endeavor in which they have no interest and make no attempts.
Those Blacks who come from poor or broken families and achieve widespread fame and success, such as Dr. Tomas Sowell, Justice Clarence Thomas, Larry Elder, Dr. Ben Carson, are dismissed a sell-outs and “Uncle Toms” — whereas Blacks who come from middle class or even privileged, such as the First Lady Michell Obama, routinely depict themselves as oppressed by racism, even when they are favored by legal and social privileges based on race.
Other examples of “invisibilization” in other spheres could be multiplied endlessly: the Patriarchy of the Feminist exists invisibly, as we live in a matriarchy affording females privileges to a degree unknown to any past generation, and verging on the absurd. The sole institutional harm done to women these days, such as invading their locker rooms, or punching them in boxing matches, is done by men pretending to be women.
The Jewish world-conspiracy to destroy the West popularized by the Nazis and reinvigorated recently by the Alt-Right is likewise invisible, unless the world-conspiracy actually means to have Jewish students harassed or the State of Israel denounced and destroyed.
Again, the GOP KKK conspiracy against the Blacks is invisible, so much so that their lack of hate-crimes must be fulfilled by Jussie Smollett dousing himself with bleach, Bubba Wallace cringing in terror before a wrist-sized garage-door pull as if it were a lynching noose, the Duke Lacrosse team being accused of rape, the Covington Catholic Kids accused of facecrime.
When all the hatecrimes are hate hoaxes, the hate must be invisibilized, lest it otherwise would be abolished, and the problem solved.
A final reason why the year must remain Year One is so that a curtain of cultural amnesia can be drawn across the past, lest past glories shame current wretchedness caused by the inescapable failures and follies of progressive progress.
Any glance at history will show, not only the failures of past institutions, but their successes.
Slavery was abolished by the Christian powers of the world, and solely by the Christians. Where the radicals abolish the Church, slavery returns, both the mass-slavery of the mass-murderers in socialist empires, and the chattel slavery of drug-running and child-selling cartels promoted and protected by the Democrat party, and celebrated by the elites visiting Epstein Island.
Suburban housewives in the 1950s achieved the greatest happiness for the fairer sex ever known in history. Where radicals introduce the sexual revolution, women are victimized and degraded, forced into the rat race, and all the delicate dignities and privileges awarded them by chivalrous customs are expunged. She is urged and lured into harlotry in the name of equality, the misery of divorce, and thence forced into supporting baby-murder, whose deep psychological wound can never be cured. Men are psychologically castrated, or, in the case of Transgender activists grooming underage catamites, physically.
The miseries and abominations of sodomy, pederasty, and polygamy largely and successfully abolished by Western Civilization, are now celebrated and reintroduced as the tide of barbarism grows.
And here I mean literal barbarism: the Mohammedan is protected and promoted by Progressives, but the alliance lasts only until Sharia Law is reintroduced. The genital mutilation, rapes, stoning of rape-victims, and loss of right to vote, to speak, to own property, to testify in lawcourts, to wear her hair or show her face in public crush women under and oppression deeper, darker, and uglier than anything known in Europe, either in the Christian Era or in the Classical world. The lowliest odalisque chained in a whorehouse in ancient Rome was not required to wear a full-body garbage bag, and peer only through a narrow eyeslit at the world.
The unparalleled success of the physical sciences, medicine, and the triumphs of technology, springing solely from Western Civilization, are now being quickly and recklessly abolished by partisans of Junk Science, by woowoo New Age feminism, by the idolatry of tribal medicine, by the Lysenkoism of Ecopanic-mongers, by the antibology of Gender Theory cultists.
Hiring pilots and engineers and police and soldiers based on racial and sexual quotas rather than merit will degrade the capacity of civilization to fly planes, practice medicine, repair electrical grids, protect civilians, wage war.
So all of the progress beloved of progressives, the equality of races, liberation of women, the triumph of science, all spring solely from Christian roots and all wither when those roots are cut.
Progressives retard progress.
The inevitable logic of their position, the conclusions that follow and must follow from their actions, forbid any other outcome.
Progressives reverse progress.
It cannot be otherwise, until and unless the progressives repent of progressivism.
Contemplate the difference between the Russia of the Romanovs and the Russia of Stalin. The reforms abolishing serfdom were undone when all men were enslaved, and farmers starved in the Holodomor. The case of China under the Mandarins and under Maoism is likewise. Technological progress, of a sort, was introduced and in places maintained. Indeed, during the Space Race, the Soviets could rightly boast that they employed their technology to accomplish historically unprecedented feats before the West. That all the technology thus used was stolen from the West goes unremarked. Regardless, of technical progress, the progress sought of the progressives in other areas, the increase in liberty and dignity allegedly sought, have obviously, sharply, and deeply been reversed to the level of Aztec tyranny, with mass murders no less gruesome.
Contemplate the difference between Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, or between colonial South Africa and postcolonial. Contemplate Batista Cuba versus Castro’s, or Venezuela before and after Maduro. Contemplate Lebanon, once a nation equal to any European land, now a cesspit theocracy, void of peace or liberty.
So it must remain Year One, since if the past were allowed to remain, the downfall could not be misremembered as an ascent.
How could it be otherwise? Once our optimistic Manichaean irrationalist simpleton enters a world blissfully free from reason, facts are foes, and reality is badthink.
Recall, there is no possibility of any good faith opposition to the simplest and most shallow of solutions to any human ill. In each case, addressing the symptom is considered a cure of the disease, especially in cases where the disease is made worse.
This is because the link of cause and effect between the cause of the problem and the solution of the problem is always, by the very nature of the progressive approach, anathematized. It is mentally illegal, it is crimethink, to think about what is actually causing the problem. Goodthink requires that the scapegoat selected by the Cult be blamed.
As said above, when the evidence is overwhelming that the real cause of the problem is something in human nature, or history, or in one’s own shortcomings, the evidence must be disregarded, and if the scapegoat is obviously not at fault, and an invisible version of the same scapegoat is erected, one whose nonexistence, by design, can never be disproved.
The inability to face reality, so aptly parodied by George Orwell with the term ‘doublethink’ requires that falsehoods, no matter how blatant, continue to the thought and spoken, and actions no matter how counterproductive, continued to be acted out. All these words and actions are not meant to accomplish anything, aside from a public display of the loyalty of the Progressive to his lofty, simplistic, psychotic ideas.
The progressive allegedly means to return us to Eden by abolishing religion, law, and marketplace, but in fact his policies, when enacted, crash civilization, hence merely merely return us to the Stone Age, the savagery, tribalism, and primitive anarchy of ancient brutality.
It is always Year One in the Stone Age.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
