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Most of our schools teach almost nothing of importance, and nothing is more important than the study of good and evil. In the United States today, nearly all schools, from elementary through graduate, concentrate on teaching about racism, sexism, preferred pronouns, homophobia, transphobia, LGBTQIA+, climate change, diversity, equity, inclusiveness and white guilt. In other words, most of our educational institutions, including the most prestigious, do not educate.
Here are a few proofs.
It is almost certain that the great majority of American high school and college students (with the obvious exceptions of Christian students) could not name the Four Gospels (presuming they even know what they are); five of the Ten Commandments (presuming they know what those are); or the names of two Shakespeare plays. Most American students know little about the American Revolution, let alone about the French or Russian Revolutions. The same holds true for the Constitution and every other American founding document. It is doubtful that, other than Washington and Jefferson having owned slaves, American students know anything about these men or could name two other Founders.
When it comes to evil, the ignorance is enormous, often almost total. For example, according to Pew, about half of Americans ages 18-39 cannot identify Auschwitz or any other Nazi death camp. And there is every reason to assume that much fewer than half could identify the Gulag Archipelago (20 million-plus murdered); the Ukrainian forced famine (5 to 6 million murdered in a little over a year); Mao’s Great Leap Forward (about 60 million murdered); or Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (about one in every four Cambodians murdered).
As noted, almost no one outside of Russia has ever heard of the Russian Civil War, let alone knows anything about it. One reason is that the winners, the communists, had no desire that people know about it. Yet, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, about 10 million people, the great majority noncombatants, were killed.
Why don’t students know about evil?
The first reason is that nearly all the genocides of the 20th century were committed by communists, and the Left, which runs virtually all educational institutions, has always had a soft spot for communism. If people were to recognize that communism has been the greatest source of evil in the modern age in terms of numbers murdered, number of lives destroyed, liberty stolen, and the sheer amount of human suffering inflicted (greater by those metrics than those of the Nazis before they were forcibly stopped), the Left would lose much of its appeal.
Another reason is the foolish notion that people are basically good. This has been a left-wing belief since the French Enlightenment leader Jean-Jacques Rousseau came up with the idea. As he wrote in his book, “On Philosophy, Morality, and Religion,” “Man is a naturally good being, loving justice and order; there is no natural perversity in the human heart… All the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it.”
This nonsense had been foreign to the Western mind. Its view of humanity was rooted in the Bible, and neither Bible-based religion — Judaism or Christianity — affirmed the goodness of the human heart. As Genesis states, “The will of man’s heart is evil from his youth,” and the rest of the Bible repeatedly warns us against following our hearts.
However, as the West began to abandon the Bible, including belief in the God of the Bible, Westerners began to believe in man. As Marx put it, “Man is God.” People had no choice. For if there is no God to believe in, one must believe in man — or one has literally nothing to believe in. Therefore, belief in man’s inherent goodness became both psychologically and philosophically necessary.
A third reason follows from the second. With the exception of the mass murder of the Armenians (which was committed by Muslim Turks), the genocides and the other horrors of the 20th century were committed by secular regimes. Given the centrality of secularism to leftism, this fact has been kept from young people. Likewise, the fact that all these genocides were committed by big governments is not taught to young people because big government is also central to left-wing ideology. In other words, a true depiction of the evils of the 20th century would mean the end of the two pillars of left-wing ideology: secularism and big government.
If you want to make a more moral world, you must begin with the study of evil. But, for the reasons enumerated here, the Left is not — and cannot be — interested in fighting real evil. So, the Left fights made-up evils: American systemic racism, transphobia, capitalism, carbon emissions, sexism and former President Donald Trump, to name a few.
This is why young people know almost nothing about evil. The Left doesn’t want them to know about it. Because knowledge of evil inevitably leads directly to rejection of the Left.
Thank you. Very well said.
“ about half of Americans ages 18-39 cannot identify Auschwitz”
My daughter’s school teacher taught the class that it was in Germany and my daughter had visited it when we went to explore my father’s home town Krakow. The teacher was not happy with being proved wrong. But at least they were taught about the holocaust.
What they learned was that it was right wing ideology that caused it, not the truth that Nazi is short for National Socialism.
I hate litmus test, but I imagine there a whole lot of stuff your kids teachers don’t know.
To understand evil is the foundation of all ethical judgement.
Evil was established at the beginning in the Book of Genesis at “The Fall”.
So of course the Left would attempt to undermine that.
The suicide of the West is their goal.
And a return to the ancient pagan societies of the barbarians is their final destination.
It’s hard to find an every mans book, on the French revolution, that isn’t sympathetic to the revolutionaries. Also I’ve noticed a progression we’ve gone from having a spark of the devine, to being little g gods, to a place where we are all big g gods now.
If man is evil at birth, if his nature is fundamentally crooked and sordid, if he really is a depraved creature, like Ted Bundy for example, then he cannot be trusted with freedom.
This innately evil creature must be put in chains, he must be surveilled, watched carefully at every moment, by a moral elite, by Big Brother, by the government.
Who in their right mind knowing full well that most men are Ted Bundys to their very core would let all these Ted Bundys be free? Dictatorship by a moral elite is the proper government for a race of Ted Bundys.
But if man is born evil at birth then there can be no moral elite. All men are evil and depraved at birth. So there would be no hope for a human race of Ted Bundys. The best that could be hoped for is that this race of Ted Bundys would kill itself off as soon as possible.
What if both Dennis Prager and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are both wrong?
What if every individual person, at birth, is born neither evil nor good, but born ignorant of the knowledge of what is good or evil? What if man is born “tabula rasa”, an ignorant and innocent, moral clean slate?
What if, at birth, a baby is born only with the potential for good or evil, but he has not yet become good or evil? The idea of tabula rasa comes from the Greek Pagan Aristotle.
Prager and Rousseau offer mankind a tragic, malevolent, FALSE DICHOTOMY, definition of man’s moral nature.
“Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments.
Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth, both are “tabula rasa.” It is man’s cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the content of both….
At birth, a child’s mind is tabula rasa; he has the potential of awareness—the mechanism of a human consciousness—but no content. Speaking metaphorically, he has a camera with an extremely sensitive, unexposed film (his conscious mind), and an extremely complex computer waiting to be programmed (his subconscious). Both are blank. He knows nothing of the external world. He faces an immense chaos which he must learn to perceive by means of the complex mechanism which he must learn to operate.
If, in any two years of adult life, men could learn as much as an infant learns in his first two years, they would have the capacity of genius. To focus his eyes (which is not an innate, but an acquired skill), to perceive the things around him by integrating his sensations into percepts (which is not an innate, but an acquired skill), to coordinate his muscles for the task of crawling, then standing upright, then walking—and, ultimately, to grasp the process of concept-formation and learn to speak—these are some of an infant’s tasks and achievements whose magnitude is not equaled by most men in the rest of their lives.” – Ayn Rand
If they knew the total truth about Stalin and Che they wouldn’t be parading around with those colored pictures of them like they are. We have even more reasons to home school the youth of today and keep them out of those leftists Indoctrination Centers we once called Schools/Collages
The real problem about this piece is that it does not address the main issue. The teachers themselves do not know these answers. How can you expect them to teach about the situation? Instead of the brightest and dedicated women we grew up with as instructors, we now have the lower IQ individual that is poorly educated at best.
Standards have been lowered in the Ed departments to fill the seats as more intelligent women now shuffle paper in the corporate world. The communal respect and support for the teaching profession is gone.
And even if teachers knew about “real” history and they taught it, they would quickly be called to the principal’s office and reprimanded – or fired (as so many of them have been). Teaching the nature of evil these days is viewed as racist, fear-mongering and promoting divisiveness. Yet, there is nothing wrong with being “divided” from evil ideologies.
So, there are no Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers. What a sad day it has become.
Dennis Prager says:
“It is doubtful that, other than Washington and Jefferson … American students … could name two other Founders.”
I’m just a neighbour north of your northern border, but I think that I can name (without Googling, mind) at least 5 or more signers of your Declaration of Independence, or make a good stab at it:
Monroe, Madison, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, Light Horse Harry Lee (?), Sumner(?) and – best of all – Button Gwinnet from Geogia.
🙂
Lack of knowledge always causes a reapeat of things in History. Hopefully people learn from mistakes, thats where education and truth are useful.