You have to accommodate human nature

Editor, The Beacon:

Every pathology we’re watching play out right now in this country and the world springs from the assertion that human nature, while broken, can be fixed.

Pressing on, we or those clever people who know what’s best, have the tools to fix it.

Problem is, human nature is hard-wired, and you have to accommodate it, not do battle if you’re going to improve our lot.

That’s a lofty goal anyway, and you’d better be honestly invested or a good liar to declare it.

It’s arrogant to try to reset someone else’s course for them. You might incentivize a person to play along for the door prizes you offer, but odds are he’ll take your gifts, resent you for them, and disappear.

Hand out clean needles to addicts, cripple then replace realistic energy production with windmills and lowered expectations, and browbeat children to embrace the damnable lie of inborn racism and to deny their own biological realities.

Then tell parents to let the public-school experts manage their kids’ development without being second-guessed by Mom.

Or why not usher millions of strangers into America, people who have no affection for the place except as a geography with a reasonable chance for survival. Better still, move them around the country like chess pieces.

Meanwhile we witness expensive, rudderless brinkmanship in Europe, dwindling grocery shelves, political arrests, and slickly produced show trials.

Three hundred years ago, a clever Frenchman warned that when you stop believing in God, you don’t start believing in “nothing” … you believe in anything.

Everyone wants our lives to matter. But we can’t do it on the cheap, and we should never give our proxy to people too eager to make our hard choices for us. Their motives may not be pure, and they’ll likely start by trying to improve on us.

Brad Mason

DeLand