More Russell Kirk:

“If rights are confused with desires, the mass of men must feel always that some vast, intangible conspiracy thwarts their attainment of what they are told is their inalienable birthright. This [creates a] danger of fixing upon society a permanent grudge and frustration.”

We can see this issue clearly in the conflict between men who mistake their desire to be perceived as women for a right and the people who timidly remind them they don’t have the right to control other people’s inner lives. And even if you managed to regulate what people think, it still wouldn’t satisfy you. Nothing would because, to quote the first sentence of every course in basic economics, human desires are limitless.

“The conservative refuses to accept utopian politics as a substitute for religion.”

Russell Kirk wrote this in the 1986 preface to his 1953 book The Conservative Mind, and if I’d heard this before, I’d have saved myself a lot of trouble.

Also, this, written before even my parents were born:

“We ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite.”

Brilliant stuff. Seventy years later we see the results – for the nature, society, politics economy – of worshiping the insatiable human wants above any deity or any moral principle. We’ve got to the point where people treat even their own bodies like costume because the idea of anything remaining immutable, free from the tinkering of the desiring humans is intolerable.

Everything in education is stupid. There is this extremely popular slogan, “teach people not books!” that semiliterate fools roll out to explain why they teach woke garbage instead of real literature. That they should think this sad little pun is a good argument to use in adult conversations tells you everything you need to know about these folks’ capacity to teach.