If you grow up in a country where everything always works, you don’t have to waste any energy on bending every aspect of uncomfortable reality to your will all the time. Then you have more energy for creative pursuits or for personal growth.
On the negative side, this experience can make you think that this is what life is naturally like. And it’s not. Everywhere else outside of your bubble of high civilizational advances it’s a constant battle against things, relationships, institutions, and social structures that are indifferent, hostile, and very uncomfortable.
This is why, instead of giving daily praises to life for placing them into a rare ultra-civilized pocket of reality that is hospitable and sweet, people act carelessly towards this inherited haven, destroying it for the future generations.
Clarissa's Blog 
I really understand the desire for some people who are living this type of good life in a rich and evolved country to want to share their privilege with others. What I can never understand is where the original idea that you needed to import all these people into your own countries came from. First, it’s impossible to physically do that, second how could they not see the consequences of doing this? Why not stick to helping people in their own countries?
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“Everywhere else outside of your bubble of high civilizational advances it’s a constant battle against things, relationships, institutions, and social structures that are indifferent, hostile, and very uncomfortable.”
Hmmm, well, it took us about 10,000 years to build Western Civilization, but only a scant 100 years to undermine it. Whatever are you suggesting — that we bring back the “Scold’s Bridle” ;-D
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Your post reminded me that gratitude is essential to good mental health
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Absolutely 100% essential.
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Clarissa, I was only half joking. The continued survival of Western Civilization, Christendom, requires a birthrate North of 2.1.
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That alone will not help you. What if all those 2.1 kids grow up left-wing? Or at least some of them? You also have to indoctrinate them properly.
Just like democracy is a bad idea, freedom of opinions is also a bad idea when the fate of the whole Western Civilization is at stake.
(sarcasm)
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Why do you think the left is so fixated on having control of our education system?
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Ideally, I would prefer if neither side had control. Especially in a society that is as polarized as the US one, where both sides are tempted to take it too far.
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We are a very long way from the Left not having an iron grip over everything but I didn’t self-mutilate for this year’s obligatory reading club at work because, for the first time, the reading selection is not racialized. It’s openly and cheerfully neoliberal but at least we are all going to be equally told that we are psychologically damaged if we oppose budget cuts. Nobody will be singled out because of their race.
That’s already an improvement.
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The solution to a problem of the obligatory left-wing book club is no obligatory book club, not an obligatory right-wing book club.
What happens to those who do not attend?
I should really explore somehow if we have all the stuff you are describing in our humanities departments. Because we surely do not have that in STEM…
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I’m sure you don’t believe that I’d ever want to force colleagues to read right-wing books. Or any books.
As for not attending, I’m contractually obligated as Department Chair to attend these bimonthly meetings. Thankfully, I’m entering my last year as Chair. Or last semester if the department is disbanded.
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Also, this isn’t a Humanities thing. The book club is for all Chairs.
I have found, by the way, that the more sciency types are often the absolute worst on this stuff. We have a woman from Dental School and another from the School of Pharmacy who are the most unhinged.
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Yes, we’ve had so much democracy and freedom of opinion under our leftist regimes. No indoctrination of any kind. How can we ever let that go?
Also sarcasm.
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vo7
Hmmm, actually, to tell you the truth, I really don’t want anybody to “indoctrinate” any children whatsoever — no more empty minded political platitudes, and most definitely, no more mind control drugs.
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