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World Improvers

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Clarissa

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What do you call a person who thinks that the world is as right as it’s likely to get? And that we should all leave the world alone and try to better ourselves in the direction of being kinder to the people who share our daily lives?

The idea of “making the world a better place” and the grandiose plans to solve problems that have existed since humans existed are alien to me. My program is to work on my many flaws and spend as much time as I can reading and talking about books. World-improvers seem to be allergic to these activities. They think they are too good to bother about something so seemingly small.

12 responses to “World Improvers”

  1. Avatar
    Anonymous

    It comes as a shock to my students when I tell them, ‘I’m not in the business of changing and saving the world. I’m in the business of reading books (especially poetry, my field) to figure out how they work’. Imagine that! A non-activist professor.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      That’s exactly how I feel. A savior complex is not healthy. We miss out on the most wonderful parts of life when we become possessed by a messianic zeal to save humanity.

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  2. Avatar
    Anonymous

    I think the person who wrote that is a progressive who think he understands conservatism and doesn’t because he can’t see the world as anything other than an improvement project.
    I agree with you that the world is what it is. we are all imperfect so the best we can do is work on ourselves

    people think conservatives want no change ever, like let’s live in the 1400s, which isn’t true.
    A.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This is so well said. It’s precisely what I can’t stand about progressivism. They are obsessed with fussing around with things endlessly, trying to improve and increase. In the process, they break things that worked perfectly well without their endless messing around.

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        Also, going back to the 1400s would entail enormous, dramatic, terrible changes. It’s not conservative to want such changes. All I am proposing is: let’s stand still for a bit without careening in a random direction, because we convinced ourselves that new is always better than old.

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          There’s also this weird phenomenon where people get mentally stuck and cannot imagine wanting to “go back” to anything (socially, technologically, culturally, governmentally) that existed or worked in the past, without having to adopt every single thing in the cultural/technological suite that coexisted with it.

          Like, “Hey, people lived reasonably well in the 50s, what if we could roll back residential building regulations and home finance to something more like what we had then…” instantly gets this weird “OMG THE 50s YOU MUST WANT SEGREGATION AGAIN!”

          Where does this bizarre lack of imagination come from?

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          1. cliff arroyo Avatar
            cliff arroyo

            “Where does this bizarre lack of imagination come from?”

            To stay relevant in their own minds they end up pretending no progress has been made since the 1950s in things like race relations or womens rights.

            So any positive mention of the 1950s (for example) makes them think no progress can ever be made (that is, they believe their own hype).

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          2. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            It’s like these people have a brain defect where they are conditioned to despise everything from three minutes ago, no matter how much they liked it three minutes ago. For example, if you ask a leftist about Obama, you’ll hear how horrible, conservative, and evil Obama was. These same people worshipped Obama like a deity when he was in power. Now he is “too conservative.” Because that’s what the past is. It’s conservative. It cannot be changed.

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          3. oldcowboy3 Avatar
            oldcowboy3

            Well, I was raised in the ’50’s, and while everything was certainly not perfect, life was generally improving. And most importantly divorce was not only considered personal failure, but extremely difficult to achieve, so things were generally much, much better for children. And believe it or not, the sexes actually generally liked each other ;-D

            And at first social improvements were largely created by technological and legal changes, rather than establishing deliberately discriminatory programs. The unthinking imposition of the latter clearly continues to tear Western society apart on both sexual and racial lines. And the massive government borrowing necessary to hide the resultant societal failures must be hidden by debasing all Western currencies — e.g.,the value of the American dollar has depreciated by 50% since 2000.

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            1. oldcowboy3 Avatar
              oldcowboy3

              Hmmm, do downvoters understand that two out of every three feminists are simply as historically ignorant as the other one ;-D

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  3. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “we should all leave the world alone and try to better ourselves”

    I’m all for changing the world for the better, but that’s outside the abilities of those most passionate about the project and those who want lightspeed change.

    What works is slow, undirected, incremental change taken up by individuals trying to do better for themselves and those around them. Small, limited movements can work for some things but then you have the problem of the movement succeeding and a minority within the movement who can’t let go and quickly become nuissances to everyone as they try to simultaneously pretend the movement hasn’t made any progress while searching for every more niche and/or ridiculous and/or harmful goals.

    Fools who think of themselves as traffic cops for world betterment inevitably make things worse for everyone.

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  4. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Porque no los dos?

    Once upon a time a traveler came upon  a man who had been set upon by thieves. The traveler bound up his wounds, took him to an inn, and paid for his care, then continued on his trip.

    The person any traveler’s path varies: a local school board that needs someone to thwart mediocre activists and support the virtuous and capable teachers; a neighbor’s lost dog; a Naval force fighting for its people against a communist invader that needs missiles now.

    The judgment required to discriminate between “the man in my path” and “the distraction from my duty” is why men need virtuous parents, teachers, and institutions.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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