Nothing says that human nature is naturally good, better
than when someone tries to prove it is evil. And this is what Dennis Prager has
done in the article he wrote under the title: “Letter from Africa” and the
subtitle: “The history of real racism, and human nature, is distorted by the
Left.” The article was published in National Review Online on March 11, 2014.
Dennis Prager went to Africa and has related his
observations from there about the things he saw which he says overwhelmed him
with regard to “the amount of cruelty that human beings have inflicted on other
human beings.” And this led him to reiterate what he concluded a long time ago,
and has written about many times before, mainly that: “People are not basically
good. Human nature is not good.”
There are many ways I can respond to the above, but there is
one way that would be the most powerful of all. To use it, however, I must tell
a story I pledged to myself I shall never reveal but shall take with me to my
grave. It was a reasonable pledge to make at the time, but meaningless to
maintain now. And so I have decided to break the pledge and tell the story. It
is something that happened sometime in the late Sixties or early Seventies of
the Twentieth Century when I was taking part-time courses at the university.
I had read a book whose title I believe was: “The human use
of human beings” and wrote an essay about it. Then as now, I was making waves
but because I was blacklisted, the waves were contained among those who were
“in the loop.” That is, the “elite” followed what I was doing – to use a modern
term – but did not mention my name in public when reacting to it. There was not
the internet at the time, or the panoply of social media we have today, and so
the people in the loop, having only a rudimentary kind of “intranet” to connect
them together, were slow to communicate with each other, especially across the
border between the US and Canada.
The result has been that when there was a reaction to something
I had written, my professors who were in the loop would tell me things on a
delayed basis. But because I would have deduced what they were about to say
from seeing the public reaction to what I had written, I would tell them about
it before they had the chance to finish telling me about it. This caused them
to think I could read their mind, thus created a reputation for me that I did
not deserve.
Getting back to the essay I wrote, the late Mike Wallace
used it for a 60 Minutes segment in which he displayed normal college-age young
men and women administering what they thought were electric shocks to people
who were actually actors pretending to suffer greatly. Those who inflicted the
pain kept increasing the intensity of the current when so ordered by a
supervisor. They showed no reluctance to doing so because they thought they
were participating in a scientific experiment, and doing something for the
greater good.
That 60 Minutes show settled the argument regarding the
relationship that may exist between the human race and the concept of good and
evil. It was concluded at the time that human beings are naturally good but
that they are weak, and can be easily persuaded to commit the most horrible of
crimes by someone who is truly evil, and bent on spreading his nature around.
As to how that someone got to be this evil in the first place, the question was
left hanging in the air by explanations that were not too convincing.
Well, a lot of time has passed since those days; I saw a
great deal and lived through a great deal. Despite all this, I may still not be
fully qualified to make a judgment as to how someone gets to be evil in the
first place. But I have the right to offer an opinion that will be out there
for others to refute, modify or accept as is.
To this end, I invite the reader to go over the Dennis
Prager article, and try to determine what it is that he is trying to do. And
when you have done this, ask yourself: If this is not evil, what is?
As far as I am concerned, it is one thing to say: “Lest we
forget” so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past. It is another to say:
Look at the horror that was committed, generate the revulsion that your
humanity will cause you to generate, then turn all that into hate, and direct
it against my opponent of the day which is the Left.