The Revenge of Affirmative Action

Suppose I tell you that you can achieve being a doctor or a lawyer or even a President. Suppose you are a minority. We know you have had a rough time being black, Latino or a woman. How would you like a break? Even though you cannot pass our normal standards for a student at this university, we are going to let you in. We think you, if you study, will do OK and be able to get started. Besides, we will feel better. Maybe you will become a doctor or a lawyer or even a President.

By one standard, the social one, so the argument goes, this sounds good. “It’s a way for our society, for us as a whole, a group, to make up for the past. No matter if none of ‘us’ had slaves or was ever ‘mean’ to a woman or a Latino. It’s just right that we do this. It’s social justice.”

(I’m not going to go into the metaphysical, epistemological and moral fallacies of collectivism in this article. Suffice it to say that people come in the form of individuals, not groups. To claim anything true about human beings as a group in the realms open to their choices is false. It is his conceptual faculty and volition that distinguish him as human being.)

By another standard, the professional one, this is not good. If a person takes the bait of the bounties of affirmative action, he does so knowing that he is not up to par measured by the standards of that profession or the university training him for that profession. There is nothing hidden about this. He may be dazzled by the surface, but he ingests a plug of poison hidden deep beneath the surface if he accepts it.

It is possible that such a person could take the bait in one of three ways. He could think this an authentic opportunity to be what he always wanted to be and measure himself by the standards of the profession of his choice. He would have to be very clear to do this. He would have to work diligently to honestly succeed – by his own ability - to measure up to those standards. He would want to be measured by those standards.

Or, he could be cynical and play it for all it is worth, exploiting the “fruits” of these relaxed standards all the way to the top.

Or, he might not be too smart and try to float.

Six or eight months ago I read an article about individuals, members of a minority, who wanted to be doctors, lawyers and other professionals and failed. They took out large loans for their education. But they accepted the seductive fruit of Affirmative Action. They found themselves behind the bulk of the students, generally hung out with the people in the same situation, and never measured up to the qualifications for their profession. They failed the bar exam or the exams to get into med school. They thought they were OK by what they were told in school, but where the rubber met the road, they failed.

They didn’t like being behind the curve, dropped out and found something else to do. Many of them over a $100,000 in debt couldn’t pay back the loans and ended up caring less because they felt trapped and cheated. They either went bankrupt or tried to get out of their obligation. They found themselves cynical, broke as well as broken, and damn angry.

But there were others who went on with their work where the standards for brain surgery or the rigors of preparing a legal case did not apply. They ended up in the humanities. The humanities have no intellectually rigorous course of preparation. Although they may have had to meet the requirements of their professors, often those were not too tough. Every specialized course of study in those subjects is not objective and thus intellectually bankrupt - from philosophy to sociology to psychology to political “science”, and many others. (Note: Objectivism is the only philosophy I’ve found that is rigorous. And I’m not the only one who has responded to it. People are responding to it in droves, driven by the increasingly apparent consequences of our unworkable society and lack of viable explanations in the humanities.)

So long as any member of a minority accepts the premise of affirmative action, he accepts one thing: I am inferior. He has to embrace being the victim and this seals his fate. He is done; doomed.

Burnishing the stories and wounds of victimhood, he never can achieve his independent, authentic self nor the fruits of such a crucial achievement. Either he is the master of his own fate or the victim of his circumstances. And those states of mind are mutually exclusive. Like the drawing of the vase which transforms into two faces, the mind cannot see nor be present to both at once. It’s one or the other. Choose.

Unless he is able to throw aside that premise and refuse to advance except by his own work and achievement, he is done. And necessarily by accepting the premise of inferiority and victimhood, he is going to end up angry and want revenge. Why wouldn’t he? Anyone who had accepted such a premise would. It can be no other way. He will end up blaming the successful, the capable, those who achieve and if he is to maintain his worldview, he must bring them down.

Culturally, we are reaping the consequences this thinking now - in spades - via the Presidency of Barack Obama. Now everyone is going to get what it is to be a victim as the President seeks to carry out his beliefs to their bitter end. (Notice how he holds the victim up as the reason for all of his actions.) In the populous, the anger is growing. Committed to this course, this will not end well.

Barack Obama knows he has a gift. He’s said so and revels in it. And he thinks he is going to negate the plug of poison he swallowed years ago. How? By forcing everyone to swallow that poison plug so that his inexcusable sin which negated his worth to himself becomes invisible - to him.

Barack knows well how to speak to invoke the moral basis that keeps this idea in place. He is not a force for the lessening of racism nor any form of victimhood. (Note his choice of Sotomeyer, a confirmed “ethnicist” who wants to judge cases, not by the consequences of a man’s actions, but by his irrelevant circumstances.) He is a force for its increase. Instead of advocating standards and ideals which are consistent with man’s necessity to make judgments about reality and produce values, he’s wholesale turning the world upside down.

Because of the wreckage caused by this idea, which is widely accepted in the culture, he is attempting to redistribute wealth based on it. He is attempting to take America down to size so that it be no better, no stronger, no more capable than the least capable countries on the planet. Just as the standards declined and became increasingly worthless at the universities that instituted Affirmative Action, now those low standards are going to be instituted everywhere – BY FORCE.

If you cannot afford a house, Obama will see to it that you get one. If you cannot pay your debts, Obama will see to it that you can get help. If you cannot survive as a business, Obama will keep you afloat. If you cannot decide what to do in your business, call him. Wherever reality intrudes, he will intervene and protect you from the consequences. This is Obama’s professed mission.

His foreign policy and his economic policies here at home are a testament to this idea. If the idea of Affirmative Action is to really work, then the standards must be relaxed. Obama’s method? FORCE them to relax!

This is the method that led to the Fannie and Freddie fiasco. This is the method that sourced the failure of our biggest banks. This is the method that set up GM and Chrysler for ruination. This is the method that has made health care and consequently, health insurance expensive. This is the method that has made our schools a cesspool of non-learning. The list is already long and is growing at a terrifying pace. And it the method, FORCE, that is growing at a terrifying pace.

Except for the force instituted by the government, none of the current financial mess would nor could have happened. Human life, left alone, sorts out the bad ideas and decisions as it must to survive. It’s correct them or die.

The free market never fails. It is always correcting its mistakes. But, soon this will be impossible - by rational, above-board civil means, that is.

Some of us have said that if we get universal healthcare, we will probably go to the post office for brain surgery. That is a laughable exaggeration, but in essence it is true. That is the end of the road for erasing standards.

Barack Obama is a smart man – smart in one sense. He knows how to use rhetoric to manipulate the system to his ends. This is why he has no problem calling businessman to the White House and telling them it is his gift, his capability as a manipulator that protects them from the pitchforks. (Of course they only have to thank him for his powers and succumb to his dictates.) This is why he has no problem bankrolling permanent community organizers and rabble rousers, the pitchforks, which he can call out whenever he wants to bring pressure against his intransigent enemies. This is why he has no problem taking wealth from Chrysler investors and simply giving it to his supporters, the unions.

And it is also why he can combine contradictions in one sentence as if they make sense.

He is so delusional about his powers, that he thinks he can alter the absolute of reality around the globe. He is wrong. But he believes it.

Questioning, thinking people don’t buy it. Peace cannot be obtained by a man who INITIATES force to cause it and Obama has that record here at home. The people who enjoy his rhetoric and don’t ask questions, hope. True to this level of superficiality, they think it is so nice that Michelle planted a garden..

Obama forgets one thing. He is invested 100% in his particular form of flight. Like Icarus who fashioned wings of wax, Obama soars high in the sky. In the thrill of his flight, Icarus forgot his wings were made of wax. Flying too close to the sun, they melted. “Holy damn! REALITY?” He plummeted to his death.

When a man says "I've always been a strong believer in the power of the free market." after he had commandeered AIG, GM, Chrysler, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rending them un-free to act in the market, anyone who is thinking says “What? How can you say that?” Obama isn’t bothered by this. Affirmative Action showed him the way.

When he decided he was going to become a politician he wanted power. He schooled himself in what it was to have power. Then he decided to run for President. He wanted to really have power, the ultimate power. Now he could FORCE his ideas on society. And by his actions we see his deepest motive - unadulterated hatred of the best mankind has to offer: Creativity, production, authentic values, and a life to live for - and all in the name of a pseudo-virtue, "You shall give to the poor at all costs, including the destruction of the engine of life and wealth."