Everybody wants to be a hero. Everybody wants to be that one guy in the picture who’s not giving the nazi salute.

Most recently, we’ve seen this in the case of the literal nazi salute that was supposedly given by Elon Musk.

And that’s the appeal of modern left-liberalism. It’s an appeal to vanity. If you convince yourself that the other guy is a nazi, then you only have to be one percent better than a nazi to be the good guy. If the other guy is Hitler, then you can be Stalin.

The left only pretends to care about anti-Semitism when it wants to smear its enemies as anti-Semites. They will make great noises of outrage, and pose and posture and portray themselves as “fighting nazis”, just so long as those “nazis” can be connected to the people they don’t like anyway – conservative, largely Christian and European-descended people.

The enlightened intelligentsia, the laptop liberals and timid technocrats who form the governing class and who deem themselves our moral and intellectual superiors, fancy themselves akin to the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy; when in fact they are fighting imaginary nazis in a fantasy battle that is about as dangerous as playing Call Of Duty.

Ask these folks to stand up for Israel – or stand against the keffiyeh-clad nazis who stage rallies daily in Europe, Britain, and North America, extolling Hamas and Hezbollah and calling for the massacre of Jews and the conquest of the West – and they’ll pee their panties and bleat about “islamophobia”.

The same people who cheered the global lockdowns and the forced medical experimentation on billions of humans; who praised censorship of social media and called for mass surveillance and suppression of dissenters; who support the jackbooted black-shirts of antifa and the islamo-fascists of Hezbollah and Hamas; who look forward to the glorious day when the world will bend the knee to the dictatorship of the UN and the WEF – these are the people who want to tell me who I’m supposed to be scared of because they’re a “nazi”? Yeah, no. [353]

‘Cultures are particular ways of accomplishing the things that make life possible – the perpetuation of the species, the transmission of knowledge, and the absorption of the shocks of change and death, among other things.  Cultures differ in the relative significance they attach to time, noise, safety, cleanliness, violence, thrift, intellect, sex, and art.  These differences in turn imply differences in social choices, economic efficiency, and political stability.’ 

– Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures

There are a lot of factors that influence a person’s chances of being successful in school, in the professional world, or in life. Much of it starts with culture. A stable home and family life probably helps you more in school than (say) having a high IQ.  And for having a healthy, fulfilling life, a high IQ is irrelevant.

I was one of those kids who scored high on aptitude tests, but performed poorly in school, and it certainly wasn’t because I spent too much time playing sports.  (In retrospect, sports probably would have helped me.)

Most of what we know about the world, we learn from other people.  This includes not only declarative knowledge (information about things like mathematics, geography, practical skills, whatever) but also the knowledge of how to interact with other people.  We use the feedback of other people’s reactions to help keep us sane; we learn how to think, speak, and act by observing others.

We also learn the values and the habits of the people we associate with, and whose continued acceptance and approval we seek.  If you choose friends who have high standards and expectations of themselves and of you, it will have an effect on you.  If you hang out with people who make excuses for failure, or who regard themselves as too “special” to be troubled with conventional notions of work, discipline, and accomplishment, it will have a different effect.

Knowledge is the most valuable commodity that we exchange on a daily basis.  We rely on both technical knowledge (the “how to build a bridge” kind) and social knowledge (the “how to win friends and influence people” kind) to get through life.  You might possess great technical knowledge (as, say, an engineer), but you need social knowledge to capitalize on it (by building a rewarding career, relationships with your colleagues, and family life).  It is not an either/or choice between jocks and prom queens on the one hand, or math champs and engineers on the other.

Culture is the body of social knowledge, built up and evolved over generations, that makes it possible for people to support one another and negotiate with one another, without having to re-invent the metaphorical wheels that keep society running.