Who decides who is a member of a community? Does the community decide who is, and who is not, “one of us”? Or is that decision imposed by an outside authority, dictating who must be admitted to the community and who must be excluded from it?

If a community is truly a free association of individuals, then it is a bottom-up process: the discretion as to whom to accept rests with the community. Criteria may be exclusively hereditary (as with some Native American tribes), or through some combination of birth and/or naturalization (American citizenship, or Jewish status).

When an external power or authority seeks to commandeer the process of granting membership in a community, it is a safe bet that the ultimate goal is to destroy that community – and ultimately all free associations and communities – altogether. This is a top-down process and it is the hallmark of socialism.

Eve Barlow:

“In the trans community, socialist imposters are erasing the voices of genuine trans people who have lived their entire lives as well-adjusted, recovered and integrated trans people. These trans people reject extreme gender ideology, and rhetoric around non-binary, and live as transgendered people while simultaneously acknowledging facts about biological sex that don’t pose any threat to non-trans people. Similarly in the Jewish community, Marxist antizionist voices are drowning out the history, truth and ethnoreligious identity of regular Jewish people, and superimposing a globalization rhetoric that would wipe Israel off the map and bring an existential threat to the lives of every Jew in the diaspora.”

Membership in the human race entails membership in the community of men or of women; this is our oldest and most basic level of social organization. To affirm one’s gender as a woman or as a man is to affirm a basic commonality with half of the human race, and set oneself apart, in some way, from the other half. If a small portion of the general population (say about half a percent) experience a profound and persistent sense that they properly belong to the opposite gender – based on temperament, personality traits, and other intangibles – rather than what’s suggested by their biological sex, then this is a special case that can be addressed compassionately and constructively. That’s what good-faith transgender people and their allies in the non-trans world are seeking.

But in recent years, large numbers of people have been actively encouraged by the Left to identify as “transgender” for political reasons, ruining their lives and everybody else’s. This is further enforced by policies designed to demolish the safe spaces women have traditionally enjoyed on the playing field, in the locker room, and in the restroom. Leftist policies are actively aiding and abetting predators while punishing their victims. This is a top-down approach, and one that is calculatedly malevolent and destructive to human dignity and lives.

What the Left seeks is to eradicate gender entirely; to eradicate the communities of men and women, and ultimately to eradicate all communities, the better to soften up humanity to be crushed under the boot-heel of communism. It is another instance of the same tactic deployed against Jews and many others. To stand against it is to stand for the right of free people and communities. [431]

The left’s playbook:

1. Identify an activity that most people do not engage in, but most do not object to.
2. Do the activity in such a manner, and to such a degree, so that it becomes objectionable.
3. When people do object, scream “BIGOT!” and play the victim to garner sympathy, protections, and special privileges.
4. Repeat.

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Leftists are committed to a worldview where they see everyone else as ignorant, hate-filled racists. This flatters their own self-regard (because you can always look good by comparison to the other guy if you set the bar low enough) and rationalizes their sense of authoritarian entitlement.

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If you really care about making life better – for one person, or for many people, or for the world – what you care about is results. You care that the person is actually better off after you have helped them, and you do everything in your power to make sure that your help is really helping. If you’re not doing that, then you are just pursuing the feeling of “doing good”.

People say “but they have good intentions!” I say BS. If you care about helping people, then you care about the outcome, and if you care about the outcome, you are constantly, obsessively, checking to see whether what you’re doing is making people’s lives better. And if you’re not doing that, then I say it’s questionable how good your intentions were in the first place.

Humility means being willing to learn from others – specifically, to learn what you could be doing better.

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.

‘What occupation are you talking about? Do you mean, end Israel and give Hamas what they want? Give Hamas weaponry, territory, soldiers, army, so they can mess more with the global security? … How can’t you see the things in common between the West and Israel? And how can’t you see the violence and the brutality of Hamas movement? Or it’s your hatred. You have nothing to do with Palestine, you’re just projecting hatred and inflicting emotional pain on the Jewish people, as they mourn a modern-day holocaust?! Do you think this is how you help Palestine? There is no such thing as Palestine. … You have no idea what you’re talking about.’

We want to help others, and it’s good that we do. But how to help? Sometimes the answer is simple: if a person is starving, you give them food; if they’re drowning, you throw them a life preserver; if they’re in a burning building, you bring them out. I am not claiming that these things are easy – clearly, it takes great courage to rush into a burning building – but there is nothing difficult about knowing what the person needs. You know immediately what’s the right thing to do – you just have to do it.

In the real world, knowing how to help is often more difficult and complicated. What is the right kind of help, and what is the wrong kind? How much help is enough, and how much is too much? Perhaps you see an elderly or disabled person carrying a bag of groceries, and you want to help. But maybe they are suspicious of your intentions; or maybe the person is very proud, or has worked hard to overcome a disability, and prefers to be independent. How do you know? You might have to pay close attention to the person’s reaction as you offer to help – their words, their tone, their facial expressions, their body language – to be sure that your help is really wanted.

For the government bureaucrat, every problem is a problem for the government to solve, by “some sort of collective action”: changes to public transit, changes to building codes, and hey, why not a “basic income” while we’re at it?

Every one of these proposed courses of action (“some sort of collective action”) implies some sort of public policy change – to transit, to building codes, or to the economy itself. Each one of those changes entails something that will impose costs on someone else (transit riders, shopkeepers, the working population), and (not coincidentally) accrues more power to the party imposing the changes.

Conversely, what is lost in the “collective action” approach is the knowledge of the particulars – the granular, mundane, local knowledge of THIS individual in THIS situation in THIS place and time – that is essential to assessing the person’s specific needs.

So, the first step is to determine whether the person actually needs help – that is, to ask. And how you ask makes a difference: there is a difference between “May I help you with that?” and “Do you need help?”. “May I help you?” communicates that the speaker would be honored, would consider it a privilege, to be allowed to help; while “do you need help?” puts the listener on the defensive and forces them to state a need.