Fireside Chat Clip

 Here are my notes and comments on a 12/23/2020 Fireside chat  video excerpt by Dennis Prager, about 3 minutes long. He writes this short note: "It is good to learn this deeply important lesson: a painless life does not exist.A utopia is not possible. The sooner that you can accept that pain is part of life, the happier you will be."

Before I share my notes on his video, I wish to bring it to the reader's attention that Jordan Peterson and Buddhist thought remind us that life is suffering, and other conservative intellectuals like Dennis and Stephen Hicks are picking up on Jordan's gloomy or realistic emphasis on life being painful. I see how he influences these other great conservative thinkers, and I sense a convergence, a meeting of the minds, a uniting of disconnected, competing or parallel strands of conservative thought that will reintroduce the American Way of Life and the culture and ethos of Western Civilization as the valuational bedrock for building a high civilization later in this 21st century. My Mavellonialism should serve as  philosophical, theological and ideological canopy under which all these converging strains of conservative thought can come together, tried, tested and refined.

Let me return to Dennis's video: He hints that there is a silver lining from the coronavirus pandemic (I had independently told this to my blue collar peers at work a month ago, that one positive result of the pandemic will be to darken the view of over-sheltered, pampered young people that big problems out there exist, and they invade the lives of all, and it hurts. Learning to deal with the hurt will make the young people more mature, grow up fast, and strong enough to deal with tough times--like Nixon that the tough get going when the going gets tough.): The pandemic is a blessing for the young in that they are learning early on that life is difficult, and that orientation and personal conclusion about the world will allow them to be happier as adults. 

Dennis offers that in the developed world life in unnaturally easy--the young are wealthy--by historical standards--healthy, well-fed, well-housed and not die young. The generation is the 30s and during World War II did not expect life to be painless. They suffered but were much happier as a group than the spoiled, coddled, privileged students on campus today, so resentful, ungrateful, angry and jaded.

These snowflakes are so bored and unhappy, without purpose and meaning--channeling Peterson--that they invent problems that do not exist. Women and blacks claim to be oppressed here by the tyrannical white patriarchy and neither are. 

Dennis: You have it great.You are not oppressed, though you may oppress yourself (Your failure is your fault, I offer.). You may have family problems, psychological issues or poor values, or selected poor choices. You accuse the system of holding you back but it is not. When you expect a painless life you will be in pain.

Dennis criticizes the Left for preaching utopia and the future prospect of a future life, that will never come about.

I add that the horrors that inflicted humanity in the 20th century of the 19th and 20th were brought about by intellectuals that usurped totalitarian powers over whole populations and attempted to bring about their idealistic utopia through murder, terror, genocide and world wars.

The perfect is absolute, fanatical and immoderate, and is the enemy of the good, the relatively good, the moderate and temperate. The horrible historical paradox seems to be that to reach by violent means to bring about a painless life for all humans is to create hell on earth, increasing suffering manifold. Yet, these true believers are unshakeable in their confidence that they are on the right track.