Occam's Razor

Dogma in the broad sense is any belief held with unquestionable certainty.

Wikipedia

America is being strangled by dogmatism. Happy yet?

We’re awash with dogmatism and thanks largely to social media and more specifically Facebook, most of us are living in a dogmatic virtual reality. So dogmatism was driven in part by the dogma of capitalism: that the capitalism is always good and the private sector’s innovations like social media should go unquestioned.

But when you look at what’s wrong here in America and in most of the world, the root issue is dogma. It’s killing us. It’s not just dogmatic capitalism, it’s the dogma in most religions and most of our political parties. Right now dogma is consuming the Republican Party. That’s the thing about dogma. If you accept a dogma, by definition you don’t have to search for the answers: they are already there. It’s right and just for you to “make it so” regardless of the cost.

Dogma shuts the mind behind a steel door. And the inside room is designed to be so super comfy you never have to leave. If you need entertainment, there is the large screen TV that watches you all day parroting the message of 1984. Big Brother knows best. You can delegate all thinking to him. Your role is to sing his praises and when needed fight to the death to make sure we are always at war with Eastasia.

What really upsets the dogmatic is when people question their dogma. The response is to not allow it to be questioned. America has never been a racist country so simply prohibit its teaching in principally southern states. Abortion is the taking of life so simply don’t allow it, even though a zygote is not even technically alive and can’t even become an embryo without a uterus attached. The world is a messy place, but we can at least pretend it’s not a messy place by simply refusing to accept reality. With enough dogma, reality is irrelevant. You make your dogma that which everyone must do and this dogma becomes reality.

Pluralism is the idea that we are a bunch of people with different perspectives so we have to work together cooperatively as best we can. Dogmatism is fundamentally opposed to pluralism. That we know how dogmatic regimes all ends up though does not seem to be enough to stop these dogmatists from requiring everyone to be dogmatic just like us. When dogmatism directs a state, it becomes tyranny. So not surprisingly, the dogmatic are rushing to create tyranny. Only in tyranny where they get their way can they find peace.

It’s just that no tyranny lasts forever. Hitler’s didn’t last much more than ten years and killed tens of millions of us. Ditto with Stalin’s tyrannical reign, and arguably he killed a lot more than Hitler. But the champ of them all was probably Mao Zedong. Somewhere between 15 and 55 million people died in China as a result of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. As so it has gone time after time for millennia. So we can predict with almost absolute certainty that if the dogmatists in the Republican Party get their way, it will happen here too.

The irony of course is the United States was founded specifically as a response to repeated lessons learned in Europe and elsewhere. Our founding fathers learned firsthand why it’s a really bad idea to merge church and state, or to have a king. We set up a republican form of government specifically to keep from happening exactly what the Republican Party now seems eager to create. Through pluralism we would not find peace exactly, but we would create a government that could peacefully work through differences between various factions. It obviously went awry during the Civil War, but the Union eventually prevailed. Now Republicans want to create a new civil war, and seem to be chomping at the bit to get it started.

So far at least they are trying to do it through cooption, rather than overt violence. If you can seize the powers of government through technically legal but dubious means, you can make it so. It’s been a project Republicans have been working at for decades that is now coming to fruition. They’ve packed our courts with conservatives. Through gerrymandering and voter suppression, they are giving themselves grossly disproportionate minority control of government. Now they are working hard to ensure they never have to relinquish power. They are giving state legislatures the power to overrule to voters choice and putting in partisan election officials to ensure that the ballots are stuffed so they can’t possibly lose. Once they control all three branches of government, with no constraints on their power, they simply take charge forever. Law that says otherwise is only meaningful if someone will actually enforce it.

Realizing all of this, I suggested that maybe we don’t want to save the republic. These states are run by dogmatists and they won’t see reason. It would be better to let them go and let the rest of us states that do believe in pluralism retain a functioning government that actually represents the will of the people. It’s unclear though whether these rebel states would be satisfied. Their goal seems to be about power and control, and they appear all too willing to institute fascism in blue states simply to “own the libs”. Somehow, fascism will Make America Great Again.

Few of these red states, in an honest election, would actually vote to secede. Alabama and Mississippi might but not even Texas would in an honest election. Leaders in these states seem to sense this which is why they want to preclude its possibility by wresting control from a democratic process. God help us.