The leftist mind as titanium sea.

Takuan Seiyo manages to capture the essence of the West's turbocharged rush to obliterate itself:

The good intentions of the squishy West stem from biblical morality so mainstream that a sermon in a random Western church or synagogue sounds like induction into the Body Snatcher creed. There is the shame and sorrow for Nazism and Fascism, Colonialism and Slavery, centuries of poisonous anti-Semitism, copious internecine bloodshed in the name of the loving Jesus or xenophobic nationalism, exploitation of peasants, workers and women.

Contrition and restoration one can understand. But suicide?

After all, any calamity, any atrocity committed in the history of Western civilization was exceeded in non-Western civilizations – and they don’t have the West’s redeeming features on the other side of the ledger either. Both Stalin and Mao murdered more people than Hitler did. The Khmer Rouge murdered 26% of Cambodia’s population in four years. In the 1200 years of Arab slave trading, millions more Africans were enslaved by Arabs and treated with far greater cruelty than were ever by white men. As Thomas Sowell, a descendant of slaves himself, has pointed out, more Europeans were enslaved and taken to North Africa by Barbary Coast pirates alone than there were African slaves taken to America.

I’m reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle in which scientists developed a substance that would instantly solidify water. The tiniest quantity of this chemical would suffice to turn rivers, lakes, or entire oceans into something like carbon steel.

So with the liberal mind. Let history record that one priest in the last 2,000 years was caught with his hand up a dress and this fact, once introduced into the leftist mind, instantly produces the sure knowledge that the whole rotten, smug, Christian, patriarchal lie that is the West stands revealed for all time.

One flaw discovered or alleged and the leftist’s mind solidifies instantly. Zero perspective. Thereafter he’s forever impervious to any good thing about his own society or any competing evidence of bad things about some other society. Insufficient handicapped parking? Diminishing population of slime toads? Instant meltdown! 100,000,000 deaths caused by communist swine in the last century? 120,000,000 slaughtered in the Muslim takeover of the Indian subcontinent? Ho bleeping hum.

Chromium rivers and titanium seas as far as the eye can see.

"From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 12: Swallowed by Leviathan." By Takuan Seiyo, Brussels Journal, 6/7/09 (footnote omitted).