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David McElroy

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Radical truths first seem untenable — until they finally seem obvious

By David McElroy · August 16, 2011

I have a certain old friend who’s very bright and thoughtful. He’s a respected attorney with a responsible government legal job. I have a lot of respect for his intelligence and his intellectual honesty, but our ideas about politics and society are strongly opposed.

When I wrote Sunday about the idea that taxation is theft, he strongly disagreed, arguing that the idea was impractical and “naively idealistic.” He referred to what I said as an “untennable radical position.” I don’t want to re-argue that debate here. Instead, I want to look at other radical positions that seemed pretty untenable when they were first proposed.

Hundreds of years ago, it was taken for granted that kings had special rights that ordinary people didn’t have. He was seen as having his power from God and any opposition to the king was opposition to God. It was called the “divine right of kings.” The king had rights that made him little short of being a god in his kingdom. No one was allowed to judge or oppose the king except for God Himself.

It was a radical idea that “all men are created equal.” It caused anger, persecution and civil wars. Very few people believed it at first — just the radicals. In time, though, the idea became more and more obvious. Insofar as their civil rights, there was no justification in the law distinguishing between two different people. Even though the application of the idea today is uneven and imperfect, it’s at least an ideal that almost everyone subscribes to.

That untenable radical idea became accepted as truth.

When Martin Luther realized that the Roman Catholic Church was doing things at the time that conflicted with scripture, he had to know that his understanding of truth was radical. This led him to a number of  radical ideas, including that the Bible should be available for people to study for themselves. He nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg. It was a radical move.

As far as the established church was concerned, his position was untenable. The fight over his idea led to schism and even completely unjustified war. Finally, though, even the Catholic Church accepted that Luther had been right on some points. The scriptures were for the people to read for themselves. Even if there’s disagreement about who gets to interpret scripture, the Catholic Church that tried to destroy Luther eventually accepted the truth of his position — and many of his ideas are accepted even more widely in other Christian churches.

Luther’s untenable radical idea that the people should have scripture and that salvation is through faith alone is accepted as truth by most Christians today.

When abolitionists argued that slavery was immoral, right-thinking people were appalled that some people were attacking a bastion of civilization. When suffragettes demanded that women be given equal legal right as men, most people initially hated and feared the idea — both men and women. When civil rights protesters in the United States started arguing in the middle part of the 20th century that it was immoral for governments to treat white people as superior to black and brown people, it was the source of almost endless conflict, hatred and anger.

The radical ideas won. Slavery was understood to be immoral. It was understood that women should have equal legal rights as men, even if some people disagree about what that should look like. And the radical notion that a black woman should be able to sit anywhere on a public bus came to be understood as obvious.

In each of these cases, the untenable radical idea was finally accepted as truth.

Today, I’m told by my friend that people having control over their own possessions is an “untenable radical position.” I believe it’s only a matter of time before my assertion joins the ranks of these other truths as things that once seemed radical, but which were eventually accepted as obvious.

I disagree with the politics George Orwell professed, but he was an insightful observer of the world. He pointed out how difficult it is to see the truth when he wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle.”

When I was younger, I didn’t understand that taxation was theft. The idea would never have occurred to me. It was just a part of normal life to me. Even I was finally faced with the idea because I read it somewhere, I rejected it. Even after I accepted that government should be strictly limited (in a libertarian way), I still saw taxation as a necessary evil. It took me a long time to realize that it was just evil, not necessary.

The fact that other radical ideas have come to be accepted as truth isn’t proof that this idea faces the same future. Plenty of other radical ideas have ended up dismissed as the ravings of crazy people and been consigned to trash cans where they belonged. But it’s not a reasonable objection to an idea that it’s allegedly untenable or demonstrably radical. Truth has a long history of first appearing as impossible and radical.

It’s not easy to oppose the status quo. People are rarely happy to hear that you’ve come to change the world as they know it. But in time, more and more of them accept the ideas that are worth accepting, confounding and angering those who favor the status quo.

With all due respect to my friend — in the literal sense of the phrase — I’m willing to argue the morality of freedom. Over time, I suspect everyone will accept this untenable radical idea as truth, even if it seems impractical to those who oppose it today.

Note: I have at least one more point to make about this subject before we leave it for awhile, so be watching for an article about why freedom can work in the practical sense to provide the kind of society we all want — without taxation or other coercion.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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