Pure Dumb Luck

Ringo isn't even the best drummer in The Beatles.

JOHN LENNON

When I think of someone who made it on pure dumb luck, Ringo Starr springs to mind. I like Ringo, and I think most people in the world like Ringo. He is the most likable Beatle. But his fame and fortune are due primarily to the Beatles firing Pete Best and hiring Ringo to replace him. Had that event not happened, the world would never have known Richard Starkey. He would have played in a few more bands and probably returned to his working class roots. Even as a Beatle, Ringo never felt secure in his job.

Ringo is humble which is why he is so likable. He played his role in the band and never let his ego create friction. The band already had three egos to contend with and a fourth would have blown it apart. Ringo Starr caught one of the luckiest breaks in musical history. His talents as a drummer are debatable which explains John Lennon's snarky quote about him. Paul McCartney was probably the best drummer and best musician in the band, but you can only play one instrument at a time. As for singing, Ringo is good as a singer and did some memorable songs with the Beatles.

The antithesis to the pure dumb luck of Ringo Starr was the pure bad luck of Pete Best. There is debate about Pete Best's drumming abilities, but he was the most solid of the Beatles eschewing drugs and grinding it out with the band for over two years. But seeing a picture of Best with the Beatles tells the real story. Pete Best was the best looking guy in the group. The girls swooned over him. But when you see a picture of Ringo with the band, you can see why he got the job after they fired Pete Best. Ringo wasn't so good looking.

My personal opinion is that Pete Best got the heave-ho for being pleasant to the female eye while Ringo got the job for being ugly. Normally, being good looking would be a stroke of good fortune but not for Pete Best. Best would return to his life of relative obscurity. People only know him today as the guy who got sacked by the Beatles.

The fact is that the rest of the Beatles owed much of their success to the same dumb luck that plucked Ringo Starr from obscurity and put Pete Best back into obscurity. What makes it harder to make that case is the undeniable talent of the band members as singers and songwriters. We feel that McCartney and Lennon are somehow deserving of the fame and fortune that came to them. The problem with that argument is the vast abundance of talent that exists in obscurity. If you doubt this, peruse the YouTube channel of this fellow. Thanks to the internet, we can witness people playing in their bedrooms or on the street in performances that are simply mind blowing. Why aren't these people megastars bringing down millions of dollars? Who can doubt that this guy playing his PVC pipe techno solo has more talent than Ringo Starr? Instead, the millions go to subpar talents producing hip hop albums.

The only real difference between Ringo and the other Beatles was that humility. Ringo knew he made it on dumb luck. The real agonizing thing is to decide which is better--talent or dumb luck? Is it better to be the best at what you do? Or, is it better merely to be lucky? The simple and undeniable fact is that dumb luck beats talent every time. That is a sobering reflection.

Moving to the world of art, we have the most potent example of the delinking of fame and talent in the artwork of Jackson Pollock. Pollock became a rockstar in the artworld for producing works that could be painted by any small child let loose with a bucket of paint. This period of drip painting as masterpiece shows that the artworld is akin to the emperor's new clothes. Here is a critical analysis of Pollock's work:

Pollock’s finest paintings… reveal that his all-over line does not give rise to positive or negative areas: we are not made to feel that one part of the canvas demands to be read as figure, whether abstract or representational, against another part of the canvas read as ground. There is not inside or outside to Pollock’s line or the space through which it moves…. Pollock has managed to free line not only from its function of representing objects in the world, but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or representational, on the surface of the canvas. (Hans Namuth)

Pollock had zero talent who lucked into a period of utter stupidity on the part of the artworld. In the world of pure dumb luck, Pollock's luck was the dumbest of all time. Pollock remains controversial to this day, and he suffered from a lingering doubt that he was just a phony. Let me end the debate now. Jackson Pollock was a complete phony. He deserved none of the fame and acclaim he garnered in life. I believe this drove him to drink harder and to kill himself in a drunken car crash.

It is not enough to have fame, fortune, honor, and glory. One must also believe that one is deserving of these things. That deserving part is what creates bitterness in the talented but obscure and self-loathing in the famous but untalented. This mismatch between what people receive and what they deserve leads to a profound sense of injustice in the world. Either God is unjust, or the world is governed by the same chaos you find in a Jackson Pollock painting.

The first myth we can dispense with is the idea that life really is just pure dumb luck. There is no such thing as pure dumb luck. What we call luck is really the collection of factors beyond our control or influence. The reality is that all things that happen are governed by the providence of Almighty God. This would include Ringo Starr and Jackson Pollock. Nothing happens to us or anyone else that isn't foreordained and determined by God. As Matthew 10:29 puts it, "Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father." If even the most insignificant things happen as a consequence of providence, you should believe that the fortunes of all people, nations, and the like are also foreordained and determined by Almighty God. Life is not the product of chaos.

The second myth we can dispense with is the idea that we are deserving of anything. The only thing any human being deserves from the hand of Almighty God is eternal damnation. The fact that any of us escapes this fate is completely as a consequence of God's mercy.

When we forget these two facts of life, pride comes into the picture. This pride is what produces arrogance in the fortunate and bitterness in the unfortunate. We believe we deserve good things from God. So, we look with envy on those who receive better things than us, and we look with disdain on those who have received worse things.

The antidote to these two poisonous myths is humility. We must acknowledge our sinfulness and utter dependence upon Almighty God. We must never forget these facts. Jesus Christ could have come as anyone in this world. He could have chosen to be the emperor or even the king of Israel when that would have been a glorious thing. But Jesus came as a humble carpenter and a suffering servant. He alone is worthy of all the honor and glory we think we deserve in our pride. Yet, Christ emptied Himself and humbled Himself even to the point of humiliation and death on a cross. It was not bad luck that put Christ on the cross. It was Providence. And Jesus accepted the Father's will for Him without bitterness or complaint.

For us, our cross is to accept where God has placed us and what God has planned for us. It matters not whether we have good fortune or bad fortune in our lives. What matters is that we accept both with humility and the knowledge that it all comes from God's hand. The proper response to these things is gratitude. God knows best, and the light of eternity will reveal this even if we see it only through the darkened looking glass of the present time. Life is not chaos, and God is not unjust. Trust in God.

Rise and Fall

An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.

CHARLES DARWIN

There are two competing views of humanity in the world today. The view you subscribe to has a large impact on your lifestyle, your values, your politics, your morality, and many other things. It is important that when picking which view to hold that you get it right because of the large effects such a viewpoint will have on you and on the world. These views center on two questions. Did humanity rise from humble origins to greatness? Or, did humanity fall from greatness?

The belief that humanity rises is the one held and promoted by those who subscribe to the worldview known as secular progressivism. These are your atheists, materialists, and left wing liberals who believe that the human race evolved by accident from lower organisms. According to these people, humanity was bestial but has become more civilized as a process of evolution. Now, humanity has the chance to evolve and progress further as it ascends to utopia. Many are the cries to not "turn back the clock" and "lean forward." Humans are getting better and better.

The Christian religion opposes progressivism and declares that humanity is fallen. Humanity is not getting better and better except to the extent that the Christian religion is allowed to flourish. Human beings began at a high place and have descended to a lower place. Instead of animals becoming men, men are becoming animals.

The antagonism between these two views is fierce. For the progressive, man's "elevation" has occurred accidentally through a process of deliberation. Now that we have attained our present enlightenment, we should no longer leave the progress of humanity up to mere chance. Progress should be directed collectively and from a centralized authority with great levels of control over families and individuals. Anything that thwarts progress such as Christianity needs to be eliminated.

In the progressive's mind, religions like Christianity represent useful stages in the evolutionary mindset of man. These religions helped to advance humanity but now outlive their usefulness being supplanted today with philosophy and science. The Church of Reason is the new temple in which all human beings will worship. All other religions are outdated superstitious ignorance.

Who is right? The argument would seem to hinge upon the idea of evolution. If human beings did evolve from primates, it would seem to indicate that our superior reason and intellect over the inferior reason and intellect of animals means that we are evolving or progressing to something higher since we started somewhere lower than where we are now. This is what I call the "clever monkey" view. Humans are merely clever monkeys, and our survival and flourishing depends upon us becoming more clever. This cleverness is the bedrock of the progressive ideology.

Religion's role in this progress was as a handmaiden to philosophy. Religion promoted culture, literature, art, and thinking. These are good things except that religion also retarded reason and science. This weird relationship is how things like pagan civilizations could build monumental structures, map the stars and their movement, and also sacrifice their infants to cruel gods.

The Christian viewpoint is decidedly different. Humanity was created in a harmonious relationship with God. God allowed humanity to eat of all the trees of the Garden of Eden except the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They were forbidden to eat of this tree. Essentially, all the trees of the garden are all the many fields of human endeavor. Humans excel at many of these things. One of these things is science.

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is essentially the tree of religion. By eating of this tree, our first parents decided that they would be the captains of their souls instead of God. The result of that decision is a panopoly of civilizations that were adept at technology and architecture and many arts including warfare. They also sacrificed their infants to cruel gods we know today as the demons. The Fall was a trick where humans were not turned into gods but where Satan and his horde were turned into gods. Humanity has suffered ever since.

It is no accident that the most advanced civilizations in human history have also been the most cruel. Progressives will claim that it was the superstitions of these civilizations that fostered this cruelty, and they would be correct. Pagan religions are evil. They make you kill your own children. It is not unlike the carnage of abortion.

Millions face death in the name of progress. The Aztecs ripped hearts from the chests of their living victims. Yet, are we no different in declaring "brain death" before we start carving up people to harvest their organs and tissues? Is it the act or the reasons for the act that are the deciding factors in these atrocities? Would the Aztecs be seen in a better light if they had developed anesthesia first and used it on their victims? Is butchery of human beings OK as long as the living have no sensation of the pain?

The progressives are at pains to explain an uncomfortable fact of their program. Wherever progressive enlightenment is found, a lot of people end up dead. In France, the revolution lead to a reign of terror with priests and nuns being the primary victims of the purge that ended up taking down aristocrats, a king, and the revolutionaries themselves. This same thing would repeat itself in other revolutions whether it was the Russian revolution, the Maoist revolution, Pol Pot, or today's revolutions for "democracy." The glaring fact is that there is little progress in progressivism. The only difference between ancient paganism and modern progressivism is that atheists have a higher body count.

G.K. Chesterton stated that original sin was the one Christian doctrine that could be proven empirically, yet it is the one doctrine that scientifically minded progressives are at labors to deny. The simple reality is that humanity is evil. It has always been evil since the Fall. The tendency of man is not to become like the angels but to become like the demons that tricked them in the first place.

Christianity offers the antidote to this fallen condition. Yet, progressives are at pains to deny the uniqueness of Christianity. To them, Christianity evolved from paganism. The Christian religion supplanted the more primitive religions. Now, progressivism is the religion that must supplant Christianity. Yet, where are these saints of progress? What great moral person has science ever produced?

One does not have to believe in Christianity to believe in the fall of man. If man is merely a clever monkey, then he has not evolved from his base origin and will never evolve from it. His cleverness will increase, but his savagery will remain intact. Inevitably, the human race will annihilate itself in nuclear holocaust. The simple fact is that natural history shows that extinction is the end of virtually all species, and there is nothing to indicate that humanity will not share the same fate as the dinosaurs. The key difference between humans and dinosaurs is that humans will be the authors of their own destruction.

Christians are accused of creating a myth out of the past. By the same token, progressives make a myth out of the future. In their myth, the future is utopian and perfected. Humanity will achieve a greatness that will extinguish its flaws. The extraterrestrial is the icon of that perfected humanity.

The extraterrestrial represents an advanced sibling to humanity. If advanced civilizations exist beyond our own world, then this gives us hope that our own race can extend itself into space. Aliens have replaced pagan deities as the new gods of a new mythology. It is no coincidence that alien representations look so human. There is no scientific reason to think that aliens will look so much like us except with bigger brains and the absence of body hair. And what is the deal with those big black eyes? But it is no mystery. The lack of hair removes the animal from the being. The big brain is the advanced reason. The big black eyes are the lack of a soul and empathy. Basically, advancement means losing your soul to become more like a robot than a human being.

All of this is madness and nonsense. Humans are not advancing except in the cleverness department. Where civilization advances in all its facets, you find Christianity. Christianity is hope. The problem with people is not that they are stupid. The problem is that people are evil. They lack the sanctifying grace needed to become better. Yet, this sanctifying grace is the gift that Jesus Christ gives to all who believe in Him. Through Christ, the fallen man can be restored and put on his proper path.

The fact that the world hates Christianity testifies to these truths. People only become better when they submit to the lordship of Jesus Christ. The proper and fitting end of a man is to become a saint. The world has never had a saint before Jesus Christ. It can never have a saint apart from Jesus Christ. Jesus conquered the Fall. Eventually, we will be allowed to eat from the Tree of Life which is immortality in eternity. Those who follow Christ aim for a new destination for humanity. That destination is the elevation of humanity from evil to good. And if you lack faith on this, I would suggest that you follow the evidence. Progressives can merely lie and try to tell you that black is white, wrong is right, and the end that does not exist will justify the meanness of the means in the interim. What good can come from such evil?

The Day Job

The talentless job you're currently working for just to make money, while in the process of following the career path you are working on and that you actually really want.

URBAN DICTIONARY, day job definition

I have a day job. I use this term because this job is not a career. It is simply what I do to pay the bills. It does not command my passion. It does not contribute to any concepts of self-actualization. It merely feeds me, houses me, clothes me, and puts gas in my vehicle. I hate my day job but not because of the actual work I do. I actually like working, and I engage in labor that can be greater drudgery than the work that earns my paycheck. My hatred for the day job is because of the mismanagers who make each day of my working life a complete hell with their endless stupidity. It is never the work itself but the frustration of that work by people who do no work at all.

The opposite of the day job is the dream job. This is the job you wished you had getting paid to do what you love. You already do what you love, but it costs money instead of generating money. The dream is that this job would actually pay you enough to live on. Naturally, these dream jobs involve professional athletics, music, acting, and the arts. For some weird reason, dream jobs never pertain to the janitorial arts or the digging of ditches.

Dream jobs just don't pay the bills. For every millionaire Mick Jagger, there is one hundred or more people who sing better or who are better looking fronting unknown bands in bars around the world. The simple fact is that a guy like Jagger represents not someone with talent who achieved through hard work so much as a lottery winner who happened to pick the right numbers on his ticket.

My dream job would be working as a full time writer. The problem is that precious few writers can earn enough to pay the bills and this includes those with books on the bestseller lists. In fact, writers who don't write fiction have very little chance of being full time writers because their work can't be turned into movies which pay better than books. Then there are those writers who write full time by being journalists during the day and novelists at night and on weekends. This arrangement is probably worse than being a janitor who writes novels because the journalist must use his brain for the entire day while the janitor's thoughts are still his own.

Many of my writer heroes had day jobs. In fact, I think those day jobs provided inspiration and structure to their days. It definitely makes for a busy schedule and a hectic life, but I think that life is more fulfilling than merely working a job and watching four hours of television at night or writing four hours a day and watching eight hours of television in the evening.

I have come to reject certain ideas. One of those is the idea of retirement. I don't believe in retirement, and I have no intention of ever doing it. I want to work myself to death. Similarly, I reject the idea that you should do only one thing. I love wearing multiple hats. One of those hats is my day job. Another one of those hats is my writer's hat. Still another is my apostolate. Then, there is being a husband.

If I won the lottery, would I keep working my day job? That seems like an absurd question to ask. If I work for the money, having money would end the necessity of the day job. But I have to admit that I would not give up my day job for much the same reason that I would never retire. It amounts to the same thing. Winning the lottery makes it possible to retire early. I equate retirement with decay and rot. I will always work a day job though I might change my field of endeavor to something more challenging. Winning the lottery would afford me a chance to retrain. But the day job is a permanent part of my life.

Being a full time writer is an intriguing possibility except that I can't write full time. I have two to three days off each week, but I cannot write for an entire day on these days. Four hours is all that I have in me at any given time. Unlike my day job, the writing gig takes more energy out of me. I believe that sleep is more for the benefit of the brain than the body, and I find that writing drains me more than a 12+ hour day at work. On a day when I neither write nor work, I feel energized and fresh. Writing is work, and it is more intense than real work. If you doubt this, watch a typical university student procrastinate on writing his term papers.

Not having a day job would not increase my writing output. The problem I have in writing is not so much time as it is material. The day job gives me time to think about what I want to write next. I used to write way more than I do now, but that is because I got married. It was a good trade because being married has been the single best thing that has ever happened to me. Unfortunately, my wife can be a writer's widow during the time I work on my projects. But she has her projects she works on.

Having a day job negates the time I would spend watching ball games on television. I am always in a state of work. Everything I do has a seriousness about it. I don't have time for frivolous things. I don't understand how people can idle away time watching grown men play games. At the very least, you could spend that time playing that game and improving your health and fitness. Even a nap is more beneficial.

We fool ourselves with the notion that we would achieve more if only we had more time. But that is a myth as evidenced from the fact of all the time we waste now. If we are profligate in the small things, why should we be given the greater things?

All of these things make me more accepting of the day job. The day job earns me a living, but it also does something else for me. It keeps me from being lazy. Nothing is more perilous for the writer than success. Success makes it possible to do nothing. I embrace my day job. I don't embrace it the way someone embraces a career, but I do embrace as something more than just paying the bills. It refines me and strengthens me. Work is good for the body and the soul even if it is rarely pleasure.

As for self-actualization, all I can say is that I am not paid to play. This is what people want from a job. They want to be paid very handsomely for what amounts to play. One of these groups of people paid to play is the professional Catholic. The professional Catholic is a layperson who neither teaches in a university nor serves in any capacity except as a full time blogger, vlogger and/or podcast maker. These professional Catholics like to pass the hat for donations to keep doing what amounts to a hobby. They could do this stuff for free while holding down a day job because I do it for free while holding down a day job. I will call it what it is. It is laziness. It is getting paid to play.

I want to live more robustly, and I believe the day job is part of that program. I have never been fond of specialization, and I subscribe to the Renaissance Ideal. Pursue multiple projects. Do many things. My day job is me, but it is not all of me. It will always be me. I work. I am a worker. I want to work until the day I die. I want to work forever. Work is life. Idleness is death. I am grateful to God for the work He has given me. I give it back to Him with love.

Chernobyl

. . .whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

MATTHEW 18:6 NASB

On April 26, 1986, the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl became unlivable. A nuclear reactor had a meltdown, and the subsequent disaster left the site and the city covered in radioactive contamination. Chernobyl is now a ghost town. The area will not be safe for human habitation for 20,000 years. The picture above is the famous "elephant's foot" in the basement of the reactor. If you saw this in person, it would be the last thing you saw because it would kill you instantly. This blob is what is left of the nuclear fuel of the reactor.

This disaster is what comes to mind when I think of the sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. This tragedy came to light during the waning years of the ponitificate of Pope St. John Paul II who was obviously too ill and too much in the dark about what amounts to a disaster for the Church. The reason I think of Chernobyl is because the scandal still continues to contaminate the Church in much the same way the elephant's foot of Chernobyl keeps sending out its radioactivity. Like Chernobyl, the disaster has been contained, but the damage lingers on in after effects on people's lives and perceptions of the Church.

I cannot evangelize or even mention that I am Catholic without someone throwing pedophile priests in my face. Becoming Catholic in the aftermath of this scandal is like electing to buy a home in Chernobyl and going there to live. Now, they write books and make movies about the scandal. This thing is never going to die. It has eclipsed the Spanish Inquisition and the Galileo Affair in terms of damage to the Church's image and reputation.

People may wonder why I would wish to join the Catholic Church in the wake of this mess, and I can only say that I truly believe it is the One True Faith. I can never leave the Roman Catholic Church. It is not an option for me. Conversely, I cannot remain silent about what I think of this scandal or the direction of the Church under the disaster of this current pope who lectures world governments about corruption while sitting on a Vatican Bank implicated in money laundering. Combined with the sex abuse scandal, Pope Francis is pulling specks out of the eyes of the world while trying to look around the log in the Church's eye.

This scandal undermines virtually all of the Church's moral authority in the world. The simple fact is that pedophilia is considered to be the most heinous crime in our time. Men would rather die than even be accused of such despicable acts. Even incarcerated criminals will batter and kill a pedophile in prison because they wish to not even be in the company of such evil. Yet, for decades, these crimes were committed and covered up within the Roman Catholic Church. When the morality of our priests and prelates has sunk below that of your average criminal, what authority does the Church have to speak about faith and morals?

If my faith rested on the sanctity of the priests and prelates, I would be an atheist again. But my fidelity to the Church rests on Christ's promises, and I look to Him. The simple fact is that we are all sinners, and the Church is comprised of sinners. I am disappointed in the scandals, but I am not surprised by the scandals. It is good to read about saints and martyrs who lived and died for the faith, but I think it is also helpful to read about the scoundrels who caused scandal. This practice creates defensive pessimism, so that when a leader stumbles and falls it does not make shipwreck of one's faith. Jesus had his reasons for picking Judas Iscariot, and I think it is to be a warning to us all to remain in the faith.

How do you go about cleaning up such a mess as the sex abuse scandal? You might as well ask what it would take to clean up Chernobyl or Fukushima. But what I can say about the matter is that the world is worse than the Church. The day is coming when this perverted society will embrace the crime of pedophilia as merely another lifestyle alternative. The secular society is already making moves in this direction. And if you doubt this, look no further than the present scandals of abortion and gay marriage and adoption and transgender restroom policies. Don't say it can't or won't happen. They said the same thing about the travesties we see today.

In a full scale global thermonuclear exchange, Chernobyl would look absolutely livable in comparison. Chernobyl was merely an accident in contrast to nuclear armageddon. Similarly, the sins of the Roman Catholic Church will look tame in comparison to a worldwide unleashing of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The reason for the scandal in the Roman Catholic Church is because it became too much like the world around it. The Church does not corrupt the world. The world corrupts the Church. All people are sinners and fall short. The antidote remains the same as it has for two millennia. Flee to Christ. Avail yourself of the sacraments. Get into a state of grace and remain there. Do works of penance and mercy. Be a saint.

This advice to become a saint seems really stupid. What can one saint do? What is one candle against a world of darkness? But as John 1:5 puts it, " The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." Darkness cannot extinguish light. Similarly, evil cannot extinguish good. As much as people decry the sex abuse scandal of the Roman Catholic Church, the reason they can even care about such evil is because of the Church. Before Christ, such crimes against children were commonplace in the pagan world.

Be a candle in the darkness. That's all any of us can ever be. Night will not last forever. The daylight will return. Until then, we have to be the light of the world. And we will not be overcome.

Politics and Temperament

Where you stand depends on where you sit.

MILES'S LAW

Miles's Law came about from the observation of how a bureaucrat changed his thinking on a thing when he was promoted to a different position requiring a different viewpoint. Instead of basing his opinions on an objective view of the facts, he chose to mold his opinion to his paycheck. Similarly, most people's political viewpoints are based not on reason or creed but merely on what enables them to get paid. Yet, we see people who can take a welfare check and still vote Republican. Or consider the character of Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation who was a libertarian who worked for a government agency. You can decry certain people as hypocrites or sell outs. Yet, Miles's Law contains a truth and an untruth. People's political viewpoints are not based so much on reason or where they get a paycheck so much as temperament. Their personalities are what determines their politics more than anything else. And this matters because it points to the futility of reason in the political sphere.

The terms "left" and "right" come to us from the French Revolution of 1789 when members of the National Assembly sat down. Those who supported the king and the Roman Catholic Church sat on the right. These were the conservatives. Those who opposed the king and supported revolution sat on the left. These were the liberals. Left and Right have been with us ever since.

The Left/Right thing is present in virtually every country. In the USA, we have the Republicans on the Right and the Democrats on the Left. In the UK, they have the Conservative Party on the Right and the Labor Party on the Left. In Israel, they have the Likud Party on the Right, and the Labor Party on the Left. Granted, there are third parties such as the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, etc. But they tend to be greater or lesser extremes of Left/Right. When I was a libertarian, I tried to defy the Left/Right thing, but I have to admit that I was on the Right and always have been. I have never voted for a Democrat in my entire life.

People tend to fall on either the Left or the Right. It is much like the issue of Continental divide with water and streams flowing either towards the Atlantic side or the Pacific side. Now, this tendency towards Left and Right defies reasonable explanation. For instance, in the USA, everyone was essentially conservative at one time. If you were blue collar, you voted Democrat. If you were white collar, you voted Republican. Otherwise, the country agreed on many things. The split between Left and Right began under FDR as Roosevelt instituted social programs. Blacks who had been Republican like Lincoln started to become Democrats. Southern whites who had always been Democrats became Republicans. Today, you have weird things like blue collar people supporting conservative and Republican candidates, and hedge fund traders giving millions to support Democrats and Hillary Clinton. If Miles's Law held, these people should be voting completely opposite to how they actually do. But they don't.

The explanation for these oddities come from temperament. A person's temperament is their natural disposition. Some people are simply predisposed to fall on the Left or the Right. And this predisposition is easy to discern in a person. You should not ask someone what their politics may be, but ask them how they feel about work. The answer to that question will tell you everything you need to know about that person's politics.

People on the Left hate work. Work is a curse. The Left has not always thought this way, but we have Karl Marx to thank for this mental shift. Marx was all about the working class or the "proletariat." He was at pains to show how the working class was downtrodden and victimized. The irony was that Marx was never a member of this proletariat. He was basically a lazy bum trying desperately to not be working class.

Leftists today are essentially the same as Marx in their laziness. This is why liberals champion expansion of the welfare state, taxing the rich, and wish for a socialist state with a gigantic sucking bureaucracy where people like themselves do very little all day and get paid handsomely for it. When leftists do work such as in academia, journalism, government, NGOs, and the entertainment industry, they work at jobs that resemble play more than work, and they draw down salaries far in excess of anything a working person receives. And they have no problems or qualms availing themselves of every tax break and Swiss bank account they can find to keep their lightly earned lucre.

People on the Right are different. They believe in hard work. They take the hard jobs, and they work hard. They become entrepreneurs or work hard in companies. If they do work for the government, it is in the grittier roles of the police and military. People of a conservative temperament are used to work, but they resent having their income stripped from them and employed in things they disagree with. People on the Left like to decry the greed of the Right, yet it is conservatives and not liberals who give the most to charity and are most grateful for what they have.

I have seen this division more times than I count, and it explains the reason people become either liberal or conservative more than anything else I have considered. It defies wealth and class. It also explains why a blue collar worker would wave the flag and vote for a Republican despite the Democrats trying to champion his cause. It also explains how a billionaire like Warren Buffett can be a Democrat and a liberal giving millions to causes like Planned Parenthood. Warren Buffett has never had to do a day of real work in his life.

I wrack my brain trying to think of an honest worker who was a Democrat, and the few examples I come up with are handful of black people who were 99% Republican on the issues but insisted on voting their race instead of their deeply held beliefs. Beyond that, those belonging to the Parasite Class tend to be liberal and Democrat while those who belong to the Producer Class tend to be conservative and Republican. Where you stand on the issues depends on where you sit as a producer or a parasite.

I have always been a producer in my life. Consequently, I have always been on the Right. I was a conservative then a libertarian and now I'm back to being a conservative. Despite being an atheist at one time, I could never embrace progressive thinking or the Democrat Party that champions that thinking. Despite my religious views being very different, my political views have been much more consistent. This is an important thing to consider when it comes to political discourse and debate.

If people were liberal or conservative based upon conclusions derived from reasoned arguments, you could stand a chance of persuading them. But if people are liberal or conservative based upon being hard working or lazy, you are wasting your time. You would have better luck convincing these people to change their hairstyles or their fashion sense than you will with their politics. But this begs another set of questions. Are conservatives good? Are liberals evil? Is work a curse?

Work is not a curse. The curse of work comes from the frustration of work, and liberals are fond of creating such frustration. As it stands, liberals and liberalism/progressivism is evil. Their revolution is not so much to overthrow aristocracy as the original leftists back in France desired but to become the new aristocracy set free from work. Conversely, conservatives are champions of work and the work ethic. Conservatives are good.

If you abhor honest work, you will be a Leftist and a Democrat. If you believe in honest work, you will be a conservative and a Republican. It really is that basic.