Not many people try to do difficult things; either that or else they don't learn anything from their experience.
If they learned from their own experience of doing something difficult; they would soon realize that if you really want to do something difficult: you have to make doing that thing the major priority.
And - if you do not make doing it the priority; then either the thing will be done badly, or it won't be done at all.
Not doing it at all means that it won't be done...
Or, at any rate it means that the 'function' it would have done will not be accomplished.
What would have happened if the thing had been done, will not happen...
However (and this is the complication): Not doing it at all is not necessarily or usually fatal to people on the inside, people or organizations backed by power and influence; because the failure will be covered-up and celebrated as success anyway - because most people don't really know or care about the thing.
Indeed; I have often seen that people who try to do something difficult, and fail, and instead make that thing worse! are celebrated for their work.
So long as the people say - over and over and loudly - that they are working and trying to do the difficult thing - they can be funded and praised for actually making it worse, pretty much forever.
Anyway, the main point of this is that it is actually - for obvious reasons, when you think about it - very difficult to do difficult things; but the fact that this is not obvious, or denied, or covered-up - means that someone who really is trying to do something difficult will find himself required to do a lot of other stuff as well; and the other stuff will be regarded as more important than the difficult thing.
One could, indeed, define Leftists as those people who think the other stuff is more important than the difficult thing; and therefore destroy the possibility of accomplishing anything and everything difficult.
Leftists just take for granted that the difficult stuff will... happen. And therefore they can concentrate on making all the other stuff a pre-requisite of doing the difficult thing. And before long, everybody is talking all the time about other stuff - and wondering vaguely why the difficult things don't happen any more...
Until they read the mass media; and learn that actually the difficult stuff is still happening (yay!), more than ever (whoop!); and the difficult stuff is happening exactly because of all the other stuff! (huzzah!...)
Two worlds emerge: the world of other stuff and the mass of people who care most about other stuff; and the micro-minority world of difficult things - about which only the few people who really care about that difficult thing are concerned.
So (here is the moral or this story) if you want to do something difficult, and care about it - then either you work for yourself and the (very few!) folk who really care about that difficult thing...
Or else You Won't Do It - for the simple reason that you are Not Even Trying to do it.
*Note. I mean Leftists 2023. That is, when Leftism (and its basis in atheistic materialism) is the official ideology of The World; but especially all 'international/ multi-national' institutions and Western nations. Leftists of the past and in other places were/are (by contrast) partial and/or rooted (to some significant degree) in human instinct and common sense; which is Not true here and now. Leftist ideology is (here and now) rooted-in a incrementally-increasing inversion of instinct and common sense (and, increasingly explicit, opposition to The Good): a virtual-world unto itself.
I've never had the impression you were keen the parables of Jesus, Dr. Charlton, but anyway, this one haunts me:
ReplyDeleteFor which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?
Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him,
It seems to be taken as worldly advice *against* the tower builder. Yet it seems to me Jesus is chiding the pharisees for their unwillingness to do difficult things in the face of a world which mocks men who do difficult things.
@Crosbie - It's not that I dislike parables as such, far from it! - but that some of the synoptic parables seem to go against the core teachings of the IV Gospel - so I don't believe that they really were said by Jesus.
ReplyDeleteThis one (taken as a whole) is probably one of them, since it *seems* to be saying (overall, rather than in this excerpt) that only one who has made a monastic commitment to forsake the world entirely, in a material sense, will be able to follow Jesus and attain eternal life.
If that is what it means, then that is a wrong understanding of Jesus's work, presumably something garbled or added after Jesus's ascension - IMO.
I laughed out loud
ReplyDelete@G Result!
ReplyDelete