Last Crusade 19: Equality and Envy
Frank Baum, the Royal Historian of Oz, in his book QUEEN ZIXI OF IX, reports that the immortal fairytale witch, Queen Zixi, has riches, magical powers, health, and the appearance of endless youth, and everything else her heart desires but one thing only: her image in the mirror shows her to be an unsightly old hag, not the young and beautiful queen she appears to all other eyes.
The queen hears of a magical cloak that will grant the wearer his heart’s desire. After using her magic to deceive the innocent children to whom the fairies gave it, Queen Zixi discovers that the cloak grants no wish one who steals it. Hopes dashed, Zixi weeps in utmost wretchedness, and leaves the cloak, which she had struggled so hard and so sinfully to acquire, ignored on the grass.
She comes across a rugged old alligator laying on a riverbank, weeping with bitterness equal to her own. The alligator says that he weeps because he cannot climb a tree. Why does he wish to climb? Because he cannot.
Next she finds an owl lamenting that he cannot swim like a fish. Why does he wish to swim? Because he cannot.
Then Zixi comes next upon a little girl sobbing with sorrow. The little girl wishes to be a man. Why? Because she is not one.
This reply makes Zixi angry, and she calls the girl a fool. “There are other fools in the world,” says the child, and renews her sobs.
L. Frank Baum reports as follows:
Zixi did not reply, but she thought to herself, “We are all alike—the alligator, the owl, the girl, and the powerful Queen of Ix. We long for what we cannot have, yet desire it not so much because it would benefit us as because it is beyond our reach. If I call the others fools, I must also call myself a fool for wishing to see the reflection of a beautiful girl in my mirror when I know it is impossible. So hereafter I shall strive to be contented with my lot.”
This was a wise resolution, and the witch-queen abided by it for many years. She was not very bad, this Zixi, for it must be admitted that few have the courage to acknowledge their faults and strive to correct them as she did.
This was written in A.D. 1905, and was presumed by the publisher and public alike to be fit reading material for the entertainment and the instruction of the young.
In those days it was well known that youth would not attend lectures that hectored and tongue-lashed them into virtue, but stories that opened in the inner eye of imagination might give them images, bright as the emblazon on a knightly shield, which would bring firmness to a tempted heart in an hour of weakness.
Many a child might, when tempted to envy a thing craved only because it is forbidden or out of reach, recall to mind the folly of the climbing alligator, the swimming owl, and the little girl who wanted to be a man, and return to sober thoughts with a laugh and a blush of shame.
But surely my dear reader has noticed something odd about the above passage. If you are a modern youth, educated in modern schools, you have been conditioned in proper Pavlovian fashion to react to the third absurdity in the list of shameful absurdities in precisely the opposite way that your grandparents, parents, or you yourself five years ago would have viewed it.
In other words, you have been tongue lashed and hectored, not into approving of the virtue of self-command and temperance, which is Zixi’s hard lesson, but into approving of the deadly sin of envy, which the state of mind into which our elite leaders wish us to be habituated by Pavlovian conditioning.
No attempt will be made to reason anyone into the position of upholding envy as a virtue. The real words for things are never used.
If you have been properly conditioned, when the stimulus of hearing the wish of a little girl to be a man called absurd is exposed to your ear, your automatic response should be to have your mouth call that attitude problematical, inappropriate, mean-spirited, judgmental, or even bigoted.
If the impulse can travel directly from the nerves of the ear to the nerves controlling the vocal cords without travelling through or near the cortex, so much the better.
Now, the progress of science from that day to this has discovered no particular examples of little girls growing up in to men, or little boys growing up into women, and the techniques of castration and genital mutilation, the injection of hormones, and plastic surgery have not actually granted any real person the magical fairy cloak which allows one to change his sex.
What has changed, the only pertinent thing that is changed, is language. Our Pavlovian conditioners have the goal of making their patients, us, respond with words like problematical, inappropriate, mean-spirited, judgmental, or bigoted (1) to the use of the pronoun ‘he’ as the pronoun to refer to a man of either sex, (2) to refer to men, and not words, as having a sex rather than a ‘gender’, (3) to refer to men of both sexes as ‘men’.
These changes are not meant to clarify language, but to obscure it. Specifically, they are mean to present to the gullible the idea that no innocent use of language is possible. Using English according to the accepted rules of grammar, that is, the non-politically-correct forms, is held to be an oppression, a small scale aggression, and an insult to the spirit of women.
But the belief that Mohammedanism is as source of oppression, large scale aggression, insult, genital mutilation, mass rape and honor-killing of women, not to mention an insult to their spirit, is held by the politically correct to be a psychopathological condition called Islamophobia. Also, the use of the term ‘Mohammedanism’ is problematical, inappropriate, mean-spirited, judgmental, or bigoted.
Please note that in neither case does the Pavlovian conditioner attempt to tell us what a proper and healthy and virtuous attitude is.
What, pray tell, is one’s attitude toward the Fairer Sex is supposed to be? Chivalry is held to be a condescending insult, romance is held to be a trap, marriage a torture, and children an imposition one can freely choose to escape, not by chaste and prudent selections of when and with whom to copulate, but by prenatal infanticide.
What, pray tell, is one’s attitude toward Mohammedanism supposed to be? Chivalry, such as motivated the Crusaders to rescue Christian lands from paynim invaders, and defend Western civilization from Eastern barbarians, is clearly condemned. Love of one’s family, clan, community, nation, traditions, laws, and constitution, all put at risk by the influx of violent Jihadists bent on imposing Sharia Law, is dismissed as contemptable. Even the recognition of the truth about the Religion of Peace, namely, that it neither preaches nor promotes peace, is censured, nay, is damned as damnable.
In both cases, the Pavlovian conditioners seek to condition you to surrender to the demands, no matter how unreasonable, of the feminists and the multiculturalists. But it must be noted that the feminists do not speak for a majority of women, and most are not women, but white men of Jewish or Christian background, now atheist or spiritualist or neopagan. Likewise, it must be noted that the multiculturalists do not speak for the Mohammedans, and none are Mohammedan, but are white men of Jewish or Christian background, now atheist or spiritualist or neopagan.
Finally, it must be noted that the Pavlovian conditioners not only want to condition you to surrender without a fight, they seek also to condition your foes to make demands reason cannot sate.
If the Mohammedans had desired peace with Israel, land for peace, or a two state solution, or any solution, it would have been found decades ago. They say what they want and are not shy about it: the utter destruction of the state of Israel and the death of the Jews. It is not as if the Jews are doing something or failing to do something which, if done or not done, would sooth any umbrage. There is no claim being made of any needed restitution. If each and every Jew in Israel departed from that tiny nation and moved to Antarctica, the Jihadists would follow them there and blow up schoolgirls, and the Progressives would excuse the acts, and call any man who did not buy the foolish excuse bad names.
If the feminists wanted legal equality between male and female, they would not complain about rocket scientists wearing shirts with a pattern of racy bathing beauties on them, because this has no effect on legal equality. If they are complaining about any other type of equality aside from legal, they are chasing a chimera. They would not complain about there being more men than women in rocket science any more than Scotsmen complain about there being more German brewers than Scottish in America, or that Caucasians complain about there being more Negros than Caucasians in the NBA.
Of course, there is an inequality of numbers in all these fields. Miller, Pabst, Schlitz, Budweiser, Stroh, Erlanger, Goebel, Schmidt, all outsell any Scottish brewmeister. Indeed, I am hard pressed to name a single Scottish brewmeister at all, except, ironically, for one named Brewmeister.
If we were the believe the logic of the Pavlovian conditioners, we would believe that the use of a German words, like brewmeister, somehow cause or create a sinister advantage for Germans over Scotsmen in the American beer market. If we only change the vocabulary words, so runs the theory, we will be conditioned to respond as desired to the stimuli.
But why do we hear no complaints by Scotsmen about the Scottish being unfairly and micro-aggressively denied beer-equality with the vicious and sinister Germans?
Why do we hear nothing but complaints by feminists and multiculturalists that women and Mohammedans are subject to cruel oppression, unequal representation among comic book characters, and endless victimization by some sort of alleged White Privileged Patriarchy?
This, when the evidence is unambiguous that laws and customs have been in place for years to promote and protect and encourage women to enter traditionally male fields, and for Mohammedans to take over traditionally Christian lands, laws, customs and institutions? We live in a nation that obviously and openly grants Negroes and Hispanics privileges, hiring preferences, and the genuflection of lower standards, but the Pavlovians wish to condition us to react as if the Christian Anglo Males receive some sort of privilege from some unidentified source.
How has the wish for male girls, which common sense and common decency condemns as no less absurd than the wish for climbing alligators and swimming owls, now become accepted as normal?
The answer is simple enough that it needs no argument. Envy. Envy is the reason.
Envy is what the conditioners have conditioned this generation to take as their highest virtue and noblest goal. The envy of an alligator for a squirrel, of an owl for a fish, or a little girl for a man, produces nothing but misery.
But the conditioners never cease to attempt to condition us to have exactly this reaction, the reaction of envy, between two persons equally protected by equal laws for each to envy whatever difference of nature or nurture makes them different in any way.
The promise of the conditioners is that once we are all as identical as grade-A eggs, and have no differing characteristics, we will finally all be equal, and envy will no longer bite.
Is anyone foolish enough to believe this promise?
The envy of women for the legal privileges of men, even back when such privileges existed, was not encouraged in order to sponge those privileges away. Had this been their goal, the feminists would have folded up shop and gone home, once the right to vote and the right to own property was granted all their sisters. Instead, the feminists insist that they are still damsels in distress, helplessly tied to the railroad tracks by the evil patriarchy, and they must scream and scream until a prince on a white charger, in the form of intrusive progressive totalitarianism, rushes in, sweeps her off her feet, and makes her a princess without her lifting her delicate Victorian finger.
And, while he is at it, the prince can thrash any blackguards whose speech or even thoughts the matron regards as problematical, inappropriate, mean-spirited, judgmental, or, in other words, improper or indecent.
The modern feminists then displays her manly strength of spirit by retreating in terror to her safe space, where she sniffs the smelling salts to prevent a fainting spell from overwhelming her.
No, the sad truth is that the breakdown of motherhood, of the family, and the alienation of child from parent is the goal, because only if the family is weak and all children are schooled and conditioned by the state is the gluttony of the state for power fed.
Feminine women and healthy mothers married to one man for life tend to be happy, and to raise Christian children to be happy. No opportunity for revolt, revolution, or social tumult to carry the conditioners to power exists in happy conditions.
Likewise, the conditioners do not wish to encourage the envy of the barbaric Mohammedan for the civilized West in order to produce an equality to sponge away all differences in degree of civilization, and share all wealth equally. If that were their goal, the feminists would insist that pressure, or even force of arms, would be used to grant equality under the law to women currently oppressed by Sharia Law, which treats the Fairer Sex as legally inferior. The barbarism is the goal. A religion to wipe out the Christian religion is the goal.
Christians, because Christianity is the sole worldview fitted to human life on Earth, tend to be happy, even during martyrdom, and to raise Christian children to be happy. No opportunity for revolt, revolution, or social tumult to carry the conditioners to power exists in happy conditions.
And envy? No one can be happy who envies. Those who encourage and enflame the fires of envy are not seeking your happiness, but your misery.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
