Optimism and Personal Responsibility
Aayan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-Born Dutch-American Activist and Refugee. Hirsi Ali was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. Her father was a political prisoner in Somalia, and after he managed to escape from prison, the family fled — eventually settling in Kenya. While visiting family in Europe, Hirsi Ali fled (to escape an arranged marriage) to Holland and was granted political asylum.
Hirsi Ali has written a few books, wherein you can read in oft-excruciating detail about her experiences growing up, her Islamic indoctrination, her own personal awakening, and her flight into exile.
One memorable excerpt from her book Infidel was the following exchange she had with a Policeman after arriving in Holland to seek asylum. She writes:
“I went to Zwolle. The center was easy to find. Everyone seemed to speak English, or at least want to understand it. There was a policeman in uniform, and I felt a sudden fear when I saw him, but he told me politely, “Our center is full, we’re not taking any more refugees, but you can go to Zeewolde.” He gave me a bus card and a train ticket and instructions for the journey. He said I should go to see Refugee Aid before I registered, and complimented me on my English.
Police to me were oppressors, demanders of bribes. They were never helpful. I asked him “Why are you helping me?” and he smiled and said, “Those are the rules.” I asked, “And is every policeman this kind?” and he replied, “I sure hope so.”
After this, anything was possible. To me, government was bad. It was crooked and duplicitous and it oppressed you. And here all these people were busy helping you and this for foreigners. How on earth did they treat their own clans?”
We take so many things for granted. Americans are ungrateful.
Naïve, ignorant, and ungrateful.
We don’t know how good we’ve had it, and it seems, it’s been too good. When we stop to complain about how dysfunctional our society is, and how bleak the future is — do we ever stop to consider “Compared to what?” Hirsi Ali has a different perspective. Then again, she was only five years old, when her grandmother held her down on the floor of her home while a strange man performed her “circumcision”. Those experiences give perspective — and even more — it’s not like they’re uncommon. We’re just ignorant of them.
I try to understand Aayan Hirsi Ali’s surprise, as she describes it, upon having that encounter with someone in law enforcement in a new country. Imagine being genuinely surprised that a police officer would just simply help, without extorting. They would just help. It’s not that hard to imagine, is it? We’re not really all that far from the fascist dystopian nightmare that exists in many countries, currently, and that existed in most of human civilization gone by. But, yet, we’ve managed to build a society wherein that’s something we take for granted. It only took us less than 350 years to get there.
There are many people in our society that think that what this country stands for, and what characterizes it best, is oppression (racial, and otherwise) and that our country is full of selfish, greedy, extortionists.
To me, that is the most pessimistic possible interpretation of what this country stands for — and not only is it not true — it is full of a kind of self-loathing, and self-victimization that characterizes someone of weak mind and weak character.
For some reason, we have lost the American idea of the Individual that led to this country’s creation. We have forgotten that it is the Individual which our society is comprised of, and the rights of the Individual that should be first and foremost protected. Instead, we have grown more tribal. We have decided, collectively and (perhaps) unconsciously, that the rights of the group matter more than the rights of individuals. That (ironically) your skin color is your defining characteristic, and in some instances, even precludes you from saying or doing certain things.
Pick a group — any group. You have to pick one. Everybody has to fit into a box. While many who have adopted this ideology are described as being “progressive” I would posit that it is much more a regression. A regression in behavior back to the kind of which, if we were to study history, we could plainly see.
Characterizing one another by our group affiliation (Race, Sex, Gender, Political Affiliation, etc.), and the ill-effects of power used by that group in the public arena (as accurate as those accusations may be) is a zero-sum game, and will surely lead us down a path of Tyranny, and Totalitarianism — the likes of which we have already witnessed in the 20th Century . Students of history should take note that our current society bears an uncanny resemblance to early 1900’s Germany, China and Russia — and strangely those kinds of assertions aren’t hyperbolic in the least.
It seems evident that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wished he had studied history, or thought a little bit more about these kinds of things. After all, he and some estimated 18 Million Russians were imprisoned by Police Forces (who were, in contrast to our modern police force, an actual good example of an oppressive, corrupt police force). He wrote of his time in one of Stalin’s Gulags the following:
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more — we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Slavery is a despicable stain on the history of this country; and racial prejudice is small-minded idiocy. It should be abhorred, and demeaned. But it is not what defines this country, or it’s people — and if we decide that it is — then we, also, shall deserve “everything that happens afterward”.
As Aayan Hirsi Ali recently stated in an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “America Doesn’t Need a New Revolution”:
“Although I am a black African — an immigrant who came to the U.S. freely — I am keenly aware of the hardships and miseries African-Americans have endured for centuries. Slavery, Reconstruction, segregation: I know the history. I know that there is still racial prejudice in America, and that it manifests itself in the aggressive way some police officers handle African-Americans. I know that by measures of wealth, health and education, African-Americans remain on average closer to the bottom of society than to the top. I know, too, that African-American communities have been disproportionately hurt by both Covid-19 and the economic disruption of lockdowns.
Yet when I hear it said that the U.S. is defined above all by racism, when I see books such as Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” top the bestseller list, when I read of educators and journalists being fired for daring to question the orthodoxies of Black Lives Matter — then I feel obliged to speak up.
“What the media also do not tell you,” I tweeted on June 9, “is that America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you. We have our problems and we need to address those. But our society and our systems are far from racist.”
America looks different if you grew up, as I did, in Africa and the Middle East. There I had firsthand experience of three things. First, bloody internecine wars between Africans — with all the combatants dark-skinned, and no white people present. Second, the anarchy that comes when there is no police, no law and order. Third, the severe racism (as well as sexism) of a society such as Saudi Arabia, where de facto slavery still exists.”
If we choose to define our society, above all else, by the worst parts of its history — we will grow nihilistic. If we choose to identify, above all else, as a member of a group — we will lose the meaning in our life. These two anti-truths are not a path forward into a future I want my children to have. That is a future rife with suffering.
What this country has accomplished, what we’ve become, is nothing short of a miracle. In this country, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Policemen will help you (though, perhaps, not for long if the current trend continues). If you work hard, you can elevate the status of your life. If you deal honestly, and have integrity, and act with compassion and kindness and love — you will build a life, and a community that supports and sustains not only you and the ones you love — but everyone that dwells in in it. In this country — we have a chance to actually improve our situation.
For the vast majority of humankind’s existence — this has not been the case. It is naïve, and stupid, and incredibly ungrateful to not understand that — let alone try to define our society as being primarily oppressive, racist, and corrupt. It is, in every way, the best society that humankind has ever managed to achieve — and by a longshot. Does that mean there’s not work to do? No, of course not. Racism is a problem. Wealth inequality is a problem. We have lots, and lots of problems. But the kind of self-deprecating, hateful rhetoric about how terrible everything has become is immature, and pessimistic and it doesn’t help make anything functionally better.
America is that “shining city upon a hill” despite its sordid and racist past. Because, that’s never all that this country was defined by. Now is the time to move beyond that; not by forgetting it, but by overcoming it. Moving past it.
It’s time for us all to step into the responsibility of living life as an individual, and understand that we can pick our choices but we can’t pick the consequences — and that what we do, as individuals, moves our lives, the lives of others, and this whole planet — a little bit closer to heaven or a little bit closer to hell. Then we need to act accordingly.
As the Great Jordan B. Peterson once said:
“The entire notion of the reality of the individual . . . which is (I think) the entire notion of the idea that human beings are made in the image of God most fundamentally . . . that is what’s being attacked!
(…)
If you don’t have the idea of the sovereignty of the individual, because there’s no individual , then there’s no free speech! All you are is an avatar of you group interests, and if I’m not in your group it’s not in my interest to let you speak! There’s nothing that we have to say to one another! There’s nothing but power! It’s a Hobbesian nightmare of group-against-group and that’s the post-modern doctrine. To call it appalling is to barely scrape the surface. It is truly an assault on the most fundamental principles by which the west is governed. It’s not surface-level philosophy. It goes all the way to the bottom.
(…)
Is the idea of the sovereignty of the individual correct? The western answer is: that’s the most fundamental truth! That is exactly what is under assault at the Universities. The reason that the collectivist types hate me is because I’ve got their number! I know what they are up to.
Further, they do not wish to shoulder the unbearable responsibility of being of being a sovereign individual — and that accounts for the cowardice, and that accounts for the attempt to weaken the spirit of those they’re teaching by overprotecting them. They’re not willing to take on the responsibility, and the fault has to lie elsewhere . . . and I think that’s a good judge of someone’s character in general.
The world is in a messy state — and the question is — whose fault is it? And the answer is: Yours! That’s the right answer. It’s not the Patriarchy. It’s not some unidentifiable group. It’s not some structure that’s gone wrong (even those things can go wrong); and that’s the other fundamental truth of the west is that things would be a lot better if you were a lot better and you have to decide if you’re willing to accept that.”
