Now we’re all indoctrinated with the idea of the perfectibility of man. Among other things, it leads to disastrous foreign policy. What’s the use of being a shining city on a hill if the world is blind?

After woke has burned itself out, perhaps we’ll all be ready to shrug off the white man’s burden for good. Kipling pointed out what was wrong with it, and we didn’t listen.

Your dive into it all ought to be a lot deeper; the thread you need to follow goes much further back than even the Enlightenment. It’s a product of wishful thinking about human beings that you can trace back to before the birth of Christ or even monotheism. Some of us are just that delusional. The thought processes that produced the early Church were not unique or at all original; the whole cult-like belief in the “decency of man” goes back to some of the preceding religions and philosophic systems that were eventually expressed as Christianity.

Root problem is that many of us do not like what they see when they look inward; because of that, we deny our essential nature, and fail to grasp that being a decent human being is a daily struggle that you can never abandon. We want to believe we’re inherently nice–Decent, good people who would never do anything evil. Reality is that we’re forever one step away from doing the expedient nasty to our fellow man, and would do it in a heartbeat if self-gratification were allowed to come to the fore and dominate our actions.

There are people who want to believe that people are all the same (and everybody knows your name) and they insist on saying this in the face of all evidence. It’s not honest ignorance. It’s denial, and denial is a form of bad faith with yourself.

When these people rise to policy level positions (and they do, because they’re so damn nice and so good at faking levelheaded reasonableness) then nothing good ever comes of it.

I blame organized religion. Mainly Unitarian-Universalism. The universalist half of that, to be specific. What a load of wishful thinking.

Also Mencius. Mencius was a tool.

I could relate the experiences I had with the folks from the State Department back when we were dealing with the Bosnian debacle, but that would take hours. The gist of it all is that they simply do not comprehend that other people might think differently than they do, and they apply that attitude even towards their own countrymen. They can’t understand or comprehend their own; how do you expect them to grasp an entirely different cultural context? For the average State Department drone, sourced from the various ivy-encrusted universities where such creatures are bred, the very idea that an Appalachian or Western US-born American does not share their exquisite and rarefied views is not only unthinkable, but anathema. So, if you think they’re going to be any better at sussing out how foreigners think, try again. They’re not only unable to grasp that, they’re entirely uninterested in the idea itself–Anyone who doesn’t think the way they do is obviously incapable of influence, or worthy of engaging with.

And the first Cold War was largely a culture clash, a clash of fundamental values and worldviews. The whole point of a culture clash is the enemy doesn’t think the way you do and you know it.

The only time to be direct is with people you don’t fear.