An imgur gallery of statistics that show how society is improving went viral.
Far-left liberalism, in a nutshell, is the belief that man – particularly white, heterosexual men – are intrinsically corrupt [1] (similar to the concept of original sin) and that it’s the job of the state ‘purify’ man, as well as to enforce equal outcomes and punish/suppress exceptionalism and talent (egalitarianism [2]). As I explain here, here, and here, optimistic statistics such as how crime is declining is an affront to the left’s self-appointed role to ‘fix’ society, because if society is peaceful and prosperous, it’s less inclined to need the left’s ‘help’. The left thrives on chaos but also foments it, too, by pitting the rich against the poor, makers against takers, Whites against Blacks, and so on. And from the rubble and chaos, the left seeks to ‘rebuild’ society in their image. But if society isn’t collapsing, the left can’t rebuilt it, and this makes the left very mad. And also, entire narratives, such as the existence of man-made goal warming that threatens humanity, depend on the willingness and credulity of the general public to not reject this collective guilt and burden foisted on them by the far-left, similar to the concept of ‘original sin’, where all men are born sinners and have to redeem themselves through repentance.
The left are desirous for power, with liberalism and the state the national ‘god and religion’. In the absence of turmoil and suffering, acquiring this power is much harder for the left. The left is still powerful in terms of controlling certain national narratives and institutions, but their ambitions are so much bigger than isolated issues such such gay marriage and global warming may suggest, because it’s total control they seek under the pretense of ‘free speech’ and ‘liberty’, and those small issues are just skirmishes in a far bigger war.
Furthermore, the sensationalist liberal media manipulates data and statistics to spread fear, in order to boost advertising dollars. By only reporting bad news, one is inclined to believe that everything is bad, when in actuality the media is just deliberately choosing the bad stories and ignoring the good ones. One may not realize that the number of homicides and burglaries relative to the total US population has fallen in recent decades, because crime gets a lot of media coverage, and the media can affect public perceptions of crime or the health of the economy by the stories they choose to report or ignore.
[1] This would seem to contradict the left’s belief in tabula rasa. The far-left tends to hold absolutist and conflicting views on this – that everyone is either a blank slate for certain traits, or born corrupted by ingrained prejudices. This is similar to the left believing that sexual orientation is a fixed trait but intelligence and susceptibility/propensity to crime isn’t. A second explanation is that the left believes everyone is born a blank slate and are later corrupted by environmental factors such as racism, and that it’s the role of the state to ‘program’ people to be politically correct. The existence of individual cognitive exceptionalism is not a failing of tabula rasa but rather attributable ‘unfair’ environmental advantages bestowed upon said individuals, and that state intervention, at any cost, is needed in the futile effort to close an achievement gap that is actually an IQ gap.
[2] Egalitarianism, from Wikipedia (from French égal, meaning “equal”)—or equalitarianism[1][2]—is a trend of thought that favors equality for all people.[3] Egalitarian doctrines maintain that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or social status, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.[4] According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the term has two distinct definitions in modern English:[5] either as a political doctrine that all people should be treated as equals and have the same political, economic, social, and civil rights;[6] or as a social philosophy advocating the removal of economic inequalities among people, economic egalitarianism, or the decentralization of power. Some sources define egalitarianism as the point of view that equality reflects the natural state of humanity.[7][8][9]
For the far-left, by ‘egalitarianism’ they mean equal outcomes instead of equal opportunities. With the exception of ‘congenital racism’, the far-left rejects the idea anyone is intrinsically better than anyone else. And individual differences in socioeconomic outcomes are a collective failing of society, not the individual. Far-left liberalism always shifts the burden from the individual to society. The left champions civil rights provided no one is able to get too far ahead of anyone else, and rights such as private property don’t count. Inequality is blamed on imagined structural racism, unfair advantages, or oppression, not differences in biology or work ethic. The far-left tends to blame environment for inequality, because biological differences, such as IQ, that may engender inequality less tractable to state intervention. Stephen Jay Gould (The Mismeasure of Man) and Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel), who were inspired by the progenitor of cultural relativism, Franz Boas, are major proponents of this view. The media by corroborating with academia are complicit in pushing what is essentially cultural Marxism wrapped in flimsy science.