Attention news readers: We will continue writing articles about the violence decline until you stop kvetching. http://t.co/G9YHHc3U8X
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) January 14, 2015
Upon first glance, one would assume that a Cato report about the world being safer is good news, but to the discontent left who yearn for class warfare and crisis, it isn’t. How Come? The left sees society as incomplete or imperfect, and unless they have things their way, they want everything to get worse. They use crisis as a catalyst to gain power and remold society to their liking, such as in 2008 and 1929. Oh, and then there are the numerous Communist/leftist revolutions though history (too many to list). Economic crisis spurred the French Revolution.
Not only is society malleable, so are individuals. To the left, humans are blank slates that can be programmed, such that no one is congenitally cognitively superior to anyone else. The left sees the huge success of web 2.0, the stock market, Silicon Valley, Wall St., IQ being a determinant for success at life, and America’s economic exceptionalism as an affront to their blank slate egalitarianism worldview, and they seek crisis, upheaval and violence to erase it like a shaken Etch A Sketch.
(1) By ‘left’ and ‘libs’, I am referring to the welfare left, which includes libs like Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Reich, not neo liberal pragmatists like Larry Summers and Steven Pinker.