Thursday, April 29, 2021

Feynman quote on Leftist Groupthink

...There was a special dinner at some point, and the head of the theology place, a very nice, very Jewish man, gave a speech. It was a good speech, and he was a very good speaker, so while it sounds crazy now, when I’m telling about it, at that time his main idea sounded completely obvious and true. He talked about the big differences in the welfare of various countries, which cause jealousy, which leads to conflict, and now that we have atomic weapons, any war and we’re doomed, so therefore the right way out is to strive for peace by making sure there are no great differences from place to place, and since we have so much in the United States, we should give up nearly everything to the other countries until we’re all even. Everybody was listening to this, and we were all full of sacrificial feeling, and all thinking we ought to do this. But I came back to my senses on the way home. The next day one of the guys in our group said, “I think that speech last night was so good that we should all endorse it, and it should be the summary of our conference.” I started to say that the idea of distributing everything evenly is based on a theory that there’s only X amount of stuff in the world, that somehow we took it away from the poorer countries in the first place, and therefore we should give it back to them. But this theory doesn’t take into account the real reason for the differences between countries—that is, the development of new techniques for growing food, the development of machinery to grow food and to do other things, and the fact that all this machinery requires the concentration of capital. It isn’t the stuff, but the power to make the stuff, that is important. But I realize now that these people were not in science; they didn’t understand it. They didn’t understand technology; they didn’t understand their time. The conference made me so nervous that a girl I knew in New York had to calm me down. “Look,” she said, “you’re shaking!..."

2 comments:

  1. When your entire philosophy of prosperity revolves around the idea of taking wealth away from someone else by force in order for you to proclaim it as your own success, you are walking with evil on the path of envy.

    If you feel guilty about your own wealth, Please feel free to put your own money where your own mouth is and see if that makes you feel better. It should be an enlightening experience to see if you feel as generous with your own money as you would be with someone else's.

    If you feel guilty about someone else's wealth, you are projecting your own guilt onto someone else's property, and using them as a financial scapegoat for your own debits of conscience. Stop coveting. Stop confusing empty virtue signaling with moral values, reflect, and seek counseling.

    ...you could also consider the 10th commandment.


    "You shall not covet...anything that is your neighbor’s."
    -Exodus 20:17

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  2. Poverty in our world is often relative. Thus, it's true that the poor will always be with us, at least as long humankind will live.

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