2023: A Year of (More) Bad Ideas

By Itxu Díaz

Sunday, December 31, 2023

 

Bad ideas have existed since the dawn of time. Eve had a crappy idea when she offered Adam the apple. Mao thought sparrows were a pest, exterminated them, and caused a famine that killed millions of Chinese. The idea that the Titanic was an unsinkable ship was particularly stupid. And Decca Records turning down The Beatles in 1962 was the pop industry’s most notorious shot in the foot.

 

Disastrous ideas have always been there. In over 20 years in the profession, I have been amazed at the amount of terrifying, stupid, illegal, ruinous, wrong, or ridiculous ideas that can emerge within a company in the short space of a couple of days. The year 2023 has been no different. One of the problems with the crazed proliferation of business meetings is that it gives too many opportunities to express an opinion to people whose greatest service to humanity would be to work in silence. Even so, the worst ideas will never cease to exist. What’s really needed is not to extinguish the witless idiots, but to make sure that the people who must ultimately make the decisions are not as half-baked as the ideas that come to their table.

 

Politics is a fertile ground for bad ideas. Communism, for example, is a terrible idea. If, instead of pertaining to the realm of ideologies, communism moved into the realm of science, it would be more out of the question today than the commercialization of Google Glass. If an experiment were to cause more than 100 million deaths, no sensible scientist would repeat it. Raising taxes ruins the real economy, but in the realm of politics, or political economy, there are still plenty of bad managers willing to do it. Passing laws to fund sex changes for minors is an atrocity, an unnatural stupidity, but in the political universe it has its place because there are people willing to vote enthusiastically for the worst possible ideas if they believe them to be genuine ideas, true to their ideological stripe.

 

Multiculturalism, for example, is another big stupidity. It is an invention that only works in the thick sociology textbooks I endured as an undergraduate. In practice, it is as effective as a telephone without a microphone. It is a typical failed product that would not have survived either if its survival depended on the economic laws of a capitalist market. For centuries, academic communities, civil society, and intellectuals have worked to maintain and enhance one’s own culture, protecting it, not diluting it in a magma of cultures. It had a reasonable explanation: Even if we were to take for granted the fallacy that all cultures are equally good (a claim that loses strength in the face of Aztec human sacrifices), the only way for them to survive is for them to be isolated, strengthened, so that someone cares about them.

 

Today, educational establishments, school and university textbooks, and a large part of the media strongly support the idea that multiculturalism is a success. We miss the point of view of those who preceded us centuries ago, when culture consisted of safeguarding the good, the beautiful, the true, the useful, the tried and tested, of each community of individuals.

 

However, political leaders who make stupid decisions do not usually do so by intuition, but often rely on equally idiotic theories or ideological currents with which, if necessary, they can justify their initiatives. That is why these days we find so many socialist leaders justifying trans laws through the queer doctrines and pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo of Judith Butler. The “intellectual” of gender feminism is probably the most overrated philosopher of the last century. Her theses are full of holes, her assumptions are a load of nonsense, and the practical effects are devastating for society. She who came to save women has ended up eliminating sex, and thus eliminating women. Yet she enjoys incredible popularity because she allows idiot politicians to cling to bad ideas. They do so without needing to understand Butler’s thesis, just by quoting it as if it were the ultimate source of sociological authority. In fact, that is like citing the Beagle Boys as the ideologues of a national plan against theft. Of course, the plan won’t be good at stopping theft, but it won’t be good for the thieves either, because the Beagle Boys were the clumsiest thieves in the history of comics.

 

There are two areas where conservatives, and in general people who prefer truth to ideology, have fared particularly poorly in the last half century: universities and the media. This is a failure by default. Universities, once a beacon of wisdom for the entire West, have been savagely colonized by the Left since the start of the second half of the last century. The media, and the entertainment industry, followed a similar path. They provide ideological sustenance, or a mirage of social approval, to idiot politicians who are willing to rubber-stamp nefarious ideas.

 

Politics rarely allows for a confrontation of ideas. Our modern parliaments work more with Instagram — sometimes even Tinder — in mind than with intellectual debate. Argentine president Javier Milei has been a happy exception in this respect. His pedagogical offensive has managed to penetrate society — although that society, Argentina, had to reach an extreme point of depravity, corruption, and poverty for someone to begin to listen to the counter-current ideas of the man who is now the president.

 

Bad ideas will continue to surface. What seems crazy today, the Left will make real tomorrow, perhaps as soon as next year. If no one prevents it, the lonely voices clamoring for postpartum abortion, for infanticide, or the trans-species lunatics demanding their right to be recognized as animals, will in 2024 have an idiot politician at the helm unable to detect that these are terrible ideas. The hope lies in the formation of a more ambitious, more intellectual, more didactic, and more courageous political class. And in gradually reconquering the media and the universities, so that at least terrible ideas can be confronted in the academic and media sphere with brilliant ones. I fear that this, too, will be an exclusively conservative undertaking.

 

It’s true that the Left is the driving force of much that ails us. Yet all that we have suffered this year, and are suffering today is also the consequence of several decades in which right-wing politicians repeated parrot-like that the only thing that people really worry about is the economy. They thereby justified their failure to contest seriously in ideological debates. Conservatives who have been too focused on the economy have forgotten to be present in other forums, and have wasted the opportunity to wage cultural war on non-economic ideas also in the academic sphere. Maybe that’s why university chairs of what were once the Humanities are today seeming more like an outing to the zoo. If next year is going to be any better than this one, then conservative politicians can no longer abdicate these debates. A (sad) spoiler for 2024: Bad ideas will continue to be among us. A (happy) wish for 2024: that idiot politicians lose important ideological debates on the streets, in classrooms, and in the media. We should be as insistent with our ideas as environmentalists, although without gluing our hands to the Mona Lisa — which, although it is artistically a little overrated, is not to blame.