The evil behind the arrogance

| 3:00 pm EDT September 16, 2024
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As with many of you, I was in high school when I first learned Newton’s three laws of motion. I was fine with the latter two, it was the first one that gave me trouble. A body in motion remains in motion? That seemed completely counterintuitive to me. You throw a ball and it falls to the ground and rolls to a stop, does it not?

Initially, I responded to Newton’s proposition with my knee jerk prejudices. Now, there was nothing intrinsically wrong with that. Our experience should play some role in how we negotiate life and decide what is true and what is not. No, my error would have been in rejecting it out of hand and refusing to listen to any explanation, refusing to understand that the ball comes to a stop only because it is acted on by outside forces, like gravity and friction. Besides, I didn’t want to flunk the class.

Isaac Newton was a transcendental genius whose intellectual playground was the whole universe, and in the vast majority of the universe a body in motion does in fact remain in motion. Had I been raised on the International Space Station, that would have been intuitively obvious. But even though I was raised on good old planet earth, I set aside my prejudices anyway and accepted it as true, initially. (I should point out that Newton was something of a jerk who had lots of human prejudices. It was only in physics that he was usually right.)

Had I decided to reject what tens of millions of other students, scientists, engineers and Newton himself knew to be true, my principal sin would not have been stupidity, it would have been supreme hubris. That is the chief problem with prejudice, it seems to me. If it was a simple case that some people are bigots because they are merely stupid that would be easier (though by no means easy) to accept. Our chief enemy isn’t stupidity alone. Our principal enemy is arrogance, and the wilful ignorance it creates.

Bigotry isn’t only influenced by our flawed, provincial and often misleading experiences. It is also influenced by what we want to believe, what we fervently hope to be true. Human beings are capable of believing anything, even that which defies the logic of their own experience, if the thing they believe is a thing they want to be true. That is a common mistake that many of us recognise within ourselves. Unfortunately, it is also a common mistake that many of us are blind to.

I am now about to say something that may, on the surface, sound like a prejudice that I believe merely because I wish it to be true. But I have evidence to back it up. It is this: I believe that MAGA Republicans are deeply overrepresented by people who are deficient in humility and the ability to see beyond their own confirmation biases. That is why so many of them are so easily manipulated by obvious bullshit, like the absurd notion that Haitian immigrants are eating the pets of the people of Springfield, Ohio.

I further believe that the degree of willingness to accept these prejudices is evil. That is why they (MAGA Republicans) are being easily manipulated by the likes of JD Vance, who wrote on the social media site X, “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

Now I know perfectly well that Vance doesn’t really believe this nonsense. He repeats it because he knows many people will believe it. They believe it because they want it to be true. The disingenuous notion that it’s “sarcasm” or offered in the spirit of parody is also a complete lie. The motivation for posting this horrendous lie is power.

Now, it’s also quite possible that Vance (who is merely parroting Donald Trump anyway) has done his evil intentions far more harm than good. This latest propaganda gambit could in fact do mischief to the already failing Trump/Vance campaign. But that is a subtlety lost on Springfield’s Haitian immigrants, who are experiencing personal slurs, death threats and even physical attacks as a direct result of Vance’s and Trump’s hateful rhetoric.

This latest, hamfisted attempt at a power grab by the Trump/Vance campaign has real and tragic consequences for its victims. The peaceful, law-abiding Haitian immigrants of Springfield don’t find it funny. They can’t afford to take the high, cynical view that it’s just another instance of politics at its nastiest. Their lives and the lives of their children are being put at risk by these monsters who insouciantly practise stochastic terror without regard for the human lives that terror destroys.

So this isn’t a joke. It’s just more MAGA Republican evil, brought about by their wilful ignorance and inability to see beyond the myopic boundaries of their own bloody-minded biases. In the end we wrestle more with arrogance than mere stupidity. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.