Ceaseless Stasis

At the beginning of his essay All America’s Problems are Leftist Problems, Daniel Greenfield observes quite accurately that

The problem with solving problems is that once they are solved, no one needs the solver anymore. The better kinds of problems are recurring problems that ensure customer retention, employing plumbers, locksmiths and police officers, but the best kind are the completely unsolvable problems.

And those are the only kinds of problems that the Left wants to solve.

Given enough human ingenuity and technological development, most problems can conceivably be addressed and that is why the Left has to contrive to make them unsolvable by either causing the problem (homelessness), defining it in such a way that it is inherently unsolvable (equity), defining the inappropriate problem while obscuring the actual problem (gun violence) or inventing fake problems (global warming) that can never be solved because they don’t exist in the first place.

Why create unsolvable problems? They’re a virtually infinite source of money and power.

Similar thoughts about race have occurred to me in the past. We had largely internalized the message of MLK and were, as a society, at a point around twenty years ago where I could believe that we were light years ahead of the rest of the world in race relations. But over the course of the last few administrations, political actors have revitalized that potent polarizing concept with “microaggressions,” CRT, and sloppy revisionist history.

While disappointing, it is not surprising that such an inherently galvanizing organizational tool is too valuable to be left seeming tractable.

There are a plethora of other stubbornly unresolvable problems that we must live with without any foolhardy hope of lasting resolution.

Islam is, by its own creed, incompatible with Western civilization, but neither one is likely going away.

Other religions have their absolutist adherents, and few will change their beliefs.

Socialism demands a universal acceptance of its tenets, or it doesn’t work (hint: it doesn’t work). Wherever it’s tried, it has had to be a hybrid to even exist in the real world as a coercive economic situation under the thumb of an insular and privileged ruling class.

Israel and the ‘Palestinian’ groups opposed to it cannot make peace because being a ‘Palestinian’ includes a demand that Israel cease to exist.

With these unresolvable situations come devotees pushing untenable positions, and all the rest of us can ultimately do is resist.

Because those pushing untenable solutions don’t commonly care about the rights of their opponents, and ceding universal power to any authority has a poor track record in human history, the foresight of the U.S. founders is appreciated.

Forging a tetrahedral form of government, with the inherent checks and balances from separating powers between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches and the citizenry (Bill of Rights), they created a system that allows for representative democratic governance while both protecting the rights of whomever is outnumbered in the latest elections and acknowledging that disagreement would be perpetual.

The beginning of this piece launched with the Left’s unresolvable problems. What problems of that sort are of the right?

I’ve read that First Amendment and Second Amendment absolutists are of the ilk blocking resolution to the questions associated with their constitutionally recognized rights.

Abortion is another issue that will likely never be resolved to everybody’s satisfaction.

It’s never getting sorted out; the best we can probably hope for is creating or maintaining some portion of the environment in which we can live.