Why Charlie?
With so much video evidence of the completely banal and common sensical ideas Charlie Kirk supported, what was it that motivated such hatred?
An old friend of mine called me out of the blue recently. She was in tears of confusion. She couldn’t understand why so many people were praising such an evil man. That “evil man” was Charlie Kirk.
My friend is a religious person who professed her desire to love and accept everybody, but she was just deeply confused by the situation. She is another victim of popular lies. The hardest part of this situation is how many intelligent people are victims of this process. It’s more difficult for highly intelligent people to admit that they could be so heavily influenced by lies. Much of their moral framework is caught up in the lies themselves.
But why Charlie Kirk? What was it that so deeply threatened his opponents?
We could go on and on about video clips that without context sound controversial, but I tend to think about what lies underneath all of that. What motivates a person to take something out of context in the first place? With so many people out there in the world, why Charlie? What is the fundamental idea that he held that irked people so deeply?
Charlie’s message could be summed up like this: “I aim to love and accept everyone; however, some life choices are better than others. Let me discuss with you why I believe some choices are better than others, and I’ll give you an opportunity to tell me what you think.” That’s it.
But there is something fundamentally problematic for leftist progressives in Charlie’s message that cannot exist within their ideology: the idea that some ideas are better than others.
Hierarchy as Progressive Kryptonite
Hierarchy is progressive kryptonite. Just mentioning the word around them can cause a rash. Their aim is to create a radically egalitarian society where all people are materially and socially equal. I have one cow, you have one cow. I have two kids, you have two kids. I have twenty dollars, you have twenty dollars.
Their idea of equality is equality of outcome (which is why they use the term equity) and social status, which cannot exist if any hierarchy of ideas or value exists. (I’d bet $20 the level of agreeableness on the five-factor personality scale for these people is through the roof.)
This is why they are always talking about privilege as if it’s a dirty sin for which they constantly need to repent. “My advantage puts me in a hierarchical position as compared to you, and for that, I am eternally sorry.” So when Charlie would say things like “two-parent homes are better for children than single-parent homes,” regardless of the mountains of evidence to support that, it creates a firestorm for leftist, woke, progressive types, who aim for an abolition of all hierarchy, which includes a hierarchy of ideas.
Free Will and the Necessity of Hierarchy
But humanity—free will specifically—cannot exist without hierarchies.
Anytime you choose to do one thing over another, you are creating a hierarchy of value. The fact that you are reading these words instead of doing a million other things is evidence that you value reading these words, in this moment, over whatever else it is you could be doing. Every time you go to work instead of turning off your phone and lying in bed all day is evidence that you value what it is you get out of work more than what you would get out of lying in bed all day. Every time we choose to be with one person over the opportunity for different people throughout our lives, we create a hierarchy that places the value of that individual person above any other opportunities we have forgone.
All Charlie was doing was pointing out that he values some life choices over others, and encouraged others to see why those choices were best so that they too could make similar choices. People are free to disagree with those choices, and were specifically invited to disagree with them, but they were still framed by Charlie as choices. To anyone who sees hierarchies of ideas as inherently evil, or who sees the world as determined not by free will at all but by a person’s environment to a point that they have no real choice, this is too much to bear.
Not only is it kryptonite to those ideas, it is like a wet blanket for anyone who thinks shaping society will shape humans into what they should be. And that wet blanket is a barrier to the consuming fire of progression that must be eliminated.