Prosperity can be the very cause of decline

Submitted by Prashant (United States), Dec 23, 2021 at 01:46

Dear Dr Pipes, The above letter from your reader Stas of Ukraine is worth reading for everyone. Our younger generation who is fast drifting toward the political left, in particular, must read and reflect upon it.

When a society becomes prosperous, the beneficiaries of the prosperity are usually are not the people who worked to bring that prosperity. Often times, it is their children. So, it is difficult for the young people to appreciate that prosperity is not something that happens by accident. Young people are likely to come up with easy explanations of prosperity.

Interestingly, this is one reason why the knee-jerk leftists get easy support from their young constituents. An American kid going to an Ivy league school, may easily forget that his/her privilege is a direct result of the correct decisions that his parent took for the decades. He may even less realize that his privilege resulted from the correct decisions that the generations prior to him took for decades.

More importantly, the young people may easily be misguided by the leftist propaganda that seems to suggest that all prosperity and all misfortune results from the past 'injustice' inflicted by one group upon another.

Young Israeli kids under the leftist onslaught might completely ignore the possibility that the misery of the Palestinian Muslims resulted from three generations of stone pelting and not from anything else.

The leftist argument is easy to understand and propagate. But it is convenient and false. Rebutting it is difficult. This is why we need to speak. And, we need to repeat ourselves over and over. That is why I am writing in support of the reader Stas.

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