Radical Change Prompts Hostile Reaction

Human nature resists change.  We are comfortable with things as they are, not necessarily because they are in some sense good but because they are known.  We are skeptical that change will produce improvement.  But if the change seems modest or incremental, our resistance is not likely to be strong.  The fight isn’t deemed worth the struggle over what is seen as small differences from the way things were.

However, beware if the change is seen as radical.  Human nature causes the digging in of heels.

This fact, with myriad examples throughout history, is ignored repeatedly with disastrous results for either the proponents of drastic change or those subject to it.

This willful ignorance of reality is so typical of the left since its adherents deny the intractability of human nature.  Prominent examples are the French and communist revolutions.  In the former, the hopes for liberty and equality ended soon after it began in a reign of terror followed by the reign of Napoleon.  In the latter case, the communists soon recognized that they had only one option to failure.  Fierce opposition was crushed by force.

There is a reason why the phrase “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is a truism.

On our home front, a recent example involves domestic policy:  Obamacare.  If the Democrats had proceeded incrementally by requiring that insurance coverage be provided to those with pre-existing conditions and left it at that for now resistance would have been minimal.  But radicals don’t see the need to be patient.  They’re not evolutionary in their thinking.

Another current example of such thinking is seen in Egypt.  One doesn’t think of the Muslim Brotherhood – Islamists – as leftists, but they are radicals and equally unmindful of the virtues of moderation.  Their efforts to revolutionize a strongly secular society generated, as should have been expected, sharp hostility which led to their ouster. 

It is ironic, isn’t it, that leftists would be more successful if they were more conservative in their approach to change?  

We Conservatives can be grateful that they’re not.