Unthinkable truths

If you told the average person that you believed with near 100% certainty that intelligent alien life exists in the universe, they would consider you crazy. Yet the truth is that our universe is so incredibly vast, so full of Earthlike planets, that the odds that intelligent life only emerged here are low enough to be indistinguishable from zero.

Yet the near-certainty of intelligent life is, to most people, an unthinkable truth. It’s something that many people, perhaps even our entire society, just cannot accept.

Our world is full of unthinkable truths. Indeed, our society is built upon them. We can find examples of them in our taboos and social mores, or in the unspoken things that everyone “just knows.” In order for civilization to function properly, there are certain things we must all agree on, such as the idea that all men are created equal, or that we all have certain rights. It’s easier and more efficient to just program people not to accept some ideas than it is to encourage them to examine everything, and hope that truth prevails.

For Americans, one of our most unthinkable truths is the idea that our constitutional rights and freedoms are fragile, and can all be taken away. Those of us who were born in this country don’t realize that the United States is, in many ways, an aberration. We take it for granted that the world around us will continue the way it always has, and that our nation will endure. Anything else is unthinkable.

But how many nations have endured? How many republics have survived the crucible of history? Rome barely lasted a thousand years, and the republic was dead long before the empire reached its greatest glory. The Middle East is full of the bones of dead empires, from the Hittites and Babylonians to the British and the French. Even the most powerful dynasties ultimately fall into ruin, and the periods of relative freedom are the exception in history, rather than the rule.

I got into an argument on Facebook (yes, I’m back on Facebook, though I haven’t decided whether to stay back permanently) where the other person said, quite unironically:

We live in an Era in which our rights are secured by the free dissemination of information; not through the ability to send rounds down range… the fact that you can type those words is proof enough that [you don’t need an AR-15].

As a student of history, this argument strikes me as obscenely absurd. There are numerous countries in the world today that have access to “the free dissemination of information” via the internet just as we do, but are horribly repressive even by historical standards. In China, for example, political prisoners are held in concentration camps and harvested for organs. In Syria and Iraq, ISIS burns people in cages and carries off young non-Muslim girls as sex slaves. In Canada and Europe, you can be imprisoned or fined for merely saying things on social media that the government deems “right-wing.”

The mere existence of Liberty does not guarantee its preservation. The only way that any people have ever remained free is by cultivating a culture of self-sufficiency. Without the right to bear arms, self-sufficiency is impossible, because it forces people to depend on the government for their own self-defense and preservation of their Liberty.

I’ve blogged before about why I need a gun. This post is largely a continuation of those thoughts. It’s unthinkable to us here in the United States that our country may one day fall, but if history is our teacher then that fall is inevitable. It may not come for another thousand years, but it may also come within the next ten.

Truth prevails—even the unthinkable truth.