One of the most stunning situations in the world right now is that Reki Kawahara, quite possibly the best author on Earth, has made the extravagant claim that all people are exactly equal at birth, that genes have zero influence on a person's life whatsoever, and only chance causes people to deviate one from another as they grow up.
This is absurd beyond belief. Endless twin studies have shown that identical twins are more closely similar to each other, even separated at birth, than fraternal twins raised together. The same similarity exists across the board -- biological siblings are more closely similar to each other than adopted children, cousins are more similar to each other than two total strangers, and so on. It is unquestionable, according to all scientific studies, that genes do matter and do have an influence on your adult life IQ, behavior, personality, bodily health, beauty, athleticism, etc. Even the most liberal of liberals rarely question the concept that biological traits can be passed down from parent to child. Their only unscientific claim is that this phenomenon only accounts for individual differences within a group, but can't account for any statistical differences between groups. Only Reki Kawahara has gone off onto this flat-out religious limb with no scientific data supporting his claim whatsoever.
One does not come through this conclusion via careful study of the data and experiments that have been done on the issue. There is absolutely no data, none, that supports his claim. Furthermore, no anecdotal observations could ever lead you to this conclusion, because it is the most ridiculously wrongheaded idea in the world. Of course biological children are more similar to their parents than adopted children (who actually have a zero percent correlation between their adoptive parents on important issues like IQ). Of course identical twins are more similar to each other than fraternal twins. Of course extended family members, even if you've never met them before in your life, have more in common with each other than total strangers. In other words, he is not making this claim after a good faith effort at getting to the truth. He's making this claim in the face of all evidence and all personal observations he's ever had in his life. He's saying the direct opposite of what Nature and God has been telling him ever since he opened his eyes to see the world in front of him.
Why would he do this? Why would he deliberately lie about what he believes? Or, even worse, how could he so mangle his own five senses and his common sense to somehow truly believe something so ludicrous, with absolutely no evidence supporting his claim? Either way, whether he's lying to us or just lying to himself, refusing to believe through clever double-think what he must really know to be the truth, he's doing a great affront to Truth by publishing inside his beloved books read by tens of millions of people such vile falsehoods that could lead so many young people who trust him astray. This is evil, and it will lead to great evil in the future, because anyone who bases their public policy on this nostrum will lead their country to ruin. If Japan really believed Reki Kawahara, who says that all differences between people were random and that one guy, before he is born, is just as likely to be the next Einstein as the next, then they would have to abandon their current closed-door immigration policy and invite in all the billions of African children about to be born (according to the UN, four billion of them are coming in the next century) to the Japanese mainland. This would mean the destruction of the last good country and last hope left to Earth. The amount of harm Reki's propagandist lies could cause is cataclysmic. It's existential. He could be responsible for the end of the world. Lying in order to destroy the world is clearly about as evil as one can get. He would make a perfect supervillain no different from the ones Superman and Green Lantern are always fighting in the sky.
And yet, this evil beyond all belief writer is good when it comes to virtually anything else. He says many wonderful, true, and lovely things on all other topics inside his books. As far as I know, in his personal life, he hasn't harmed or demeaned anyone or anything. He's created portraits for amazingly heroic characters in Kirito, Alice, Asuna, Sinon, Suguha and so on, perhaps the most heroic men and women to ever grace the eyes of fiction. How can the same person be so wrong on one issue, so destructive and evil in one field, while being so insightful and generous on all others? How can the same breast harbor a heart of pure blight and darkness right alongside one of pure light and love?
It's obvious that people are not as unitary existences as we would like to believe. We value truth sometimes and fight very hard for it sometimes, while other times discarding it in favor of other things and trampling all over it. So at different times in the same person's life, sometimes only seconds apart from each other, they can be both the champion of Truth and its nemesis. We can act with amazing love and self-sacrifice one day, and then inscrutably change our minds the next and be utterly selfish and malignant to the very same people we helped the day before. We can heroically go on diets and lose ten pounds, and then a month later have regained twenty. I can't put down people for the moments in their life when they are championing the truth, losing weight or altruistically giving themselves to others. At those moments, they are indeed good people, regardless of everything that has come before or will come afterwards. In a way, people are so full of so many multiple personalities, are so naturally schizophrenic, that it's impossible to blame them for their own hypocrisies and endless betrayals. Reki Kawahara cares about the Truth when it comes to the validity of the right to self-defense, but he just plain doesn't when it comes to the science of genetics. How is this possible to reconcile? In principle, if you care about the truth, that should extend to all truths in all fields, not just some narrow topic you care most about personally. And yet people are not principled, they aren't acting on principle, but instead are just emotionally flailing about and out of pure chance happen to sometimes match up with what is objectively right and just and good while usually being completely out of synch with said firmament.
People who do what is right out of principle, by first identifying what is good in the world and then adhering to it, are vanishingly thin. Either they're unwilling to identify the good (which requires courage to go against the mainstream), or they don't have the willpower to adhere to it (which requires a stoic resistance to all temptations and insane amounts of pain tolerance to reach the other side of goals that are obstructed at every turn). For all I know, there are only a handful of them scattered across the entire world. But strangely enough, a meta-person, who does not exist inside any one person's skull, but patched together through the emotionally driven good deeds of billions of bad people across the world, can easily achieve this level of sainthood. If you take the best efforts and the best insights of all the billions of people who themselves are flawed, but in this one schizophrenic moment displayed stellar qualities that would not have to flinch before the face of God, you can actually have good people in the world after all. Not identifiable people. Not anyone with a name. But purely conceptual people who, through their combined efforts, manage to keep the world on the right track all the same. You could call them our guardian angels, in a way they're a divine miracle we ourselves aren't worthy of having, but somehow luck was on our side and we got them anyway. Even though our principles can't carry us nearly far enough to make a good world, our random thrashing about, combined together in the nexus of society, lurches through to progress all the same.
Because of Reki Kawahara's defense of self-defense, one patch of a perfect being was sewn. And because of Charles Murray's Bell Curve, another patch was sewn. Charles Murray never arrived at the truths Reki Kawahara did, and Reki Kawahara never arrived at the truths Charles Murray did, but arguments with the force of the truth behind them are stronger and more compelling than arguments drowning in a sea of lies, so overall people only remember what Reki Kawahara has to say about self defense and people only remember what Charles Murray has to say about IQ. Through a sort of evolutionary force, a survival of the fittest influence that reality imposes upon all ideas, only those concepts which ring true are ultimately adopted by the public at large, so truth can succeed in a world even when everyone else is lying and in complete opposition to the lone single truth teller. Because reality reinforces what the truth teller is saying, he can turn the entire world upside down, like Galileo did with Jupiter's moons. In a way, it means that liars, despite their clearly evil intentions, are ineffectual when it comes to actually doing harm to the world, and good prevails naturally because God is on our side.
It's often said that it's easier to destroy than do good, but actually the reverse is the case. Any good thing your society does is reinforced by evolution, by God, into a mighty and irresistible force. Whereas evil devours itself, weakens itself into oblivion, and disappears from the face of the Earth almost as quickly as it appeared. People who live by lies just end up acting like fools and losing any and all competitions. Criminals just end up locked up. Degenerates just end up impoverished and die early deaths. Evil intentions are everywhere and control virtually everyone at all times, but those evil, warped brains are stymied at every turn when it comes to actually making the world a living Hell -- because the first thing they hurt is themselves, to the point that they can't even influence anyone else. Can you imagine how many people said 'hunting is better than farming' before that one lone farming community decided to try farming instead of hunting? How many millions of people were evil in a row before one good person appeared? And yet the whole world ended up farming and all the hunters are gone. Why? Because farming was better than hunting in reality, so the conceptual war gave a million-fold multiplier to the lone farmer's voice and divided by a million the strength of the wreckers who wanted to stop the farmers by keeping their food supply so sparse that they could never gain the numbers of organization needed to oppose the farming community.
In this way, miraculously, even though one lone good person is surrounded by evil people who directly oppose him at every turn, trying to foil everything he says and does at all times, he still winds up on top. Whether it's Galileo and the Copernican theory, or Darwin and the theory of evolution, or Charles Murray and the genetic basis of IQ, they always win in the end because their arguments work in the real world whereas their opponents' arguments don't. Truth tellers are never weaker than liars because they have God at their backs. God is a better ally than a billion fools. And you can, as a single person, whipsaw between the position of being God's prophet or the ridiculous barking fool who's trying to drown out that prophet's voice, often many times in a single day. And yet the good you did as God's prophet is multiplied by a million, because God lends his strength to your words and deeds during those moments, while the evil you do is divided by a million, because the inherent weakness of evildoing undermines and sabotages itself to being a pale shadow of its original intentions. Muslims, Aztecs, and Mongols may all have wished to paint the world red with the blood of their foes, but their own actions made them too weak to actually carry out those plans. Hobbling their economies, refusing to accept technological advances, infighting over petty things, suppressing their own best and brightest and discarding the advantages of a meritocracy, in so many ways evil bleeds itself dry that all a good person need do is blow on them and they all topple like so many blades of grass.
Which means that even if you're a dyed in the wool demon, and even if 999 times out of 1,000 you're doing the wrong thing and thinking the wrong thing, you'll still overall do more good in the world than evil because the impactfulness of that one good thing you did in a 1,000 will outweigh the stupidity of all your other decisions put together. Which is why the world is now a better place than ever before, even though the vast majority of people have been evil since the very beginning of time and still to this day exhibit all the same stupid flaws as before. Lurching towards paradise, a meta-sentient being is propelling us to a place none of us ourselves deserves to be, who are diligently trying to recreate Hell with all our strength every day. Divine providence on full display.
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