Smug Social Theories Not Sufficiently Supported by Reality

It only took a decade, and we had to put up with a lot of verbal abuse, but a few Europeans are finally getting at a tiny piece of George Bush’s reasoning:

The revolutionary spirit sweeping the Middle East has provoked as much fear as joy in the West. Der Standard questions why is it that we doubt that Arabs have the will or the ability to be the masters of their own destiny.

The only flaw in it, is that the author uses it to hector specific people about generic assumptions about those empty headed ”national attitudes” that all too many Europeans think make every individual tick, in highly bigoted fashion.

Perhaps the Internet and social media are having a much more dramatic impact on the general consciousness than we have assumed till now. The so-called experts really know nothing, because there has been too much flux in the past one or two years, and learned expertise often falls back on a long history – which may have been dramatically overtaken by recent social modernisation processes without the "experts" having even noticed.

If you can wade through all of that, what really means anything in all of that muck is that these “experts” that those in a newspaper induced lethargy are in are nothing more than people with opinions that they borrowed from one another in a sad bid to seem relevant, but with a pinch of memorable controversy. In reality they’re sheep: not only would the idea of will for individuals not square with their bloodlust for revolutions LED by people with attitudes that they like, but they suddenly seem surprised that all of their talking about Twitter and Facebook is more about wanting to predict the methods others use, rather that understanding that they don’t especially need them.

It must be painful when an impoverished, oppressed population doesn’t follow your script – when all you really need to do is understand natural human will, and defend individual freedoms.