Wat Peter Singer is voor het vegatarianisme en dierenrechten is Michael Shellenberger voor sociale en politiek-ideologische culturele vraagstukken. Zijn nieuwe boek, met de veelzeggende titel San Fransicko, heeft als nog veelzeggender ondertitel Why progressives ruin cities. Wat eigenlijk al zoveel zeggend is dat onderstaande quoutes uit een interview met het Zwitserse blad Schweizer Monat bijna overbodig zijn. Maar niet minder waar.
“In human history, we’ve never recorded so much prosperity and freedom as under Western civilization. Our success has led us to forget that it depends on a material reality. We’ve become ideological – lost in media, lost in a kind of dream world. This started well before social media.
The downtowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles or San Diego have all been taken over by large open drug scenes. People overdose and die at shocking rates from smoking fentanyl and meth. One block from Civic Center, the main subway station in San Francisco, a 16-year-old girl was raped while she was overdosing. This depravity, this breakdown of civilization is occurring in the heart of our cities. These cities that moralized to the rest of the US about the need for walkable, livable cities have destroyed the ability to walk safely in the cities.
Feces on the sidewalks, tent encampments, people acting like zombies because of hard drugs: These things are not the consequence of poverty. They’re the consequence of decadence and wealth.
To some extent, you would say this is the end of American civilization: America has succumbed to entropy, it has turned on itself in the way that all empires do.
We must deal with the drug scenes and the destruction of our cities before we can move on to our other huge problems. A 33 percent math proficiency rate and a less than 50 percent reading proficiency rate in our schools – those are numbers with which civilizations die.”
The Democrats have been dominating all branches of government for years. What are they doing wrong?
“It’s the idea that you can divide the world into victims and oppressors, and that people are frozen in those identities by nature of their identity or experience. To victims, everything should be given and nothing required. Furthermore, progressives think they must take revenge against the so-called victimizers by taking from them and redistributing to the victims. This victim ideology is central to the destruction of our cities.”
