A former mentor of mine (who has now passed on, God rest his soul) taught me a very valuable lesson the first summer I was home from college. He said:

“Smith, son – your goal in life should be to simplify, not to complicate. Complication is obfuscation.”

He then clued me in to a proposition first developed by Friar William of Ockham in the 14th century. Sir Isaac Newton stated it as:

“We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.”

Occam’s Razor. The most common modern idiom is typically expressed as:

“When you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the simpler one is the better.”

Progressivism seeks to complicate. Why else has it become de rigueur on the left to confuse the most basic binary of all human existence – the destination of male or female?

Progressivism purports to be an ideology that love science. I was taught science was a tool to reduce complexity – to promote understanding – not to increase complexity and reduce understanding…but that was before science became politicized.

The reason progressives complicate is exactly what my mentor stated – to obfuscate. This action results in the conflicting position of eliminating rules while creating a need for even more rules. Think of the use of gender pronouns – it is no longer he or she (which have very clear demonstrable evidence), we are now in the world of hundreds of genders with multiple pronouns (variations of xe and xhe) none of which are bounded by rules of nature, only the preference of what the individual feels like being today.

A given human may feel – or believe – they are one gender or another, that much is true because the human brain and body are amazingly powerful things, but the fact remains, this only how you see yourself and not how nature – and in turn, the world – sees you. If you are biologically male and choose to identify as a female, more power to you – but you cannot force nature into your delusion. You are simply a male making a choice to live another way.

Progressives fancy themselves as empiricists but act as alchemists. Immanuel Kant (a rare pissant) was a true empiricist and in his “Critique of Pure Reason” wrote:

“If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. And if he succeeds in doing neither (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real.”

What Kant is NOT saying is that if a thing can be proven, because we want it to be something else, we should go with that.

Given that nothing really ever changes and what was old is new again, the comments coming from the progressives after the tragic Parkland shooting indicates 1) the absolute intent of the Democrats to lie about everything, 2) the total denial of objective reality, 3) their necessity to create an alternate reality where their incoherent and absurd thoughts and statements can be true, 4) the complete, absolute, total and all-encompassing mental illness that is progressivism and 5) that there is no length the lying progressives won’t go to gain and retain power.

George Orwell wrote “Animal Farm” and “1984” as warnings – cautionary tales of man’s descent into dystopian existence – not as instruction manuals for how to do it. Blackwhite, newspeak and thoughtcrimes are the order of the day. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.

To which I would add, “Complexity is Simplicity; Obfuscation is Clarity; Progressivism is Progress.”