Ever heard someone use the phrase “faith in humanity?” People tend to use the phrase as part of a sarcastic remark to the effect that someone has “lost their faith in humanity,” but this was never intended to imply that they ever had at any point in time an orientation of optimism about the world which could be called a “faith in humanity.” Yet it appears such a faith, though it has received no official recognition as a religion, performs a substantial service on the part of Progressives, who seek to shame and shun whoever dissents or invalidates these articles. Naturally, the heresy is always one of noticing too much about the world and being willing to say what would make women uncomfortable, and though one needn’t reject these propositions as per se impossible, suggesting that these doctrines are unevidenced, or worse that evidence to the contrary exists.

I cannot promise this is an exhaustive summation, but these do seem to be the most consistently held articles of faith by Progressives:

1)      Things get better for humanity over time

2)      Scientific inquiry will proceed indefinitely

3)      Technological progress shall never cease

4)      Civilization will always continue

5)      Society can be planned, but civilization cannot

6)      No group is intrinsically better than another

7)      Every problem has a solution

Note that each of these propositions may just in fact be true, there is just no evidence suggesting that. Indeed, it is very easy to speculate as to why each may be false; if humanity ever blew itself up in a nuclear armageddon, each of these would necessarily be false. It isn’t necessarily inevitable that mankind will blow himself up, but there certainly isn’t proof mankind won’t. Each article would be nice to believe, on some level, but when you stack them up against reality you find either at best no evidence in their favor, or at worst a lot of evidence to suggest they are almost certainly false. The most important article of faith, that things get better, is almost certainly false even if all the other articles are true.

Why does rejecting one of these, either explicitly or implicitly, generate such a harsh response by the Progressive? One is led to believe it is due to a kind of ignorance. Progressives are so busy putting on blinders which make them unable to see otherwise leads them to believe that, because they can avoid seeing it, moving the problem into their sight must be a shock as traumatic as walking in on your parents doing it. Only far more unnatural. The Progressive is almost pleased to be able to testify as to how blind they are to how things work, that their level of understanding proceeds no further than the mythical and myopic “everyman,” as though speaking from one’s place of intellectual and knowledged privilege is a kind of oppression. It is, ironically, the Progressive who chides you on your lack of academic achievement while blithely extolling the virtues of ignorance. Their knowledge is preferred because it is technical and impractical; our ruling class is effectively composed of technicians of ignorance.

When one analyzes the logical outcome of these ways of thinking in the American system of education, the results are unsurprising. Special education teachers are regularly required to have higher academic achievement than their “regular” education peers; one’s pursued major has relatively little predictive effect on their actual career; individuals with degrees are preferred over non-degreed individuals not for any demonstration in capabilities, but merely because the hiring decision is defensible in the case the individual screws up; we fret about teenagers having sex when teenagers having sex is normal (delaying marriage to one’s mid to late twenties is the historical anomaly). Do we value education as much as we do because education is so important, or because it has become the only permitted form of discrimination? Likewise, the relatively anonymizing and transient early years of (cultural) adulthood tend to be a meaningless blur of trying new experiences around general strangers, disconnected from anything signifying an underlying continuity of culture between generations and the self.

The Millennials are, in one sense, the most successful generation to ever have existed; our rates of education achievement are unparalleled in human history. The education system has been perfected to a degree never witnessed, and its impressive effect on informing the opinions of Millennials to a surprisingly restricted range of thought is the undoubted envy of Orwell’s hypothetical thought tyrant. This generation can recite and respect the Progressive articles of faith with a zealotry which would make the Pope blush in embarrassment. These articles of faith and the Millennials as a generation are inseparable, the triumph and victory of the Baby Boomers. Ours is an education after the end of history, and is thus secured from being mere indoctrination, from which it follows that any extremity of Progressive religious sentiment may be preached openly to forming minds without admonition. The activist and professor are more likely to agree than disagree, indicating how truly proletariat the ivory tower has become. The status quo of unrivalled status quo bashing persists as a substance of self-defining correctness and paranoia about the sentience of people who disagree, especially if that dissenting individual is white.

To be a Millennial! To be raised up in a religion just coming into its own, to be witness to the decline of an empire, to be certain all our ancestors were not only wrong but extremely evil, to be expected to succeed or fail for reasons that have no tracking to reality! Cause and effect have been broken from each other, obscured through the premise that reality occurs in a plane just outside our cognition which the anti-racists have access to through a mastery of chanting the correct voodoo and the one size fits all ad hominem. The Progressive articles of faith written into our hearts are become not only dry propositions concerning the operation of the world, but are the summun bonum, the very conditions of human flourishing outside which no happiness is possible (or may be permitted).