This, which I ran across on Twitter the other day, is a profound insight, that has more than earned a permalinked spot on my Quotes page. I have witnessed its demonstration in no uncertain terms, watching absurd nonsense that we failed to reject clearly enough, and perhaps laughed off with the assumption that it would simply go away, instead become set in stone as a foregone cultural assumption. The assertion that someone else’s hurt feelings or fragile sensibilities should trump your right to speak freely and honestly. The notion of a “right” to “free” healthcare, of a “fair share” of what another has labored to earn. The exactly inverted idea that capitalism enslaves but the state somehow liberates. “Progressive” used as a casual synonym for actual, desirable progress. All of it nonsense that must be stridently fought, and all of it now what you and I are naturally assumed to believe.

This is an apt reminder of the price we will pay in the future for ignoring such absurdities now, for not taking them seriously enough to mount a decisive counter-offensive:

The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other — until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.

— Ayn Rand ∞