Saturday, April 25, 2009

Liberals are Cylons

Battlestar Galactica finished up its season. A modern morality play if ever there was one. All the characters were boringly normal – only more so.

Cylons are artificial intelligence run amok. Why artificial intelligence in the most extreme of computing capacity would choose to redesign itself in human form is beyond me. However, it makes perfect sense in this morality play. Cylons represent all our fears of computers and machines taking over. It is as if the HAL 9000 from 2001 Space Odyssey had flow into the black monolith – and then returned.

And just as Cylons are the epitome of computer design, with all its computing capacity and instant logic, so too are liberals the epitome of philosophy and political theory. Liberalism is a byproduct of education as surely as hygiene is a byproduct of our learning of infectious agents and contamination.

The ultimate liberal schema, Communism, proved to be a failure. The best five-year plans in all the planned economies of the communist world with their absolute control of all aspects of the economy could never compete with the chaos of free markets. The fruits of chaos were more bountiful than planned fruits.

And yet, liberals keep trying. Somehow there must be a way to take all our knowledge and philosophies of how we should live and apply them as diligently as we industrialize our other technological innovations. Like Cylons with all the computing bandwidth wanting to be human, liberals seem to believe they can concoct some perfect system in which everything is equal.

If liberals are the Cylons of BSG, conservatives are the humans. Emotional and irrational to a fault, they struggle against the Cylons for not only existence but a richer life. The humans prefer to decide things based on gut feeling instead of intellectual judgment. And like humans possessing some inherit ability that Cylons want to obtain, conservatives with their free market economies obtain life styles for everyone that are richer than the best of the planned economies can provide for all.

Liberals are so Cylons.