The major trait that links those who have acted to destroy American society is hubris.
When I went off to college, I was not religiously observant. I never denied my Judaism, and I did the minimum, like fast on Yom Kippur and eat matzah during Passover. As I did my research first for a bachelor's degree and later for a Ph.D., both in biochemistry, I came to an inescapable conclusion. I am including a link here to a poster that used to hang in my apartment in Madison. It was put out by the Boehringer-Mannheim Company. It shows the biochemical pathways that were known at that time. I suggest you look at it. While you do not need to know the names of enzymes doing the reactions or the specific pathways listed, you probably will come away with one conclusion: what goes on in our cells is extremely complex. There are thousands of enzymes performing various necessary reactions to keep us healthy and functional. And what I concluded during my doctoral work was that there are two possibilities: it just happened naturally or I was peeking into the handiwork of God.
While some may try to invoke bacteria from outer space or some such thing as being the source of life on Earth, I think it fair that one can either choose a completely God-free path of material somehow appearing, making a transition from lifeless chemicals into something living, and then that living thing developing and evolving into all of the species in the world, or you can say that God created it all. It was actually the science that pushed me towards religious observance. When one looks at the incredible perfection of biological structure-function relationships, he has to be a fool to think that it all just happened randomly. My thesis project as an undergraduate at Harvard involved studying an enzyme in which a key portion was slightly modified by directed DNA mutation. Though the altered enzyme had only a small change in structure, its reaction rate dropped from 10,000 reactions per second to 3. One can—and must—conclude that either the world around us is simply the result of random events or the work of a truly extraordinary God. Again, we’ll skip the other theories. Is a human with his 30 trillion cells and enough DNA to go to the moon and back tens of thousands of times just an outcome of impersonal evolutionary events or a reflection of the divine?
The question is important, not so much for the science of it, but for what comes afterwards. We as humans tend to act humbly when we are in the presence of someone truly greater than we are. I would imagine that a novice paired with Tiger Woods would be embarrassed and ashamed at being in the presence of one of the greatest golfers ever to live. And the same would be for any such scenario—a new student sitting around with a Nobel laureate, for example. The modesty that is generated by the imbalance of abilities allows for the more junior to respectfully learn from the master. The same should be true for someone who believes in God more than just Oh My God when the cat falls off of the roof. If one looks at the world around us and concludes that there is a master Creator out there, then ideally the resulting behavior in the person involved would be based around modesty. Who am I in the presence of such greatness?
But what happens when people believe that they are the creators, that there is nobody above them? The result can be spelled Fauci, Gates, Comey or in a whole bunch of other combinations of letters. Tony Fauci and his cabal at NIH and China thought that they were so smart, so experienced, so good that they could play around with a natural virus with little to no chance of danger. Their hubris led to the death of millions and the destruction of societies from which we have yet to fully recover. Fauci, Gates, and the folks over at Pfizer and Moderna figured that you could inject a human with mRNA and what could go wrong? From death and disability to serious questions as to whether the vaccines actually prevented illness or seriously reduced its virulence, the god-scientists unleashed chemicals whose negative impacts on the human body have yet to be fully documented. We know of heart damage, primarily in younger men. Some have posited that the excess deaths seen post-Covid in Europe were an outcome of the new vaccines. A little dose of modesty might have saved millions from adverse effects. But modesty demands that one think that he is not at the top of the heap, and these highly-accredited scientists thought that there was no one better or smarter than they were. Kind of like Enron, “the smartest guys in the room”—until it all collapsed.
James Comey and his colleagues over at the FBI violated federal laws to destroy President Trump, because he was not their cup of tea. He gave a professor friend confidential notes which somehow made their way into The New York Times. General Milley violated his military oath and offered the Chinese a leg up should the US go to war with them. Fifty-one former intelligence officials knew that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real (the FBI at that time had had it for over a year). But their hatred of Trump and more honestly the folks who voted for him led them to brazenly lie to the American people and claim that the laptop was the work of Russian disinformation. From Lois Lerner at the IRS to the people who faked 2020 election ballots, when there is no God over their heads, then they become gods unto themselves. Anything is possible because everything is legitimate.
As Western societies trend to less religiosity, most people see religion kind of like dessert: if you want some, have it—but you really don’t need it. The problem is that technical virtuosity is dangerous without some moral guardrails. Imagine an incredibly powerful missile, but nobody can be quite sure in which direction it will travel. Its power is canceled out by the real threat that it will blow up the same people who sent it on its way. I am not saying that people have to be religious, but what we have seen—and continue to see—is the incredible hubris of people who think that they can control outcomes. When things get out of hand, they are nowhere to be found. The whole canard of fighting “disinformation” and “misinformation” is a crude attempt to remove unfavored ideas from the public square. They can’t win on merits, so they need to shut up the other side that has the truth and facts going for them.
There is a Yiddish expression that says, “Man plans and God laughs.” Our self-appointed elites have thought for decades that they can control the direction of society. Virtually everything they have touched has turned to lead. Covid was the most obvious example of their hubris getting the best of them. Who would be so foolish as to trust the Chinese with potentially lethal virus strains? When President Obama banned gain-of-function work in the U.S., Tony Fauci did not stand down. Rather, he farmed out the work out to the Bat Lady via EcoHealth Alliance. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is a very shiny, impressive building. But the Chinese do not share the same safety ethos that is driven into the American mind. It’s like the gleaming offices I visited in Northern China, whose toilet consisted of a big hole in the ground. From giving the Chinese dangerous work to do, to inventing rules of masking and shut-downs, from getting rid of useful drugs and giving us unknown vaccines—everything that Fauci and Company did was based on hubris.
One has to be a big believer to think that the world just made itself. A little modesty would be in order from those who know a lot less than they think.
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