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How Neocon David Brooks Gets Human Nature (and Everything Else) Completely Wrong
Guest post by Glenn W. Smith.
Humans are a brutish, belligerent and evil species, rotten to the core of our incorrigible selves, according to New York Times columnist and neo-conservative propagandist David Brooks. We should consider ourselves lucky to have committed, self-sacrificing leaders like, I guess, David Brooks to help build and enforce the commands of the "strong, order-imposing state" Brooks says we need in his column, "Human Nature Redux," of February 18, 2007.
Given the number of downright brutish and belligerent misrepresentations of science and history in the column, the piece is a kind of paradoxical self-proof of Brooks' view of human nature. That is the contradiction at the heart of this gloomy, Hobbesian view of human nature: If humans are not to be trusted, why in heavens name would we...
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