Anthony Stokes was a black juvenile delinquent who needed a heart transplant in 2013. Initially the hospital refused to provide him with a transplant because he had a history of committing crimes, and had a “history of non-compliance” with the directives of his doctors regarding his health. This meant he was not a good candidate for a heart transplant over others who would actually take the gift of a heart transplant seriously.
Of course, once the leftist media got a hold of this story, the hospital was criticized for being “mean” and “racist”. The hospital caved to pressure, and reversed its decision, giving Stokes a heart. Since there are only a limited number of human organs available for transplant, this meant that someone else had to wait, and possibly die, because they gave a heart to the less-deserving Stokes. (The fact that we have limited organs for transplants, which could be solved with a free-market in organs, where people would be paid, while alive, to contractually sell their organs when they unexpectedly die in the future, is a separate issue. We can argue about that at another time. Right now, the system is what it is.)
What did Anthony Stokes do with his new lease on life? Go out and commit more crimes, of course. About two years after he got his heart transplant, he committed an armed robbery of an 81 year old woman in her house, shot at her, and then ran from the police in a high speed chase. During the course of the chase, he crashed into a pole, and died. (Presumably, he decided he was going to get his “reparations” through armed robberies.)
Our society is a society dying of altruism. What is altruism? It’s not just “helping others”. Its fundamentally about sacrificing those who are good to those who are evil:
“The injunction ‘don’t judge’ is the ultimate climax of the altruist morality which, today, can be seen in its naked essence. When men plead for forgiveness, for the nameless, cosmic forgiveness of an unconfessed evil, when they react with instantaneous compassion to any guilt, to the perpetrators of any atrocity, while turning away indifferently from the bleeding bodies of the victims and the innocent—one may see the actual purpose, motive and psychological appeal of the altruist code. When these same compassionate men turn with snarling hatred upon anyone who pronounces moral judgments, when they scream that the only evil is the determination to fight against evil—one may see the kind of moral blank check that the altruist morality hands out.” (“For the New Intellectual“, Ayn Rand; http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/altruism.html )
There is more I could say about this story. I could talk about how we coddle black criminals, because it is considered “racist” to hold them accountable for their actions, and thereby infantilize and endanger other blacks as well as whites. It’s also a story about how “black culture“, by which I mean the culture of a significant segment of black society, needs to be changed, both for the sake of black people and our own. It’s also a story about how many, many, many needlessly guilty white people, especially the “liberals” and “progressives”, are unwilling to judge and hold black people accountable for their actions. But, I think, at root, it is a story about altruism run amok, and not just with respect to race relations. Until more people explicitly recognize the value of their own lives, and chose a set of reality-oriented principles for living their lives, and for living in a rational society, which includes the willingness to judge and recognize a criminal when you see one, it’ll only get worse.
