You are Enough
Installment 6 — The Dogma of Enough
Just take a side — that was enough.
Dogma became the new rigor. Democrats are evil. Conservatives are bigots. Science is a hoax. Political Correctness — diversity and tolerance — is salvation. No reading required. No study, no nuance, no patience with uncertainty. Just repeat the line, wear the colors, raise the banner. That was discipline. That was enough.
And it was attractive. Dogma relieved us of exertion. We didn’t need to weigh evidence, examine history, or read anything outside our feeds.
We could be lazy learners and still think ourselves virtuous.
But in trading discipline for dogma, we became blind to abuse. To demagoguery.
We overlooked the twisting of the very moral codes we claimed as sacred — the small-d democracy we swore by, the inheritance of the children of Abraham. As long as our dogma stayed intact, we pretended the abuse didn’t exist.
The resentment deepened. Some resented the classics, without ever knowing what those disciplines could or couldn’t teach. They didn’t know what they didn’t know. They didn’t know what good schools once compelled students to weigh before they judged, how to wrestle with uncertainty before they legislated, at what depth to learn before they crusaded.
But it was both sides. The professors — juiced on their own Kool-Aid — didn’t know enough to recognize how their brittle doctrines threatened decay. They couldn’t see that replacing learning with identity rituals left students defenseless against backlash. They were too intellectually invested in wokeness to notice the rot.
And so went the truths that actually mattered — that human beings were driving the climate toward ruin, that civil liberties are fragile and must be defended, that corruption eats the soul of a nation, that transparency is as vital as air, that history can’t be revised to placate either party. These were hard lessons. They demanded humility, discipline, repentance. Instead we handed students dogmas and tuition-sucking distractions: DEI as an all-sufficient gospel, “disciplines” like grievance studies marketed as wisdom.
In the end, of course, so-called “principled” positions weren’t enough — whether against the woke or for them. Validation isn’t fruit. Position isn’t product. And we never advised our students that marketing majors can only matter if there is a real service, a real creation, a real thing to sell. People — engineers, tool and die makers, miners, linesmen, farmers, grain elevator builders — had to produce it!
When the world finally came apart, it was the true craftsmen and -women who had been essential all along. They were never glamorous, but they were fruitful. And when fruitfulness was despised — by the grifters, by the pharisees, the marketing professors — collapse began.
In its place came coercion. Not the steadying discipline of conscience or law, but coercion of thought, coercion of speech, coercion of spirit. We called it safety…security. But it was control. It was comforting. We called it unity, but it was only fear. And once the fruitful were despised, only force remained.
And what was it, other than self-satisfaction, that numbed us to a foremost command of both testaments: be fruitful? Christ had even allowed judging of others along the order of fruitfulness. (And it’s opposite: thorns and thistles.). And we had been well warned of the destruction the pharisees would bring. Destruction was really their drive.
And in the end, it wasn’t abject moral collapse that brought us down. It was the general second-ratedness. Yes, what had brought down everything was the complete absence of any excellence in the world. (It wasn’t that the train had derailed and left the tracks clear for other traffic. It just got out-of-line and piled up the path of others who were making progress.)
No “shining city on hill” anywhere. Just sorriness.