It's all too easy to understand why. It's called selective listening. You liked what he said 10% of the time, so you chose to ignore what he said the other 90% of the time. I've never understood this, but we will circle back around to this.
What awful things did he say and what did he dress it up as?
He advocated for rape and incest. He said a 10 year old daughter should be forced to have her father's baby in the guise of being "pro-life".
He claimed all women were only money grubbing whores. He dressed that up in twisted interpretations of the Bible. But if he was correct, then him getting the "hot wife" as he described AFTER he got super rich "proved" women are what he said, at least the ones he's told all these young men they should be looking for. That's a vicious circle he created for an entire generation of young men to think they are wallets not men.
He advocated for children to die in school shootings. He didn't mince words on this one. He repeated it over and over and over from debate to debate to debate. In this case, it's clear he was always trying to smooth the edges of the hate he was spewing, and each time he got better and better at it.
Which brings me to his debates. I've watched several of his debates, including both at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England. I was brought up to believe you cannot debate someone's ideas without understanding their view. Here's the shocker:
He did not understand anyone else's point of view.
What he did was overrun the debate. He would not answer the counterpoints presented to him. He would just keep talking on his own points and often spew complete nonsense. He would then attack the other debater with "you have no argument" to what he said.
But an Oxford professor shut him down with the reply that everyone that ever gave this guy air should've said. Here it is in a nutshell:
He was talking nonsense. Nothing he had said that day or any other day was based in any facts. He was making it all up, making it impossible to argue with made up nonsense.
He made up an entire world to fit his view of the world.
BUT WORSE?
He wanted everyone else to live in that view of the world.
When the world and all its pesky facts don't fit? He did what they do and spew off nonsense to force it to fit together like some creepy Frankenstein's monster.
No one is good 100% of the time, so all of us can twist our view a little bit. Abused children who grow up into healthy adults have to turn the kaleidoscope slightly to survive. Those of us that are honest with ourselves know we do this, but we don't run around trying to make everyone else twist their kaleidoscopes to our vision.
Likewise even those that do can't be 100% bad. I'm sure as there is daylight that Kirk was not all bad. From his earlier broadcasts, he was an angry young man who couldn't find a woman who liked him at all. The advocating for rape aside, he didn't understand how the world differed from his own view, so he set out to force the world into his view. Most of the time now we see this as mental illness, but as he advocated for the 50 years ago "white" male view? He could be as ill and self centered and awful as he wanted to be. Rape, incest, forcing 10 year old girls to carry their father's child, all the most disturbing ugly things he advocated were ignored to the point of being disguised as normal. He knew to dress it up in pretty sayings from famous philosophers without understanding anything outside of the one liners he shared. Does any of that make him or anyone 100% bad?
What I think is the tragedy here is he did. He very much played the his way or no way. Everyone to him was either turned to his exact degree of kaleidoscope or they were 100% against him, 100% wrong, 100% of what his followers should hate. His wife's eulogy really highlighted that the most once you ignore the emotion of the moment.
What will surprise you is I found him boring and predictable, like a badly written character in a B movie. He was basically a parrot who was intelligent enough to constantly polish his act. He had perfected it, but getting a parrot to sing "Sympathy for the Devil" doesn't make it Mick Jagger.
What will surprise you is that I never understood why anyone followed him or anyone else bothered to debate him. He was a very flat human. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Great for brainwashing an audience that he, or the cage owners, wanted brainwashed, but hardly worthy of more than a side show act. PT Barnum would've been proud, but great philosophers like Socretes would've found him dull. Shakespeare wouldn't have bothered.
What a sad view of people in general this man lived his life in, trapped in his own small kaleidoscope of the world he created for himself. Full of ugliness that he had twisted into 100% this or that that allowed him to make the ugliest of our own nature into something he regularly argued was good. Up was down. Green was red. Everything captured, categorized and once deemed one or the other? No ability to grow or change or even twist the kaleidoscope a little in the other direction. The turning mechanism glued in place.
He missed the best part of the world, and as a result so has most of his following.
Most of us, AND YES, I do mean most as in even you, almost all of us, are far more complex. We are a mixture of both our better angels and lesser evils. None of us are 100% one or the other. Some of us might be 60-40 good, while we all have to believe that serial killers would be 5-95, what good must be almost completely gone. For this man, there were no hues. There was a turn, his turning point, and he froze that thing solid into a teenage boy's frustration at not being able to get a girl.
Was he 5-95? 40-60? 60-40? That is not for any of us to judge.
No, I didn't like him. I found him mostly foolish when I listened to him. He had turned bullshitting his way through life into an art form, like a paint by numbers simplistic picture. Everything that didn't fit was simply pushed into one of the colors that came with his 17-22 year old views. Sad, but true.
What could we learn from his life? Whether you liked him or not, I hope one lesson is don't fixate on making the world in your image. Our world whether you believe in Kirk's version of God or the Big Bang or some other way the world was created, I don't think anyone should be limited to the ridiculous view we had in our late teens and early 20s. Instead, see the world, open your mind like he definitely could not, and see how it changes in the most beautiful ways right before your eyes.
As always #thinkaboutit. Have a beautiful and blessed Sunday! #peace.
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