PragerU and the Politics of Pain

The other day I was browsing YouTube on my phone

and I ran across this community post from PragerU.

This post contained a poll with a single sentence.

"Most of leftism is an avoidance of pain.

Agree or disagree?"

Now my gut instinct because it's PragerU was to go

"No, of course not, OBVIOUSLY."

But the more that I sat and thought about it,

the more I wasn't sure that I was right.

I wanted to genuinely, really engage with this

and think about what the statement meant.

So that's what this video is for.

In this video, I want to figure out three things about this post.

What does it mean?

Is it true? And is it good or bad?

So let's get to it.

Before we can even answer the question that they've posed, we need to figure out

what they mean by "avoidance of pain."

Because this is such a weird way to phrase this idea, right?

So I did a little bit of digging and I came across this PragerU

video about the differences between the left and the right

and how that difference comes down to the left's fear of pain.

But listen to how they define pain.

At the core of left wing thought is the denial of painful realities.

The denial of what the French call les faits de la vie: the facts of life.

Because people on the left find it too painful to look reality in the eye

and acknowledge that human nature is deeply flawed.

One might say that leftism appeals to those who wish to remain innocent.

Growing up and facing the fact that life is messy,

difficult and painful is increasingly a conservative point of view.

To PragerU, pain is basically the acknowledgment of the tough fact of life.

Reality sucks and people are inherently bad

and leftists are just afraid of believing that's the case.

And they're avoiding pain by being hopeful and optimistic,

by believing that the world can get better and that people are good.

They are afraid of the facts of life that are too painful to acknowledge.

But I think that pain is more than that, too.

If we look at a lot of their other videos, we can see that pain to them

is also hard work and failure and not getting your way.