Or make that the “liberal” collective instinct. My friend Mike Adams provided a good example of the same when he was unlucky enough to be on a youth ski trip with a hippie and his kids.

Mike wrote:

In the morning, when we met for a buffet breakfast, the former hippie sat down with an enormous plate of food. He had a bowl of fruit, eggs, biscuits, five cartons of milk, and (literally) a bunch of bananas. I thought there was no way he could eat all of “his” food. I was right. He stuffed most of it in his coat and offered it to his (now four) children on the bus. Apparently, none could afford breakfast, even though four of the five members of the family were now skiing for free.

I almost felt sorry for the family until I found out they were wealthy. The oldest daughter went to a private college and paid $40,000 tuition her freshman year. Her father went there, too. …

The youngest child of my former-hippie/fellow chaperone … started bragging about how his family had twenty pairs of ski goggles, although they hadn’t paid for a single one. “When someone leaves them at a table in the ski lodge, we just take them, don’t we daddy?” …

When we got back from the trip, I was unsurprised to learn that the liberal chaperone once decided to have picnic with his family underneath a tree in a neighbor’s front yard. Of course, he didn’t ask his neighbor first. He just laid out a blanket and started playing his guitar and munching granola with his wife and four children. We must always remember that friends don’t let friends drop acid – at least not every day for a whole decade. The effects tend to linger for years, sometimes even decades.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that every liberal hippie from the 60s is a full-blown sociopath like my fellow chaperone. But the symptoms are always the same, aren’t they? His condescension towards blacks, his unwavering arrogance in the wake of his own obvious stupidity, his looting and hoarding of limited resources, his lack of respect for the truth, his the lack of respect for the property of others, and, mostly, his refusal to grow up.

Or to put it another way: We come into this world as mewling little socialists. The trick in life is learning to outgrow it.