An open letter to the Guardian: The World Needs More Mountain Climbers, Not Less.

Mankind's Need to Explore and Push Boundaries

In the aftermath of a recent scandal in which an Indian couple was exposed as frauds after doctored photos of them appeared showing them on the summit of Mount Everest, the Guardian published a hit piece by Brigid Delaney on mountain climbers in general, and Everest climbers in particular, urging them that if they want to be heroes they should stop conquering Everest. She writes: “The days of the early explorers are well and truly over. Our personal challenges—even if for noble reasons like raising money for charity—are no longer serving a greater good.” With this one quote she reveals a lack of regard for qualities like courage, bravery, ruggedness, individuality, and manliness, qualities that have driven men (and some women) to explore our world and achieve remarkable goals. In addition, she shows a lack of comprehension about mankind’s fascination with soaring to great heights, which goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks with the story of Icarus and his fateful voyage to the sun, but in our era has fueled men to become test pilots, high-altitude mountaineers, and even astronauts. But the ancient Greeks knew what fueled Icarus’ dream of reaching the sun: it was hubris, audacity, boldness. adventurousness, and more than a little chutzpa.

Icarus versus the New World Order

In the legend, Icarus is a Greek god who, because of excessive pride and self-confidence, made wings of wax which melted when he flew too close to the sun, causing him to fall into the sea. The Greeks understood that mankind possessed an inner quality, usually hubris and adventurousness, which would forever drive him to soar to great heights. It was this same hubris that fueled all the great explorers in history, drove men to create the world’s greatest inventions, and allowed man to reach the Moon. It is this quality that Progressives and Globalists like Ms. Delaney seek to uproot from mankind in their goal of creating a New World Order.

Mount Everest from north face.

Tiresome Rhetorical Questions

Ms. Delaney asks the rhetorical question, “Why do we still feel the urge to “conquer” mountains?” When George Mallory was asked this same question, he famously quipped, “Because it is there.” In other words, if you have to ask such a silly question, no answer on earth will ever satisfy.

Standing at a height of 29,029 feet, and straddling the borders of Nepal and Tibet, Mount Everest has fascinated mankind since the dawn of time. Additionally, the Himalayas hold a strong spiritual and geographical fascination, and none possessed it more ardently than Sir Francis Younghusband, the Great Game intelligence agent who wrote: “I have stood under their highest heights. I have faced their sternest precipices. I have traversed their greatest glaciers…so the Himalaya remains to us a joy of which we will never tire. The ill is but the evanescent. What stays for always with us is the grandeur, purity, and light. And these have power to draw us everlastingly to Heaven.*” Unfortunately for Ms. Delaney, the lure of the mountains has existed long before the advent of the New World Order, and our attraction to scaling their peaks is embedded in our physical and spiritual DNA.

A Globalist Mindset that Leads to Dangerous Assumptions

But Ms. Delaney goes further. She writes: “This type of tourism has to be ego-driven because only that mindset would allow you to override the wishes of the Indigenous people that find your climb on their sacred site offensive, or be willfully harmful to the environment, or risk your life or those you’ve paid to assist you. Once you allow yourself an enlarged world view that takes into account the true impact of your visit to these once-wild places, it becomes harder to travel with a conquest mentality.” This is pure Orwellian gibberish. Statements like "Our personal challenges are no longer serving a greater good" and “Once you allow yourself an enlarged world view that takes into account the true impact of your visit to these once-wild places” are evidence of a Globalist mindset that is antithetical to freedom, liberty, and individual rights. Whether she knows it or not, Ms. Delaney is promoting a dangerous mindset, the philosophy of Communitarianism, in which the individual's rights are balanced with the rights of the community. This is antithetical to the rugged individualism that created the world’s greatest superpower. In America we believe in the individual’s right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Under Communitarianism the individual's rights are subsumed to the rights of the community, which they call “the common good” but is a euphemism for the State. And when she adds such cryptic phrases like “traditional owners” she implies that citizens of a country have no right to climb a mountain (like Australia’s Uluru) if they are not considered the “traditional owners.” And that even by merely VISITING such places like the Galapagos or Mount Everest we are destroying their fragile ecosystems: a classic example of the Hegelian Dialectic, which says that a crisis is posed and a solution is offered. All of a sudden mountaineering is viewed as a threat to global warming. (Of course it’s never the private jets the global warming enthusiasts are using to go from one summit to another. They get an automatic pass because their intentions are so “noble.”) Soon Ms. Delaney will be advocating for a UN commission on mountaineering to “Save the Sherpas” without realizing that mountaineering is the Sherpas’ GREATEST SOURCE OF INCOME and one of the few ways out of poverty for the next generation. Progressive do-gooders like Ms. Delaney would literally “help the Sherpas to death” by destroying their greatest source of livelihood, namely Western mountaineers.

Some Unexpected Insight

In the end Ms. Delaney honestly admits there are qualities she admires in these gritty mountaineers: strength, determination, fortitude, mental and physical strength, and courage, and she enjoins them to use their talents to “solve the world's problems.” I find this amazingly insightful from a person who acknowledges that when these problems finally get solved, it will NOT be from someone in the coterie of Progressive armchair generals, but by someone who has the hubris to strap on his crampons and actually “climb the mountain.”