The post-Cold War era has seen an unprecedented rise in America of European-bred, radical-Left political thought. The radical Left is defined here as any authoritarian Collectivism in which individual freedom is increasingly subsumed by the dictates of a dominant central government: Communism in particular, but revolutionary Socialism in general under its Fascist, Third Way, or Progressive pseudonyms. Regardless of descriptor, the common denominator is the elimination -- or at least the emasculation -- of Capitalism as the hated engine of disparate wealth distribution.
Today, this Collectivist ideology travels under the sanitized, if disingenuous, banner of "social justice" but remains essentially Marxist nevertheless. As Marx so succinctly put it, "Communism is the elimination of private property." This is an idea that may have been feasible in a tribal world of small, mono-cultural, agrarian communities, but it is completely irrational in today's world. Worse, it's a fatally flawed ideology built on the Left's implicit denial of human nature: man's "out-of-the-herd" evolutionary progress toward individual achievement and self-actualization.
To suppress human nature and human difference is, in essence, the Left's utopian ambition -- an ambition that requires the totalitarian state.
It requires a totalitarian state because it is a delusional quest to return man to an egalitarian herd from which he evolved thousands of years ago. And as the history of the twentieth century shows, humanity rebels against such coerced devolution. Marx's elimination of private property coincidentally strips incentives to produce. The result is social decay to a dismal level of perpetual shortages and shared poverty -- just ask the citizens who stood in the endless bread lines of the former USSR.
The radical Left's denial of human nature carries with it the arrogant assumption that humans are little more than replicated androids content to do whatever government mandates.
There is a deep hatred of humanity that infuses this type of thinking. If you haven't already seen it, take a look at this video, posted at The Belmont Club, which is so revealing about 'the warped mindset of the Marxoid leftist' that they had to take it down almost immediately when first posted (fortunately, the new media cannot be so easily manipulated and not leave traces). Here it is in all its gory glory:
Wretchard comments:
The power of the Party, Orwell noted, is power over the mind of man.
It has no power over nature. The man-gods cannot talk to God.
They have to talk to God to build the button. Listen to the laws of science. The same laws, which through evolution, created us in Deep Time, and will create us again should the Greens find a way to destroy us.
The laws of nature, which they pretend to respect, are commandments they will scarcely listen to. The radical Greens are anti-science and before science was science, it went by the name of Natural Philosophy, authored by the same source which has given men unalienable rights.
So they will make the men who can still talk to God, who can make out the voice of natural philosophy, build the red button for them. They’ll do it through their control of education, the media, public discourse and the minting of memes. Then — boom, ha ha ha ha — the man-gods will still the Voice forever and have their dominion.
Or so they think.
They think this way because they have always gotten away with it before. They have always believed that their parasitic ways could go on forever; that the host upon whom they feed--those who are productive and rational--would always bail them out, even if enslaved. And throughout history, it has always been thus.
But something strange happened several centuries ago. Mankind had always been striving for freedom and against the forces of enslavement and collectivism, but in fits and starts--until the singularity that was America came into being; brought forth the natural philosophers Wretchard speaks of. We know these philosophers as the "Founding Fathers", and these remarkable men declared that "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" were the unalienable rights of man!
It was an incredibly frightening idea to the parasites and second-handers who had always believed it was their divine right to feed off the minds of others.
These soul parasites can never bear to have the bright light of reason and truth illuminating reality. They cannot ever look in the mirror and be honest about what they see staring back at them. They cannot, and must not allow a shining city on the hill, whose beacon of freedom illuminates the world to persevere. And so they have banded together and declared that YOUR life is theirs to do with as they please. YOUR liberty and pursuit of happiness is hardly their goal--but they disguise their real motives behind words like "social justice" and "hope and change." They will pollute the minds of the young:
So they have set out, deliberately and cleverly to destroy the revolutionary idea that motivated our Founders. The leftist intelligentsia continually bash freedom, capitalism, private property, business, and free trade; while simultaneously enjoying the benefits of all of them.
Our academics--even the ones who teach kindergarden-- rail against business and private property. Our present Adminstration has made major efforts to control that which is the foundation of our liberty. Our youth are propagandized to death about the evils of capitalism from pre-school through college.
Teachers have been well-indoctrinated at the various teachers' colleges; and are well-equipped to indoctrinate all students into the prevailing leftist dogmas of political correctness, multiculturalism (all cultures are of equal value EXCEPT American or Western culture which is uniquely evil); leftist environmentalism (capitalism is destroying the environment); and, of course, "social justice"--the old Marxist dialectic that holds that capitalism is a system of evil oppressors vs the poor, downtrodden oppressed. They see themselves as the champions of the middle class, when in fact, they are the destroyers of the very prosperity that makes a middle class possible.
In the picture above you see the results of their child abuse. Young minds cannot be allowed to develop even the capability of thinking for themselves, but must submit to their authority. This is the hallmark of their "social justice."
In fact there is nothing that is "just" about it. It represents the worse kind of oppression with the goal of enslaving the human mind. And enslavement is exactly what is required to establish their socialist utopia, since it refuses to acknowledge the reality of human nature.
Socialist ideologues like many of those teachers know that in a free market of ideas, the social system they are championing-- which has only brought human misery, slavery and death to those who have embraced it--cannot function in the real world. Thus they must "stack the deck" and take absolute control over the thinking of the utopia's future citizens.
On some level they even understand that the very foundation of capitalism is human freedom in its most classical, liberal tradition. And that frightens them to death.
Capitalism's incredible production of wealth is the economic side-effect that occurs when political freedom is present. It has been argued, and I agree, that both economic and political freedom are absolute prerequisites for moral behavior.
Children propagandized by dogmatic tyrants have had not only their capacity to think for themselves abrogated; they have had their capacity to make moral choices taken from them.
The moral case for capitalism is not taught in our schools, nor is it argued much in our culture. In fact it has been more or less universally accepted by the intellectual elites that systems such as communism and socialism are "morally superior" to capitalism (hence more "socially just")--even though in practice such systems have led to the death and enslavement of millions, and to those unlucky enough not to die from them, they have led to the most horrible shrinking and wasting of the human soul.
The truth is that neither socialism nor communism nor any kind of religious fundamentalism is compatible with morality at all.
If one's actions are coerced by the state or religion, or both; if human activity is indoctrinated, legislated, regulated and ordained down to the last minute detail--particularly to the degree we see in other countries of the world --then how can it possibly be argued that one's actions are moral?
Human behavior under such systems is not voluntarily chosen, but actively coerced.
But, morality has to be a matter of choice, not mandate.
One cannot hold a person responsible for actions that are coerced or forced from him. Morality can only exist when freedom of action exists; and thus moral actions in any field of human endeavor require freedom.
Conduct may only be thought of as moral or immoral when it is freely chosen by the individual. It is only then that the moral significance of the action can be assessed. It is only when we are free to act that we can exercise moral judgement.
Which brings us to a capitalist political/economic system. Only in a free economic system within a free political system is it even possible to be moral, since benevolence toward others, compassion, charity, and generosity cannot exist without freedom. Benevolence, generosity, charity, and compassion that are mandated by the state, or by a religion (on pain of death or other consequence); or by any regulations on behavior; or by force--are meaningless insofar as individual morality is concerned.
The left's utopian agenda has already forgotten that human ambition and the drive to freedom is not as easily crushed or eradicated--as the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century discovered; and as the ones of the 21st will soon realize.
The human spirit--a spirit which strives always to throw off the shackles hold it down; which constantly veers toward freedom and away from slavery--cannot ever be completely extinguished and will always rise from the ashes of the left's next failed utopian experiment.
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