Opinion

The American Left: Justifying Evil

The American left has become the victim of a great brainwashing, whether the ideologues realize it or not. Not only have they been stripped of their moral compass, rendered unable to tell right from wrong, but they are actively seeking destruction under the false pretense that they will liberate themselves and mankind. Instead, their unchecked action will lead to chaos, mass violence, and slavery to the state.

There are three main roots on the left’s shriveled tree of evil, which bears no fruit except immorality, decadence, and economic decay. The first is the Kantian ethic of equality, a categorical imperative that leads its believer to eschew reality for a beloved abstraction. The second is nihilism, described by Friedrich Nietzsche to mean a lack of belief in God, or more broadly, moral standards. The third is Marxism, which deludes its adherents into trading a voluntaristic economic system with individual protections for an authoritarian one with no systemic barriers to arbitrary state control.

Equality has become a fetish for leftists, causing them to overlook biological differences between men and women, adults and children, and even human beings and animals. The result is a degradation of human life, and by extension, sexuality. A prolonged period of such demoralization provides the preconditions for inhumane behavior.

Immorality blurs or obliterates the differences between right and wrong. Nihilism, in its academic form of relativism, and in its bureaucratic guise of pragmatism, removes all moral boundaries to state action.

Marxism is an inversion of moral economy. It twists production to mean theft, and theft to mean justice. It implies men are without agency, and scapegoats a system for individual human behavior, leading to irresponsibility and even entitlement demands on other human beings’ labor by virtue of merely being alive. It leads to enslavement of man to man, and all men chained to the state. It does this by convincing its true believers that if they only yield the state absolute power, someday, somehow, their utopia will come true.

A dominant Marxist website effectively admits as much, commenting on Karl Marx’s view of the state, as compared to Friedrich Engels‘:

On the basis of what facts, then, can the question of the future development of future communism be dealt with?

On the basis of the fact that it has its origin in capitalism, that it develops historically from capitalism, that it is the result of the action of a social force to which capitalism gave birth. There is no trace of an attempt on Marx’s part to make up a utopia, to indulge in idle guess-work about what cannot be known. Marx treated the question of communism in the same way as a naturalist would treat the question of the development of, say, a new biological variety, once he knew that it had originated in such and such a way and was changing in such and such a definite direction.

In other words, socialists are supposed to take on faith that once the economy is wrecked (including all attendant human misery that comes with it), after rioters have taken to the streets in an orgasm of social chaos, and by association, after the state is given complete control over the economy to redistribute wealth, we may see our imagined communist state. Then, as Engels so fantastically put it, the state will wither away.

But a social scientist can only empirically verify the past; and as one can easily can testify, there are no examples of even functional socialist states there. On the contrary, socialist countries are not even close to prosperity or their professed goal of material equality. The only countries that appear at first blush to be socialist while still enjoying high standards of living turn out to be predicated on capitalist systems, accruing considerable foreign trade income or engaging in high deficit spending, or both. These mainly European social welfare states are experiencing a slow demise rather than a shocking implosion.

The most drastic of the socialist regimes of the twentieth century are undeniably the bloodiest and most miserable. If we are to be scientists, as Marx exhorts us to be, let’s examine the facts. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics presided over a deadly and corrupt communist system that slaughtered at least 60 million humans and enslaved tens of millions more in gulags. Maoist China, through its ruthless and inept policies, ushered in the deaths of around 75 million people. The Khmer Rouge of Cambodia was among the most horrific, killing four million out of a nation of seven and a half million through what RJ Rummel describes as “war, rebellion, man-made famine, genocide, politicide, and mass murder.”

Yet the left, for all their feigned worldliness and knowledge about the human condition, ignores both the historical record and elementary political theory. Delivering totalitarian control to the state, for any rationale whatsoever, simply leads to evil; immoral men are drawn to power and use it to entrench their privileged places in society.

A solution has been crafted to untie the Gordian knot of how to preserve power sufficient to maintain domestic tranquility and to protect the country from foreign invasion without accumulating too much centralized control: divided powers as expressed in The Constitution and elaborated upon in Federalist 51. When combined with such precautions as private property and sound currency, the evils a cadre of men can commit is severely limited under such a governmental system. Whether or not good or evil flourishes in the world thus becomes predominately up to us.

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