Instrumental Rationality: How Progressives Use People as Means to a Political End

Whenever there is a tragic loss of human life, conservatives grieve or pray. Progressives scheme for a way to turn the tragedy into an emotional weapon to promote their irrational agenda. Their perverse point-of-view may even lead them to abuse the dead for their political causes.

Such was the case with Newtown, where 20 beautiful children’s lives were snuffed out, along with six who worked for the elementary school. The emotive force of that catastrophic event provoked an immediate chorus of argumentum ad misericordium from the left to deprive Americans of the right to self-defense.

Leftists thus uses as a cudgel the dishonest presupposition that they have a monopoly on compassion. They pose as if conservatives are on the side of the deranged shooter if they are on the side of the individual’s right to defend himself and his family from criminals; and let’s be frank, from the government. But conservatives value human life much more so than progressives, who employ an instrumental rationality that deforms people into faceless, numbered entities or members of victim groups — means to their political ends.

Conservatives want to see every human life unfold naturally. Each person should be free to explore, face adversity, and with the support from those who know this particular individual, overcome those obstacles that prevent him from becoming a person in full. Each human being’s life is an end in-and-of-itself. It is complete and needs no addition or subtraction from government — only protection and true justice.

The progressive is racked by a tortured conscience that cannot accept that this kind of life is “all there is.” Disbelieving in the ancient religions, he partakes in the creation of illusory grand causes and fancies himself an integral part of them.

It is inconsequential to the progressive whether the cause really makes a positive difference for the individuals he shares this world with. Indeed, many of his causes, such as radical environmentalism, are based on irrational hysteria, and serve to make life worse for his fellow man. But he intuitively follows the supposed nobility of his vision, affirmed by the presumed elites who inhabit his environ.

What progressives cannot grasp is that supposedly positive causes like feminism, veganism, animal rights, and environmentalism are actually anti-causes: they are directly opposed to human life itself.

Abortion is the feminist opposition to human life. Veganism is the codification of guilt for man’s “predatory” behavior of eating meat (like other animals). Animal rights is the false elevation of animals to rational beings, and the lowering of man’s mind to that of instinctive beasts. Environmentalism is the synthesis and all-encompassing opposition to civilization, and the flourishing of human life on the planet.

The latest cause of ‘gun control’ (more accurately, the government control of guns) implicitly argues that men have no free will, and that we are slaves to inanimate objects.  Therefore, men are not entitled to self-defense; yet the moment that someone becomes part of the government, he is somehow not a member of the human race. He is a privileged being –able to control his savage impulse to kill his fellow man, which comes about merely by being in the presence of a gun.

As opposed to making the nation safer, the inequality of power resulting from gun control would be infinitely more dangerous than the dispersion of the potential for violence as reflected by high rates of civilian gun ownership. This is true for other social phenomena besides violence; the economy, for example.

The progressive cannot see that by not trusting himself, and by not trusting others, that he is denying the existence of agency and free will. By blindly trusting this mystical entity he calls “government,” he is misplacing his faith in easily the most corrupting and dangerous human institution known to mankind.

The tragedy of the socialist’s vision, for all its unblinking homage to democracy and human rights and social justice, is that his causes are easily manipulated by those who see collectivism as a means to power over the impressionable. For those who desire a ready path to meaning in life, as opposed to the torturous path of self-discovery, socialism holds out a means to instant karma.

The progressive is someone who is easily led, and even more easily misled. This is because his ideology leads to the abandonment of the self and the systematic avoidance of personal responsibility and accountability. Ask a socialist about someone on his side taking responsibility or accountability for his actions and he will inevitably blame ‘the system’ or his ideological opponents.

Unwillingness to compromise on principle makes the conservative hated. Deemed selfish, individualistic, and judgmental, he is shunned and forced to commune with the great minds of history that are yet hallowed in the libraries (until the socialists obliterate them, as they do with all those who stand outside their totalitarian schemes). He chooses to educate himself so that his mind is his own; his to care for as a work of art. The educated conservative is very much a creature of the Enlightenment; but even deeper at his core, of the Renaissance.

In essence, the socialist has no understanding of what it means to be alive and to be a human being in full; he must live at the expense of others, not only physically, but metaphysically. His is a sad life of craving appraisal, which he even denies to himself out of altruistic pretenses; he pours out this unfulfilled desire for validation in the worship of a cult leader, who gladly accepts the power to rule over him, and in turn gives him what he desires: More self-denial.

The ugly process of self-negation is reinforced in millions of true believers’ minds until the vicious community consumes itself in a spectacularly bloody conflagration of self-sacrifice and the sacrifice of others.

Contrary to popular mythology: Socialism destroys society. What promotes society? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for each individual, who is protected by, though not encumbered by, the corrupting power of government.