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A Clash of Revolutions

“Revolution” is a word that conjures up scenes from the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, and Russia‘s Bolshevik Revolution. Young men with tattered banners, bayoneted rifles, and ragged, blood-stained attire come naturally to the American imagination, following the powerful leitmotif of the nation’s founding. But before ever a shot rings out in a revolution for the control of political power in a country, if a shot rings out, there must first be a revolution for the hearts and minds of the people.

There can be no greater contrast in ideology with revolutionary political implications than that of individualism and collectivism. While the overwhelming majority of Americans intuitively take for granted that a moral system of law and politics should value the individual, and the ability for each person to determine one’s own life, the collectivists who are prevalent in academia and the halls of government have no such assumption. Individuals are abstracted away by intellectuals and politicians due to a utopian vision, a naked lust for power, or both.

What is not grasped by the soft-minded collectivists in the American public, the social justice zealots, the bumper sticker-brandishing busybodies, the lapel-pinned lecturers of lost causes, and the moralizing malcontents is that the utopians and the power players are inextricably fused, married to one another in a deadly dance of social destruction, now spiraling out of control.

To fully grasp the demoralizing effects of collectivism in its various forms, one must follow the twisted thinking of collectivists as it manifests itself in every sphere of human existence. Since collectivism is an inherently totalitarian ideology that knows no borders, bounds, or barriers, this is not difficult to do. It is no accident that collectivists think that literally every issue is a political one, and one that should be solved by the use of power; if not by coercion, that is, by ridicule or legal harassment, then by allure, whether of easy money, job security, or social status.

When one thinks like a collectivist, no one part of the whole can be “above” the whole. Everything must be leveled, economically, socially, and politically. This comes with an important caveat. Since neither human ability nor natural resources are distributed evenly in the world, there must be levelers to constantly intervene to make everything “just.” These levelers can be professional brainwashers of the government-controlled “public” schools, who drag the brightest down and vainly attempt to elevate the ignorant, or the politicians who feel it is their need to “spread the wealth around.” In a capitalist economy, the wealth is spread around; only it requires skilled work that is actually demanded by others to acquire it. In the collectivists’ minds, demanded work is exploitation. How one sustains one’s own life goes without explanation to the collectivists – it is simply owed to them – by the state, by the “public,” by the ethereal “other.”

In the collectivist worldview, the applications of “equality” are endless. There can be no competition, economically or otherwise, and by extension, no judgment of inferior or superior. There can be no standards of right and wrong, which is known as nihilism, and by application, cultural and moral relativism. There can be no patriotism, since no nation should think itself “above” another. And no individual should make claims on the herd, lest the herd think the individual is asking for more than his “fair share.” Which brings us to healthcare.

In a government-run, that is to say, collectivist healthcare system, one’s “fair share” is determined by others, who neither value your life more than you, nor are disposed to give you scarce resources (and growing scarcer) if that means “taking away” from others. What collectivists, with their holistic mindset, don’t get is that an economy is created, not distributed. Yet when their point of view is implemented, that is what comes to pass. The economy becomes stagnant, ossified, crystallized by the collectivists’ ideological assumptions, which are intrinsically demoralizing as it sucks the creative, productive spirit out of a people. Healthcare is a service provided by some humans, with special abilities and talents, to other humans; it is not a good to be “deemed” by a government to the people, nor can it be a “right.” Rights safeguard us from coercion from the government and the mob; but it is easy to see that a collectivist mindset would recognize no such distinction between rights and supposed “entitlements.”

The fatal flaw in the collectivists’ assumptions, and indeed, collectivists have overrun the schools and universities, news and entertainment media, courts, and government, is that Americans instinctively know that individuals not only comprise the political system, they are above it. Life, and our value of it, is what holds us Americans together. That which does not edify life, and our enjoyment of it, our pursuit of personal, even heroic greatness, is alien to us as a people. The collectivists may say that vision is an illusion, and greedy, selfish, and vain, but it is what animates the spirit of most Americans in their deepest cores. We know that each one of us can aspire to our own standard of greatness, sustain our own lives with our own minds and our own hands, and build a nation that is worth living in, for ourselves and our posterity. That is the spirit of our revolution, and that is the one that will triumph in our political and ideological war against the collectivists.

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