The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 sparked a wave of optimism and triumphalism across the West. Our nuclear-armed rival and ideological enemy had suddenly disappeared, taking with it the shadow of nuclear apocalypse. But for the Left, since 1917 the Soviet Union had been the locus of the hopes and dreams of leftist collectivism. Now history, understood as an ideological game of thrones, had ended, dashing that hope. Liberal democracy, private property, and free-market capitalism had prevailed, and no credible alternative remained.
This optimism was expressed by George H.W. Bush in 1991, when he celebrated this “new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind––peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.” Yet the demise of the USSR did not mean the end of various Marxist ideals like collectivism and the “command economy,” which haven’t just survived, but in recent decades have grown stronger under progressivist rule.
How is it that an ideology so graphically repudiated by history and so bloody in its application, has managed to endure, especially in the West, which has provided the greatest and most widespread prosperity, political equality, and freedom in human history?
The survival of the Left has nothing to do with the intellectual coherence or truth of its ideas. Leftism is predicated on dubious, if not wildly absurd, assumptions and ideas about human nature and motivation: secularism, philosophical materialism, determinism, and the technocratic fallacy that “science” can discover and exploit the timeless forces and laws of human progress and social improvement. The latter claim in particular has been repudiated by Marxism’s ghastly toll of 100 million dead, and millions more enslaved in gulags and forced-labor camps like the ones we see today in Communist China’s Xinjiang western region, where more than a million Muslim Uighurs are being subjected to forced labor and brutal “re-education.”
One obvious reason for Leftism’s survival in the West is its successful “long march” through our educational institutions. It started in the universities, where tenure, unions, and a lack of accountability to voters or the market ensured that bad ideas could flourish, then trickle down into K-12 schools through higher education’s monopoly on teacher-training.
Just track how widespread transgenderism, the unscientific notion that biological sex can be chosen, has become. From its beginnings in universities and the work of intellectual farceurs like Michelle Foucault, these pernicious ideas now are shaping grammar school curricula and activities, government regulations, and corporate C-Suites and boardrooms, including the U.S. military.
As transgenderism also shows, this form of Leftism has evolved away from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, or the ruthless, dangerous work of making a revolution or organizing on the factory floor. The failure of the Marxist libretto to achieve the predicted eventual triumph of collective ownership of the means of production, and the “withering away of the state,” has made Cultural Marxism much more comfortable and profitable.
This sort of Marxism also has other attractions more suited for the affluent cognitive elites. The decline of faith in a justifying, transcendent narrative does not mean that the need for such assurance and solace disappears. Communism has long been defined as a “political religion,” one based on faith rather than reason and empirical evidence, on many points corresponding to Christianity.
Historian Michael Burleigh has catalogued the similarities between Marxism and the Judeo-Christian heritage:
““consciousness” (soul), “comrades” (faithful), “capitalists (sinner), “devil” (counter-revolutionary), “proletariat” (chosen people), “classless society” (paradise). The ruling classes were going to face a “Last Judgement” . . . . But there were far deeper unacknowledged correspondences, including nostalgia for a lost oneness and the beliefs that time was linear . . . , that the achievement of higher consciousness brought salvation, and that history was progressing with its meaning and purpose evident to the discerning knowledgeable vanguard.”
Moreover, these correspondences fit as well the master narrative of the modern West, particularly the idea that knowledge of the material world is sufficient for understanding and improving the human world, and this progress is inevitable, if only the ignorant and superstitious who “cling to their guns and religion” could be converted––and the anachronistic Constitution be replaced with a technocracy of cognitive elites.
The gratification Marxism provides from knowing one is part of that elite is another reason Marxism or progressivism, Marxism Lite, has maintained its hold on our culture. In other words, pure snobbery, the sense that one is better than everybody else. By espousing, usually in word rather than deed, the “liberation” of the “oppressed victims of capitalism,” the Marxiste snob can show off his superiority to the vulgar entrepreneurs, manufacturers of low-brow products, and commercial hucksters who generate all the wealth, while also stiring bitter resentment in many “brights,” especially academics who chronically whine that they’re underpaid and unjustly ignored.
The Leftist confection of “false consciousness” also conveniently allows the snob to champion the masses afflicted by this malady at the same time he sneers at “smelly Wal-Mart shoppers.” The snob thinks he’s superior because he knows what’s really politically true, just as he knows which films or novels or restaurants or music or fashion is superior. Leftist ideas, then, are like designer labels, emblems of class superiority. Only the vulgar rich and bourgeois parvenus vote Republican.
Another modification of Leftism is its therapeutic thrust: its sentimental privileging of the suffering masses and victims of American global depredations; and its smug displays of “conspicuous compassion,” as Allan Bloom called it. Hence the therapeutic Leftist opposes free-market capitalism because it creates winners and losers and so hurts people’s feelings, not to mention besmirching the environment. He feels bad about all the unjust suffering in the world, but he practices what Charles Dickens called “telescopic philanthropy,” the conspicuous display of sensitivity to suffering, but from a safe distance.
Endorsing Marxist or progressive illusions about the perfectibility of human life, the sentimentalist chafes at tragic limits and human corruption, seeing these as distortions of a fundamentally good and cooperative human nature. And Marxiste politics is the political program that will sweep away the economic and political impediments to this authentic human nature, one warped by traditional superstitions like free will and responsibility for one’s bad choices––which are in fact determined by an unjust political order.
Finally, “woke” identity politics, a species of parochial particularism––which, like nationalism, real Marxists would have contemptuously dismissed––has added being Left to the “woke” suite of identity markers. Hence the popularity of socialism among the young, who endorse it as a hip token of identity like being trans or gay. Indeed, as Robert Spencer reported,
“Eric Kaufmann, a Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology research fellow, says that this expansion correlates with the students’ identification with the Left: ‘The trend toward LGBT identification among young people, which has seen a threefold expansion since 2008, encompasses both university and non-university young people, white as well as minority. That said, those who identify as ‘very liberal’ are substantially more likely to say they are LGBT and white left-wing activists are extremely likely to do so, with some 70% of very liberal women who support shouting down offensive speakers identifying as LGBT.’”
Being a leftist, like being gay, is now a brand in the intersectionality of identity fashion.
In short, human weakness and frailty––its susceptibility to “black-market” religions, as Chantal del Sol defines political religions; its thirst for status and superiority, and its indulgence of showy feelings that signal one’s superior virtue and compassion––have kept Leftism alive despite its manifold bloody failures, and has helped it to persist by making it immune to empirical evidence and rational argument.
Unfortunately, the rest of us are paying for this reliance on bloody nonsense to secure status, a sense of superiority, and, of course, the acquisition of a fat income, social power, and political leverage. We will likely soon see that the cost is too high.
I think this is somewhat inaccurate. In my view Class War of the old Marxist type has been replaced by Race War and Gender War- different and actually harder to fight.
Why your info is correct. Your analyses I don’t think is. My opinion differs from yours. It is only Chamber of Commerce types, that pretend that tariffs are not part of the “free market.” My argument is that they are. Substitute the word tariff for tax and it begins to make sense. Is it a “free market,” or does this “tax,” take into account the true “Cost,” of that product?
“the Marxiste snob can show off his superiority to the vulgar entrepreneurs,”
The vast majority of professors, academics and the elites in government are Marxist snobs, they know better than us plebs. They just love division in society because without it they have no purpose in life.
That must be why dreaming of white Christmas is seen as being positive.
What a load of bollox
And everyone remembers that do they? More bollox
…and the bloodiness of the Left endures.
More than 100 million people were murdered last century by leftists. Their Cause was far more important than the lives of Counter-revolutionaries and Reactionaries.
And don’t think that such deadly sentiments were limited to the Soviet gulags and Mao’s re-education camps.
It wasn’t too long ago in our country that American radicals like Obama’s friends Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn had planned to kill up to 25 million patriots after they took over the government.
And don’t think for a minute that the new generation of BLM/Antifa radicals wouldn’t do the same.
See Larry Grathwohl interview:
Evil will always exist in humans, and the political form of evil is leftism. Liberals, socialists, communists, Democrats, leftists – whatever label they carry, they are evil humans. Liberalism is a hate crime. Like a weed, liberalism needs to be constantly eradicated wherever it appears.
Thanks for mentioning Michel Foucault. Reading one of his books was one of the most shocking experiences I had had at the time, when I read it in the 1980s. But once when I casually criticized him, I got blasted for it, probably because the person wasn’t familiar with his work.
Foucault was a horrible human being. He would fly to Tunisia, I believe it was, and pay children for sex. Was also into sado-masochism. Just a real low life.
Really well done. Great verbiage, all very quotable!!!!
BEGINNING: THE CPUSA TEAMED UP WITH THE SOVIET KGB TO START THE VIETNAM PEACE MOVEMENT AND RECRUITING MILLIONS OF OUR COUNTRY’S DEGENERATES, DRUG ADDICTS, AND “MAKE LOVE NOT WAR!”
Those TRAITORS aided and abetted the Vietcong and SPIT ON OUR TROOPS. (My brother was SPIT ON and called a baby killer by our hippie sister who still hasn’t left the movement but now brainwashing her kids and then the grandchildren. One nine-year old niece: “Trump is Hitler.” I said, “Who’s that?” “I don’t know.” My sister and her brainwashed daughter were standing there. “Who taught her that?” Chirp Chirp. The sister called my brother a baby killer in a court hearing only five years ago.)
Yeah, the left demonized the troops, as if they were responsible for the war.
BEGINNING: THE CPUSA TEAMED UP WITH THE SOVIET KGB’S WORLD PEACE COUNCIL TO START THE VIETNAM PEACE MOVEMENT AND RECRUITING MILLIONS OF OUR COUNTRY’S DEGENERATES, DRUG ADDICTS, AND “MAKE LOVE NOT WAR!” “U.S. OUT OF VIETNAM!”
Those TRAITORS aided and abetted the Vietcong and SPIT ON OUR TROOPS. (My brother was SPIT ON and called a baby killer by our hippie sister who still hasn’t left the movement but now brainwashing her kids and then the grandchildren. One nine-year old niece: “Trump is Hitler.” I said, “Who’s that?” “I don’t know.” My sister and her brainwashed daughter were standing there. “Who taught her that?” Chirp Chirp. The sister called my brother a baby killer in a court hearing only five years ago.)
Then in 1979, the KGB’s U.S. Peace Council, run by the CPUSA, was officially started in time to TAKE OVER CENTRAL AMERICA. “NO CONTRA AID!” At the same time, while screaming for peace, they were aiding the Communist FMLN rebels in El Salvador and even raised money in churches, from the believers in God, and the Son of God, to fund a war and also to fund an ideology that said, “THERE IS NO GOD!” REMEMBER CISPES? (I talked to Alfredo Cristiani on the Larry King talk show and informed him of all the CPUSA front groups activities and going to the rebels Zonas de Controlidad. The next week, he put up a travel ban of all Americans enters those Zones. The CPUSA just used Cubans since they fit in better.)
THE MASSIVE RECRUITMENT OF AMERICANS CONTINUED, including Democrats in Congress who were against the Contras, especially anything Trump…. I mean Reagan while also aiding in funding the FMLN using CISPES and other good-sounding fronts. “EL SALVADOR IS SPANISH FOR VIETNAM!”
THOSE ’60s AND ’80s CPUSA/KGB RECRUITS then became teachers, professors, Hollywood, MSM, Big Tech, city/state/national leaders, and the takeover of the Democratic Party and Congress. One CPUSA/KGB RECRUIT became PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (Google: Obama Sundial 1983 which is an article he wrote PROVING he was in the most radical CPUSA/KGB fronts that were very anti-American and Pro-Soviet groups of the day. Remember that he admitted to seeking out Communist Professors. This article proves he sought out Communist students, that he then joined!)
Obama then surrounded himself with the same CPUSA/KGB recruits and appointed them to head departments, in a complete takeover of the hierarchy, who were then used to target ALL OPPONENTS and to conspire in a COUP ATTEMPT AGAINST A SITTING PRESIDENT!
THEIR JOB TODAY IS TO RECRUIT THE NEXT GENERATION OF COMMUNISTS WE SEE IN THE STREETS, UNIVERSITIES, AND EVERYWHERE! (CAPS ARE ME SCREAMING!)
PROTEST ORGANIZERS used to recruit The Next Generation of Communists. Their own signs prove it and yet, the followers don’t care.
BLACK LIVES MATTER AND ANTIFA
The Party for Socialism and Liberation associated with ANSWER.
The Revolutionary Communist Party.
Democratic Socialists of America
THE MOTHER OF THEM ALL… CPUSA.ORG
Go to the CPUSA and tell me the difference between Communist agendas and those of the Democratic Party. Strangely, the same so did the CPUSA moderate their positions to equal Democrats or did the Democrats radicalize their positions to equal an ideology that has killed over a hundred million of their own people, now in a war, another in a takeover attempt while enslaving its people/CCP.
CUBAN PROTESTERS, risking their lives for Freedom, are being ruthlessly arrested, disappeared, AND YET, THE DEMOCRATS SUPPORT THE COMMUNIST REGIME and have always supported their Hero, Fidel Castro.
TRUMP: “CHINA VIRUS.” Who went ballistic and yet they say nothing about China, including by sports figures and teams. Forget the Big Guy and Hunter who are now being BLACKMAILED by China.
We won the Col d War but the ideolpgy of Marxism took a long march through American institutions and valueson on issues of race, gender and climate
President Reagan’s team defeated the Soviet Union, the West’s Cold War opponent, without open war and with limited military engagement. As with every other American victory since the Spanish-American War, the Department of State went right to work to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, encouraged by the permanent security-military establishment whose corporate sponsors would suffer mightily if disarmament came with peace. It took the end of the Great War to make this peril crystal clear to the arms manufacturers, and they have never let a victory stand in the way of their profits since.
Reagan’s victory did nothing to arrest the progress of secular progressivism in the institutions of our republic: libraries, public schools, universities, print and electronic media, religious organizations, and charitable foundations. Since the end of the Coolidge presidency, we have moved from the shared belief that the federal government may not properly extend aid to victims of floods or blight to a prevailing view that no sparrow is too small for the government to lift it up should it fall.
Perhaps the coming economic collapse will shake the faith of the unwashed in government when it becomes clear that help will not come once US government credit is found worthless.
The ideilogy of the left remains persistent because it serves as a fake religion for the left
Are true religions any better?
The one-thousand years of the Christian Dark Ages followed by three hundred years of bloody wars and persecutions of the Reformation and Counter Reformation. The legal persecution of the Jews by Christendom. The Puritans fled the persecution of the theocracy of the Church of England and no sooner did they land in America when they set up their own theocracy to persecute their members.
The darkness of Islam. The Hindu catse system. The Maccabees were the Taliban of their time fighting against Hellenization, killing any Jew they viewed as an infidel, an apostate.
Fake religion or true religion — they both stand against REASON, logic, and rationality, mankind’s only means of survival, flourishing, respect for unalienable rights, and therefore peace and prosperity on earth.
Unalienable NATURAL rights are not permissions and privileges granted to man from a supernatural, mystical, dimension but are NATURAL requirements, NATURAL-POLITICAL conditions, necessary for mankind’s flourishing, not in a supernatural after-life-utopia, but here on this natural earth.
Are true religions any better? Why Yes. Yes they are. And there is not a damn thing you can do about it.
And there still is no such thing as the “Christian Dark Ages.” Just your usual Objectivist atheist propaganda.
THX, you always leave out the consequences of bad military strategy.
Good article. The takeover of academia by the Left is probably the biggest root cause of the degradation we’re seeing in all the institutions.
Don’t forget envy. It preys on people with a strong sense of envy and entitlement.
100 years ago Winston Churchill said socialism was the gospel of envy. I think you’re right.
The envious simply cannot stand anyone having more than them in any way. They are lazy,
inadequate destroyers.
So much to discuss in this article.
“Yet the demise of the USSR did not mean the end of various Marxist ideals like collectivism…”
Collectivism is a political “ideal” derived from the moral code of altruism and self-sacrifice as the moral “ideal”. You can clearly see that this moral “ideal” of altrustic self-sacrifice for others, to save others, comes from religion, specially Christianity. Jesus Christ was sacrificed for the masses of sinners to save them from damnation and open the Pearly Gates to an Eternal-Magical-Mystical-Mystery-Tour in a Christian Utopia.
Marxism is essentially Christianity stripped of its overt and explicit supernatural, mystical, elements and given a veneer, a cover-up, a facade, of science. Marxism jettisons God out of the mystical equation and replaces him with Almighty Society as the mytical super-organism for the indivdual to be altruistically sacrificed to. The promised eternal utopia instead of being in the after-life is now supposed to be on earth in a future thatnever arrives.
“Christianity prepared the ground. It paved the way for modern totalitarianism by entrenching three fundamentals in the Western mind: in metaphysics, the worship of the supernatural; in epistemology, the reliance on faith; as a consequence, in ethics, the reverence for self-sacrifice.” – Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff
“You are probably wondering here: “What about Communism? Isn’t it a logical, scientific, atheistic philosophy, and yet doesn’t it lead straight to totalitarianism?” The short answer to this is: Communism is not an expression of logic or science, but the exact opposite. Despite all its anti-religious posturings, Communism is nothing but a modern derivative of religion: it agrees with the essence of religion on every key issue, then merely gives that essence a new outward veneer or cover-up….
The Communists reject Aristotelian logic and Western science in favor of a “dialectic” process; reality, they claim, is a stream of contradictions which is beyond the power of “bourgeois” reason to understand. They deny the very existence of man’s mind, claiming that human words and actions reflect nothing but the alogical predetermined churnings of blind matter. They do reject God, but they replace him with a secular stand-in, Society or the State, which they treat not as an aggregate of individuals, but as an unperceivable, omnipotent, supernatural organism, a “higher unseen power” transcending and dwarfing all individuals. Man, they say, is a mere social cog or atom, whose duty is to revere this power and to sacrifice every thing in its behalf. Above all, they say, no such cog has the right to think for himself; every man must accept the decrees of Society’s leaders, he must because this is the voice of Society, whether he understands it or not. Fully as much as Tertullian, Communism demands faith from its followers and subjects, “faith” in the literal, religious sense of the term. On every account, the conclusion is the same: Communism is not a new, rational philosophy; it is a tired, slavishly imitative heir of religion.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America”
No one is wondering about Communism, you fraud. It is and always has been totalitarian with the blood of 100 million on it hands in the last century alone.
Give it up THX. Repeating yourself endlessly makes you your own version of the big lie.
Is he your foil? Or your Siamese twin?
I guess he is my foil, but I have no idea what that really means, and I don’t care.
Oh boy. Here’s my big chance to drag out the moronic trope that Christianity paved the way for modern totalitarianism by my favorite self-hating human Lenny Peekaboo Peikoff.
After two plus years of bagging on Christianity I really have nothing new to say so I’ll just repeat the same nonsense.
And it’s just two days before Christmas. I really hit a Home run this time….didn’t I Lenny. Please Lenny, tell me how great I am
“How is it that an ideology so graphically repudiated by history and so bloody in its application, has managed to endure, especially in the West, which has provided the greatest and most widespread prosperity, political equality, and freedom in human history?”
How have Christianity, Islam, and Hindusim managed to endure? With all the thousands of years of misery and devastation those religions have caused mankind? The Christians today VEHEMENTLY deny the the oe-thousand years of the Christian Dark Ages were cause by Christianity at all. They blame everything but Christianity as the cause of the Dark Ages. Just like the Marxist true-believer always clais that “Real Communism has never been trried!”
Point out to a Christian instances of Christians doing evil in the name of Jesus Christ and they will argue those were not real Christians, they were betraying the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
A true-believer in the irrational is dedicated to the irrational and will whitewash and evade the facts of reality that contradict his magical-mystical-supernatural-religion. His religion and his thinking are by definition based on unreason and the unreal. Don’t bother him with the facts of history or reality.
Ooops! forgot to mention the non-existent Christian Dark Ages too. Some day, maybe I’ll be successful in getting my warped ideas about Marxism really being Christianity over to somebody anybody.
One thing I have never tried is going on a Marxist site like The Hill and saying that Marxism is really just an outgrowth of Christianity.
I wonder how that would go over with the Marxists there….since Marxism is really my first love — THX !!#*
How ignorant. I guess you are going to point out the crusades as the “Christian holocaust?” Because pushing foreign invaders out of Christian lands is “evil!” And then taking the fight to the enemy after they invaded and brutalized your lands is “really evil!” And Muslims are just misunderstood, not brutal raiders. Yeah. And let’s always look at the actions of the church and never look at the actions of the child molesting, slaving, disgusting people that the church rightfully put down. I’m tired of Christisn “apology.” Christianity ended the dark ages, ended slavery, opposed nearly every tyrant in history and built every country worth inhabiting (look at the US borders–you don’t see that in non-Christian countries). You can throw out platitudes and unspecified “evil,” but this Christian isn’t buying one bit of your snake oil.
“How have Christianity, Islam, and Hindusim managed to endure?”
One might speculate that fill very real human psychological and emotional needs that, say, Objectivism cannot. Surely you can admit it’s possible.
Absolutely I can admit it’s possible. Emotionalism is the motivation underpinning many religious desires.
The fear and terror of death. The fear of actual, metaphysical, independence and self-reliance, i.e., we are all alone inside our own bodies and minds, and no one is coming to rescue us and help us escape from our essential, individual, aloneness. The desire not to die and not to be alone, independent, and self-reliant.
The fear that our sins, the betrayals of our personal values, are unforgivable, i.e., our sins cannot be taken back and repaired. The desire to have an omnipotent God reapir the damage we have done in our lives, to ourselves, and to others.
The fear that man will not be moral without the terror of a supernatural punishment after death. The fear that no rational, secular, morality is possible. And even if it is men are too stupid or too evil to be inspired or motivated to be moral without a whip, either a natural whipping here on earth, or a whipping after death. The desire that men be FORCED to do good. Etc. ,etc., etc.
You pretty much outlined your future. no one is coming to rescue you and help you escape from your essential, individual, aloneness. What great future. Who, in your immediate aquaintance would waste a second on you as you breath your last.
You can act like it won’t matter to you as you put on a brave face. With a person like you it won’t matter to anybody. So much for rational selfishness.
“The survival of the Left has nothing to do with the intellectual coherence or truth of its ideas. Leftism is predicated on dubious, if not wildly absurd, assumptions and ideas about human nature and motivation…”
The survival of Judeo-Christianity also has nothing to do with the intellectual coherence or truth of its ideas.
The irrational absurdities on which Judaism and Christianity are based all there for any one who cares to see them and admit them. The Parting of the Red Sea? The Garden of Eden? Original Sin? Noah’s Ark? A Talking Snake? A Burning-Talking Bush, A Virgin Birth? The list of irrational absurdities is extemely long. But the intellectual incoherence doesn’t keep the True-Believer from believing them.
Just Two days before Christmas and here’s my big chance to bag on Christmas because I am basically just a classless lunk who really has no impulse control.
Guess what meat….Christianity and Judaism will survive long after your Objectivist goddess is but a vacuous memory. We can put her in the pantheon of those Roman and Greek gods and those of the long dead Incas and Aztecs who have long ceased to matter
In the meantime, this weekend the churches will be full, hymns will be sung, Christmas trees will go up, presents exchanged, Christmas dinner will be enjoyed and those football games will be forever on. Gosh it just sucks to be you. Changed any minds? Now go pray to your Festivus pole while listening to Lenny Kravitz
Every religion has a fictional part and a morale code.
If we go by the fictional part only, every religion should be null and void. It is the morale code in the religions which is the practical part. A very well thought formula to base the civilization on, it has been working well, except for islam, which has been advocating, theft, murder, hate and violence.
Because without leading religions, there would have been nothing. No morality, laws or order, it’d be just chaos. Only the most savage and brutal would survive. Slavery, theft and murder would be the norm. As evident by the communist regimes.
Absolutely!
Now, let us identify and define the essential moral code of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; what is it? It’s altruism and self-sacrifice for Yahweh, Jesus Christ, or Allah. In order to gain salvation in an after-life, supernatural Utopia.
Pray tell, what does that supernatural, mystical, moral code of altruism and self-sacrifice have to do with human flourishing and happiness on earth? It has nothing to do with those worldly, natural, rational, earthly, pursuits and values.
Could that be the problem? Altruism and self-sacrifice are inimical to the pursuit of happiness, freedom, and liberty on earth?
Could it be that the pursuit of happiness on earth requires a diametrically opposite moral code? A moral code defending and upholding the moral idea that man as an end in himself and NOT the sacrificial means for the ends of others? A rational moral code of rational self-interest and rational self-preservation, in other words Ayn Rand’s moral code of RATIONAL SELFISHNESS. Which means that man — every man — is an end in himself, neither sacrificing himself to others, nor sacrificing others to himself?
Still trying. Still failing. Christmas is only two days away. A big swing and a miss for Mr. Downer.
“One obvious reason for Leftism’s survival in the West is…”
One obvious reason for Leftism’s survival in the West is — ALTRUISM. Morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers and so long as Americans believe that altruism and self-sacrifice are the highest and noblest virtues a man can practice; collectivism and socialism will win.
And so long as Americans are ignorant of the fact that SELFISHNESS properly and rationally defined, RATIONAL SELFISHNESS, is the very essence of virtue and nobility, the moral code on which human survival, flourishing, happiness, and capitalism depend — America the land of the free and the home of the brave will not survive.
“America’s inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.” – Ayn Rand
Can’t forget altruism can we? The go to safe space for you isn’t it?
I’m here day after day taking your silly personal insults, like water off a duck’s feathers. Do you see me retreating from your silly, infantile, insults to a safe space?
“like water off a duck’s feathers.” I think “duck’s back” is the correct phrase
Retreating? really? I see you as having nowhere else to go. It appears that this is the only outlet that will have you. This is your safe space.
Yeah, you are here everyday posting the exact same Objectivist gibberish to the point where I almost have the cafeteria version of Objectivism down pat. Replete with your invented history of Christianity, the endless tropes about Christianity paving the way Marxism and totalitarianism, the non-existent Christian Dark Ages with a couple of nods to the other major religions, along with the gratuitous and the petty insults including The Parting of the Red Sea? The Garden of Eden? Original Sin? Noah’s Ark? A Talking Snake? A Burning-Talking Bush, A Virgin Birth? You know, the usual childish blabber.
One of your biggest problems is you take the easy way out with your insults. Old Joe Goebbels would be proud of your shtick and your cheap grift. Making up history to suit your tired narrative requires little effort. It is your big lie. And it shows everyday.
So I will be here everyday. And eventually when you can’ stand it anymore you will tell me what a tough guy you are, thereby showing us what a weakling you are.
The left promotes a moral ideal, today it is called equity. The right talks about the practicality of this mongrel status quo called the mixed economy. In the long run, moral ideals will always dominate no matter how many bodies one has to climb over.
As Bruce has pointed out, the faith of the woke has parallels with Christianity. Faith means ideals & narratives trump objective reality. Reality, however, won’t go away; it will just slam you in the face and knock you down. Bruce is onto something but doesn’t go far enough.
Precisely what I noticed, Mr. Pappas. Dr. Thornton pushes his RATIONAL argument to the edge of the logical clarification and resolution but pulls back, the question is WHY? Is it ignorance or fear? It’s hard to believe such an intelligent and erudite man does not see where his argument leads.
“There are men today who advocate freedom and who recognize what ideas lie at its base, but who then counsel “practicality.” It is too late, they say, to educate people philosophically; we must appeal to what they already believe; we must pretend to endorse religion on strategic grounds, even if privately we don’t.
This is a counsel of intellectual dishonesty and of utter impracticality. It is too late indeed, far too late for a strategy of deception which by its nature has to backfire and always has, because it consists of confirming and supporting the very ideas that have to be uprooted and replaced. It is time to tell people the unvarnished truth: to stand up for man’s mind and this earth, and against any version of mysticism or religion. It is time to tell people: “You must choose between unreason and America. You cannot have both. Take your pick.”
If there is to be any chance for the future, this is the only chance there is.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Religon versus America”
Maybe he is not concerned with your standards or lack thereof. He doesn’t owe you anything.
You lack an actual life ,don’t you?
Try compulsive gambling. It gives one strong motivation to get a start on the day.
A motivated chap might look for a model year at the thoroughbreds
400 wagers, with a p of 0.7 or better, at average odds:1 exceeding 5:2, and you’d be rolling in greenbacks.
Of course, like any worthwhile goal, it requires dedication. Anyone unwilling to work seventy hours per doesn’t deserve success.
I do just fine.
Marxism, communism, socialism, and every other -ism used to convince people to rebel against God all boil down to Satanism. You mention their reliance on science, but that’s not really true. They push the trappings of science to lure people into anti-Christian religions like environmentalism (global warming, not actual stewardship), abortion, homosexuality and all its perverse offshoots that target children, and now Covidism (harmful masks, anti-human lockdowns and deadly vaccines that use fetal tissues in different ways, if not including them in the injection). Even cannibalism and pedophilia are working their way in from the fringe. It’s all Satanism (which I believe is being in opposition to God like Satan rather than worshipping or even believing in Satan). Every plank of the Progressive movement defies some prohibition in the Bible. That’s what drives it, and because people can’t believe it, the world will burn. God won’t have to do anything. These religious practices will destroy themselves and most of us along with them. It’s the only paradigm that explains why people will work so hard to destroy themselves, their families and their societies.
The leftists collage professors and administrators brainwash the youth with their leftists ideas and text books with their lies and revionists history lessons(Brainwashing)and still Johnny still cant read
Animalistic, low IQ people are more prone to hate and violence. They can not advance in the well thought, organized and civil society. No matter if they were given advantages, expert education and given free stuff for doing nothing. They will remain animalistic, low IQ, hateful and violent.
Leftism is nothing but large groups of such people who can not be reason with, banding together to destroy everything that they can not understand or never be part of. They have not evolved, so they want to destroy anybody and anything that has.
They feel at home when they live in a primitive environment, with nor rules, but animalistic instincts, where they can get away with their crimes. Logic and reasoning has no place in their undeveloped brains.
Some of their leaders can be intelligent, but also full blown psychopaths who have no souls. So they use their army of “zombies” to stay in power.
Feel free to consider the Left to be chimps with vocal cords.
The persistence is due to laziness on the part of many who fully believe that there is such a thing as a free lunch.
No one’s asking for a free lunch. They’re asking for an affordable lunch, and sometimes the abillity to have lunch at all.
And who is obligated to provide this affordable lunch? Me?
Yes, you. All of us. It’s called living in a society. You’re welcome to move to Somalia where there basically is no society and everyone lives in heavily armed anarchy, but I have a suspicion you wouldn’t care for it very much.
I’ll give up my lunch when you give up yours.
No one is asking you to give up your lunch. Not sure where you got that from.
“Hence the therapeutic Leftist opposes free-market capitalism because it creates winners and losers and so hurts people’s feelings.”
No, it’s because dividing people into “winners” who get everything they want and “losers” who can f*** off and die is inhuman and monstrous.
So everyone should share equally whether they work for it or not.
Sorry Mr. Communist. The world has always been made up of winners and losers. It always will be. You are the latter. And it is not my job to support judgmental slacker Leftists like you.
Get off your duff and actually build something without government assistance. Otherwise you can f*** off and die
You reveal yourself more and more with every post
Like I said, if you want to live in a heavily armed anarchy where no one cares about each other, you’re welcome to move to Somalia. If you like the country of laws and services that has given you a comfortable middle-class life, then you have to accept that you are not an atomized individual but have certain obligations to others as they have obligations to you. Otherwise you’re just a hypocrite who wants to gorge on the benefits of society while avoiding any of its obligations. But then, your hypocrisy has been clear for some time, so I’m not very surprised.
What a grotesque evil you are defending and promoting. The evil of duty, altruism, and self-sacrifice.
Do you even know and understand that what you are defending is the moral basis of communism, fascism, and Nazism?
Duty, altruism and self-sacrifice sounds fairly noble to me. Without them, civilization is impossible.
There’s fewer people going hungry in the world than at any time in history, this year has been tough but only because of government interference with the free market, have you forgotten the lockdowns already?
What the Progressive Socialist Liberals have in store for Conservatives (part 1)
https://metallicman.com/laoban4site/what-the-progressive-liberals-have-in-store-for-conservatives/
One of the main reasons why the people of the left wing are so completely steadfast to their ideology is because they base the foundations for the beliefs on their feelings and emotions and not reason , logic or history.
Obviously, they can’t learn from history.
Therefore then some even attempts to tell them something that is in contrast to what they believe . One of their typical replies is very good ,at first. which is “Where did you that information ?” Which is a fair question, because there are many unreliable things that are printed in the world. Nevertheless , when the Conservative shows him or her the source of that information and that it is very reliable and genuine. The leftist will then say I don’t care about where that information came from. Which is a real “flip flop.”
In other words a leftist is saying “Don’t bother me with the facts my mind is made up.”
“WHEN THE WALL FELL, we cheered, they cried. When the Twins fell, we cried, they cheered!” SC
(My suspicion is the terrorists thought the Twins would fall instantly like trees causing millions of deaths and damage blocks long. Imagine that one.)
“WHO ARE THEY?” “They” are the enemy within who saw Lady Liberty bend at her knees. “THEY” are the only hardcore Communists left in the world and now they’ve successfully infiltrated, and taken over, The Democratic Party!
They are the UN.
“One obvious reason for the Left’s survival in the West is its successful ‘long march’ through our educational institutions.”
The first word of Bruce Thornton’s sentence could be corrected to read “The.” Education really is upstream from everything else in society.. Most Republicans have traditionally sneered at the idea of a career in…ewww, public school teaching. Instead, they want to make as much money as possible. And they still haven’t stopped their sneering, even after the Left/woke idiotology (no sic here) has infected nearly everything. As one example, the Unitarian Universalist Association was actually a religious organization as recently as 30 years ago. Now it’s just another left-wing political activist group.
They’re persistent because they have nothing else.
“false consciousness”. Another word for that is the word “Stockholm syndrome”. No matter what the truth is about the proported victim “Stockholm syndrome” allows the weaponization of victimhood against their enemies.
It could be that it is the very cruelty and the graphic horrors of the leftist projects that so many people are attracted to. in the first place.
The assumption that leftists and the woke liberals are motivated by (misguided) desires to do good is likely wrong.. It might be that the very idea of a blood bath against the leaders and people of the outgroup is what is the most attractive to a large swaths of humanity. Vast swaths delight in the thrill of torture of those deemed unfit for civil company.
Cruelty is a lust that is forever in our shadow selves. It is not that people do not know the history of socialism, , do not know the cruelty that emerges from socialism every time, from USSR to Venezuela.
It is that cruelty can always be justified.. People on the left can satisfy their blood lusts and think themselves good on account of their appetites for blood and humiliation are being stimulated.
Cruelty is an insatiable appetite, and people in socialists countries can be cruel to the level of neighbor or son and daughter. turning in each other to the gulags.
The will to cruelty is deep within our humanity, and leftism is the most convenient outlet in our current moment.
If you need a rationale for looting, living high off other people’s money while running their lives into the ground. and thumbing your nose at all genuine moral standards, while still feeling morally superior, the Left has it for you.