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Social Science
Sparked by the comment:
You know, the more I've learned about Adolf Hitler, the less he resembles any sort of conservative, and the more he resembles the far left. He was a vegitarian, an atheist, an intellectual, an artist, a revolutionary, and dreamed of a return to a past utopia when people (or Arayans, at any rate) were truly free. The classification of him, and other reactionaries, as conservative smacks of intellectual dishonesty.
He wasn't far left, he was most definitely far right. What he has in common with your list of "hard lefties" is he was a socialist. Before WWII, there were two kinds of socialism... right and left. The right-wing socialists wanted power to coalesce into the hands of a strong central state, controlled by a select and elite group of people who would keep the common folk's (technically, the proletariat's) best interests in mind while governing without their input.
Left-wing socialists see the state as an oppressive construct foisted on the proletariat, and wish to destroy it thereby allowing power to be wielded by the people themselves as expressed through various theoretically self-forming collectives.
The right wing of socialism is commonly considered to have been destroyed by WWII. Left-wing socialists were conceded the field and have run amok and essentially unopposed since then. Never the brightest bulbs in the bunch, these utopians, when given access to the levers of power, were directly responsible for the abattoirs of the late 20th century.
In my own opinion, right-wing socialism was not destroyed but was instead forced underground. To me, the various governments of continental Europe and Japan, most especially those of Germany, France, and Japan, very strongly represent models of right-wing socialism. True, they have been softened a bit with a veneer of democracy, but close observers of these societies will always comment that power is wielded most often by unelected bureaucrats with only a vague understanding of what the people of their countries really want.
The reason why we do not clearly understand this distinction is to me obvious. Now utterly dominated by nihilistic left-wing socialists, the "soft sciences" of western academia have renamed right-wing socialism "fascism" because it is a) a poorly defined term into which everything bad about the right can be dumped and b) it removes a real and to them dangerous stigma to their hallowed and cherished leftist brand of socialism.
If the 20th century has proven anything it is that socialism of any sort, be it right, left, or the newly minted Islamic kind, is easily the greatest danger to humanity that has ever existed. Hyperbole? Hardly. Societies ruled by the various forms of socialism have probably killed more people in the past century than were killed at the hands of Christians in the previous two thousand. A papal legate may have consigned thousands of innocents to the flames with his comment, "let God sort them out", but this is nothing compared to the millions who have been starved, gassed, beaten, shot or simply worked to death by the likes of those who have substituted the state or some vague secular ideal in His place.
This all has a great deal to do with why I fear our current crop of religious "righties" far less than I do our current crop of secular "lefties." A right-winger may secretly want to force you into a church and consign the most unreasonable of your friends to the flames because they can’t keep their mouths shut and their pants zipped, but it takes a left-winger to starve your entire town to death in a camp for thinking the wrong thing.
Hanging onto a set of discredited beliefs like socialism is one thing. Humanity’s capability for delusion in the quest for radical egalitarianism long predates the plea of, “can’t we just all get along?” It’s something different altogether to be so myopic as to cover up the tendency of those beliefs toward genocide just to give them “one more try.” That those on the left continue to do so, and in such a garishly naïve fashion, is why I fear them.
Excellent point, and quite possibly the real key that has united all the genocidal campaigns of the 20th century.
More dangerous even than socialism, I think, is the access it gets to those levers of power. Why is it, after all the horrors the 20th century has visited on the world, do we continue to allow socialists to operate public schools, universities, and the media, essentially unopposed? Are their utopian visions really so beautiful that we must fall for them again and again?
Maybe it's because people are smarter than ever before, more organized than ever before, and in turn become more dangerous than ever before. The construction of bureaucracies whose sole purpose is to eliminate entire productive portions of their own population could not be accomplished in any previous era, and finding some means to prevent them from ever being constructed again is, I think, critical to winning the War on Terror.
And the trickiest part is, it has to be prevented in such a way that won't turn into a genocidal bureaucracy itself, as the UN is quickly becoming.
Excellent point, and quite possibly the real key that has united all the genocidal campaigns of the 20th century.
More dangerous even than socialism, I think, is the access it gets to those levers of power. Why is it, after all the horrors the 20th century has visited on the world, do we continue to allow socialists to operate public schools, universities, and the media, essentially unopposed? Are their utopian visions really so beautiful that we must fall for them again and again?
Maybe it's because people are smarter than ever before, more organized than ever before, and in turn become more dangerous than ever before. The construction of bureaucracies whose sole purpose is to eliminate entire productive portions of their own population could not be accomplished in any previous era, and finding some means to prevent them from ever being constructed again is, I think, critical to winning the War on Terror.
And the trickiest part is, it has to be prevented in such a way that won't turn into a genocidal bureaucracy itself, as the UN is quickly becoming.
Couple of things on this:
1 - We're a free society, so we need to let these sorts of ideas be discussed and exposed to the light. We also need to make sure we take the responsibility to point out the flaws in those ideas - just as others* who disagree have the same responsibility to point out the flaws with our positions.
2 - As for the large groupings of socialist thought, it might have a lot to do with the idealist nature of these positions. In these positions, you're typically comparing idea to idea and debating the merits of said ideas. In many respects, you're not dealing with hard facts (science and math aside for teachers and economics for business/economy reporters). In this light, idealism becomes more favorable - and utopian ideals do look attractive: No one wants for anything; we're all equal; people are doing what they want to do, not what they're forced to; no poverty, etc. This is very attractive (especially to students, who are typically very, very idealistic). However, it does go completely against human nature and, as Scott has illustrated, has lead to some rather horrendous atrocities.
3 - The construction of bureaucracies in and of itself is likely an inevitable off-shoot of material wealth. When you get a surplus of material goods (food, products, etc.), you tend to end up with a class of folks that offers some attractive benefit to the rest of the society in exchange for a portion of that surplus. Once they get into some level of power, they have to offer some return on the investment from the people, so they start doing jobs outside of what they started with. Then, they find other jobs and put "family" members in those positions, and the whole thing becomes somewhat of a snowball.
4 - The easist way, in fact, potentially the only acceptable way, to defeat the terrorists is to co-op them into our economy. Once they're part of our global economy, you get internal businessmen who have a very strong incentive to keep things as stable as possible. This tends to limit major wars and the like - the ensuing instability is bad for business (unless you're trying to get rid of instability that's bad for business). This alone tends to make revolutionaries/terrorists/insurgents and the like into pariahs - eliminating their effectiveness.
*For the purposes of this discussion, our/we/others is used not to mean left/right, but any opposing ideas.
Posted by: ronaprhys on October 3, 2005 12:39 PMHmm. So the World Bank becomes the substitute for the UN.
I'm not so sure that's a good idea, either. Certainly there is much greater power to audit financial institutions than diplomatic ones, bur I think that, in the end, the financial institutions will only become corrupted by socialist goals.
I think the whole problem of socialism is rooted in humanity's desire to better ourselves and our environment, and I don't think there is any real way to end that. The Founders of America realized the inevitability that people would naturally form governments based on socialist-style ideas, and if these governments were not carefully hedged from meddling in certain areas that they themselves could not agree on, the result would be an abomination.
I think it may actually be time for this idea, mocked at best and feared at worst, to be applied on a worldwide basis. Instead of creating a one-world government, we need to create a framework to restrict the one-world government that is already growing like a tumor among us, and devastating entire populations in its wake.