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Apr 28, 2024 11:32
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- SMILLENNIALSMILLEN
- Jun 26, 2009
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After this many decades, shouldn't it be pretty clear this isn't going to happen?
Leftism makes implicit assumptions about the world in order to bend it to fit within certain prescribed parameters. The very worst and most obviously wrong assumption is that it would or could ever be possible to get a high enough percentage of people to think consciously and hold informed opinions that they apply to actively improve the world around them. It assumes a degree of faith and hopefulness in individual industry that is just naive on its face; the Tragedy of the Commons is never truly addressed.
In fact, instead of addressing the fact that most people are objectively pretty selfish and useless to the advancement of any particular ideology, Leftists of all stripes usually find some mitigating reason to shift the blame for one subgroup's issues onto another, ad infinitum, as necessary to keep the populist vote. Everything, in the view of a Leftist, is a calculated plan to oppress some underclass; nothing could possibly just be an emergent effect in a complicated, stratified world permanently besot by entropic scarcity.
Now, I don't deny that it would be possible to make a modern and marketable Marxist-compatible doctrine and shop it around. I just don't think it's possible to make one that's actually got the substance underneath it to back up the claims. Any modern manifesto usually consists of such high-level language as to be entirely useless in execution; nobody can describe what their communist state apparatus looks like, or how it pays for itself. They forget that all the millions of things they wish to have people do for each other for free require a massive amount of logistics and planning to actually deliver, and that such requires business processes and project managers and policy analysts and all that poo poo. In the end, it's not going to be particularly different in a Communist system compared to the modern Western government of today, except in the scope of services it aims to provide with all the trappings.
Forgive me for not having an especially positive view of the cost-effectiveness of most existing Western bureaucracy...
Sometimes I wonder whether most social-justice types have ever truly internalized what evolution means and necessarily results in. Stratification of every possibly divergent factor is implicit in a genetic environment; this inevitably gives an advantage to some groups over others, and this will manifest in any environment no matter the strictures placed upon it - unless you were so strict as to remove any possibly way that a person could succeed over others. Classes will necessarily arise in any environment as long as there is any mechanism by which a group of people can excel to the exclusion of their peers.
Now, that's not to say I totally disbelieve in the struggle. The argument that the top 1% have too much money relative to everyone else has some merit. However, that's a very different level of privilege differential compared to what the average Tumblrina is complaining about on a daily basis as being Privilege. As Marxism evolves into Cultural Marxism, the struggle becomes more inwardly focused and so hipster-oppression-olympics obsessed that it is damaging itself.
No amount of rebranded Marxism can fix a problem that started with applying Marxism in the first place.
As Marxism evolves into Cultural Marxism,
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Jan 26, 2015 07:19
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- SMILLENNIALSMILLEN
- Jun 26, 2009
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But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call 'human nature,' the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival-so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to' think or not to think.'
A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. 'Value' is that which one acts to gain and keep, 'virtue' is the action by which one gains and keeps it. 'Value' presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? 'Value' presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.
There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence-and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not; it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and-self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it does; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.
"A plant must feed itself in order to live; the sunlight, the water, the chemicals it needs are the values its nature has set it to pursue; its life is the standard of value directing its actions. But a plant has no choice of action; there are alternatives in the conditions it encounters, but there is no alternative in its function: it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.
An animal is equipped for sustaining its life; its senses provide it with an automatic code of action, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil. It has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In conditions where its knowledge proves inadequate, it dies. But so long as it lives, it acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.
Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. Are you prattling about an instinct of self-preservation? An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess. An 'instinct' is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living. And even man's desire to live is not automatic: your secret evil today is that that is the desire you do not hold. Your fear of death is not a love of life and will not give you the knowledge needed to keep it. Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him t9 perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer-and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survive. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.
Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice-and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man-by choice; he has to hold his life as a value-by choice: he has to learn to sustain it-by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues-by choice.
A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.
Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man's Life is its standard of value.
All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.
Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being-not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement-not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason.
Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose. If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man-for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.
Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death. Such a being is a metaphysical monstrosity, struggling to oppose, negate and contradict the fact of his own existence, running blindly amuck on a trail of destruction, capable of nothing but pain.
Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness-to value the failure of your values-is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man-every man-is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the2 achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.
is this the gentleman's "i can't even"?
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Jan 26, 2015 09:00
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Jan 26, 2015 01:42
