Condemned to repeat it?
We have a century of evidence of what happens to a society when it falls into the traps of centralized economic planning, suppression of free speech, and the categorization of people–especially ethnic categorization. But an awful lot of people, including powerful and influential people, seem to want to go in these directions.
I can have some sympathy for people who became Communists and/or advocates of world government back in the 1920s. The theory of centralized economic planning is very seductive (see this, for the actual practice), and the slaughter of the First World War led people to grasp at any possible way of avoiding such horrors in the future…
And [today] we see the party, the political movement, and the individual politicians behind all of these directly totalitarian policies–many with clearly Fascist and/or Marxist lineage…being winked at or even embraced by many of those who were so quick to accuse Trump–and his supporters–of being ‘Fascists.’
My brothers and sisters, they cannot do it again. Only a race of madmen could do it again—
That last paragraph is a quote from A Canticle For Liebowitz, a futuristic novel about society rebuilding after a nuclear conflagration.
It is easy to understand why it seems “mad” – as in, “insane” – to go this way again. But it is also human nature, I submit, and it is not literally insane although it is tragic. After all, how often do we learn from experience, even in our private lives? Only sometimes, and only some people, and it usually takes an event that’s very personal and dramatic to cause the change. When I wrote “a mind is a difficult thing to change,” I wasn’t kidding and I wasn’t exaggerating.
Why is that the case? I don’t know, but here are certain things I believe may go towards explaining at least some of it:
(1) A person has to be paying attention and be able to connect the dots. There are often ways to rationalize away the conclusions one could and should draw.
(2) Emotions are huge drivers of behavior both personal and political. The leftist dream is enticing (I’ve written many posts about that, some of which you can find by doing a search for “socialism” on this blog), and it’s apparently easy to say “this time it will be different because we’re changing this detail or that one.” In this previous post I listed some of the emotions that drive the attraction to leftist thought: covetousness, anger, guilt, a desire to feel righteous, and the need for simple-sounding solutions.
(3) Leftists are dedicated True Believers, and whether their belief is sincere or just a way to get power, the result is that they are relentless in pursuing their goals. Taking over the educational establishment was the key to almost everything that has followed, and that includes legal education that forms the viewpoints of many judges and lawyers dedicated to The Cause.
(4) To even have a chance of learning from experience one must have more experiences and more knowledge than most young people have today. With a lowered voting age of eighteen, many people delaying adulthood in order to be students past that point, and the corruption of the teaching of history, most young people not only have the usual idealism and naivete of young people, but less experience in the real world and less knowledge of the past with which to compare the present. This is by design, and it is hurting us terribly.
As Santayana said in his famous quote:
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
That’s true of the younger people, but it shouldn’t be true of the people in charge right now, who are older (and in some cases old). I submit that it’s not true of them, and that they remember the past but have a different interpretation of it and a different goal for the future. Their interpretation of the past is that all the bad things that happened were the result of the right or of bad luck, and their goal for the future is that the left will be in power forever.
At the American Thinker site, one of the articles was about Chile voting on creating a new constitution.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/chile_votes_itself_a_oneway_ticket_to_communist_hell.html
Most of the people don’t remember the days under Allende and despise the name of Pinochet so the have to remake “Pinochet’s constitution.”
The writer believes this will destroy Chile’s freedoms and economy as most look to Castro and Cuba to emulate.
Certainly a concern for one of the few free-market economies in South America and their citizens.
Perhaps the worst part of the current dire and dismal situation in our moribund republic is that it is nearly impossible to imagine how, with an educational system encouraging, among the young, an intense hatred of the country and a demographic transformation underway which is likely to ensure permanent one-party (mis)rule, the proverbial ship of state might be set on a sensible course. Only a conservative “long march through the institutions” against leftist domination of the “commanding heights” of the culture (winning an election or two will not suffice) might be able to accomplish this, but who can believe that such a counter-revolution is truly within the realm of possibility?
This can’t be pointed out enough. I’ve always felt that adages like “those who forget the past…” and Hanlon’s Razor are far too forgiving or overly generous with the benefit of the doubt.
How many evils have been set loose in our world by people who were convinced they were doing the right thing? In modern times, how many times has this happened from people who had All The Right Degrees or consider themselves the Smart Set™? Intellectual justifications abound from Malthusianism (and its various re-brandings) to current-day neo-segregationism.
They are making conscious, educated choices. It’s just that their education is fundamentally different, as you astutely point out.
j e,
I keep hearing rumblings of an undercurrent of one forming, but see precious little in the way of anything organized or coherent. It’s theoretically possible, but I’ll believe it when I see it. To say that the Left’s infrastructure for activism dwarfs the Right’s is to astronomically understate the comparison.
My resources are limited, but I know that I’m not the only one on the Right with the energy and motivation to contribute. So far, I’ve seen an e-mail list…
“To even have a chance of learning from experience one must have more experiences and more knowledge than most young people have today.” neo
In facilitating and enabling the fashioning of the chains of their future enslavement, the young people of today will gain the most painful of experiences.
But in their all too often contemptuous dismissal of the reasoned, logical and common sense objections from conservatives, they will fully deserve their future experiences.
But their innocent grandchildren will not and in that, today’s adults will be cursed by future generations.
“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we lose our freedoms, it will be because we have destroyed ourselves from within” – Abraham Lincoln
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French economist and he explained that socilism is thieft. The socialists take your stuff and give it to somebody else. I noticed that when Bernnie was campaining he would promise the audience free stuff and they were cheering.
“(3) Leftists are dedicated True Believers, and whether their belief is sincere or just a way to get power, the result is that they are relentless in pursuing their goals.” [Neo]
I think you have touched upon the fundamental reason socialism continues to be promulgated. On the one hand, if you look at socialism’s less knowledgeable proponents (Lenin’s “useful idiots”), they see it as a pathway to a “better” world where inequities cease to exist. They fail to understand that, as Thomas Sowell has noted, socialism is a great theory but a poor reality. IMO, this is too often the basis for seeing socialists as well intentioned even though they are wrong.
On the other hand, there are those at the top of the power pyramid who promote socialism as a modern day system akin to Louis XIV coalescing the French nobility at Versailles. All in one place, the nobility was easier to monitor and easier to control. Likewise, central government control becomes a bureaucratic Versailles and to Neo’s point: “[those in control] remember the past but have a different interpretation of it and a different goal for the future.”
And for those who doubt the fundamental mean-spiritedness and lust for power of the people in charge, we need only remember the quote from Marthe Kent, OSHA director of the safety standards program (June 26th, 2000):
So long as she’s happy, but she does not suffer the effects of the regulations she imposes. In the direct language of the street: “Hooray for me and to Hell with you!” If her attitude doesn’t send chills up our spines, then we are not paying attention either!