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Quote of the Day: It Must Be the West’s Fault
“In other words, the assault on the West’s history succeeds because it speaks into a vacuum of vast historical and contemporary ignorance. It speaks to a populace inside the West as much as outside it, which is willing to see the whole of history through a single lens. If anything bad happens in the world, it must be the West’s fault, because there is no other legitimate explanation of how things can go wrong, other than explanations involving the West.” – Douglas Murray
Recently it occurred to me that in one sense, it is our own “fault” that we are being attacked and blamed by the Left for all the problems in the world. Our being a Republic, the most successful one ever created, makes us vulnerable to a takedown by all those people and countries who don’t know our history, are envious of our successes, and have failed miserably to demonstrate their ability to form prosperous societies. In fact, they have never intended to do anything of the kind.
Instead, they have been determined to establish maximum power, wherever they have existed. Whether we study Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, or other totalitarians, providing an egalitarian society was only a pipe dream. These leaders used their delusions to lure the people into a societal abyss, where everyone would serve them, as we acquiesced to fear and intimidation in order to survive. Literally millions of people died in service to their deranged agendas.
So, the West is a threat to those who elevate power above all else. Any promises made about equality, serving the masses, or fairness are intended to blind us to the lost gifts of freedom and agency.
They believe we must be destroyed, at any cost.
But this time in history, we will fight back.
Published in Culture
They don’t contemplate an end state because they expect their work to go on forever, thus gaining more power indefinitely.
They object to all the great works of western literature. These have heroes and a battle between good and evil. That is why I push Michael Walsh’s book so much.it is not a political one but a cultural one. He recognized we were in a Marxist cultural revolution.
They don’t contemplate an end state for the Worker’s Paradise. I don’t think they believe they will live forever, but that their work will continue to evolve into the future. But I’m not well-studied on that suggestion.
I would guess they think their great ideas will continue into perpetuity under the work of others. I don’t think that any of their projections were necessarily rational. If you think I’m way off base, Mark, I’m open to your input.
I tend to think of these six men as among the most successful cadres of the single ideology of 20th Century Progressivism/Historicism…
An interesting but unanswerable question for me, with respect to each, is this:
My guess is this…
Lenin: Yes.
*Progressivism’s success gave him the power to satisfy his lusts, and those lusts became more and more evil the more power he got.
**See Mao. Except that he was either a psychopath, or like Saddam Hussein, someone whose early childhood trauma made him behave very like a psychopath
***He believed he was born to the aristocracy, and that to treat ordinary humans as the experimental animals for his hobby was his birthright. But he wasn’t ever a thinker. Keynes became his yoga instructor at one point, like Ravi Shankar to John Lennon.
Imho that’s because the Left that’s attacking ‘you’ (who? The American Right?) is also American. Americans, Left and Right, perceive their country as central to the world. And perhaps it is – certainly it is very powerful, and has vital interests across the globe. But with power comes responsibility. Two sides of the same coin.
That said, I think the Left (and Right) outside of America would be more switched on to the other things (not America) that also influence their situation.
From what I’ve read, Pol Pot only had a vague idea of what communism was and just made the rest up as he went along. He wasn’t a reader.
When I use the term “believing in one’s ideology”, I mean this: If a person believes that his great ideas will continue into perpetuity under the work of others, then he believes in his ideology.
If he does not, then he does not.
So I take your answer to be, yes, they believe in their ideology.
Right, but it does not seem too important to me. I think that all Progressivist ideologues, and even all phony Progressivists (for other reasons) are irrational.
Nope. I think you are on target.
Thanks! I kept feeling like I wasn’t being at all clear, but as you say, we are in agreement! I sometimes I think that their irrationality is what makes me the craziest; I’m asking myself continually, how can they think that way?!
Satan doesn’t care about ideology. He’s the father of lies, not of reason. He knows he’s wrong. And he knows his fate. That’s why he doesn’t try to build but to destroy.
Do human psychopaths even have an ideology other than: I do what I like?
I have no evidence of this but tend to think that satan’s fall could have happened as early as the moment he saw Adam and got jealous of a superior creature (created in God’s own image). Adam’s fall happened some time afterward.
I never read it as a lament but as an accurate eye witness accusation of one who was at the top of the order (the all-covering cherub) and wanted to stay at the top.
No. They do not.
If a person has an ideology, then he or she gives a care about someone or something other than himself. So by [my non-professional, and now officially deprecated] definition, he is not a psychopath. (He “is capable of empathy”, as the authentically professional people used to say, and still do in the latest Edition, just not about psychopaths. I think they call it “the dark triad” or something spooky like that).
Cassandro,
That is another new thought for me. I do want to understand everything in Scripture including this, but have started prioritizing the things. He never intended anyone of us to know it all during his time in the World of Sights and Sounds, as some famous guy* called it. (*St. A, please give your students 12 hours to finish this quiz before you give the answer.)
Well, I’m not sure what we’re talking about anymore. Who has empathy? Are you referring to satan or the human psychopath? And when I say “have an ideology” I mean “have a view to a purpose beyond or independent of themselves.” It’s possible to spout ideologies for expediency’s sake all day long, but not to have a personal ideology other than to live for oneself.
What they were working for was an unending world-wide struggle, enabled by dividing the populations into classes. It was to be a constant class-warfare that enabled the ruling class to skim benefits. Are Mao, Pol Pot, and Xi idealists whose goals were/are the betterment of the common people? Look at their writings, but also at their actions.
What did the Greeks, Christians and Jews sort of have in common from the beginning that made them successful and what did they do that caused failure? The Greeks were decentralized, ordinary folks had power over themselves, cooperated but to fight a prolonged war centralized and destroyed themselves. The Jews went back and forth and were successful when the folks had power, rotted quickly when power was centralized. Now they’re surrounded by enemies that want to destroy them so the top can’t rot. Christians took the Jewish notions and moved the center from family to individual. The US tied it down so the center didn’t have and couldn’t acquire controlling power. Let’s not forget how the democratic west centralized and rotted prior to post WWII. Hitler was an aberration, but centralization is where folks who get power go. The vast unknowably complex modern economy can’t be run from the top. We’re seeing that now. The speed of decay here is blindingly rapid and without the US to compete with and get new technology from decay in the rest of the west will accelerate. We think it’s Biden’s ineptitude, but he’s not running matters. We also think it’s the Chinese, but we’re doing it for them. Both parties have folks who believe that our economy can be run from above even more successfully because we have brilliant folks who know how to do things better than ordinary ignorant folks at the grass roots. Even if we could get the most brilliant, objective, caring folks in charge, which of course can’t happen, it wouldn’t matter as the economy is beyond understanding. It will continue to concentrate, narrow and it will collapse in some way if we avoid war which isn’t likely. There’s a new phenomena as well, infinitely falling costs, i.e. economies of scale in digital companies. We have to learn how to manage that new reality or there is no fix.
Don’t forget Whitey.
That would explain the smell of burning rubber.
Mark Camp (View Comm
I would be very interested to know if you think there is such evidence in the record.
I have so far seen no evidence in the historical record or their words that Lenin, who was an intellectual, didn’t believe Marx’s and Wilson’s theory of History, in which the successive phases of class struggle must end in a peaceful classless Heaven on earth.
Lenin’s avowed ideology claimed that in the then-current phase of history, under Stalin, it is ordained that there must be dictatorship and brutal oppression, with the cadres happily submitting to Stalin’s false denunciations, false accusations and convictions, and long terms of imprisonment and torture, or execution. Loyal cadres and kulaks and bourgeoisie and aristocrats, side by side. Yes, a state of continual warfare between the Party and the people, until humanity had been transformed and the next or final phase of Progress could be ushered in.
Neither Marx nor Lenin nor any of the rest were ever going to lay down their pens and take up the plow. Susan has the right of this. Watch the feet, not the hands.
People who have suffered severe abuse, especially as children, have extraordinary self-protection triggers. This results in constant shapeshifting and blaming others.
Govt education is an education based on severe psychological child abuse that few survive intact.
I would say THIS is where the West failed and I think this idea is a very post-enlightenment/post-reformation concept. It isn’t Catholic.
There’s an old Christian ideal that the nation forms from the family and individual choice, but that the individuals survive and are protected by the nation and is understood through family, adoption, and grafting.
Those outside the family are grafted in by choice, forsaking their own roots to become part of a new root. Those born into the family are part of it automatically, but can choose to leave and be cut off from their root and go elsewhere.
None of that is a Baptist understanding of Christianity, but a very Catholic and Jewish perspective.
Here’s another place where we failed: refusing to keep debt and creditors in check.
A Christian and Jewish concept is that you do not enslave or in debt your own people. You don’t believe it to be a Christian concept? Go read the Lord’s Prayer.
Indebtedness is enslavement and the west forgot that for very utilitarian reasons. Keeping in check people’s avarice was a necessary piece of civilization that we rejected.
And we can watch that play out with our government completely ignoring our own debt as a nation. Pitiful.
I don’t know why you keep referring to Baptists. What you have described is not even unique to Roman Catholicism. It’s Biblical Christianity.
Because baptists were the first set of Protestants to have a completely clean break with Catholicism and they are very big in American Christian formation and part of the root of evangelicalism in the US.
Their view of Christianity has heavily influenced American Christianity. That’s why I find them relevant to point to.
What I described as historic Christianity is part of the historic view of baptism and it isn’t very individualistic.
While there is some individualism in Christianity, it is very limited to personal responsibility. Being a part of the body of believers is much more prominent. So when someone asserts that Christianity was all about the individual, I want to point out that is a very Americanized and *baptist* view of Christianity.
Quillette had an interesting article about this topic today:
https://quillette.com/2022/07/13/the-classically-greek-roots-of-civilizational-self-doubt/
The question we are discussing is “did Lenin (and the others) believe in the ideology they espoused?”
We can speculate, as you have.
But I am asking if anyone has any evidence. “What they do with their feet” tells you exactly this much: that either the answer is “yes”, or the answer is “no”.
Is it clear? In the second case, their feet will do exactly the same thing, all the way to their death, as in the first case.
You would stack words against deeds?