The mere existence of the Thomas More Society - just the mere thought of an ideologically-driven and intellectually dishonest organization named for a man who was notable specifically for the fact that he refused to subvert his reason to political expediency - fills me with rage.
I’ve suspected it’s largely performative. I still don’t really get it though.
And I have the same reaction I have to most of these types of things - I wonder what it tastes like, and wish I could try it.
I’ve never understood why these things trigger such uproar. It’s not like it’s poison or some sort of bodily secretion or something - it’s just a somewhat unusual but entirely edible ingredient. And it could be good. So what’s the problem?
Most people seem to miss the fact that it’s a paradox, even though it’s right there in the name.
And I dream of a world in which, instead of merely wishing to oppress and murder this group of people instead of that one, people don’t wish to oppress and murder anyone.
It’s as if the people who talk about it the most don’t actually have the foggiest idea what a “ruling class” actually is or how it comes to be.
There is a lot of backwards ideas that get accepted as “leftist,” when they’re really statist.
This is my objection too.
All too many people here don’t seem to even begin to understand the inherent threats of institutionalized authority, so in their rush to head off the recreation of the Third Reich, they’re basically advocating for the recreation of the Khmer Rouge instead.
Exploitation is inherent to any system in which there is an established hierarchy, which necessarily includes any and all systems in which there is institutionalized authority, entirely regardless of the economic system in place.
Leaving institutionalized authority in place and merely switching from a capitalist to a socialist system only changes the specific hoops the exploiters have to jump through to gain and maintain privilege - instead of gaining wealth and using it to buy political power, they have to, and do, gain political power and use it to commandeer wealth.
If you want to fight exploitation, you need to go all the way to the real source and fight the institutionalization of authority.
Any time anyone has the power to rule, you axiomatically have a ruling class.
It’s just game theory in action.
People with morals, principles, integrity, honor and/or empathy will exercise self-restraint - there are choices they will not make and courses of action they will not follow.
Those without those qualities will not be so constrained. They can and will do absolutely whatever it takes to gain whatever they might want.
So all other things being more or less equal, psychopaths actually have a competitive advantage in systems of institutionalized, hierarchical authority - governments, corporations, police departments, armed forces and so on. For all intents and purposes, those institutions reward and thus select for psychopathy.
It’s sort of akin to the way that cancer spreads through an individual by outcompeting, dominating, displacing and destroying healthy cells.
And it’s just as ultimately fatal, and for essentially the same reasons.
The problem isn’t communism per se, but communism forcibly imposed.
More precisely, the problem is that communism is the superior system to the degree that it’s egalitarian - that it eliminates the ruling class and instead treats all citizens equally - and the forcible imposition of communism immediately destroys that, since it presumes that those carrying out the forcible imposition rightfully possess the authority to do so, and thereby simply establishes them as a new ruling class.
Communism should be the goal, but in order to actually fulfill its potential, it MUST be voluntarily adopted by the people rather than forcibly imposed.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.