Saturday, October 23, 2004

What can a man do?

I write this blog laying out my best ideas, criticisms, and hopes for world. We have a lot of fun here, i will admit that, but underneath the smirk there is a serious attempt to understand the world i live in.

One day i come up with a turly amazing idea, and give it my best shot. I write my idea down and them wait for the world to recive me in all my glory. While i am waiting and learning more about the world i discover that my idea has been done for many years.

My idea: Why god is a socialist and what man can do about it. Some other smuck's idea: Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism

The phrase "Heaven on Earth" in the context of the book is lifted from a phrase by Moses Hess who, in his Communist Confession of Faith, noted that while Christians imagine a heavenly joy "We, on the other hand, will have this heaven on earth." It's exactly this kind of religious fervor for the concepts of socialism (and communism - the terms are used interchangeably) that gave socialist regimes the license to do whatever it took to cram Paradise down people's throats. And when people rejected the "freedom" offered to them, the results were horrific: Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's Soviet Republic, and Mao's China. In total, Muravchik estimates that more than 100 million people were murdered in the name of socialism since 1917

cube

1 comment:

Andrew said...

It really all comes down to free will. God left us here on earth with choices. He allows us to chose to love him, and chose to help others. It is his way of picking the wheat from the chaf. God is a lover of freedom. Socialists believe everyone should be forced to help others, and that freedom is something that cannot be trusted with the average citizen.

That's not a valid argument. You say God uses free will to seperate the wheat from the chaff. The wheat get salvation (or whatever) and the chaff get damnation (or whatever). But you could make an analogous argument with socialism. Citizens in a socialist culture have the free will to either follow the law or not. If they participate, they get to share in the (supposed) earthly utopia; if they don't participate, they get to live in jail or die. Fundamentally, the options are the same, although the stakes are higher in the Christian model.

But yeah cube, that ideas pretty old: Nietzsche already analogized the psychology of Christians and socialists 130 years ago. The easiest approach to it is in the last chapter of his *Twilight of the Idols*. Of course, Nietzsche was critical of both Christianity and socialism, so the passage has a fairly negative bent.