On the Incivility of Socialists
Forgive me if I fail to list by definition and axiom and minor premise and major all my reasons for the thoughts I express below. Those reasons have been given many times before, by me and by other men more learned and articulate than I.
It is instructive to notice that it greater part of the rudeness, the incivility, the madness in public discourse comes from the Left.
It does not matter whether they are Christian or agnostic or atheist, the socialists cannot hold a civilized conversation or debate.
This is because, ultimately, after one says “eat the rich!” one has nothing to say.
One may just call people names after that, bark at them like a foaming mad dog, sneer at one’s betters, scoff and snarl and heap disdain on people too decent to reply in kind.
If someone says, “But once we eat the rich, by what means will the society accumulate and invest capital? In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The socialist will reply, “You are a moron. I am smart. You are a reactionary. I am progressive. You are benighted. I am enlightened. I am good, because I want to kill the rich and steal their things and dash out their baby’s brains against the rocks. You are evil.” or something of the kind.
If you say, “Let us grant that I am an evil moron. How can civilization be maintained without specialization of labor, trade and industry, and the other incidental effects of private property?”
The socialist will reply, “You are a moron. I am smart. You are a reactionary. I am progressive. You are benighted. I am enlightened. I am good, because I want to kill the rich and steal their things and dash out their baby’s brains against the rocks. You are evil.” or something of the kind.
If you say, “Consider the following chart (see below). If socialism, even if at first a peaceful movement motivated by legitimate grievances imposed on exploited workingmen, has come to this throughout the entire Second World, what does that imply about the nature of socialism? What does that imply about its relation to classical liberalism?”
In case that is too many numbers for you, the bottom line is that socialism murdered one hundred ten million men, women, and children in the Twentieth Century.
Socialism is allegedly an economic theory on how to redistribute wealth in order to cure social injustices or defects endemic to the free market. But, if so, why does it lead to mass murder unparalleled in human history in any place it has been fully implemented?
Why does it lead to rationing, scarcity, poverty, depression, decay of the economy, metastasizing bureaucracy, loss of liberty, and loss of civility and virtue in any place it has been partially implemented?
The socialist will reply, “You are a moron. I am smart. You are not listening to my argument. You are not being fair. You are afraid to argue with me!”
You might, if in a jovial mood, answer, “Let us grant that I have all the character defects you ascribe to me. For what reason do you believe that socialism, which had proven a ghastly failure leading to mass murder of a magnitude without parallel in history, will not fail if tried again, or if implemented more rigorously?”
Him: “If we only kill another one hundred million innocent people, and inflict tyranny and misery and cruelty on countless more, this time it will work for sure!”
You: “Why will it work this time if it never worked before? Why will eliminating money from society and eliminating the incentives which produce wealth somehow create money and create wealth instead of destroying it? Why will the same behavior under the same conditions not lead to the same result?”
Him: “You. Moron. Evil. Evilly evil moron and moronically evil evildoer! You bad! Fascist! Racist! You are mean to me and I am going to cry.”
You: “Perhaps you could give me the chain of reasoning which leads to your conclusion, except without calling me an evil moron.”
Him: “You want to push crippled grandmothers in a wheelchair off a cliff!”
You: “Uh … what?”
Bizzaro: “Bizzaro am smart! Bizzaro am smarter than you!”
You: “Granted, but how does that bear on the argument? If the government enacts policies which act as an incentive uncivilized behavior, such as discouraging marriage, while at the same time deterring saving and investment by socializing costs but concentrating benefits…”
Him: “Evil! Evil! EVIL! EEE-EEVILLL!!!”
And then lather, rinse, repeat.
To be sure, I am joking. I indulge in a rather unsubtle satire of socialists I have read or have addressed, starting with Karl Marx. But I am satirizing a disturbing and persistent behavior in the intellectual life of those who lean to the Left.
They are pathologically unable to treat any opposition as an understandable or honest error, or as an alternate point of view worthy of respect. Heaping disrespect upon the opposition is not the main point of socialist rhetoric. It is the only point. That is all there is to their argument.
They have no argument. The emperor has no clothes.
To be sure, socialists come in many breeds. Some are nonviolent, and seek to undermine civilization by slow and patient legislation and educational conditioning, incremental judicial activism, and press corps to act as an informal and unarmed Thought Police.
They want the benefits of the police state without the actual need for police. They want the taxman rather than the hangman to soak the rich. They want the sheep not to stampede.
Well, I will give the partial socialists credit for yearning after a peaceful tyranny, imposed by consensus and peer pressure, where the population votes itself into its chains voluntarily, and is kept disarmed, stupefied, uneducated, porn-addicted, drugged, drunk and childless by their own psychological prison.
That is better than the revolution and the guillotine. The terror imposed by the violent socialist, with his secret police and gulags and torture rooms, are in the long run less efficient than the despair, the sheer mind-deadening hopelessness imposed by the nonviolent socialist, with his socialized medicine and cradle to grave welfare state, his hate speech laws and sensitivity training, the pornography and soccer riots and drugs and booze and mass media which keep the herd placid.
But the result is the same: the end of civilization.
The partial socialist creates and maintains a permanent underclass of infantile dependents, pays them to break up their families and to father bastards, drives both religious virtue and civic virtue out of the public square, discourages both individualism and national unity, and drives the honest poor into dishonest servility, infantilism, infanticide, vice, and, ironically, truculence.
Socialism sets man against wife, father against child, master against servant, worker against boss, race against race and all against all.
Then, having gathered and trained a generation of idle young men to despise self-control, honesty and thrift, and drilled them in race riot psychology, the partial socialist is shocked, shocked, when race riots break out, and the artificially impoverished underclass does not display and self-control, honesty or thrift.
The committed socialist is not shocked, but is delighted, because any revolution, revolt, or violence confirms his ersatz Biblical prophecy yearning for Armageddon and the promised scientifically socialist New Jerusalem beyond.
An aside: Notice that the race riots of recent years broke out in places which never had slavery and never had Jim Crow laws, not in the rural South, but instead break out in places where Democrat politics formed a generation of the youth, in New York, LA, Chicago. The race riots are caused by the relatively mild case of socialism running through the civil immune system of the nation in the 60’s and 70’s, not by the legacy of slavery nor the cruelty of white enormities.
Under socialism, it is not the fortunate or brilliant or hard-working businessman who becomes rich or stays rich, but only whoever is the crony and toad-eater of the commissars and party bosses. So under a generation of socialism the rich are just as barren of self-control, honesty and thrift. These toady capitalists are socialists of the purest ideological purity.
Why are all socialists barbarians?
Simply put, they could not be anything else. Socialism is the psychopathological denial of the law of supply and demand, the scarcity of resources, and a rejection of specialization of labor. It is a denial of economics, of private property, of the link between honest labor and the fair reward freely granted by your grateful neighbors in swap for it.
Socialists are barbarians because socialism is barbarism; or, to be specific, socialism is post-civilizationalism.
Socialism is not the return to the Robert E Howard or Rousseau glamor of lusty and manly barbarism, with its small tribes of troglodytes, Victor Mature and Rachel Welsh in leather swimsuits, living at oneness with nature and dancing with wolves in an ecologically friendly Edenic yet virile existence. Even barbarism, admittedly, has its good side: plenty of healthy outdoor air, for one.
No, socialism is not that and not promising that. It is post-civilization, specifically, the promise that you, the chump, can enjoy the benefits of industrialization and trade without the drawbacks incumbent upon the institution of private property, private land ownership, and the use of money for currency. It is promising civilization without the laws and customs which establish, create, and maintain civilization. It is promising the benefits of specialization of labor without the institutions which allow laborers to specialize.
I am talking about all aspects of this mental disease called socialism. It is a psychopathological fear of the law of supply and demand, a hysterical denial that scarce goods must be economized.
Socialism is an inarticulate harpy-scream of hatred at the nature of reality and at the curse of Adam, which requires men to sweat for their bread. It is a lust for the guillotine, the revolution, the Molotov cocktail. Socialism is hate for the rich and hate for the Kulak and hate for the reactionaries and hate for the Church and hate for other socialists and most of all hate for the bourgeoisie, the middle class, the decent people.
Imagine an iron boot stamping on the face of Sam Gamgee the gardener. Forever.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
