Much Needed Moral Clarity from Sarah Hoyt
Sarah Hoyt writes about the nature of Utopianism, and gives reasons why the the Utopian revolution, mean to turn men into angels, always end up turning them into devils. She explains a point which always confounded me, namely, why there is a strong streak of sadism in Leftism, when the individual Leftists themselves seem mild and meek and cowardly to the point of masochism. I am grateful for the illumination.
Read the whole thing, by all means. http://accordingtohoyt.com/2014/11/14/table-settings-at-the-cannibal-feast/
But here is a sample:
Revolutions like the US, which changed governance but didn’t presume to change the way people worked, in their minds and hearts, don’t turn into cannibal feasts. OTOH revolutions like the French, where people descended/aspired to changing the names of the weekdays and the months, in order to construct a completely different humanity, inevitably end up in a pile of blood-soaked corpses.
So do revolutions like the Russian and the Chinese, and others.
The difference is this: these revolutions make functioning as a normal human a crime. This requires changing your very thoughts and the way you process reality. And they presume to divine from your smallest actions, your most casual lapses, that you have commited a thought-crime.
This, of course, requires special people who can look into the actions and every day assumptions of others and tell them where they went wrong.
The process is bad enough when done by a minister or another nominally trained person. (I am not talking here of ministers in normal denominations, who are usually trained and don’t want to remake humanity, just get it to behave a little better.) In extreme cases, it creates Jim Jones. It is nightmarish when done by the left, which means it is done by people given power and authority to do this by the grace of totally arbitrary characteristics: where they were born/when/what pigmentation their skin has/what happens to be between their legs/whom they like to sleep with. This is not an exhaustive list, but it should give you an idea that none of these attributes is magical, and none of them should confer the authority to discern and judge the secrets of other’s hearts.
But the SJWs believe it does. They believe someone who is born with more victim cards, even if the person was in fact born very wealthy and never experienced a day’s hardship, immediately can judge them and tell them when they’re exhibiting “privilege” which is a taint that attaches to other seemingly arbitrary characteristics, no matter how poor or downtrodden people born with them are.
This sets them up to be abused in exactly the way that Synova describes. Worse, it sets them up to join the mob and wail for the blood of innocent people in whom one of these “anointed ones” discerned guilt. Not to do so, might mean they were tainted with the guilt themselves, after all.
By this process, they saddle themselves with psychopaths as leaders (yeah, some of the anointed ones are merely true believers, but that kind of power inevitably attracts psychopaths and sadists) and make any organization, place, country or government they take over into hell on Earth, instead of the utopia they imagine.
The state of irrationality is demonstrated by the commenter who thought I was RH because of our “similar rhetoric.” There are in fact not even mild similarities between an extreme leftist and myself. BUT both of us made him feel pain. So, therefore we are similar and possibly the same.
That means the commenter had the ability to think/react/avoid pain of a nematode, if that high.
I would enjoin those people caught in the vortex of accusation/appeasement/abasement to take a good look at what they’re doing.
A society where the rules have to be divined by special individuals (no? Would any rational human being think of “lady” as an insult, till the SJWs declared it so?) is not conducive to liberty. It’s not conducive to kindness. It’s damaging to the ability to think.
In the end it makes you animals, joining a mob to avoid being killed.
I suggest if you are caught in it, or suspect you might be, that you re-read Animal Farm.
Oddly enough, I recognize that name of the blogger who, on James Nicoll’s site, accuses Sarah Hoyt of being Requires Hate. He used to leave fewmets regularly on my blog. Since his comments were routinely toward the Nutbag side of the Nutbag-to-Sadist spectrum of Leftwing politics, I would have assumed it far more likely than he himself is Requires Hate than any otherwise.
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.
