But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you — the social reformers — see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.
Category: collectivization
The urge to centralize
At the end of a century that has seen the evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies, the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent.
It starts with the centralization of power
The path we’re embarked upon, in the name of good, is a familiar one. The unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism did not begin in the ‘30s and ‘40s with the men usually associated with those names. Those horrors were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to the consolidation of power in central government in the name of ‘social justice.’ It was decent but misguided Germans, who would have cringed at the thought of extermination and genocide, who built the Trojan Horse for Hitler to take over. We Americans promote disrespect for our Constitution, rule of law and private property in our pursuit of ‘social justice.’ But the scum that rises to the top has an agenda of command and control that’s leading toward totalitarianism. And, incidentally, it’s no coincidence that most of those at the top are lawyers — people with a special, seemingly tutored, contempt for our Constitution and rule of law.
Collectivist promised
The more government tries to control, the greater the disaster, as shown by the current health-care debacle. Collectivists (those who stand for government control of the means of production and how people live their lives) promise heaven but deliver hell. For them, the promised end justifies the means.
Continue reading “Collectivist promised”
The collectivist paradox
Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of this larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the interindividual process.
State vs. society
The more profound problem, however, is the degree to which many academic intellectuals, especially in the humanities, have lost their ability to distinguish the ‘state’ from ‘society.’
The failure of rigid central planning
The man of system … is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.
Despotism through consolidation of power
The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create whatever the form of government, a real despotism.
Freedom giving way to control
I believe that America is the greatest country in history and for good reasons, but America has been changing and not for the better. Our free society has been falling prey to a more repressive system with methods for the increased control of people. The return of groups and individuals to the controlling ideology of Imperialism and Marxism using the structures of Corporatism, Socialism, and Democracy. The result is that this nation’s foundational principles based on the ideology of Liberty are now in danger of extinction.
The failure of central planners
Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.