Amerika

Few people realize that Leftism is the product of civilization decline as well as the force that pushes the decline further toward completion. Drawing distinctions between groups of Leftists is as meaningless as talking about small versus large forest fires; given time, the former inevitably becomes the latter.

This means that as soon as you accept “equality” as a goal into your society, you are on a path that will not stop until something like forced socialism is achieved. Even the moderate Leftists are pushing toward this goal, whether they admit it or volubly deny it.

Twenty-four hundred years ago, Plato wrote about how socialism arises from democracy because of their shared basis in egalitarianism:

And this is called the wealthy class, and the drones feed upon them.
That is pretty much the case, he said.
The people are a third class, consisting of those who work with their own hands; they are not politicians, and have not much to live upon. This, when assembled, is the largest and most powerful class in a democracy.

True, he said; but then the multitude is seldom willing to congregate unless they get a little honey.

And do they not share? I said. Do not their leaders deprive the rich of their estates and distribute them among the people; at the same time taking care to reserve the larger part for themselves?

Why, yes, he said, to that extent the people do share.
And the persons whose property is taken from them are compelled to defend themselves before the people as they best can?

What else can they do?
And then, although they may have no desire of change, the others charge them with plotting against the people and being friends of oligarchy? True.

And the end is that when they see the people, not of their own accord, but through ignorance, and because they are deceived by informers, seeking to do them wrong, then at last they are forced to become oligarchs in reality; they do not wish to be, but the sting of the drones torments them and breeds revolution in them.

That is exactly the truth.
Then come impeachments and judgments and trials of one another.
True.
The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness.

Yes, that is their way.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector.

A situation where “their leaders deprive the rich of their estates and distribute them among the people” is the end goal of all egalitarian, altruistic, tolerant, pluralistic, utilitarian, and contrarian thinking. They deny the necessity of production and focus instead on theft and redistribution.

Once a system is established, people are forced to depend on it, and limit their thinking to working within its rules and exploiting those rules in order to avoid being ground down by the wheel of dogma. They cannot think outside of that framework; they will reproduce it even if freed because it is the archetype from which they think.

As a result, when egalitarianism becomes the norm, people understand only “more egalitarianism” or what egalitarians think their opposite is, namely rule by the wealthy. The idea of doing things for realistic and transcendental reasons never occurs to these people, and has not in all of recorded history.

As Plato pointed out, egalitarianism starts when people want individualism, or liberation from social norms, rules, mores, customs, and most of all, reality. They become contrarians and deny whatever is real so that they can pursue this Utopian vision in order to justify their own exploitation of the commons.

To make themselves feel better, they invent a fiction of the wealthy stealing from them, forgetting that the wealthy make their money off of selling things to others and without that audience, have less wealth, so they have an interest in keeping that audience happy.

They also forget that the wealthy do not need to steal, nor do they have any interest in controlling others, except to defend their own wealth from situations where “their leaders deprive the rich of their estates and distribute them among the people.”

In the end, all of it is fiction. Individualists form into mobs and become collectives. Those steal everything, but most important, steal the means of making more for the next generation, and soon the society settles into evenly-distributed poverty. At least everyone is finally equal.

Tags: communism, egalitarianism, equality, plato, socialism