Posted on 01/27/2011 7:24:32 PM PST by Noumenon
In the course of writing my book, Killers Without Conscience, I've had to re-think a few things after reading Chantal Delsol's Icarus Fallen and The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century. Going to take a second and third pass through the two titles to really get the complete gist of what she's up to. I can't agree with all of her ideas regarding human nature and the fate of Man, but her ideas and insights fairly leap off of every page. Highly, highly recommended for anyone who wants a deeper insight into our modern times. For example, Delsol, in the Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century understands what animates much of the tortured thinking and pretzel logic the Left employs:
Vital resistance and resentment are the two main responses to the events of 1989. Vital resistance: the mind realizes its mistake - it admits, for example, that nationalization of the means of production does not produce a happy society, but rather laziness and constant shortages; it refuses, however, to let go of the idea because of its passionate attachment to it. Existence - adventures, friendships, successes - is nourished and permeated by this belief to such an extent that the belief becomes an identity; the individual cannot renounce it without committing a kind of symbolic suicide. No one can admit... that his existence reflects the echo of a failure.
In other words, no one who has championed the ideas of collectivism in any of its forms wants to admit that the premises upon which one has constructed their entire raison d’être is an empty, shrieking fraud. This goes a long way towards explaining why we still see excuses made for the monstrous crimes of the monsters on the Left.
Getting back to Killers Without Conscience, the path I've taken with the book so far is that there are two streams of thought, two memes, really that converged with disastrous results in the last two hundred years (a period of time that Delsol also happens to agree with).
First of all, we have a set of ideas that lead to what I characterize as the dehumanization of humanity. The signal authors of those ideas : Marx. Freud, B.F. Skinner and Nietzsche. We find examples of their contemporaries in the likes of Emanuel Ezekiel, John Holdren and Cass Sunstein. Not to put too fine a point on it, the main recurrent theme in their works is that humans are nothing more than things, animals or machines. Some of them have said as much. We can all understand the downside of that particular view. The history of the last century alone is proof enough.
Nietzsche's role in this particular stream of thought is both remarkable and crucial. To sum up a fair amount of research, the notion of God - the force that move men and nations the source of our conscience and our notions of right and wrong - was increasingly seen as an invention, a fantasy - and also as an impediment to human 'progress' by these modern thinkers. But Nietzsche saw God not as an invention, but as a casualty. He wrote in 1886: "The greatest event in recent times - that 'God is Dead,' that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable - is beginning to cast its first shadows upon Europe." The Christian God, he wrote, would no longer stand in the way of the development of the New Man who Nietzsche said would be ‘beyond good and evil’. Nietzsche knew that in Europe, the decline of religion as a guide to conscience and morality would leave a huge vacuum. Who or what would fill that vacuum?
As Nietzsche saw it, the most likely candidate would be what he called the 'Will to Power,' which he felt offered a better and more persuasive explanation of human behavior than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. The very concept of good and evil would be discarded as the product of weak and inferior minds. Our notions of good and evil would disappear in the wake of what he characterized as the 'transvaluation of all values.'
But above all, Nietzsche believed that the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by religious sanctions, without moral restraint of any kind, and with an unappeasable and insatiable appetite for controlling mankind.
Then we have the uniquely destructive meme dedicated to the undermining of culture in order to weaken it, destroy it, and replace it with a totalitarian system. All as proposed by Antonio Gramsci in his call for the 'long march through the institutions.' This idea has been echoed, amplified and modified over the decades by Herbert Marcuse (repressive tolerance), Saul Alinsky, and the Cloward-Piven duo. The aims of this particular set of monsters are best exemplified by a banner I once saw at a leftist-anarchist demonstration - Burn the old world to reveal the new. Eerily echoed in a line from The Dark Knight: "Some men just want to watch the world burn..."
And some men, driven by the geas of the will to power would rather rule in hell from atop a heap of rubble and corpses than leave the rest of us alone to live in peace and prosperity. A new feudalism (or worse) and a world lit only by fire will suit them just fine as long as they believe that they will be the ones in the high castle. Most of us dead. The rest of us in chains. Their vision demands it.
The research I’ve done leads me to believe that the convergence of these two very bad - and downright evil – lines of thought, now running as memes within Western civilization have provided the perfect vehicle, the perfect operating environment for an even worse outbreak of ruin and slaughter than we have seen in the last century. Crossing those streams, as Dr. Spengler once said to Dr. Venkman, would be very bad. And so it has been. That convergence plays directly into the hands of the will-to-power driven monsters that I've characterized as Killers Without Conscience.
Worst of all, and if history’s any indicator, what's coming as a result of that convergence has the potential to make the worst excesses of the last century look like a Girl Scout picnic by comparison.
Unless we here in America stop it. No one else will.
ping
Me 2
Then we have the uniquely destructive meme dedicated to the undermining of culture in order to weaken it, destroy it, and replace it with a totalitarian system.
In the end these are not two streams. They are both the logical consequence of the belief that all of existence (including humanity) is nothing more than the outworking of time, plus energy, plus chance. In that scenario, humans are simply an accidental assemblage of matter. Objects. And the arrangement of the objects belongs to whoever or whatever has the power to do the arranging.
Both memes are, at their root, a denial of the nature of reality. That human beings are subjects, uniquely created individual personalities in the image of their Creator, the infinite, personal God of the universe. The one who made all this and placed us in it. To treat human beings as objects is more than simply disrespecting the humans. It is to disrespect and deny the Creator.
I share your concern, but I don't think the danger is due to a convergence. I think it is due to the inevitable consequence of the first humans action based on the deception that they did not need God.
But I am not optimistic about America. At best we can only forestall the inevitable.
This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. John 3:19
“Dr. Spengler”
Aptly named.
I wonder if the Ghostbusters writers knew what they were doing in that regard?
The irony is delicious.
Yep. Spengler is named after Spengler.
Oswald Spengler?
The very same. Mr. Oswald “Decline of the West” Spengler.
You know, I’ve tried to read that book at least three times. I still can’t get through it.
Glenn Beck has said several times recently that the "American Experiment" is based on the question of whether humans can rule themselves, or must they be ruled.
Those who hold the latter view he characterizes as "Ranchers" who believe they have an obligation to herd the "cattle" for their own good.
At the end of the day, as long as I have a rifle, I’ve got an answer for the ‘ranchers’ and their ambitions.
Looking forward to more of this work.
It’s coming along. I’m still surprised by what my research is uncovering. Ping for the day.
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