Socialism = A protection scheme by a “mafia” that you pay insurance to, to protect you from themselves.. by threats from the very “Mafia” that you pay insurance to..
Democracy = is a political disease that results in the symptom of socialism.. it is Mob Rule by mobsters..
Democracy is indispensable to socialism. The goal of socialism is communism. -V.I. Lenin
The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism .-Karl Marx
A lot of people around the world thought communism's triumph was therefore inevitable. The fall of the Berlin Wall put the lie to Marx's theory, but there are still a lot of people who believe it anyway.
The left is playing political warfare for keeps and our guys are lining up like tin soldiers just like its a sport.
Gnoticism teaches that human spirit was God, is now trapped in the evil matierial and only through the sufficient knowledge, can we return to be God. The process of being removed from God is called “alienation”, a theme that should be familiar to students of Marx, even as he put a secular interpretation on it. Humanity could return to God when it achieved the perfect socialist condition. The foundational ideas of Gnosticism go back to the time of Plato.
“To understand [alienation] we have to go back behind Hegel, the immediate source of Marx’s ideas, to Hegel’s own ultimate source: viz. Gnosticism. For alienation is the central theme of Gnosticism, along with the saving knowledge of how we became alienated, and from what, and of
how we can escape from it. That theme is summarized in the Valentinian formula:
‘What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we came; what birth is and what rebirth.’
All the Gnostic texts, though they differ in details, declare that we are strangers, aliens, sparks of Light or Spirit trapped in evil matter. They recount the cosmic process whereby the circles of the world have been
created, by ignorant or evil creators and not by the Light, and whereby we have become entrapped in the midmost or deepest dungeon. Finally they impart the knowledge needed to escape back to the one Light whence we have come and which is our real home.
This is the pattern of thought that Hegel took over. But, rejecting all other-worldliness, he sought to reconcile men to this world, of nature and society, from which they had become estranged. We are the vehicles of a self-creating Geist which, in order to become and to know itself, has gone out into what is most alien to itself—the merely physical world of Newtonian science—and is progressively coming thence to its full self-realization and self-knowledge in and through human life and
history. With this knowledge, given by Hegel’s own philosophy, man’s alienation from the world is in principle, overcome although Geist has not yet fully realized itself in the world.
Marx took from Hegel two basic themes of Gnosticism, which Hegel had secularized, and re-interpreted them in his own way: viz. the cosmic drama of a fall into alienation from nature and one’s fellow men, and the saving knowledge, Marxism, which explains this and the way out of alienation back to an unalienated existence. But in one central
respect Marx did not fully learn the lesson that Hegel had to teach him about modifying ancient Gnosticism.
The Gnostic texts state that we are sparks of Light or fragments of Spirit (pneuma), and imply that we are distinct from each other and from the Light or Spirit only because of our fall or seduction into the circles of the world. As we fell through each circle, we were clothed
with an outer covering. The return to the Light will be a reversal of that process, so that, as we pass back through each circle we shall strip off each coating. Consequently, but this is never stated, as far as I know, at the end of that process each spark or fragment will cease to be distinct and will merge back into the One Light or Spirit. Hence the End will be the same as the Beginning.”
From Flew, Marx and Gnosticism, by R.T. Allen,
Philosophy Vol 68, No 263, (Jan, 1993),
pp. 94-98
(”Flew” is Antony Flew, 1923-2010, a British philosopher)
So, yes, socialism is a “religion” that is the modern vestige of Gnosticism. Further, author Alan Knight in his book AntiChrist, shows that Valentinian Gnosticism can be traced back to Hellenism, which can be traced to Platonism, which is traced to Babylon.
Start the study, say, in Junior year, with a semester on Plato followed by a semester on Aristotle. Thesis and antithesis. And resume in Senior year with a semester on Marx and Hegel followed up by a semester on Hume, Adam Smith, and Ricardo. Thesis and antithesis.
It's all in the presentation.
OK. I know. There aren't enough hours in the day after the little beggars have stuffed down thrown away three Moochelle-approved, taxpayer-funded meals and practiced putting condoms on each other.
Nonetheless. Very good post.
The Hegelian Dialectic is defeated at the level of First Principles.
Did you ever wonder where the Dialectic comes from in the first place? It comes from someone, or some group, who has worked out definitions of first principles to support their position, and then engages argument through the dialectic method.
Why? Because as long as you own First Principles, you own the vector of the dialectic.
It's not a bad thing - it's a functional thing.
The Founders knew this, too. That's why they first worked out the discovery - for it is far more than a theory - of the truth of natural rights, of Divinely given rights to human beings that pre-exist any government or declaration.
That is the genius of the Founders. Stick with that, you can protect freedom. Lose it, and it doesn't matter what is attached to the Dialectic - you get slavery.
That's why the Enemy came up with the 14th Amendment, and wrapped Civil Rights around it as a Dialectic - to sell the fact that they'd gotten rid of natural rights. Ever since then, every dialectical argument has been merely part of the slow slide into total slavery, because the First Principles of the Natural Rights of the Constitution are negated and replaced by the First Principles of government sovereignty over the people by the 14th Amendment.
As long as the 14th Amendment stands, socialists will occupy the high ground. And the only thing necessary to reverse this is for people to understand it.
Judges and politicians and lawyers and a lot of cops and federal and state authorities understand it. But for the most part, the people simply do not - nor do they care to learn. And that is the pity.