Suicide of the Liberals

First Things ^ | Oct 2020 | Gary Saul Morton

[CondoleezzaProtege]

Most important, and of greatest concern, was how intelligents thought.

An intelligent signed on to a set of beliefs regarded as totally certain, scientifically proven, and absolutely obligatory for any moral person. A strict intelligent had to subscribe to some ideology—whether populist, Marxist, or anarchist—that was committed to the total destruction of the existing order and its replacement by a utopia that would, at a stroke, eliminate every human ill. This aspiration was often described as chiliastic (or apocalyptic), and, as has been observed, it is no accident that many of the most influential intelligents, from Chernyshevsky to Stalin, came from clerical families or had studied in seminaries. For Struve, the mentality of the intelligentsia constituted a cruel parody of religion, preserving “the external features of religiosity without its content.”

An intelligent could not be a believer, which is another reason no one would have considered Tolstoy (let alone that conservative Dostoevsky) an intelligent. They accepted atheism on faith, were spiritually devoted to materialism, and proselytized determinism. They based these commitments on “science,” a word they used to mean not a disinterested process of discovery based on experiment and evidence, but—and here the reason became perfectly circular —a metaphysics of materialism and determinism.

Still worse, intelligentsia “science” entailed an assertion that the world worked by blind, purposeless force and yet, as if guided by providence, was guaranteed to progress in human terms and reach moral perfection...

If there was one “philosopheme” (Struve’s term) shared by intelligents it was the assumption that all questions must be judged politically...

[CondoleezzaProtege]

A bit of dense but fulfilling reading, written 4 yrs ago by Russian literature professor Gary Saul Morton. A lot of relevance when thinking about how the elites of Western culture operate today.

[exinnj]

An “intelligent” means “intelligent person” in English.

[Wuli]

The Marxist induced suicide of the “Liberals” began in the 1960s and increased every decade since then. Year by year they kept drinking and getting high on the Red’s koolaid and have never been able to get dried out.

[Dick Bachert]

7 minutes on how to take down the DEEP STATE
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