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It's no news - certainly not to anyone on this board - that what we're dealing with is, in fact, a religion, its adherents self-exempting from any errors and infallible in each of their ever-changing prescriptions. It was true in 1790's France, in in 1920's Russia, and it's true now: a religion of reason turns out to be much more religion than reason, and its most perfervid disciples perfectly fine with vice in the name of virtue. We reach the point of nihilism when virtue is claimed to be nonexistent and belief futile; but there I depart from VDH - an active belief in evil is, after all, a belief in something, and is far more dangerous.

No one is less amenable to reason that someone whose life work is exacting revenge for imaginary crimes, especially when that work turns out to be as highly lucrative as it is emotionally satisfying. Common to communism, socialism, Critical Theory, and collectivism in general is the notion that everyone is a thief and that economic life consists of more successful thieves preying on less successful ones - that part is nihilism - and that social justice consists of the overturning of the roles, not the elimination of preying. That part isn't. That is where Woke bears its teeth and becomes less than human.

“No one is less amenable to reason that someone whose life work is exacting revenge for imaginary crimes, especially when that work turns out to be as highly lucrative as it is emotionally satisfying. Common to communism, socialism, Critical Theory, and collectivism in general ...”

Very well said.

No one is less amenable to reason than someone whose life work is exacting revenge for imaginary crimes, especially when that work turns out to be as highly lucrative as it is emotionally satisfying.

In the middle of the last century, I recall grade school teachers saying how government jobs like theirs 'paid less but were more secure'. Over the decades that has somehow changed to 'pay better and are more secure'. The extra cash and free time that government jobs bring now attracts unprincipled miscreants who leverage those benefits for power - power over the larger populace that funds their positions.

Complaints to their unworthiness are met not with "well, yes, I guess we government workers are getting a bit too large a share of our common wealth", but with "we are government workers, your betters, so don't complain. We might have a mind to punish you".

And if they have the authority, punish they will, just as the Roman magistrates would unbundle their fasces of sticks & axe to mete out beatings or beheadings as they deemed appropriate.

They are quite happy with the lucre they receive, and are willing to take advantage of others to keep it. They rationalize that their advantages are earned, while imagining that others who complain to them are unworthy deplorables. They "bare their teeth", as you said, at those who question them. They are the "successful" thieves who convince themselves that because they are more highly rewarded than their neighbors, it follows that they are more deserving, and better than, their neighbors.