Saturday, July 21, 2018

When Facts And Reason Are Against Socialism

... you deny that objective truth exists and claim that mathematics and reason are oppressive.

I just finished my third time through the audio of this lecture by Stephen Hicks on Postmodernism, based on his book, Explaining Postmodernism, which I have yet to read. Combining that with my readings from Mussolini and Hitler as well as theology and other odds and ends, I'm starting to formulate a timeline and mechanism for the spread of the postmodern disease we suffer from today.

My own crude, incomplete definition of Postmodernism is that it is the rejection of the reality of objective truth. When progressives talk about "your truth" and "my truth" and, most importantly for this post, continue to support socialism, it is a direct result of the Postmodern movement that has taken over our academies.

Here's my basic timeline so far. I'm sure it has plenty of inaccuracies, but it is, after all, my truth and therefore is just as valid as whatever really happened.

Wink.
  1. Karl Marx comes up with this great new idea, Socialism which is a transition stage to Communism. He makes all kinds predictions about how the world is going to go there because he's all sciency and stuff.

  2. Lots of intellectuals sign on to this because they like wacky new ideas that promise a utopia ruled by people like them because they are so much smarter than you, you mouth-breathing peasant.

  3. World War I comes along and the workers of the world don't unite, they kill each other in huge numbers because one worker of the world is from Germany and the other worker of the world is from France.

  4. In contradiction to Marx's science-filled predictions, revolution comes, but it comes to agrarian Russia instead of industrial Germany, France or Britain.

  5. Mussolini and Hitler, big socialists themselves, can see that something is wrong. Is it socialism? Ha! What a joke! It's not socialism, it's the failure to center socialism in the nation instead of the world. Thus we end up with National Socialism under Hitler and Fascism under Mussolini. Yay! Winning!

  6. Err, not so much. National Socialism comes to an end in a bunker in Berlin in April of 1945. Fascism sneaks out the back door and heads to Argentina and later, the maunderings of the Clintons and Barack Obama.

  7. This is all OK for the atheist socialist intelligentsia. Their religion just needed some tweaking. Now that the dead branches of Marx's slight miscalculations and Hitler's right-wing socialism (ahem) have been pruned, we can get down with that dancing fool, Papa Joe Stalin and his Soviet Union, which will lead the workers of the world to victory.

  8. 1956 happens. Papa Joe dies and it's revealed that the Soviet Union was a horrific prison camp where the roads are lined with the skeletons of slaughtered millions. As if we needed more proof, the Soviets put down a peaceful revolution in Hungary and that is televised all over the world. Walter Duranty and the New York Times can't save them this time, that sucker is right there, live, in your living room.

  9. The intellectuals throw up their hands, scattering sheafs of papers from their latest tracts excoriating the bourgeois all over the faculty lounge floor where it will later be picked up by the maid whom they all despise. This isn't working at all. Looked at from a logical point of view with data from objective reality, this whole socialism thing was a fraud from the start. It's time to embrace the Christian, democratic, capitalist nations of the world who have been trouncing the socialists like LSU playing football against Harvard.

  10. But wait a minute here. What if objective truth doesn't exist? Didn't some of the eggheads at that other university try to tell us that we each perceive reality differently and that means there is no such thing as reality? Or something like that. In any case, if that's true, we weren't wrong after all! We can continue to cling to our faith! Socialism can't be disproved because there's no way to disprove anything if you dispense with objective reality and logic!

  11. Take that, you reactionary swine! We win after all because we tossed the rules of the game into the trash and refuse to play that any more. We win because we define winning as power and control, which we will achieve by spreading our religion throughout the academy, the media and entertainment. Victory will be ours!
And so here we are. As a devout Catholic, I can assure you that I have been a staunch Papist all my life, including those decades where I drank beer, played softball and chased skirts while not bothering to look into any of that Catechism mumbo-jumbo. In other words, I outsourced thinking to Catholic intellectuals and just parroted what they said as if it were real.

Kind of like the progressive foot soldiers today.

I love the look in her eyes. It just shouts, "I am open-minded and rational and not at all a crazed, religious zealot who wants to rule over you crude, racist pigs!"

4 comments:

ligneus said...

Excellent piece. Explains why when I mentioned to a lefty friend [she who dropped me like a stone when I supported Trump in the election] that I was reading Deirdre McCloskey's The Bourgeois Virtues, seemed condescendingly amused by the very concept.

Great book btw. https://www.amazon.ca/Bourgeois-Virtues-Ethics-Age-Commerce/dp/0226556646/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1532306113&sr=8-1&keywords=bourgeois+virtues&dpID=51CgKObVSKL&preST=_SY264_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch

And Kissinger on Trump, in a nutshell:

KISSINGER ON TRUMP: “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.”

This is similar to what I keep saying, that the fundamental characteristic of Trump’s presidency is the renegotiation of post-WWII arrangements and institutions. Those who consider themselves responsible and far-sighted should be thinking about how that renegotiation should take place, rather than mindlessly fighting change.

Plus: “In the 1940s, European leaders had a clear sense of direction. Now they are just trying to avoid trouble.” And they are not doing a very good job of it.

H/T Instapundit. https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/302713/

ligneus said...

PS. I tried to do hyperlinks but couldn't get them to work.

K T Cat said...

No worries, ligneus. Thanks for the kind words. The timeline mostly comes from Stephen Hicks. That lecture was a real eye-opener for me.

Here's the book you recommended in clickable form.

K T Cat said...

The book was available on Audible! Yay! I just bought it and will listen to it on the way to work this morning. Thanks for the recommendation!

Was that enough exclamation marks in a single paragraph!