Tuesday, September 26, 2023

False Ideas Have Evil Consequences: Marxism

 Thomas Sowell in an interview on the program Uncommon Knoweldge, which can be found on You Tube, said the reason he wsas first attracted to Marxas its  was its simple explanation for porverty, that the rich are righ and the poor are poor because the rich take from thew poor.    

Eventually he came to see how false that idea is but it's an incredibly popular idea among many othersw, and in fact in our day is probably what runs the world.  Into the ground.  I don't know if it's the red hot center of the rpproblem it feels to me to be, but something in Marxism is certainly that red not center.   Marxism is the enemy of everything sane and real.  And it dominates everything these days, having grown over the last five or six decades into a voracious monster that is eating up everything that makes life worthiwhile.  Yes it's totalitarian and maybe the pithy red hot center lies somewhere in that term rather than the economic term, I don't know, I'm trying to find the best way to think about it.  

Recently somebodey on the Rogan show said something so irrational and evil it left my stomach in knots.  Instead of complaining about all the illegal aliens coming across our border now we should be encouraging more to come because it's just unfair that America has so much wealth and prosperity and good things that most of the rest of the world lacks that it's only right that they overrun us and take it away from us to equalize things and make things fair.  I don't know how he bput it, I've forgotten but that's the gist of it.  I don't even remember his name.  Chris something I think.

A crimninal idea.  Utterly irrational, utterly at odds with reality, a receipte for not only a total crash from that prosperity but a recipte for murder in the end, the death of millions in the end.  

I guess I'm not to call this liberalism but there are people who call themsevles liberals who hold such crazy ideas.  Ldeftists is another world for it.  Also Marxism, socialism, communism.  All of it.  The most even destructive ideas ever  allowed to increase to a dominating role in the world.  How did we let this happen?

Listen to that discussion on Uncommobn Knoweldge with Thomas Sowell.  Good stuff.  How the welfare state had a destructive effect on the black community rather than the other way around which is what is commonly thought.  Decreased prosperity, decreased success, increased crime, the whole jmess.


I've been wondering why  the thinkers who most attract my interest in recent years are blacks, the black public interllectuals as they call themselves, such as Thomas Sowell.   I think maybe it's because in their quest to understand the deteriorating condition of the black community they often arrive at this sort of recognition, that the liberal or leftist solutions are really the problem, and in arrivcing at that conclusion they illuminate the general problem of Marxism in the world these days and its destructive effect on America.  How it's the seedbed of so many of our current nightmarish insanities, so much of it traceable to this perverted idea of equality or equity or social engineering that has no understanding at all of human nature or economic or social realities and forces people into nonsensical abstract ideas that kill everything good and decent.


Marxism seems to be the perfect demented ideology to reflect the fallen condition of humanity.  As a Christian I see the Christian worldview as the intellectual frameworld for all good things in this fallen world, and the natural habits of fallen humanity as the contrasticg opposite.  Thomas Sowell has a book out titled A Conflict of Visions in which he contrasts what he called the Constrained Vision with the Unconstrained vision and I'm hopint go get it through my audible books for the blind.   

Sowell's Constrained View is apparently more or less synonymous with conservativism, and I'd like to find out how closely both views align with the Christian Worldview.  Seems to me it is this arena of thought that we could find the solutions to the destruvie trends we are suffering from these days.  But it would take bringing such ideas into focus for libersals and leftists to make suha difference.  Something I heard recently, some talk show or other I suppose, said that Constitution Day, which recnetly came and went, on September seventeenth, was oritginally conceived to ba a day in which all the schools spend the entire day studying and Constitution of the United Stes, but somehow that idea got dropped and now nobody even knmows there is such a day.  But wow, what a differnece that would have made if it had bwen practiced.  Wow.  And  think the whole nation, not just the schools, need a day like that, a day when all the tv shows and radio shows and special gatherings, conrferences and so on, are aimed at educating us on the meaning of our American institutions, which so few of us understand at all these days.  Wow do we need that.

Yes I thinki the Constitution is probably a great example of the Constrained vision  I don't know, I haven't heard Sowell say so, but as he defined the vision as far as I've heard anyway it's pretty clear the Constittuion aims at a restraining of the passions of fallen humanity so that tyranny and totalitarianism are presevented.  Of course when you just throw out all the restrains or redefine the Constitution to mean something other than what it was intended to mean, which is of course what has been going on for decades now, it exerts none of the good influences on the nation it was inteneded to do.  The amoujmt of recovery needed to bring that back is staggering.

I think Mark Levin's book The Democrat Party Hates America is going to do a good job of defining how all the destructive evil ideas we are suffering from reside in that party.  That's a playce to start.  As might be Eric Metaxas' books "If You Can Keep It" and "Letter to the American Church>"  Kind of foundational principles we need to recognize.  All of us.

As usual I feel mistakes galore getting tapped out under my fingers and I can't see so I can't go back and correct them and all I an do is hope the resultant garbling doesn't make my message incoherent beyond usefulness.