Sir Thomas More said "the only design of the Utopian in war is to obtain that by force, which if it had been granted them in time would have prevented the war!"
Leftist ideologues believe state power and force essential to achievement of a more perfect, Utopian society. There is an intrinsic contradiction in their theory which would nullify it, but the leftist’s flawed conception of human nature renders any system based upon it doomed to failure. In his seminal book, “The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism”, F.A. Hayek gives the main arguments for the free-market case and presents his manifesto on the errors of socialism. Hayek argues that socialism has, from its origins, been mistaken on factual and even logical grounds, and that its repeated failures in the many different practical applications of socialist ideas were the product of such errors. He labels the fallacy that man is able to shape the world around him to his wishes “the fatal conceit.”
Modern leftism has an interesting history, which cannot be fully explained here. Though it has predecessors such as Locke and Helvetius, its present iteration is rooted in Darwinian materialism, which is but one foundation of Marxist theory. This view holds that humans evolved quite randomly from inferior life forms. Undiluted Darwinian leftism is atheistic—no Divine teleological intelligence created or otherwise supervised the process. Consequently, we are nothing but blobs of matter in motion. There is thus no essential difference between humans and the insects that the leftists would have us eat.
Since humans are no more than collections of animated molecules, we can only react to whatever environmental forces surround us. There is no freedom of choice in the matter, and without free will, we cannot be responsible for what we do. Criminals are not guilty of crimes, since they cannot be faulted. We simply respond to environmental stimuli. Instead, poverty, racism, white supremacy, or capitalism are the root causes of crime. As a result, we can declare war upon some or all of these, and thereby modify criminal behaviour. Humans have no choice or responsibility in the matter; we only adapt to our surroundings, so that we will react to external factors. People are thus not good or bad, except as environment dictates. Or, as Shakespeare put it: There is nothin either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
Leftist intellectuals believe themselves so advanced that they can manipulate human evolution if we would just grant them the power to do so. They will create a Utopia, by WOKE laws and education, so that we can all be in a good environment and respond accordingly. This ideology is fundamentally atheistic. Christians believe that we are made in the image of God and endowed with both reason and free will in order to best choose how to live. Most conservatives believe in a philosophy like this, whether or not they are religious. People are not just naturalistic, materialistic animals imbued with nothing but instinct and environmental adaptations. Some extrinsic forces are obviously evident in human behaviour (culture, tradition, family, politics, etc.), but to conservatives and Christians especially, humans have free will, and we can choose to rise above our circumstances to shape individual destiny. The liberal disagrees with this to the extent that we can only do good or evil in response to our systemic surroundings; change the stimuli, change the environment, and Voila!: behaviour is automatically modified. It is “science”. When we do evil, it is the fault of the system, usually capitalism, white supremacy, or racism; but the problem is never attributable to individual responsibility.
In his book, “The Soul of the World”, renowned Christian conservative philosopher Roger Scruton defends the experience of the sacred against today’s fashionable forms of atheism. He argues that our personal relationships, moral institutions, and aesthetic judgments hint at a transcendent dimension that cannot be understood through the lens of science alone. To be fully alive—and to understand what we are—is to acknowledge the reality of sacred things. Rather than an argument for the existence of God, or a defence of truth of religion, Scruton presents an extended reflection upon why a sense of the sacred is essential to human life—and what the final loss of the sacred would mean. In short, he addresses the most important question of modernity: what is left of our aspirations after science has delivered its verdict about what we are? The prescience of this question in the aftermath (or the grips?) of the Covid-19 pandemic and resulting mass pharmaceutical experimentation upon healthy human beings is nothing short of compelling.
Scruton refers to art, architecture, music and literature to suggest that the highest forms of human experience and expression tell the story of our religious need, and of our quest for the being who might answer it, and that this search for the sacred endows the world with a soul. Evolution cannot explain our conception of the sacred; neuroscience is irrelevant to our interpersonal relationships, which provide a a model for our posture toward God; and scientific understanding has nothing to say about the experience of beauty, which provides a God’s eye perspective on reality. Ultimately, for Scruton, a world without the sacred would be a completely different world—one in which we humans are not truly at home.
In “On Human Nature”, Scruton takes this view of mankind one step further. He presents an original and radical defence of human singularity. Confronting leftist views of evolutionary psychologists, utilitarian moralists, and philosophical materialists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, Scruton argues that human beings cannot be understood simply as biological objects. We are not only human animals; we are also persons, in essential relation with other persons, and bound to them by obligations and rights.
Our world is shared, exhibiting freedom, value, and accountability, and to understand it we must address other people face to face and one to one. Scruton develops and defends this account of human nature by ranging widely across intellectual history, from Plato and Averroes to Darwin and Wittgenstein.
He examines Kant’s suggestion that we are distinguished by our ability to say “I”—by our sense of ourselves as the centres of self-conscious reflection. This fact is manifested in our emotions, interests, and relations. It is the foundation of the moral sense, as well as of the aesthetic and religious conceptions through which we shape the human world and endow it with meaning. And it lies outside of modern leftist material philosophy, even though it is a natural and not a supernatural fact. Ultimately, this approach offers a new way of understanding how self-consciousness affects the question of how we ought to live.
The distinction between liberalism and conservatism is thus based upon fundamentally divergent beliefs about human nature. Liberals want power so that they can create an earthly Utopian paradise. They believe that they can now, through technology, control all environmental factors—even global climate. Conservatives like Scruton believe in freedom that is proscribed by eternal moral principles of right and wrong. Humans must be incentivized and disciplined toward virtuous conduct, and thus use their God given freedom for good rather than evil actions. History has repeatedly shown that the influence of family and religion achieve this much more effectively than state coercion ever could.
Socialism is perhaps the ultimate example of liberalism gone amok. Centrally planned, top-down government control over the economy never works because it denies humans the freedom to choose their needs and desires, rather than what the elites think best for us. Nobody can control what another person wishes to purchase. Only the free market fits with human nature.
Liberal morality is equally disastrous. Edmund Burke explained that society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite is placed somewhere; and that the less freedom of choice there is within, the more government tyranny must reign without. We must therefore use our freedom to control ourselves, or else the state will step in to do it for us. Freedom vs. Tyranny. Right vs. Left. The eternal struggle.
Hayek’s “The Road To Serfdom”, is an unimpeachable classic work of political philosophy, cultural history, and economics. It has infuriated leftist politicians and intellectuals ever since its publication in 1944, when Eleanor Roosevelt supported Stalin, and Albert Einstein had been fully seduced by the socialist agenda. Hayek’s work was seen then as heretical for
its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasingly unlimited economic control would lead not to a Utopia, but instead to the very horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy that the free world was then allied against in bloody battlefields through Europe.
According to scholars like Burke, Hayek and Scruton, the fundamental error which liberal politicians make is to believe that the nature of human beings can be transmuted by state force. This is why political systems, nations, and dynasties rise and then ultimately collapse. They fail in the most basic concept, i.e. that human beings are fashioned in the image of God and made free thereby, and not through state laws. Forcing people to outwardly conform leads inexorably to resentment, rebellion, and even revolution. That is why Christianity has survived and flourished for over two millennia, through every sort of political epoch. Jesus knew that humans can only be changed from within—in the heart—and not by external laws. Consequently, Christianity will continue long after current political tyrannies have either disappeared completely or devolved into something as pointless and odious as whatever system they had just replaced.
Christianity therefore remains the greatest threat to self-serving, elitist politicians who lust to control others and create the Utopian vision giving them totalitarian puissance. The only ones more pitiful than such politicians are those who continue to believe the lies repeated countless times throughout human history, destroying innumerable lives. After all, what must the leftists in control of the state do with the rotten apples, the recalcitrant ones who simply refuse to respond to the Utopian environment the leftists have created for them? The answer of course is to silence and then destroy as many of them as possible.
How then do we respond as Christians to the advancing leftists, who seek to silence and destroy us? How do we interrogate contemporary values, virtues, and morality? What principles must govern our relations to animals, the nation state, the environment, and other ways of life? How do we address the rise of totalitarianism and of nihilism? How should we approach our Faith, evil, and death?
We must explore the place of God in a disenchanted world. We must respond to the atheistic culture that is now growing all around us, and also defend human uniqueness. We must rebut the claim that there is no meaning or purpose in the natural world, and hold that the sacred and transcendental are real presences, through which human beings can come to know ourselves and discover both our freedom and our redemption. In the human face we find a paradigm of meaning. And from this experience, we both construct the face of the world, and address the face of God. We find in the face both the proof of our freedom and the mark of self-consciousness. One of the motivations of the atheist culture is to escape from the eye of judgement. They escape from the eye of judgement by blotting out the face and this is the most disturbing aspect of the times in which we now live. It explains the growing sense of destruction that we feel, as the habits of pleasure seeking and consumerism deface the world: (quote) Silence in the face of evil is itself
According to scholars like Burke, Hayek and Scruton, the fundamental error which liberal politicians make is to believe that the nature of human beings can be transmuted by state force. This is why political systems, nations, and dynasties rise and then ultimately collapse. They fail in the most basic concept, i.e. that human beings are fashioned in the image of God and made free thereby, and not through state laws. Forcing people to outwardly conform leads inexorably to resentment, rebellion, and even revolution. That is why Christianity has survived and flourished for over two millennia, through every sort of political epoch. Jesus knew that humans can only be changed from within—in the heart—and not by external laws. Consequently, Christianity will continue long after current political tyrannies have either disappeared completely or devolved into something as pointless and odious as whatever system they had just replaced.
Christianity therefore remains the greatest threat to self-serving, elitist politicians who lust to control others and create the Utopian vision giving them totalitarian puissance. The only ones more pitiful than such politicians are those who continue to believe the lies repeated countless times throughout human history, destroying innumerable lives. After all, what must the leftists in control of the state do with the rotten apples, the recalcitrant ones who simply refuse to respond to the Utopian environment the leftists have created for them? The answer of course is to silence and then destroy as many of them as possible.
How then do we respond as Christians to the advancing leftists, who seek to silence and destroy us? How do we interrogate contemporary values, virtues, and morality? What principles must govern our relations to animals, the nation state, the environment, and other ways of life? How do we address the rise of totalitarianism and of nihilism? How should we approach our Faith, evil, and death?
We must explore the place of God in a disenchanted world. We must respond to the atheistic culture that is now growing all around us, and also defend human uniqueness. We must rebut the claim that there is no meaning or purpose in the natural world, and hold that the sacred and transcendental are real presences, through which human beings can come to know ourselves and discover both our freedom and our redemption. In the human face we find a paradigm of meaning. And from this experience, we both construct the face of the world, and address the face of God. We find in the face both the proof of our freedom and the mark of self-consciousness. One of the motivations of the atheist culture is to escape from the eye of judgement. They escape from the eye of judgement by blotting out the face and this is the most disturbing aspect of the times in which we now live. It explains the growing sense of destruction that we feel, as the habits of pleasure seeking and consumerism deface the world: (quote) Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak, is to speak. Not to act, is to act. - Dietricth Bonhoffer.
Turning the other cheek does not mean standing by while enemies of God dismantle Christian civilization and brainwash our children. We must decry the cowardice that masquerades as meekness and summon the faithful to do battle with leftist Utopians. An attenuated and unbiblical “faith” based upon what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” has sapped the spiritual vitality of millions of Christians. Rather than pay lip service to an insipid evangelism, we must not shrink from combating the evils of our time. We must refute the pernicious lie that fighting evil politicizes Christianity. As Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther, and other heroes of Faith have insisted, Christianity has an irreplaceable role in Western culture. It is our duty to fight the powers of darkness, especially on behalf of the weak and the vulnerable.
Silence is not an option. God calls us to defend the unborn, to confront the lies of cultural Marxism, and to battle the global tyranny now crushing human liberty. Confident that this is His fight, we must overcome fear and enter the fray, armed with the spiritual weapons of prayer, self-sacrifice, love, and Faith. We must defend a consecrated world against the habit of desecration, and instead lead a Christian way of life in a time of trial.
The late, great Billy Graham put it this way: The greatest need in the world is the transformation of human nature. We need a new heart that will not have lust and greed and hate in it. We need a heart filled with love and peace and joy, and that is why Jesus came to this world.
"Liberals want power so that they can create an earthly Utopian paradise. They believe that they can now, through technology, control all environmental factors—even global climate."
It would be hilarious if it wasn't so dangerous 👹👹 and insane 👹👹
On one hand, Bill Gates is covering 6000 acres of farmland with a new solar project...
https://www.dispatch.com/story/business/2024/03/21/ohio-solar-farm-on-land-partially-owned-by-bill-gates-wins-approval/73051549007/
While at the very same time is developing a project to BLOCK OUT THE SUN!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2021/01/11/bill-gates-backed-climate-solution-gains-traction-but-concerns-linger/
Like the book of Romans says: "professing themselves to be wise, they became utter fools."
Not to speak, is to speak. Not to act, is to act. - Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Excellent quote from Bonhoeffer... a similar Bible quote provides a warning.
In Proverbs 24:12 we read:
"Don't try to avoid responsibility by saying you didn't know about it. For God knows all hearts and He sees you. He keeps watch over your soul, and He knows you knew! and He will judge all people according to what they have done." 😱