Social Darwinism has two aspects: an observational aspect, and a moral aspect.
Observationally, it is manifestly true that in nature the strongest survive and dominate. A lion need never fear a rabbit. The smartest and most ruthless among humans tend, over time, to aggregate power to themselves.
Morally, Social Darwinism is the claim that this is how it should be, that stupid people deserve their failures, and the smart their successes. In important respects, Eugenics is a logical extension of this philosophy.
“Capitalism”, so called–I remind you it was a propagandistic term invented by Marx, to describe a very complex process, which was manifestly unjust in his own time, but which over time built a solid middle class, which over time served to generalize wealth to an extent never seen before in human history (as far as we know)–is conflated by the Left with Social Darwinism.
Actually, a comment is in order on the essential timelessness of Leftist narrative. Leftists are emotionally disconnected people. They are disconnected from their bodies. They exist at the level of abstraction, and abstraction untethered to reality will invariably tend to depart from it. This was why I came up with my concept of Perceptual Breathing. When you breath in, you abstract, when you breath out, you look at the world in all its manifold details, down the beating of the wings of a mosquito. You cannot get completely lost if you make a practice of this.
But most Marxists, because they read Marx (and Gramsci and others), are stuck in a world where Big Corporations forced most Workers to live awful and short lives. They are stuck in a world where the KKK is burning crosses and lynching people, even though this has not happened in a long time, and even though when it WAS happening was limited to a fairly small part of the United States. It was never happening in Britain, or Sweden, or in Boston or Minneapolis. Most white people had absolutely nothing to do with either slavery or the KKK. Slavery was banned in Britain before the Revolutionary War. There are countries in Africa where it was only banned in the last 15 years, and where it is STILL practiced. Libya, for example, where it was brought back after Hillary’s “We came, we saw, he died, ha ha ha hilarious”.
But for atheists, the individual means nothing. We all die, and in dying, are gone forever. Vanished. If I make the unit of morality myself, then nothing I do really matters.
I think we all sense, on some level, that we were made for better things, for higher causes, to live lives thinking beyond our unitary and solitary selves. The atheist–or perhaps I should use the word “Extinctionist” to be more precise, as someone who sees the mind and brain as one and the same–has really two choices: live for pleasure, selfishly, or live for something larger that WILL survive. It doesn’t take long to see that something as the society, as the species, although many environmentalists go right past humanity to the Earth itself, which pushes them into profoundly misanthropic sentiments.
The intent is to reject human ugliness, in the forms of greed: greed for power, greed for gold, greed for violence and cruelty.
Here is the point, though, and it is a subtle point I’m not sure I can make clearly at the moment, since it is at this point more of a feeling tone: in trying to change history from one of dominance and submission by individuals and groups at the expense of other individuals and groups, they internalize and express the SAME LOGIC of power and conquest, and merely change the locus.
Rather than, say, the Germans conquering the world for Germany and Germans, they want Government, the Leviathan, to conquer the world, and to engage in what amounts to social or class based Eugenics, to thin the herd of the inferior “types”. They want to destroy Capitalists. They want to destroy “racists”. They want to destroy Christians. They want to destroy “homophobes”.
They want Government to be God, because it is for them an aesthetically more pleasing form than allowing Nature to do it. Hitler said, more or less, that “if I can do it, if no one can stop me, then it is moral.”
What Leftists want is a world in which no Hitlers can exist. They want a world in which all power mongering among individuals is extinguished at the source. They want a world where SOMETHING is in absolute control, where SOMETHING does not need to be prayed to, and which then reacts in unpredictable and mysterious ways. They want concrete clubs for concrete people.
They want an unnatural order, a coerced order, an imposed order, by humans, on both other humans, and on the world itself, on nature, on everything we can see and touch.
What I would argue, though, is that this is the SAME but WORSE than the ideals articulated by Hitler. The violence is the same: Communists objectively killed perhaps 5x more people directly than Hitler did. But the whole thing is objectively dishonest. It is based on the same primitive psychological needs for security through domination. It is based, objectively, on theft and violence unchecked by moral rules or laws enforced honestly.
The Romans never really set out to build a large Empire. They simply, initially, I think, sought to control their little stretch of the Italian peninsula. They conquered first, if memory serves, the Etruscans. But no matter where they drew the border, people attacked from outside it. So every time this happened, they conquered those people. Then it happened again. Then they conquered them. Pretty soon they had one of the biggest empires the world had ever seen.
But the root goal was security. Freedom from violence, random violence. This is also the point of a code of law, administered impartially. Their system of law was perhaps their greatest accomplishment.
We have freed the world, by and large, from monarchy, from power structures rooted in what I would term misunderstandings about the nature of God. Monarchy, politically, is the Right. As I note from time to time, our notions of Left and Right go back to the French Revolutionary Assembly, where birds of a feather flocked together, and where those who wanted some sort of King back, and some sort of integral connection to the Church back, sat on the Right. The radical atheists–and as I have noted from time to time, Sade, when he was there briefly (as I recall), sat on the Left.
The Left might be termed the God in Government people. The heaven on Earth people, because there is no Heaven anywhere else. Hitler was a God in Government person. So too are all Communists.
There is no difference in principle, however, between an omnipotent Monarch, on the one hand, and an omnipotent Government on the other.
The American Experiment is rooted in Idealism. It is built on the premise that Government is Law, and morality is private. All individuals are their own Gods, or in the event, free to worship their own conception of God–which may include no God, or as far as the law is concerned, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
America, in principle, stands in the middle. This blog is called Moderates United for a reason. In my own view, I strike the necessary middle position, between the Scylla on the one side, and the Charybdis on the other.
Andrew Breitbart famously commented that politics is downstream from culture. I would say specifically that God in Government is downstream from atheism. As is cannibalism, practiced by wealthy elites.
And in that regard, I would assert that Satanism is the belief that there is no Light. Precisely because it is based on lies, they worship Lucifer, which literally means “the bringer of the light”. Lucifer, and the power this force brings, is their only hope. Luciferianism retains some notion of the soul, but regards all of us as trapped. If I might wax metaphysical and speculative, I think there ARE spirits trapped here, but only because of their own blindness, their own inability to REMEMBER what they truly are.
I will suggest again that a POWERFUL, in the good sense, political service would be done by launching a Manhattan Project of sorts into investigating the nature of the soul, and the afterlife. All of these things exist. Many evil people, in my view, use perverted and very small understandings of the hidden workings of the world to attain ludicrous and self defeating ends.
Power in the service of power makes people weak, insipid, lost and desperately miserable. They live, and can only live, for small and temporary ameliorations of their lostness, in the exercise of power vis a vis other living souls. And each and every such hit pushes them farther from their roots, from who they really are.
That is my Sunday Sermon for today.