Self evidently, Socialism–as the empowerment of a small oligarchy tasked with homogenizing culture–is antithetical to freedom, and hence goodness.
It is a strange fact of my own experience that as an inhabitant of a land still largely free that I know the feeling totalitarianism, coming as I did from a family in which the expression of individual emotion and initiative was banned, not explicitly, but in that dark place where all emotions one wants to hide live freely until they are seen.
As I struggle with freeing myself, my world is going darker. The DESIRE for freedom is waning, and being supported tacitly by countless thought leaders who are exhausted.
With regard to academics, I want to point out how this works. Every journalist, every doctor, every lawyer, substantially every politician, the teachers of our children, our psychologists, our ministers: they went to college, and were exposed to the ideas on display there. It is not not that bricklayers care about what Antonio Gramsci had to say, but that his or her Grade School teacher may have been taught by someone whose learning came from a texbook written by someone who was. It trickles down.
The phrase “Monster Fertilizer” came into my head this morning. Often what happens is the phrase pops up–in the spirit of Freudian word association, but spontaneously–and then I analyze it. If you watch, and if you practice, you can take nearly any initial input, and reach some conclusion your unconscious was looking to make conscious anyway.
Here, I have had the vision from time to time of monsters remembering themselves. Joining the leftist cult is a sort of magical spell that people allow themselves to fall under. It is a congenial cult. It promises a bright future, no matter what present circumstances seem to contradict that possibility. And it demands no original thought, no personal development: nothing but the willingness to yell what everyone else is yelling, when they are yelling it.
But spells can be broken. A rose-colored or white mist can sweep through and cause everyone to take that breath of life they have been holding in their suspended animation, and remember who they once were, what they once loved, before the forgetting began.
And the masks of monsters they wore can be cast down and made into a root fertilizer for something new, some new society actually worth living in.
It is an infelicitous metaphor, but I think sometimes of Hitler dreaming endlessly of the cities he was going to build in the Russian Steppes, even as bombs fell on his bunker. I think that perhaps my dreams are the same, and failure is inevitable. But why? Why not dream simply because it appears impossible? Why not allow out ideas which are made at least more possible through expression?