From hate, hate. From love, love, indifference, and hate. One allows no possibility of a good outcome; the second, some possibility.
Socialism, at root, is a moral claim: that material goods are the only thing that matters in this world, and that their equal distribution is the foundational essence of any morality. Implicitly it is the claim that resentment of material or political inequality is an insuperable barrier to happiness.
From this, it is not derived the poor must be made wealthy, but rather that the wealthy must be destroyed. The foundational stance, quite obviously, is not a love of the poor and downtrodden, but an abusive and flagrant hatred of the rich. Socialism is not and never has been about helping people, but rather about punishing people.
This is shown clearly in the fact that their policies invariably result in general increases in poverty and economic stagnation. Conversely, free markets breed wealth. These facts are beyond dispute.
Socialism also results in GREATER political inequality, since the “Salariat” class (Keynes’ term, seen quite clearly in the policies of Obama in greatly expanding the pay and number of Federal employees in a time of economic downturn) brooks no opposition. They define themselves as right, and dissension as therefore intrinsically malevolent.
Let us take, though, an ordinary example. Someone kills or hurts a loved one, and is never punished. Given the season, let’s look at “It’s a Wonderful Life”. For those brought up in the current era, watching TV throughout the 70’s and 80’s, you end that movie with profound discomfort at the fact that Potter’s crime is never detected and punished. Saturday Night Live actually did a skit once, pointing this out.
Is it not very easy for us to forget the joy with which Capra ended the original movie, and transition seamlessly to anger and violence? Read the transcript and imagine the scene. Does that not better fit the sensibilities of our age?
Why is this? Is it not in part that enormous sections of our movie output–which is to say in large measure our de facto shared culture (you will be far more likely to get people to recite the final scene of “Play Misty for me” than scripture or Shakespeare)–are related to crime and revenge? You have the nasty bad person, who does something nasty nastily near the beginning, after which you spend the rest of the movie mowing through the seconary people–normally getting the number two person first–and finally the nasty person dies nastily, with justice.
What does this teach us about living with happiness? Nothing. What does it teach us about managing resentment? Use violence, if your cause is just (and are not all of our pet causes just in our rendering?)
Phrased another, way: INDULGE in your resentment. What was it our President taught people as a community “organizer”? What was he organizing? Directed resentment. He fired the flames of self pity and entitlement, then set groups of people loose in a given direction.
And it may be that some of his causes were in fact just. It may have been that there were correctible systemic injustices. But what are the long term effects of this sort of policy? The atrophy of innocence. The weakening of bonds of shared respect and loyalty. The elevation of social and political–and eventually physical–violence, to serve any end any person declares just for any reason.
I was a “victim” of the minutest of injustices the other day. I was doing work on a crowded jobsite, and needed to get my ladder at a specific spot for a moment. The owner, his wife, and (inappriately for a job site) his daughter were standing there, talking with the foreman. I asked them politely to move, and they ignored me, even though they plainly heard me. Subtext: I am a peon, they are important, and whatever it is I need to do can wait until the King and Queen are done with what they are doing. I only needed, actually, the wife to move something like one foot. I managed to squeeze in there, but she didn’t budge one inch, apparently out of principle.
I vacillated between indifference and anger, and found indifference the vastly more noble emotion. It was also much more comfortable and conducive with my own happiness.
On the one hand, if you never stand up for yourself, you will get walked over. At the same time, I think that we need all to understand that petty affronts to our self importance are painful–to us–and incompatible with lasting, deep affection for others, and our own happiness.
It sounds saccarine, but is nonetheless true for it, that George Bailey’s LIFE was much richer in every way than Potter’s. And it was richer for his lack of standing, daily resentment. Potter in effect killed his father. Yet the Bailey’s also created a lot of happiness and hope, too, that would have died (this is, after all, the point of the movie) had they not hung in there.
And I personally do believe in an after-life. I will say, though, that we should not concern ourselves even there with the punishment of malefactors. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is that good people get access to virtually unlimited happiness.
In a deep sense, “justice”, so called, only feeds our sense of self importance. Self importance locks us in a cage of permanent shadow. You need justice for social reasons–to maintain the peace–but you do not need it for personal reasons.
Love and joy constitute our real selves, and need to be pursued primarily, if not exclusively.