Broadly speaking, our political arena offers us two options: doing what we’ve always done, respecting the Constitution, and free markets, and privileging religious commitment and our heritage; and implementing Socialism.
Now, we have been programmed since birth to believe in Progress, but you can’t progress if you keep doing what you have always done. Progress, as a theme, involves change. Logically, this is a powerful tool, then, in the arsenal of the Socialists, since they are the only ones saying they want to do something different.
Yet, regression is also change, and it seems to me that Socialism is actually a reversion to the aristocratic feudalism of the Middle Ages, without the palliative effect of the Church. Prices were fixed then, “just” wages were paid then, and the Kings would make sure everyone was fed, if they could.
We need a third way. Clearly, adherence to religious sentiment is declining, due particularly to the advent of Science as the preeminent and dominant source of Truth. Yet, regardless of what Leftist attacks on religion may claim, the reality is that our nation has always relied on religion to provide the moral compass that enabled us to be actually tolerant of diversity, and to do the right thing, even when it was hard and involved sacrifice. Self evidently, religion played a large role in Abolitionism, and in the Civil Rights movement, among other areas of social evolution.
The third way, in my view is a Liberalism denuded of a NECESSARY religious component. This is the political role that I foresee for the concept of Goodness. I have nowhere defined in detail what exactly it is we MUST do. Everything is up for discussion. My only absolutes are that self pity must be rejected; that we must persist in our efforts to improve the world; and that we must make strenuous efforts to be wise, to foresee the effects of our ideas, and to understand that sometimes NOTHING need be done. There is no pain that cannot be transmuted into understanding, and there is no point in creating a world in which pain is banished.
Our only choice is in how we choose to suffer. This sounds maudlin, but in reality for those who accept it, suffering isn’t. If you want to feel alive, take a risk. If you want to become tranquil in mind and spirit, voluntarily undertake a difficult task, and give it everything you have.
Socialists are willing to suffer for their Socialism, are they not? Are full time revolutionaries not passionately commited to their cause? Do we not see romantic evocations of the trials and travails of Reds everywhere, for example in the movie Reds?
Socialism serves this role–that of providing meaning–for revolutionaries. The problem is that this sense of purpose is not transferable. When they succeed, they have nothing left. The people on whose behalf they presume to speak, do not attain–in whatever material repose is enabled by their economic incompetence–a feeling of being alive. On the contrary, unless they themselves become revolutionaries, they find it oppressive and empty, because it is. It is a fire that burns, and if it ever engulfs our planet, it will consume to the last drop every hope of transcendance we might have had. At least, that will be its goal.
In that uses the method of stoking resentment, of rejecting traditional moral norms, and cultural forms, and in that it demands dogmatic conformity to ideas generated far, far away, Socialism is the antithesis of Goodness as I have defined it.
It is evil, in my view, and no quantity of lies can erase this fact.