If this, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Black Book of Communism, and perhaps something by Hayek, say the Fatal Conceit, were made mandatory, we would rid ourselves in short order of all the intellectual diseases currently besetting our nation. This, even if we allow, as we should, the Left to require their own texts, whatever they might judge defensible in the face of fierce and clear logic, with the whole of ancient and contemporary history behind it.
Here is the thing: it is not that teachers of history and politics and literature and etc. have read these texts and rejected them. It is the case that they are inbred, insular, ignorant, and possess the arrogance of grotesque “ideocentrism”, if I might coin a term, which I would intend to combine the negative valence of ethnocentrism, with the parochial rigidity and radical intolerance of possessing only one idea.
Ideocentrism is the central problem of the modern academy. The solution was to make universities places of many ideas, of, shall we say, multiideationalism, of diverse thought, of diversity in the ways which matter. But now it is the realm of the “idee fixe”.
Bastiat described all of this perfectly 150 or so years ago. Read what he wrote. I cannot improve on it.
I will add two thoughts using modern notions and words (perhaps).
One: if humans are, with respect to one another, the most dangerous predator, government is the apex predator, the top of the food chain, the force that is nearly unfuckwithable. Our Founders knew this. Paine described it well, and there can be no doubt Bastiat took Paine’s ideas into consideration. Paine survived the American Revolution. He did not survive the French one.
Why cede power to that animal most likely to consume us?
As he says:
For ourselves, we consider that Government is and ought to be nothing whatever but the united power of the people, organized, not to be an instrument of oppression and mutual plunder among citizens; but, on the the contrary, to secure to every one his own, and to cause justice and security to reign.
Two: “Government is that great lie by means of which morally dissolute human beings endeavor to rationalize their existences and actions.”
Government is used not just to take other people’s shit, but to serve as an ersatz religion for bad people.
Government is a deflection, psychologically. It is a means of saying you favor a cause, without being willing to take ANY personal accountability for its achievement. It is a means of shifting blame. It is a means of blaming everyone but the guilty, which can be the lazy poor, the incompetent and/or corrupt bureaucrats, or the intellectual social engineers who know nothing about anything, but still insist on being called “experts”. Usually all three are guilty, but nobody cares. The task has been accomplished: blame is shifted, consciences are cleared.
Precisely because the feedback loop exists at the level of rationalization, there can never be any reconciling of aim and objective. In point of fact, ACHIEVING the supposed objective would be disastrous, as it would unbalance a psychological project predicated on long term and utterly selfish lies.
Read Bastiat. It’s all there. Nothing is missing. I am simply offering foot notes.