We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty. Mother Teresa
The rhetoric of “oppression” is a method of propaganda used to make absurd ideas seem reasonable. Every propaganda must fit the circumstances and beliefs and prejudices of the target culture. In America, we pride ourselves on our passionate commitment to justice and equality. All that is needed to render these very real virtues the means of destruction is to pervert the meanings of these words.
Everyone gets an equal shot becomes everyone deserves an equal outcome.
Equality before the law becomes group guilt necessitating group punishment (raising no one).
Live and let live becomes conform or face social death.
Love becomes a symbol for using the pain of one group to gain power over another. Van Jones uses the word love, but there is no love in collectivism.
We live in the most prosperous, free, and tolerant society the world has ever seen. And large groups of people want to see “oppression” everywhere.
Here is what I would submit is the TRUE oppression: social isolation, metaphysical pessimism, superficiality, useless meaning systems, moral confusion, and fear for the future.
As an ideal, Socialism evokes the images of tribal solidarity. But it delivers, as I have said over and over, the reality of the very alienation–Entfremdung–which Marx preached was solely a vice of the Capitalist order.
Everywhere everyone is talking. But most of them are not saying anything useful, and most of them are making everything more confused. The educational elites attending our best schools are moral and emotional children, who recite reflexively the most idiotic and damaging ideas imaginable.
Yes, I pulled out the White Dog, but the Garuda has not disappeared. All this is stuff I’ve been sitting on for a while, and am letting out as a personal catharsis.