Utopia

With regard to my last post, I want to emphasize the feeling was not self pity, helplessness, or even anger.  It was just a moment–taken rarely enough–when I was able to feel a completely different world, one with generalized well being, in which violence was unnecessary because everyone was capable both of empathy and of providing for themselves; a world in which people did not avoid the bad, in which fear was not stronger than love, but one in which people sought out and regularly found the good.

I want to be clear: the difference between what I term Goodness and leftism, or what I term Cultural Sadeism is that the first believes in moral progress, and the second does not.  The first believes that the spiritual is practical, and the second believes, functionally, in nothing but destruction.

Leftism is often called utopianism.  It is not.  It is not a sincere belief in things that could be but are not.  If it were, it would be practical.  It is, rather, a despairing creed which believes instead that utopia–a world where perfectly moral human beings interact freely and in happiness–is IMpossible, and which therefore seeks the moral destruction of mankind in the mistaken belief that is merely carrying out nature’s orders, in reducing the spirit to the material.

Have to run.  That was about what I had to say, but not quite as well as I wanted to say it.

Postscript/Edit: the root of Leftism is the belief that life has no meaning.  The entire point of meaning is that it creates form and identity in the process of chosen work, chosen pain, and resulting joys.  People without meaning need physical binding, physical constraint, physical pain imposed from outside.  They have no reason otherwise to undergo it willingly.  This is why the intuitive sense that there is something malignant about sadomasochism (I heard a radio ad, by the way, today, in which a local sex toy store advertised “50 shades” of pleasure, presumably connoting that they sell handcuffs and other bondage gear; this ad was on the radio station my oldest teenager listens to, in the middle of the day) is in my view quite correct, even if over the short term the effects appear pleasurable in a perverse way, and benign.