Politics, religion and intentions go together.
We've all seen wonderful ideas come and go. Those ideas that are viable, "true" and that are self-consistent in theory should be the ones that win the competition for ideas and become adopted. Hegel talked of his "dialectic." Others have talked about how ideas are argued and go through their cycle of ideation, critique (or thesis, antithesis) and synthesis. In ideal theory self-apparant ideas like "Democracy" or "dictatorship of the proletariat" or "shariah/dar Salaam" ought to result in paradise. Yet the reality is often so miserably different.
Yes, the reality is otherwise. Why do bad concepts win out in political discourse? Why is that? Even after ideas are prooved to not match reality.
The twentieth century was a constant riot of Ideas that are associated with tired, destructive, larcenous, and even murderous concepts. And these tired ideas somehow keep resurfacing even though they have done nothing but exacerbate the misery they claimed to totally solve.
The land of "Salaam" is a land of eternal warfare. Arabic speaking Moslems murder non-Arabs. Sunnis murder Shia. Shia murder Sunni. Yet ideologues would throw up the same tired ideas and try to recreate the murderous and corrupt reigns of the Caliphate or revive the missing Imam. Some Christians would revive the crusades, the guilds, the inquisition. Ideas that have no relationship to reality are being danced around as if they were viable ideas. Those who know better are seduced by dreams of wealth and power by riding these foolish myths. Those who believe these things somehow are more willing to believe a living con artist claiming to speak for long dead people all of whom claim to speak for God. How can this be?
The alternatives to these religious insanities; The "Dictatorship of the Proletariate" was a lie. The "vanguard of the proletariate" was just a generation of pigs who turned into thugs and set themselves up as a class of rich folks ruling a beaten down population.
The noble ideas of democracy were corrupted by elitism, slavery, racism, bribe-taking, mobocracy, kleptocracy, and propaganda leading to these very idealistic democracies overthrowing themselves and throwing up degenerate dictators in their place. When things got bad enough, military leaders claiming to clean up the mess, set themselves up on thrones and try to become Emperors or Kings, only to be thrown up themselves by a society that cannot digest the contents of a modernization they cannot immediately understand.
The ideas of capitalism, that by specialization and trade all could do better, instead of being used to float all boats, was used to throw up mighty men of commerce who played poker with people's possessions and sold poison to their children, stole the commons to burn them in order to sear the lungs of those they enslaved to work their factories and their plantations. Instead of floating all boats we see a world where most people are being dispossessed in the name of "progress" while some do quite well. And then others, claiming to be reformers, simply steal all these things and change the name on the office doors, meet the new bosses. Who cares about the "People" when the election or the revolution is over?
What is it about our system that throws up such people? Why do we have so many good seeming ideas and so little progress? Why would countries engage in nationalism, "ethnic cleansing," genocide? Why do people do these things?
Well the answer is fundamental darkness. But fundamental darkness isn't simply "ignorance," but is "ignore-ance" combined with human needs; hunger, animosity, fear. The "Devil" isn't image-able, anymore than "God" is. Good and evil are distinctions we have to make as human beings. And we fail at this because we find it more expedient to fight than to cooperate, more productive individually to gamble on winning it all than to play it safe. These are all choices. There is nothing in capitalism, marxism, Islam, or Christianity that mandates incessant and permanent human conflict. These are choices we make. We make the choice to stake out territories and to fight over them. To play king of the hill, and combine that win "winning is everything" philosophy so that the losers instead of being simply pushed off the hill are killed.
And this game of "king of the hill" is a phyrric one. Those who win these battles do so at the expense of their own enlightenment, their own long term advancement, even their own long term happiness. Adam Smith was right about the advantages of specialization and trade. Marx, and Andrew Jackson, were right about the evils of Class Warfare, and the stupidity of creating classes of permanent wealth. Jefferson was right about "all men are created equal." Mohammed was creating a moderately improved concept over that of the Polytheistic Arabs he lived among and the Jews and Christians of the time.
The founder of Christianity were seeking to improve the lot of the Jews of Palestine and bring about a better world. They didn't expect that their Messiah would be turned into an Anti-messiah (Anti-Christ) by the Romans and Greeks. And the early Christians were trying to create a "Kingdom of Heaven" that would be reflected on Earth as well as Heaven. Why Christians aren't more fundamentalist and less willing to accept the cons of later generations I do understand -- but I don't accept.
We've had the heroes with their better concepts. Why do we listen to the anti-heros with their anti-religion concepts? Why listen to Osama and preachers of hate? Why be literalist when the context demands figurative, and be figurative when something is so baldly put as "Do Unto Others as you would have them do unto you?" Why because of anger, hunger, fear and hate. If we conquer those things we may make progress.
Posted by cholte at October 22, 2006 08:41 PM