Here’s a question to which I never hear a coherent answer:
“What will the world look like,
when the secular Left has won?”
I know what kind of world I want: a world of communities and individuals. Communities with different values. Individuals with different values, some of whom I can avoid because I don’t like their values—or whom I might befriend even though I don’t like their values. I want maximum personal liberty. Our respective ambitions and beliefs make us different, and I want a world of difference. The alternative is a world where each of us is made a slave of the collective.
Leftism has become a religion—Totalitarianism—and the driving principle of the Totalitarian Church is eternal coercion.
Christianity differs from Totalitarianism in many ways, but a major difference is that Christians believe God would rather have man free, than have him perfect. That was the point of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” The Totalitarian Church takes the opposite position.
The Totalitarian Church is a utopian religion. Catholics might accuse it of “immanentizing the eschaton”—that is, trying to create Paradise on Earth. Utopians believe human nature might be transformed, and mankind perfected—that society might be demolished and rebuilt to ideal specifications—if only people like them had sufficient power.
Utopianism necessarily means more government, more top-down solutions, less individuality, less community. It requires a priestly caste that tells you what you may say and think, what behaviors you must approve, what scientific facts you must deny—or else.
But the road to Utopia never gets you there. It’s an infinite road, full of marching prisoners—patrolled by snitches who report, and enforcers who punish, any deviation.
The Totalitarian Church talks of “loving acceptance of all people.” That’s the most intolerant concept imaginable. It means forcing people to suppress whatever private values they might have. Implicitly, it means letting others dictate what’s right or good—or letting them decree that concepts like “right” and “good” are mere constructs.
The banner of Totalitarianism bears the slogan, “Shut up!”
You might know that two and two make four, but the Totalitarian Church could force you to say two and two make five, or whatever other number the church dictates. You might continue to think that two and two make four, but you’ll not be allowed to say it—and you’ll eventually be buffaloed into defending a lie.
That will make you angry, of course. Ever notice how so many Totalitarians seem perpetually angry? Maybe I would be, too, if I were constantly repeating lies that I knew were lies, but that I had to repeat out of fear of those who held power over me.
The Totalitarian Church doesn’t really care about people of color, women, gays, etc. It doesn’t matter how black you are, how gay you are, how Hispanic you are, whatever: If you belong to a protected group, and you betray the church, you are outcast. You and your family will be shunned and defamed by the “woke,” maybe even physically terrorized and economically destroyed.
If you are not allowed your values—if you must shut up if your values differ from those of the church—you are not a person. You are an artifact. A thing. The Totalitarian agenda, in a sense, denies your very humanity, by denying your human nature.
I believe—perhaps naïvely—in a natural order. A Tao, if you like. I can’t tell you whence it originates, but it exists. Maybe the Tao comes from a creator; maybe from a “Life Force”; maybe it evolves; maybe it comes from nothing. Whatever its source, man has a nature and a natural way—just as any creature has. Part of man’s nature is reason, whence comes independence of thought, values, and preferences.
Totalitarians believe human nature can be conquered; that they can annihilate the old Tao—and create a new one, based on their emotions and their self-evident superiority. Sure, some of us might behave wrongly, now, but they insist that human beings can be corrected of their errors (and white, heterosexual males can at least be taught to hate themselves) but the only means to that end is force, force to the utmost. To “perfect” society, we must grant enlightened people the power to reform us as they please.
Get this straight: these people despise you. Ex-President Obama wasn’t kidding when he said, on the eve of the 2008 Presidential election, that he proposed to “fundamentally transform America.”
What would you think of a man who said, “I intend to fundamentally transform my wife”? Not, “I’m going to encourage her to change a certain bad habit she has,” but “I intend to fundamentally transform her.” You would conclude that he loathed his wife, had no respect for her. Would he “fundamentally transform” a person he respected?
Perhaps if more of us had taken Obama seriously, instead of assuming he was uttering standard campaign bluster, he would have received fewer votes. Maybe we didn’t believe, at the time, that he was telling us he hated America, but that was exactly what he was doing.
The Totalitarian Church hates America, and the Democrat Party has been taken over by these people—or by people who believe that they have to pretend to hate America if they want to retain power.
Moreover, Totalitarian leftists will ascribe, to that which is good, the exact degree of evil as the actual evil that they intentionally defend. A current example is the tendency to excuse, if not outright endorse, genocidal Muslim terrorists. Ward Churchill had to vilify the innocent, following the 9/11 attacks (by calling them “Little Eichmanns”), to make them just as blameworthy as their murderers.
We conservatives recognize the existence of the better, so we seek it. Thus, according to the Totalitarian Church, we are evil, racist, and greedy. No thought need be given to that assertion, because thought leads to discernment, which is a sin, according to the implicit doctrines of this church. Discernment is bigotry, by definition.
Faithful Totalitarians are not interested in dialogue, or in finding common ground. They just hate the Infidel. They want to crush you; they want you to submit, then die—so they can say they’ve won.
The Totalitarian Church has its dogma. It already knows the answers to the world’s problems—often imaginary problems its hierarchy has invented—so its devotees will proceed, from a starting point of their own invention, to build the narrative to support the dogma.
The Totalitarian Church also has a priesthood, in the person of “experts,” in charge of making laws and regulations and deciding what (and what type of) information we peasants are allowed to see.
Totalitarians have not merely got it somewhat off. They are, in most cases, as wrong as it is possible to be. They insist that a man is a woman if he says so. They claim that racial hoaxes speak to the “larger truth.” They say no culture is superior to another. They support policies that would obviously destroy our society. They lie, constantly, in support of premises that they must know, deep down, are false.
Totalitarians deny objective reality. They insist, implicitly, that “reality is what our priests say it is.” They deny morality—suggesting, “It’s moral if my side does it, because the end justifies the means.”
They want power over you. That is all.
Totalitarians will never perfect society, because they stand on nothing substantial. Right now, they’re pumping their legs like Wile E. Coyote when he has run off the edge of the cliff—and hoping they can keep moving forward into thin air. Inevitably, they will plunge into the abyss. That would be funny—except that they are determined to drag decent people down with them.
