We Are at War, But Not With a Virus, With an Idea!
I’m starting to hear more and more talk about how government involvement in private industry amounts to “Socialism.” I don’t disagree, not when the majority positions at GM and Ford are held by the United States government, and Boeing is about to be owned outright by government. But, I don’t think that’s totally accurate – it doesn’t go far enough.
The classic definition of “Socialism” is a political system where “Government” controls the means of production, and of course that’s true right now. We are even seeing the outright “ownership” of the means of production by government, with all the rights and privileges that entail. But the real story, and the real danger, is that we are following a path backward in time, transported by Dialectic Materialism into a decline for worldwide individual liberty and sovereignty, and finally into Stalinist autocracy. Where are we on that timeline? At the beginning of Stalinist Autocracy!
Exactly how Stalin got from the idea that only material objects have value, at the exclusion of ideas, and actually that ideas serve only to confuse – to killing fifty million people, including most of Russia’s doctors and university professors (for being liberal, proven by their choice of profession); is beyond me, and probably lies within the boundaries of Psychology/Psychiatry. But, even aberration can inform, and we can understand through it why Russian rulers for centuries had and have so little comprehension of the concept of Justice, or its value: It is an idea, and purely idea. To the Russian autocrat, justice can only confuse. It does not serve the purposes of the state, so it is not only useless, but dangerous. That’s where we are now, again.
How do you fight an idea (ironically, it is itself an idea)? With a better idea!
The basis of dialectical materialism, and Trumpism, is that it is “right,” meaning “true,” to grab everything that you can with both fists, the opposite of Christianity. The problem with that approach to life is obvious when Nature slaps us upside the head and says, “Work together, or I will kill you!” Like now. Cooperation is an idea. Good health is an idea. Justice is an idea. Science is an idea. When we focus entirely and exclusively on the material, and stop having ideas, we leave ourselves open to things like super-viruses, that demand we think and reason. They challenge us to have new ideas, or die.
Dialectical Materialism, and the Republican Party, say that we can only learn by being instructed by nature. But Nature is proving them wrong. If we take their advice, the lesson will be, “The Human Race was destroyed by the smallest of all enemies – outsmarted.” But, no one will be around to learn that lesson.
The play will be over. The house lights will dim. The last person will depart, The last sound of footsteps will die away. The doors will slam shut and there will be total silence, and darkness. No clock will be ticking. And it will be over. (The Coronavirus isn’t going anywhere any time soon. It is going to keep coming back again and again, hitting us again and again, until it annihilates us; or we annihilate it. We are simply a host for the virus. It uses us as the, “means of production,” to replicate itself. And it consumes our energy. That is all. When we are dead, it will continue to evolve.)
Creatures like Ryan, Bannon, Trump and McConnell don’t want to kill everyone, they want to kill our humanity. It seems that with many, that cessation is almost complete. Unfortunately, and Kalki-esque to the extreme, our “Savior” may have gone too far, and killed us all.
A very thought-provoking post. Ideas are subsets of ideals. Both ideas and ideals are manipulated by powerful men, regardless of the type of government in place. There is a school of thought that we (humans and non-humans) create our own reality, while at the same time co-creating the reality of ALL things at a specific point on the time/space continuum. COVID-19 is one more “event” humans are confronted with. How we react to it, of course, will determine how it effects our societies. It will have both negative and positive effects on us. Whether the negative effects or the positive effects dominate is up to us.
Hi Steppenwolf, another inspiring read tyvm.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, your proposal that the classic definition of “Socialism” is a political system where “Government” controls the means of production, strikes me as typically right wing definition fraught with misinformation or propaganda.
So just to counter that I would like to point out that my understanding of the definition of “socialism” is that the people (society) own the means of production, and control the government which oversees the distribution of wealth etc.
Ironically, the novel coronavirus exposes the fatal flaw in unrestrained capitalism better than almost anything else – except all out war.
You are absolutely right. The statement is also crassly bourgeois. I used exactly the old words from the Fifties in part to mock their tone of smug superiority. Our economy: our businesses and our government, are our means of production, Actually, according to Marx, the elite class come to own, or to be, the means of production. I think that he was tight, and I thing that they get progressively stingier.
And thank you for commenting.