...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

“Utopia” here we come: Without referring to Canada’s parallel legal system, the human rights commissions, a line in a Roger Kimball blog post nails why these bodies pose such a risk to our nation’s health. (I’ve highlighted the line, so as to not leave you guessing which one I mean):

…Socialism, as Joshua Muravchik noted in his book Heaven on Earth: the Rise and Fall of Socialism, was “the most popular political idea ever invented.”

It was also undoubtedly the bloodiest. Of course, many who profess socialism are decent and humane people. And it is worth noting that socialism comes in mild as well as tyrannical versions. Muravchik, who was once a socialist himself, pays frequent homage to the generous impulses that lie behind some allotropes of the socialist enterprise. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that “regimes calling themselves socialist have murdered more than one hundred million people since 1917.” Why?

A large part of the answer lies in the intellectual dynamics of utopianism. “Utopia” is Greek for “nowhere”: a made-up word for a make-believe place. The search for nowhere inevitably deprecates any and every “somewhere.” Socialism, which is based on incorrigible optimism about human nature, is a species of utopianism. It experiences the friction of reality as an intolerable brake on its expectations. “Utopians,” the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski observed in “The Death of Utopia Reconsidered,” “once they attempt to convert their visions into practical proposals, come up with the most malignant project ever devised: they want to institutionalize fraternity, which is the surest way to totalitarian despotism.”…

“We institutionalize fraternity” could be the motto of every flipping HRC in the land.

Posted by: scaramouche at 18:37 | link | comments (1)

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#1  20 November 2008 - 21:29

 

The motto of France: "Equality, liberty, fraternity". Americans have instead: "the right to the pursuit of happiness". It explains why the American model is more successful than socialist France.

Anonymous

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