Summary of previous installments
In previous installments, we have seen that the the ideology/religion of liberalism (the religion of freedom, equality and rights, which is a form of relativism) is the ultimate justification of behavior and public policy in Western civilization and it is an ideology that can be used to justify anything. So it is as if it did not exist. It is a rhetorical ploy.
Its void is filled by another official ideology: leftism, which is the base of the law and culture in Western civilization. Leftism is an absolutist ideology with absolute goods (feminism, multiculturalism, diversity, etc.) and absolute evils (patriarchy, white supremacism, sexism, racism, homophobia) and it is justified because of liberalism, because liberalism can justify anything..
In this absolutist sense, leftism is not different from any other official religion. But there are several properties that make Leftism unique between the official religions of societies:
Property A. Its restlessness. Leftism is always evolving and incorporating new absolute goods and evils in a process that has been accelerating. Some things that were common sense only five or ten years ago, now they are the evilest of evil things and they cannot be disputed.
Property B. Its direction. Leftism does not evolve in random directions but getting farther and farther away from obvious reality and natural law. Leftism is a reality inversion and a moral inversion, which constantly increases.
Property C. Its popularity. As we will see, Leftism is a religion whose goals are enslavement, impoverishment and mental health decline of the vast majority of the population. However, it is very popular among the majority of the population.
This text will try to explain property A and C while the next installment will try to explain property B and deepen the understanding of property A.
Evolution of modern society
The evolution of leftism is clear if we see it from a non-ideological perspective. Modern society always evolves in a direction where more and more good things are taken from the general population and good things are transferred to the powerful and to the people that support leftism.
These «good things» are money, power and psychological well-being. We will call them «benefits». So this change means the impoverishment, enslavement and mental health decline of the general population. We will call this «the disempowerment of the population».
It is tempting to see this change as a transfer of benefits but this would be inaccurate. The good things taken from the population are bigger and different than the good things given to the powerful and the people that support leftism.
For example, let’s suppose a bank reduces the number of their offices by forcing people to do most transactions online (true story). The good things taken from the population are: people without computer skills find their lives a bit harder, many employees lose their jobs, their families are destroyed or have a difficult life because of economic hardships, the communities where these families live are impoverished, etc.
The good things given to the powerful is that the owner of the bank has more amount of money that he doesn’t need and he can’t spend in a thousand lives. But now, he is the number 51 in the Forbes list of wealthy people (instead of number 47). In addition, this excess of money can help this guy to play God and try to implement a «better world» according to his half-baked ideas that create more chaos, but nobody tells him they are asinine because he has so much money.
So you have destruction of many lives compared to the vanity of a guy with too much money. Both are good things but not equivalent. This change is only possible because the rulers have the power and the people being dispossessed have no power to protect from this predation.
The class structure of modern society
More specifically, Western society is composed by three social classes:
- The rulers. Financial powers like the Rothschild, the Rockefellers, and others. They rule in the shadow and are often hidden behind all kinds of non-profit and profit organizations (Bank of International Settlements, Blackrock, etc). The rulers decide the direction towards society should go.
- The managers. This includes the intellectuals that create the ideas in universities. The journalists, teachers, professors and entertainers that transmit these ideas to the people. And the politicians, civil servants and white collars employees that enforce these in ideas in the public space and private companies.
Since «the Managerial Revolution» by James Burnham, it has been often claimed that the managers have replaced the wealthy people as a ruling class. I will believe it when I see the managers take decisions or define policies that go against the rulers. This was done in Communist countries, which were really managerial, but in our Capitalist system, financial powers rule and managers are only their assistants. The same way the clergy was assistant of the power during the Middle Ages.
This does not mean that managers are without powers. In fact, the upper layer of managers (say, the high officers in international institutions) have some power about how to implement the direction set by the rulers in society. The lower layer of managers have power how to transmit and enforce the directives of the managers in their companies, school, etc. Since the rulers are hidden, the population thinks that the managers (politicians, international organization) are the ones that rule societies.
The rulers and the managers are «the structure of power» in Western society.
- The serfs. The ones that have no power about the direction of the society. An immigrant, a trucker driver, the owner of a small business, etc. They can be divided into good serfs (if they support leftism) and bad serfs (if they don’t support leftism)
We will call the managers and the good serfs as «the clients» (in a Roman sense). They are the ones that support the enslavement, impoverishment and mental health decline of the population through its support of leftism.
Leftism evolves to take more and more benefits (money, power and psychological benefits) from the population and to give more benefits to the rulers and (sometimes) to the clients.
In this exchange, the rulers are the main beneficiaries but the upper layer of the clients can also be benefitted if the benefits they receive is bigger than the benefits they give. For example, a high level officer of the European Commission receives more benefits (salary, status, power) that he gives (say, through taxes).
A feminist school teacher (the lower layer of the managers) receives less benefits (virtue signaling, moral justification) that she gives (taxes, loneliness because of feminism), but she doesn’t realize that leftism is the cause of her disempowerment (she attributes loneliness to patriarchy) so she supports leftism because of the benefits she perceives (virtue signaling, moral justification).
Leftism as a justification of the power grab
So each novelty in modern society can be explained as taking benefits from the population to give benefits to the rulers and (sometimes) the clients. Leftism is only the ideology to justify this process.
For example, both massive immigration and the incorporation of woman to the workplace disempowered the population by reducing wages, increasing taxes, making people more unhappy and more dependent from the State, while increasing wealth, power and meaning for the rulers and the upper layer of the managers.
This disempowerment had to be justified so «feminism» and «multiculturalism» were created as a new «gods» or dogmas of the religion of leftism. From a logical point of view, importing masses of people from very patriarchal societies contradicts feminism, but the hidden logic is that both movements benefit the rulers and the upper layer of the managers. Leftism is an ideology to rationalize parasitism of these classes with respect to the general population.
The rulers of traditional societies could not do that so easily because the religion was established. Henry II could not define «the murdering of bishops such as Beckett» as a good thing, because he could not change the religion. But leftism has liberalism as a ultimate justification and, as we saw, liberalism can be used to justify anything (in this case, the alibi is «to increase the rights of women and poor foreigners») . So the powerful define the religion as they see fit and have no restriction in their behavior. The powerful control the religion instead of being restricted by it.
This explains the restlessness of leftism. Liberalism allows leftism to be always changing, because it can justify anything (unlike the dogmas of traditional societies). However, it does not force leftism to be always changing. If leftism is always changing is because the rulers benefit from each novelty and the rulers have the power to implement it. Each leftist novelty such as feminism, LGBTI or multiculturalism has ended up increasing the benefit of the rulers, of the powerful. The fact that it disempowers the population is a byproduct.
How people accept their own disempowerment
How do normal people accept and even promote leftism, which justifies their own disempowerment? There are multiple mechanisms.
The first mechanism is that the disempowerment is sold as an expansion of rights. Since each right is someone else’s obligations (again, the relativism of liberalism), new obligations are introduced into the population while claiming they are rights and concealing the obligations attached.
For example, rights of illegal immigrants to be given healthcare imply the obligation of everybody else to pay for this healthcare through taxes. By claiming «rights» are introduced, the impoverishment and enslavement of the population are concealed. Only the bright side is presented in a constant propaganda campaign. It is again a fallacy of omission («stacking the deck» fallacy).
The second mechanism consists in the rationalization of the disempowerment. When divorce and abortion were introduced in Spain, there were told that these were going to be very special cases for dramatic situations and there wouldn’t be masses of people divorcing or aborting ( “safe, legal, and rare”, as Bill Clinton would said). After this happened, divorce and abortion were redefined from «necessary evils» to «highest goods and rights». So now families broken and children killed are rationalized saying that these are good things because, for example, women have the right not to be trapped in an unhappy marriage and own their body.
The third mechanism is that leftism blames all its failures to other people and to insufficient leftism. So, when people get impoverished because leftism, «the right» is to blame and the solution is more leftism. For example, when feminism fails, the answer is that feminism has not been sufficiently implemented (because of the evil «patriarchy») and the solution is more feminism.
A special case of this third mechanism is that leftism takes its victims and makes them soldiers. An example is the liberated woman who followed very well all the rules of feminism and, hence, ended up lonely and childless at her forties. This woman is hurting and admitting that she has committed mistakes that cannot be undone only adds to her misery. So her mind tries to rationalize these situations and leftism provides the perfect alibi: she has not married because men are sexist and only want a submissive slave instead of a strong independent woman like her. So she has to fight against the patriarchy by promoting feminism. This gives her meaning and something to live for. And it is a perfect excuse to try to convince young women to follow the same path she followed: «Misery wants company».
So each victim of leftism is converted into a fighter for leftism. Leftism feeds of its own failures: destroys lives of people and uses them to destroy more lives of people in a vicious circle that destroys society, like a cancer growing in a body.
Something to be explained
We have said that leftism evolves in direction towards more benefits for the rulers and (sometimes) for the clients. But why does this direction coincide with the direction consisting in getting farther and farther away from obvious reality and the natural law?
This requires a more detailed examination of the mechanism of leftism, which will be done in the next installment.
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If leftism is free to wander, we should expect that it wanders in random ways. There must be some mechanism for it to always go left. Explaining this mechanism is the objetive of this post.
Spiritual reality. Satan works with secondary causes so it does not reveal its existence.
We are interested in these secondary causes.