Saturday, August 7, 2021

Society, Not Socialism

 


Article by J.B.Shurk in The American Thinker
 

Society, Not Socialism

In systems theory, complex systems are said to be resilient when they can withstand damage on multiple fronts and still function properly.  The ecosystem is one such system.  Although we are bombarded with intentional misinformation about Earth's imminent destruction to scare people into handing complete control over their private economic decisions to a small cabal of techno-fascists, political aristocrats, and Build Back Better oligarchs who promise to use their new powers to save lives, our planet's thermodynamic management of atmospheric gases and heat energy is robust without the help of cubicle bureaucrats.  Air masses move, lands green and suck up carbon dioxide, and even pollutants are broken down through dispersion over time.  The global ecosystem has inestimable "pathways" to naturally remedy any perturbation.  To believe that our four-and-a-half-billion-year-old planet is incapable of surviving without Karen from down the street becoming a Prius-leasing vegetarian abstaining from air-conditioning or having children is the height of human hubris.  Build Back Better is really about building dummies who have neither the education nor the curiosity to question the 1%'s power.  

In contrast to the profound capabilities of our global ecosystem to naturally rebalance and self-heal, our social system is far less resilient.  Society and civilization are the aberrations of humanity's existence — not its natural resting state.  Westerners who take society's existence for granted need only look at the chaos in Afghanistan, Libya, Congo, Somalia, or any of the other three dozen or so conflict zones in the world today.  When violence and famine are viewed up close and personal, it is difficult to see life outside a functioning social system as anything other than "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."  

What I mean by all this is that human society is an incredibly good, albeit fragile, thing.  Note that I did not say "government."  There's a big difference between the two.  In the words of Thomas Paine: "Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices.  The one encourages intercourse; the other creates distinctions.  The first a patron, the last a punisher.  Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one[.]"  Believe it or not, humanity can tick along just fine without a small collection of permanent power-holders ruling from D.C. or Brussels or United Nations Plaza in New York City.  When "society" collapses, however, all hell breaks loose.  

It is also true that society is strongest when it is allowed to exist and grow naturally — when the individual decisions and desires of millions of humans are allowed to influence and affect each other without the artificial intrusion of bureaucratic government.  When people are allowed to freely interact in order to maximize their wealth, security, and overall happiness, many "pathways" exist for society to respond to any system crisis.  The more pathways, the more overall stability.  When there is only one pathway for responding to crisis — the government's mandate through threat of force — the loss of that pathway cascades into total system failure.  

We are seeing today the potential for system-wide collapse because government's one-pathway solution to every problem cannot account for the complexities that occur naturally in human society.  Global protests against mandatory vaccinations, forced lockdowns, and outright censorship are only the beginning.  The more governing institutions insist on rewiring society in the artificial image of "Great Reset" bullies, the faster the failure cascade will become.

Traditionally, the "power of the purse" represented the public's power through their representatives to restrict executive overreach by starving its funding.  In a perverse irony, legislatures across the West have legally encumbered their citizens' property by manipulating the monetary and banking systems in such a way as to maximize governments' power over every purse in every home.  In pursuit of ever-more-socialist governments, Western nations have leveraged their societies.  

This is not difficult to see.  One of the primary delusions of socialist governments is this: when looking at free men operating with individual liberty in free markets of ideas, goods, and labor, they lose sight of the individual and instead view him as merely a cog in the overall system.  They prioritize and concentrate on the collective human organism and forget the huge, incalculable collection of individual and private decisions, each one of which represents personal power, authority, and self-government.  When all those discrete decisions are ignored, a socialist government cannot distinguish between the robustness of a "free system" and the fragility of one run through government mandates, even though the former arises from the individual decisions of every person and the latter reflects forced direction and coerced movement from a single conductor. 

The two systems — free and controlled — overlap, of course.  Free people are influenced by central messaging, organized law, and "groupthink."  Controlled citizens still privately tell jokes to their friends and whisper loving words to their children.  But whereas the complexity of a free society reflects personal choice, the dogmatism under a socialist government reflects imprisoned constraint.  The former is a system ever expanding; the latter is a system ever constricting.  Since socialism has failed wherever it has been foisted upon a population, I think it is fair to conclude that the natural human spirit rebels against the artificial prison in which socialism seeks to keep it chained.

Socialism despairs of the "commodification" of the human being in an exchange of labor for money, but socialism depends on treating the human being as a commodity resource available to the government when enforcing mandates.  What are we now but biological subjects for experimental science?  Each human is stripped of individuality and free will and subsumed to the architecture of the socialist state.  A person is dispossessed of his natural ability to rationalize, labor, and live as he sees fit in return for the promise of safety and security from the state.  Sameness and status quo become both desired (by the brainwashed) and imposed (by those doing the brainwashing).  By denying a person the natural ability to think and reason on his own, socialism excises the human-ness of the individual and leaves a bare reminder of a life capable of breathing but not living.

Contrary to its marketing, socialism is the industrialization of the human being on a massive scale, extracting the human soul in exchange for mere existence.  There is no more resounding commodification of humanity.  It is like a vast insurance company whose premiums are nothing less than the essence of one's human-ness, paid in exchange for the promise to keep the physical body alive.  The greater the government embraces socialism, the more it becomes a grand insurance Leviathan, commodifying the human being in a manufacturing process that treats it as a mere resource while stripping away individual possibility in exchange for subsistence.  Socialism is the single greatest mechanism for dehumanizing the world's population the world has ever known.  

This takeover of society by government is what has led us to the brink of disaster today.  By denying complex societies the chance to solve complex problems and instead insisting on one-size-fits-all solutions at every turn, our social system is on the verge of collapse.  Although it pretends otherwise, in its heart, socialism yearns for the king's prerogative.  Yet it is the king's prerogative that leads to arbitrary rule-making, social strife, and ultimately revolution.  By destroying society, the socialists have constructed a system that will cascade toward total collapse.  Once it does, it is up to us to pick up the pieces and rebuild society once again.

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/society_not_socialism.html 







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