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The transformation of the medieval world into the modern world came about with the idea that man could and should transform his lot in life. The liberal individualism of the Enlightenment however was soon countered by reactionary movements, feudal and socio-feudal, seeking to put the genie of individual autonomy back in the box through collectivist movements.
Among the most prominent of these was what would eventually be called socialism. While early socialist movements had been a radical Christian heresy emphasizing communal living, these experiments invariably failed on a local level leaving behind a trail of wrecked lives.
19th century radical theorists began laying out plans for the communal transformations of entire societies. Fourier’s socialist ‘Phalanxes’ which would influence everything from Soviet communal farms to hippie communes in the U.S,. were feudal mass communities with no private property and everyone assigned a role in life under the rule of a centralized ‘omniarch’.
Socialists had to justify the elevation of the collective over the individual through fatalism about the role of man. All evidence to the contrary, man had no ability to change his lot in life. He was only an atom in the larger phalanxes of life. As Robert Owen, the Father of British Socialism, told Congress in an address in 1825, man “never did, nor is it possible he ever can form his own character” but is “universally plastic” and socialists could make him over into anything at all.
The Declaration of Independence asserted that man was born free, but to the socialists he was born a slave and the best that he could ever hope for was to be a slave to the right cause.
Ralph Waldo Emerson insightfully critiqued Fourier because he “treats man as a plastic thing, something that may be put up or down, ripened or retarded, moulded, polished, made into solid, or fluid, or gas, at the will of the leader… but skips the faculty of life, which spawns and scorns system and system-makers, which eludes all conditions, which makes or supplants a thousand phalanxes.” Was man a “plastic thing” or the bearer of the mystery of the “faculty of life”?
Leftist revolutionary movements might begin by hailing the power of the individual but invariably ended up in a socio-feudalism system making malleable man over to fit the five-year plan.
Socialism postured as progressive when it was reactionary. Its leaders, most often hailing from the upper class and upper middle class, reverted newly liberated societies in Russia and China back to feudalism under the guise of liberating them. The Bolsheviks took Czarist feudalism and rebranded it as collective farming, forbidding the ‘liberated’ farmers from owning property or livestock, and even from leaving their farms to seek a better life in the big cities.
The empowerment of the individual had given way to the enslavement of man in the service of an ideal society. Individuals were once again worthless except as they fit into a larger plan.
The socialist argument against individualism was human fallibility. The muckrakers gathered every example of misery and described them as social ills that society had to collectively remedy. Outwardly private philanthropic organizations claimed to help the poor, but their embrace of eugenics, including mandatory sterilization, seizing children from parents, prohibition, and greater state intervention, including mandatory centralized state education, set a pattern that was innately socialist even when its proponents avoided the use of the word.
Every crisis, including WWI and the Great Depression, was seen as a reason for replacing smaller institutions with larger ones and further disempowering the individual. The National Socialists blamed Germany’s loss in WWI on free enterprise. FDR and the Democrats blamed the Great Depression on free enterprise. Both built a state system for seizing control of it. The Bolsheviks not only blamed individual farmers for their famine, but used it to wipe them out.
The post-war economic rebound in America and Europe did not end socialism, but rebooted it with governments confiscating even more wealth for the benefit of society. The macro conflicts of WWII and the Cold War, the threat of atomic annihilation, were used to define the individual as too small to make a difference on his or her own except as part of a larger mass movement.
Class warfare gave way to identity politics. Individuals had to join groups to fight for a fairer society. What governmental institutions had failed to accomplish in fully transforming man, the new movements set out to accomplish in the psychedelic decade. The individual was told that liberation would come from losing his bourgeois background, worldview, inhibitions, morality and values to a new emerging humanistic blob shooting along the rainbow to the right side of history.
The eighties marked a reassertion of individual priorities over mass movements. The movements that had broken the country were distrusted. Socio-feudalism struck back with an environmental crisis taking place on such a scale that individuals were nothing when measured against it. Global authorities had to immediately seize total power to save the human race.
Environmentalism has brought socio-feudalists closest to realizing Fourier’s vision of abolishing private property and packing everyone off to collective compounds with a defined role in life. Man has had his day, but individuals can’t help selfishly wrecking the planet. Only subservience to larger systems can stop global warming, end human misery and transform the world.
A new wave of gender identity activism further eliminated the line between the individual and the state. The personal was political at the most granular level. The pronouns you used, the products you bought, whether you left the light on or not, were political choices. Human existence became a series of political tests measuring allegiance to a state ideology.
When the personal is political, there is nothing personal left to the individual.
Socio-feudalism had contrived to reduce man to a state of total subservience.
Medieval England banned playing games especially “fute-ball” because it was seen as a distraction from the priorities of the state. Postmodern California passed two laws outlawing Indian mascots, along with plastic bags, gendered toys and a thousand other things.
Postmodern man occupies a world of illusory technologies and shrinking possibilities where children are discouraged from riding bikes, packed off to early schooling at toddlerhood and indoctrinated to believe that their playthings are the reason for the destruction of the world.
Socio-feudalism has the destruction of individual autonomy as its central goal and the pandemic lockdowns showed how easy that goal is to achieve in the face of a crisis. Government could and did assert control over what an individual could wear and whether he could leave the house. The public eventually responded to it not with a mass movement, as those mostly failed or were repressed, but by unilaterally discarding the prohibitions of the state.
Americans had ultimately fulfilled Emerson’s faith in “the faculty of life, which spawns and scorns system and system-makers, which eludes all conditions.” And that is why socio-feudalism will fail unless it can reduce mankind to a state of abject helplessness, ignorance and fear. That is what Communist and Islamist regimes strove for with varying degrees of success. And it is still the great aim of socio-feudalism today.
The ultimate struggle will be less about movements and more about individuals. The more the system fails, the more repressive it will become. And only millions of individuals can defeat it.
“The socialist argument against individualism was human fallibility.”
The Christian argument against individualism is the Doctrine of Original Sin (man is born morally depraved and therefore cannot be trusted with freedom and liberty) and that man is created by God and therefore his proper place is to be the obedient servant and property of God.
This is why Christianity does not lead to the freedom and liberty of the individual but to a brutal THEOCRACY, just like Islam does.
“All rights rest on the ethics of egoism. Rights are an individual’s selfish possessions—his title to his life, his liberty, his property, the pursuit of his own happiness. Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action. If man existed to serve an entity beyond himself, whether God or society, then he would not have rights, but only the duties of a servant.” – Leonard Peikoff
You are such a putz. We have had Christianity since day one in this country. The religion lives side by side with our constitution which is the basis of our freedom.
You can’t even live in the country that has given you your freedom. It’s really too bad that you can only exist in the shadow of failed Objectivist philosophers. Your comments since Trump won have exposed your bitterness and your totalitarian tendencies.
Maybe you could finish what Mommy Dearest couldn’t do.
Give this lonely soul a break. We’re the only ones he has. Sad, if you think about it.
He brings this on himself each and every day.
Obviously whatever Objectivism prepares the ground for exists in salted earth
Since God used Moses to deliver His people, we have known freedom and many of us will not give it up at any cost.
What are tyrants willing to pay to take that freedom? On the personal level, they don’t have what it takes.
The Democrats in California passed a law against feeding the birds, which has been a human pastime forever.
So the Demo-Rats don’t give darn about the poor Birds so are the Eco-Wackos still going to support them?! Shame shame shame Demo-Rats
Can you imagine? A $1000 fine for feeding a bird ???
Wait until you are taxed for the loss of habitat your fair share of pavement is made out to be.
yup.
There’s some cities in the uk that have done something similar.
It can be useful when there are 4 foot wingspan pterodactyl s with razor sharp beaks, trying to steal your food while you are sitting outside at a cosy pub…..
I’m going to keep this article safe.
Learn from experience, was once considered common sense but as a boss said to me when I was an arrogant 16 year old (nothing changes) “Common sense isn’t so common lad”
I was reading about Nelson’s fleet strategies the last few days. They were simple and practical, common sense based on Nelson’s experiences at sea. Yet completely at variance with the orthodox strategy of the previous century. This after many decades of my reading about Nelson’s strategy without understanding it.
Absolutely, that post-modern ideas are in essence a rejection of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment stressed natural law and natural rights. Discovery of truth was paramount, as was the idea that the individual mattered. The idea of flourishment, what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, was in essence a quest for happiness. Happiness was the central idea of the Enlightenment. But the Enlightenment did not stress happiness in terms of self-serving hedonistic pleasure, but rather moral and intellectual growth, as well as avoidance of the pain caused by poor and often destructive, immoral decisions and actions in life.
In contrast, post-modernism stresses there is no absolute truth (take note how that ironically is declared absolutely). Postmodernism is also deconstructionist; it is a rejection of the ideas of the past without acquired new knowledge or properly structured critical thinking. Therefore, the individual can seek for themselves the reality they choose. Yet, postmodernism also stresses it is the collective that matters, not the individual.
So, in essence the epic arguments of today are philosophical ones that center on two disparate and probably irreconcilable visions.
;-)) Whatever you have to tell yourself.
Post-modernism is the Enlightenment.
It is their attachment to reductionism by attempting to deny human free will. If collective humanity is incapable of self determination, then how are they?
It is in the asking of such questions that the feudalist overlords are challenged.
Even when human beings are placed in the worst states of pain, suffering and enslavement, the eternal soul finds ways to elevate itself within these dire conditions. That is choice coming from within! A Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, in his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, discusses how one can say yes to life even in the worst of conditions finding potential meaning in spite of everything. He had first-hand experience among those whose arrogant declarations of their superiority were unable to crush his indomitable spirit and hunger for life. Survival is a hardwired passion that has resulted in the overcoming of the most heinous circumstances; it is the desire for freedom that enables the overcoming of this fundamental disregard.
These self-appointed overlords betray their erroneous assumptions about the nature of humanity through the very extreme measures needed in order to most effectively control others. The leftist/communists were following the despotic playbooks of the worst,
murderous tyrants, Stalin, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Hitler…why? Because the desire for self determination is a crucible that builds strength of character Inside those most egregiously harmed by those whose controlled violations of human autonomy unintentionally fuel the much needed fusion of anger and injustice motivating radical change.
If the assumptions they hold were rationally true, then the lengths to which all despots or despots-in-training go to in order to destroy those whom they are adamant to control would be unnecessary. The American rebellion against this encroaching tyranny was loosed from within as people suffering sought change and watched as those they formerly trusted violated others with impunity, knowing that if it can happen to them, it can happen to me and the map to tyranny was eclipsed by the red wave of freedom.
This is what starmer wants in britain.
Preach on Dan ‘l my brother
People forget or are ignorant of the fact that Nazism is a form of socialism. NSDAP : Nationalscozialistische Deutche Arbeiterparei. National, socialist German worker’s party. Fascism also started, in Italy, as a worker’s party.
You have been selected for cotton-picking.
If I am too stupid to govern myself what makes them any more qualified to rule over many of us? Never understood that!
As a Christian I always remember the plans proposed to God the Father. Satan proposed to save ALL of us by instituting a system, like those proposed from almost day one, that ALL would come to earth and never be allowed to make a mistake and ALL return to Heavenly Father.. But Satan wanted the glory. Jesus Christ proposed a system where we would all come to earth and be allowed to learn, make mistakes, seek forgiveness and return to Heavenly Father. Christ’s system required a sacrifice that Jesus Christ said HE would do AND gave the Glory back to our Heavenly Father. Since our trip to earth was for us to grow more like our Heavenly Father that was the plan chosen. Satan and a third of the hosts of heaven rebelled and were cast out. They were sent here without bodies and have tried to thwart Fathers plans ever since.