Socialism and the Hegelian Dialectic [Reader Post]

Loading


A thought has been tumbling around in my head for quite some time and it wasn’t until a posting by one of our resident liberal friends that the picture became clear.

Have you ever wondered why, exactly, there is such depth and magnitude of conflict politically? My first instinct was to attribute it simply to people’s varied opinions on issues and leave it at that. But then, I noticed a trend. That is, that when a conflict seemed to resolve itself, it soon became the flash point for another conflict to develop. And on certain issues, this has continued on for years and even decades.

Examples of such issues are, but not limited to; -Environmental issues -Taxation -Gun control -Certain “rights” -Aspects of the Constitution On those issues, within certain arguments, or debates, two sides argue, an agreement is reached, and eventually the agreement becomes the focal point of furthering the argument and reaching a new agreement. The fact that such agreements seem to be increasingly restrictive upon freedom and liberty should not be overlooked.

So, what can we attribute this to? In a phrase, the Hegelian dialectic (h/t to Liberal1 for the subject). What is the Hegelian dialectic? It is, simply, a series of theses (accepted idea) opposed by antitheses (opposing idea), resulting in a syntheses (new idea). This synthesis then becomes the thesis that is opposed by an antithesis, resulting in a new synthesis, and on and on until a final, ultimate, “perfect” synthesis is realized. Now, to understand where Hegel was coming from, it is important to note that Hegel was a devout socialist. So much so, in fact, that his work, his dialectic, was put into practice by such well-known socialists as Marx and Engels.

”…the State ‘has the supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the State… for the right of the world spirit is above all special privileges. -Georg Hegel

Hegel envisioned the same control over people, by the state, that Marx and Engels were guilty of. So, how does this “dialectic” apply to now, today?

Think about an issue. Any issue that people are concerned about. Then think about the history of that issue, as in, the evolution of the issue into today’s specific arguments. Take gun control, for instance. Over 200 years ago, the Framers of the Constitution drafted the Second Amendment. The idea of gun ownership, namely the freedom to do so, went largely unchallenged in America until the 1900′s when New York passed the Sullivan Act, requiring small firearms to be registered. In the 1930′s, gun control became a national issue with two laws, both signed into law by FDR. While the regulations involved were uncontroversial by today’s standards, involving gun dealer licensing and regulating machine gun ownership, it introduced the concept of national gun control. Fast forward to the 1960′s, and we see gun control becoming a national issue with two prominent sides on the debate, particularly in 1968 with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and MLK, jr. Continue on to the Reagan attempted assassination and on up to today’s restrictive gun control laws.

At each point, there were a theses, or accepted idea of the limitation on gun control, and an antithesis, proposing ever more restrictive control over firearms. The syntheses from these conflicts are seen in the laws passed at those points. Neither being as liberal as the theses, nor as restrictive as the antitheses, but an accepted position somewhere in the middle. And each new law, or syntheses, became the starting point, or theses, for the next round of debate on the issue. And at every point, those syntheses further eroded the rights of gun ownership in America. Now, I don’t wish to make the debate about gun control, because that is not the point of this post. Rather, it is but an example of the wider idea that conflict is entered into, continuously, that applies ever increasing control by the federal government over our lives. Is it a concerted effort by the groups pushing for that control? Most definitely. Is it a coordinated effort? That is a debatable point, though I think in most cases it isn’t.

What it is, though, is Hegel’s dialectic in action. At each point of conflict, the theses are challenged by the antitheses, to reach a predetermined synthesis. Think about Obamacare, for instance. Obama, and the liberal/progressive left, could not go from no national healthcare law to the ultimate goal of a single-payer system whereby the government was the sole “insurer” and arbiter of our country’s healthcare system. No, instead they needed to enter “mild” controls upon the system itself, furthering the federal government’s control over our lives. The next phase will, most likely, be one of additional controls, and on and on until the single-payer system is realized. Remember, Hegel’s ultimate vision of a society, as evidenced by his quote above, is that the state has the “supreme right” over the individual. His ultimate vision is one of a complete socialistic society, and that is where he saw his dialectic leading to.

Joseph Stalin coined the phrase “useful idiots” in referencing the people who supported their own enslavement. Today, we in America have our own “useful idiots”. The difference is that I see everyone who allows this Hegelian dialectic to continue, meaning the continuing erosion of our rights and liberties by compromised syntheses, or acceptable agreements, as useful idiots. I am a useful idiot. So, too, are you, no matter what your political stripe may be.

The look behind the curtain is frightening, and reminiscent of the world of Orwell’s Animal Farm or 1984. And the willingness of we, the people, to contribute to our own enslavement, some more than others, is bewildering.

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
74 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

johngalt
your comments and POST should be pass on every university and schools also, because they don’t teach that anymore, which make them forget what is the real AMERICA SHOULD BE FIGHTING FOR,
TO PROTECT IT IN THESES TIMES OF ATTACKS ON AMRERICA LIBERTY AND FREEDOM FOR ALL THE GOOD WILL CITIZENS, so the students can without a doubt see with clear judgement
who are his own and his AMERICA’S enemies, and one day when they are old enough to vote, they will find their vote to go where AMERICA WIN first.

bye

the rebels helped by ALQAEDA, what is it with those taking sides against a leader trying to protect his COUNTRY by killing the revolutinaries trying to oust his regime which work for many years,
where is the agenda of the rebels if it’s not to offer the SYRIA in the hands of dangerous faction with intent to bring the COUNTRY IN WORSE SLAVERY , compare to what they had before they decide to start their rebellion

Liberal1 [ objective] okay it must have been your brother Liberalmann
who call me those names,
sorry I accused you

@ilovebeeswarzone:

Good of you to apologize to Lib1. I might be wrong, but I cannot recall a time where he hurled personal insults at a particular person. He does tend to categorize people into groups using unflattering names, but then, so do most of us conservatives. I only have a problem with the descriptives he uses, such as “ultra-” and “extreme-“.

liberalmann, however, loves to hurl the personal insults, and most likely was your name-caller.

johngalt
you are so classy with everybody, you are an example of good behavior, and I was thinking
that if we get to hear the MORMON TABERNACLE CHOIR in THE WHITE HOUSE it will be pleasing to AMERICA EARS, BECAUSE THEY ARE HARD TO BEAT IN SIGNING THE SONGS OF AMERICA’S BEAUTY AND BRAVEST ON THE LAND WHICH GOD CHOOSE FOR THE FREE. and I beth they will sing for ROMNEY if he win
BYE

To Mr. “johngalt,” I find the moniker rather interesting. As we are seeing now, the private investment community is slowing down in its willingness to invest in government bonds. Much of the new bond purchase is actually being done by central banks. We had several “offers” from banks with which we do business to “participate” in Greek bonds. Given that the haircut — a word popularized in the press here by Chancellor Merkel — will top seventy percent for many private and institutional investors, one sees many small investors becoming very conservative in their strategy. For this, it becomes more difficult for bond auctions to be fully successful, and I expect this to be more the case. This is the John Galt strategy, is it not? (I don’t have the fiction book here to reference.) But if so, then we as a little family are doing this too.

As to the notion that Germany is socialist, it is no more socialist than is the United States. There is much private capitalism and Germany works hard to export around the world and innovate. It seems so strange that socialists of today are rushing to forget the many failures which history heaps up for them. It was under the socialists in Greece that the largest share of debt was added, and no this brings them to terrible times. In one way, the collapse of the Soviet Socialists Republiks were a default on debt, as well. This means that socialism has tried conscription and confiscation to fund itself and failed. Then it has tried borrowing from the future, and needed more and more borrowing to prop itself up, and then fails again. The increase in debt in the United States is an example of being unable to pay for everything the socialist mentality wants, without threatening everything. The new ECB head, Mario Draghi, has stated in public that the age of austerity comes to Europe and it is unavoidable. This means that the socialist side of the political spectrum must deal with less funding as time goes by. Germany is leaning towards restraint, as are a number of other EU nations, while the UK’s Osborne has announced that government is running out of cash. The social welfare model is failing, and failing because it was always a snowball or pyramid scheme, borrowing from someone or borrowing from tomorrow. Tomorrow is arrived.

I summarize this to say your “johngalt” name is apt. Liberality once meant freedom in classical philsophy. The word now means its opposite. But Frederick the Great observed that he as government could do anything he wanted, and there would be men who would find rhetorical-philosophical ways to justify it if only they could be in his company. Times are not changed very much, are they?

From Wikipiedia-

The Socialist Phenomenon

Shafarevich’s book The Socialist Phenomenon,[7] published in the US in 1980, argued that the leftist-nihilist utopian impulse is a revival of gnostic religion, rooted in rebellion.[8] In his view, this is an anti-Christian urge that fights obsessively with the normal state of the world, demanding material equality and the eradication of individual and gender distinctions.[9] Shafarevich wrote that “the death of mankind is not only a conceivable result of the triumph of socialism – it constitutes the goal of socialism.”[10]

It’s a very interesting read. Idealogical anthropology if you will.

@ilovebeeswarzone:

Resentful much?

@TheProperStranger: posted: “the death of mankind is not only a conceivable result of the triumph of socialism – it constitutes the goal of socialism.”

Ayn Rand wrote the same:

“Destruction is the only end that the mystics’ creed has ever achieved, as it is the only end that you see them achieving today, and if the ravages wrought by their acts have not made them question their doctrines, if they profess to be moved by love, yet are not deterred by piles of human corpses, it is because the truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends. The truth is that those horrors are their ends.”

When I was younger, I was reluctant to believe that the left was motivated by death. Now I believe it.

TheProperStranger
hi, well I was answering to GOVERNOR ROMNEY’S WIN,
do you have a problem with that?
bye
edit; it was meant to congratulate, not to be resentful

TheProperStranger
I think, It’s time to cheer for any who is on a winning streak,
they need it, and ROMNEY sure work hard on this one,
as they all do,
the time for bashing anyone is behind ,
the odds are too crucial to for it, at this time
bye

Thank you, John Cooper, for the quote mirroring another earlier quote. The thing which seems most to annoy the nihilistic socialist is that their truth leeches out in so many ways, all easily documented. When someone claims National Socialism was not socialism, they squeeze out of one use of the term only to find the next, Soviet Socialism. They reject this, only to find the Chinese Communists also use the term Sino-Socialism. They reject this, only to find Zimbabwe’s brutal yet incompetent thigs use the term, Marxist, in their name and founding documents. The socialist then rejects this, only to find the Baath Party and a number of other Pan-Arab parties are socialist in their founding documents, the term appearing frequently. They reject this use of the term, only to find the next brutal and asset-confiscating thug also is some version of a socialist. It is interesting to me how many socialists rationalize all this while saying “next time it will be different.” Then other socialists demand I define their own term as they use it, all the while confusing a clear conversation with some version of “look over there.” The truth of soft socialism as seen in the insolvency in Greece is that while every socialist says their political philosophy is about economics, every instance of this played out in the past or being played out today on the world stage shows that socialism has no idea what to do economically to create prosperity, except to find a productive individual and demand his money, assets or ingenuity. From the perspective of someone living in Berlin, your sentence says much. “When I was younger, I was reluctant to believe that the left was motivated by death. Now I believe it.” I too believe this, as we see too many socialists now proposing various ways to decrease the population, except when they are seeking votes. This suggests demographically that they diminish their own numbers, and the future is assuredly against them, as well as the simple marektplace which holds assets away from “haircuts” and insolvencies. Thank you for furthering the discussion.

@SW:

There is a reason that I chose the moniker “johngalt”. Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is, perhaps, the finest book that I have ever read, and due to the volume of reading I can lay claim to, that is saying something. But it wasn’t the story itself. It was the philosophical points that hooked me, echoing the same resentments and angst at government overreach that I felt.

Now, I don’t know if the statists in the world today are actually motivated by death, as John Cooper and you propose, and that Rand wrote about. I’m more likely to believe that the statists are simply not aware that their end goal leads to destruction, even as they believe it leads to Utopia. I state this because it seems that the leftists in today’s world cannot see the truth, and in many ways, don’t even bother to seek it. Instead, it seems as if the process to achieve their Utopia is much more important to them than actually seeing the results that process has wrought. And we see it now, today, in the cheering from the sidelines by our liberal friends here every time our freedom and liberty is further eroded, simply because the horse they are backing has “won”.

Just curious…what did Ayn Rand think or organized religion? Did it amuse her or did she think it an essential right?

…and one more Ayn Rand quote from The Monument Builders c1962 :

“When one observes the nightmare of the desperate efforts made by hundreds of thousands of people struggling to escape from the socialized countries of Europe, to escape over barbed-wire fences, under machine-gun fire—one can no longer believe that socialism, in any of its forms, is motivated by benevolence and by the desire to achieve men’s welfare. No man of authentic benevolence could evade or ignore so great a horror on so vast a scale. Socialism is not a movement of the people. It is a movement of the intellectuals, originated, led, and controlled by the intellectuals, carried by them out of their stuffy ivory towers into those bloody fields of practice where they unite with their allies and executors: the thugs.”

(emphasis mine)

@Tracy Martin:

Sorry, but I tire quite quickly of every time Ayn Rand is mentioned, someone brings up her religious views, as somehow a means of discounting everything else she ever said. As if it is somehow impossible to have faith, whether in a Christian God or another religion’s supreme being(s), and yet believe that she had indisputable points on other aspects of life. Is this your point?

Mr. Cooper, this quote is remarkably in line with a visit to the DDR museum here in Berlin. There are displays of all the methods freedom-seeking people used to escape over fences, barbed wire, walls and wide barren areas kept graded and free from growing things. The DDR wanted the West to believe its name, German Democratic Republik, but like so many other “democratic” socialists enterprises, you were allowed to vote for only approved candidate of the Party. For those escaping there was machine-gun fire and many deaths. When the DDR collapsed and the wall fell, the flood of well-wishing people was wonderful. When I am lectured by socialists today about democracy, I think how much they want to forget the truth of socialism as your quote tells. The East German government tried to tell the world that it was a democracy from its name, and from its pretenses and Potemkin village strategy. But the shelves were bare, and the reality harsh. That the quotes you offer come from works of fiction does not make the observations less true, for history bears this out for individual men as for nations. Thank you.

Mister Galt, Ms. Martin’s question was a construction. I believe she knew the answer to begin with. But because one takes a mathemtics test and makes one error in a hundred while all the other students pass with fifty percent does not indicate that everyone “failed.” I suspect Ms. Martin likes to play with you and your readers, while offering little prose of her own to advocate a position she would espouse. Whether Rand as philosopher was consistent in all her views is no more valid a question than Noam Chomsky fine work in linguistics compared to his political indictment of Democrats and Republicans in the United States.

@SW:

That is why my comment is what it is. I do tire of the “gotcha!” moments someone inevitably provides regarding Rand and religion, and, as I said, that it somehow means that her other philosophical points are devalued.

For my two bits, Ayn Rand was a complex and troubled person if you believe what many of Her biographers wrote. I respect Her nonetheless, and don’t think her basic ideas are dependent on her being absolutly right about everthing, or even consistant, or even totaly honest. Ever see her famous interview with Tom Snyder?
It may be harder for a famous athiest to be honest about what they really believe than for an overwieght Russian crone to pass through the eye of a needle.

Thank you, gentlemen, for the clarifications. And thank you for my doing an internet search to find the video of Snyder and Rand speaking. She sets apart on the one hand reason, capitalism and individualism, and on the other collectivism, mysticism and altruism (in her sense of this), and I find that a most interesting opposition, because there is no “synthesis” between them. While the avid Left attacks, they often express mysticism because theirs is a belief system in which the collective can force altrusim. Such examples of this thinking have been the various European welfare states, now almost all being brought by simple mathematics to the end of their economic pyramid schemes. Some many will be injured economically as the collectivists fail in their economic dreamland. Who will survive this best? Individualists, I suspect. Capitalists, to be sure. And those who will use their reason to cut away the polemic and propaganda from the hard fact and reality. I think, as the Snyder-Rand interview highlights, the Western “attack on success” is as she says an “age of envy” to which there is no economic solution, but rather only chaos. Those who sought political chaos historically throughout the 20th century were the Gramsci Marxists who wanted discord to be their entree into power, as was the Bolshevik revolution and then the Nazi Putsch. I think this still true today, and I fear many will refuse to see this, believing we cannot live through the same events again and again. But, as an optimist, and based on the latest inerviews with Draghi, I see the fundamental limitations of taxation and borrowing becoming so clear, that the limits have been exceeded, and the end result is a natural push back. We are seeing this politically, economically and in terms of individuals staking out their own individualism against the collective.

As to famous atheists, Britain’s Flew left that flock, and most recently Dawkins said publicly that his was also a belief system, and that he could prove nothing as regards atheist, even preferring the term, agnostic. Most amusing. The absolute secular socialists, I conclude, are actually in a state of shock in the moment, as their totems of the social welfare state and militant atheism are losing a grip on even their own message, much less that attacks on religions and Western civilization. We are in luck, for natural law and natural marketplace phenomena are on our side, as rational individuals.

Thanks again for the reccomendation to the interview. I shall “amazon.de” to buy a book or two. Best wishes.

CO2 is a perfect instance of how the left hates life. We all know the left hates CO2 with a passion and wants to shut down any industry that produces it. But CO2 is the very basis of all life on earth. Here’s the formula for photosynthesis:

6CO2 + 6H2O + photons => C6H12O6+6O2

Without CO2, we all die.

John Cooper
hi,
It is incredible to hear them, imagine AN EARTH SURVIVING ATROCITIES OF attacks from the elements around shaping her ridging her in many places, chopping the SOLID MOUNTAINS, BREAKING THE ICE CRUST in many pieces, diverting the waters, exploding the debts of the OCEANS TO RISE INTO NEW LANDS
in how many IONS OF YEARS HAVING BEEN BURNED BY MANY VOLCANO, AND SHAKEN AND BROKEN FROM MANY EARTHQUAKES, and still here round and beautiful from space and beautiful from down yonder bare luscious lands where animals find their food and create their young,
this same EARTH NOURISHING THE HUMANS, BEING TOLD OF BEING TO WEAK TO SURVIVE,
IF NOT HELP WITH IGNORANT ACTIONS, or reactions or prevention to hurt the humans
she has sustained for so many generations, IS IN IT THE TOP OF arrogance from that group
using her as any other human, IF THERE WAS EVER A LIE, this one is topping it for sure,
the POWER OF THE EARTH to heal herself and regenerate is the most of what and who exist,
we should respect her but let her do what she do best, that is take care of herself and provide our subsistence by her own power given to her in the beginning.
bye

Part I of Snyder’s Ayn Rand interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4doTzCs9lEc