Marx (and every leftist since him) begins with abstract and general ideas that are superimposed on reality

One Cosmos Under God Robert W. Godwin

The classical liberalism of American idealism is implicitly religious, even if it doesn’t explicitly favor one particular Judeo-Christian denomination over another. Clearly, there was a coonsensus among our founders that human beings, and only human beings, were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that are rooted in our very humanness. Liberty is meaningless without both free will and a proper transcendent end for our resultant liberty.

In the absence of a free will that transcends biology, meaningful liberty is obviously impossible. And in the absence of the Good and True, both our behavior and our thinking can have no meaning that isn’t ultimately arbitrary. (In other words, thinking, in order to be worthy of the name, must converge on truth, just as behavior must converge on virtue.)

This is the “American experiment”: it was an experiment in the adventure of consciousness to see if would be possible to facilitate psycho-spiritual evolution by setting up the appropriate framework -- to unleash human potential, in part by starting out with a more accurate anthropology and ontology. For if you get either of these wrong at the outset, then your political philosophy will be hopelessly dysfunctional.

Adam Smith’s ideas are infinitely more effective than Marx’s (or Mohammed's) ideas because they begin with a very accurate and concrete assessment of human psychology, whereas Marx (and every leftist since him) begins with abstract and general ideas that are superimposed on reality. What doesn’t fit into the framework must be attacked, denied, belittled, and eliminated in order to preserve the framework. Thus, the origins of the hauntological house of the perpetually “angry left.” How could they not be angry? It’s inherently painful when reality doesn’t conform to your fantasies.

The mullahs and Islamonazis have their own dysfunctional version of reality, while Chomsky and the left have another. In the end, one is no worse than the other, which is probably why they find such common ground in their opposition to liberal America.

In Chomsky’s religion, matter is God. A nuclear holocaust would be tragic because it would end “biology's only experiment with higher intelligence.” Turning the cosmos upside down, human intelligence is subordinate to biology. The human mind is simply an “experiment” of biology. Could this possibly be true? I don't know. You would have to ask biology. It’s her experiment, not ours. Stripped of their illusions of divinity, humans are then free to be what they are, with their biology unbound:

Power into will, will into appetite,

And appetite, a universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce a universal prey

And last eat himself up. --Shakespeare

Osama lauds Chomsky, which is only fitting, since this nasty old leftist has long been one of the West's most visible apologists for the ravenous wolves of Islam -- just as he was unable to perceive the moral gulf that existed between America and the monsters of depravity who enslaved the communist world. He has to see things this way. It's his theology. Or biology. Same thing. Probably no coincidence that he was named after that talking monkey, Nim Chimpsky. posted by Gagdad Bob at 9/08/2007 06:32:00 AM 25 Comments: