The old "Jesus as hippie" meme.
Sometimes the cartoon/poster/bumpersticker thought-world is stupid beyond depressing, as well as dishonest.
I hate to be obvious
(ok ok)
but what makes a socialist a socialist
is enlisting the power of the State
to enforce sharing of material goods,
by law and by force.
Just a small difference.
Even with the medieval droit du seigneur,*
he only took her for one night.
*Like the angels dancing on the head of a pin, btw, a complete historical fiction.
I hate to be obvious
(ok ok)
but what makes a socialist a socialist
is enlisting the power of the State
to enforce sharing of material goods,
by law and by force.
Just a small difference.
Even with the medieval droit du seigneur,*
he only took her for one night.
*Like the angels dancing on the head of a pin, btw, a complete historical fiction.
8 comments:
Is it just me who fancies that if President Obama bore the Republican label his policies would be seen as pro-war (continuing on in Iraq, building up in Afganistan), and pro-'capitalism' (bailing out Wall Street).
As for whether the president is trying to give "free" health care or at least medical insurance, it's all so complicated who can tell? But it seems that the programmes he proposes would give more money to medical corporations and pharmacological corporation, while perhaps squeezing higher premiums out of the middle class in order to fund insurance. A socialist would nationalize or socialize the medical-pharmacological system, not make the government the middle-man "payer" who keeps the capitalist corporations happy and squeezes higher premiums out of the real payers in order to buy medical interventions for the uninsured.
In medieval terms, the Democrats' socialization to fee the hungry would be along these lines:
1. The huge landowners, feudal and ecclesiastical, would dispense food to the destitute according to rules imposed by the monarch;
2. The food dispensed for free to the destitute would come from higher taxes and tithes imposed on small land-owning semi-peasant (kulaks);
3. The MSM of the time -- the clergy -- would praise the monarch for redistributing the wealth (Mammon) in obedience to Jesus who presumably praised Mammon redistribution schemes when he declared that one can't serve both God and Mammon.
As for Jesus, all "policies" are "things of Caesar, surely." The medical system is among the glories of the Shaitan's oikoumene (Luke 4:5-6). ... I wonder what Jesus would have retorted if the Shaitan had said to him in the desert, "The uninsured demand free technocratic medical care. Command these stones to become insurance for them."
Maybe He would have observed that a Christian Mammon-healthcare scheme violates the separation of church and state by using state power to ram triumphalist Christian values down the throats of those who happen to not believe in the Christian God or who have opted for a different version of the Christian belief system than that insisted upon by the Catholic bishops and the Mennonite Central Committee. (Menno Simons: the state and the oikoumene in any capitalist or socialist version are of the things of perdition.)
... Do radical Jesus disciples believe that the things of Caesar and generally the oikoumene must be totally ruin'd in obedience to Jesus' contempt for these things?
But this shows a curious weakness of faith. That is, no one would follow Jesus and live like a flower and give no thought to tomorrow (e.g. future indebtedness) if the oikoumene were well run (good schools, competent government, culture à la Shakespeare and Mozart, and philosophy à la Aquinas and Hegel).
Serving God rather than Mammon can feel meaningful only if Mammon is a total mess? Therefore, in obedience to Jesus we must go around wrecking Western or American civilization, so that Jesus' contempt for the world can seem vindicated?
An inner city child graduates unemployable and even functionally illiterate, and a neo-Christian cleric and humble servant of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets shouts at him "Live like a lily of the f---king field, you ungrateful piece of t-rd!"
No way Jesus was a socialist, he hated Rome, he hated their confiscating every last morsel that people had - I am not au currant with my New Testament - but where is health care mentioned?
He didn't charge for his healings...so...free healthcare!
Right, except that Jesus exacted a payment of repentance and a forswearing of hypocrisy from most of his patients.
What is so appalling is that this era's idealists don't scruple to liken to Jesus' healings the "interventions" administer'd by the medical system of the military-industrial complex. 30-40% of all "health care" spending is done in the last month of life -- batteries of tests and machines, etc. And anyone who is disgusted must be opposed to agape or caritas à la the Good Samaritan.
Christendom's rulers weren't always so only hypocritical. Constantine was commanded in his vision "In this sign conquer," not "In this sign be caring and sharing" or "In this sign foster inclusive diversity."
NIetzsche advised "Push what is falling." But this was before WW1, or more correctly during the build-up toward WW1.
He would never have supposed that after all the things of post-1789 Europe's semi-Christian, sort-of Romantic, kind-of realistic civilization had fallen to the ground, one would go around picking up these fallen things and devote one's life to intensifying the ruin'dness in them. Surely the point is to consider how to dream the dream of life in some new way, having been exposed to the truths of the Bible, Augustine (Selfs begin in a fake dualism) up to Hegel and Nietzsche's genealogy. Freud composed something along this line with his outline of a culture based in scientific psychoanalysis of the unconscious.
But what has our generation done? Herbert Marcuse de Sade's desublimation, in righteous indignation at Freud's elevation. Why should we have to sublimate by measuring ourselves against Michelangelo, Moses, Da Vinci, et al!
... And yet I suppose if one could keep the benefits of liberal democracy and constitutional rule of law without any moral effort in self-transcendence, without any 'sublimation,' it would be worth a try, since in any case the people are refusing to do any sublimation, and obedient will-to-power in politicians can't withstand the people.
»The Caesar ... is "the avenger of the misdeeds of a corrupt people."« Strauss, On Tyranny, p. 191f, (quoting Voeglin on "post-constitutional" "Caesarism").
But who will experience the vengeance? (Lenin: Who? Whom?)
John Jay, Federalist #2, for our time:
»As I survey the conditions the new era, I note with pleasure that Providence has been pleased to socially construct this one connected system set to one bunch of populations—a people descended from the same whomever, typing the same internet acronyms, professing the same religion of some sort of spirituality, making either self-defeating demands or hoping to avoid taxation by the same government, very similar in their lack of morals, and who, by their joint conservative or liberal educational institutions more or less accept that the origins of their system is unjust in light of American idealism but feel that pressing on from these origins somehow nobly establishes the plausibility of pressing on from these origins.«
»They are the condemn'd criminals of sexism, racism, and classism. For philosophy they have only socially constructed critiques of social constructions. For eros, only porno and vampire romance novels. For art, only the sort that gets funded by government grants. For religion, only the evolution vs creationism "controversy." For divine services, only sleep deprivation and workaholic career climbing. Compulsively, they wander exhausted in semiotic hypertrophy from coast to coast. They are prohibited from asking if truth can be spoken to power. Fortunately, they are not procreating at replacement levels.«
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, On the Improvers of Mankind ¶3
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