I’ve seen people refer to the Left’s “believing in the Perfectibility of Mankind” before, yet I’m not sure that’s really the correct understanding. I think it’s more like “believing that Liberals can create an entity to replace God”.
First, in my view, the Left chooses NOT to believe that there is a Supreme Being who has given us humans definite rules for living in harmony with each other (probably because those “rules” tell us that God values our fellow humans as much as we value our own exquisite selves, and that we must therefore not lie, cheat, steal, murder, covet, and so forth). In other words, if we acknowledge a God and his law, we are required to restrain our passions and appetites, to control our impulses, to limit our actions, to not behave as though WE were gods whose mere wish should override all other considerations.
Instead, the Left posits a supremely-powerful, ever-abundant, all-knowing Super-State which will efficiently and compassionately regulate production, consumption, and even enforce appropriate social interactions. Their belief is that the Benevolent State will ensure that everyone contributes fairly TO society, and will receive “social justice” and a fair distribution of goods and services FROM society. (Lefties seem not to notice that under their system The State effectively TAKES THE PLACE OF GOD, defining what is good and evil, and offering the rewards of Paradise –or rather Utopia– to those who commit themselves in service to the True Religion.)
It’s interesting that no part of Lefty doctrine involves “Go and sin no more”; they believe that any so-called “moral failings” of their Nanny-state clients (lying, cheating, stealing, drunkenness, thuggery) are not the CAUSE of their misery, but rather are the RESULT of their “oppression” by the wealthy and powerful of society who refuse to share their (obviously ill-gotten) bounty with their deserving-but-unlucky brethren. To people of this mindset, any attempt to correlate lifestyle choices to socio-economic standing is rude at best, and might even be considered “heresy”.
In their urgency to establish Paradise-on-Earth, Leftists never seem to stop and analyze these few things:
Start with the premise that The State is not a magical, eternal, perpetual-motion machine. It requires people to serve as functionaries/ bureaucrats, it requires people to produce the wealth it distributes, and it requires people who need its Benevolent Services.
(1) While the revolutionaries who will bring Utopia into being no doubt consider themselves to be morally pure and keenly rational Arbiters Of What Is Good For All, they make no allowance for ensuring that the generation of leaders that succeeds them isn’t corrupted by the very power and wealth that accrues to any Establishment (and it is, of course, the corruption of -and oppression by- the current Establishment that necessitates their Grand Socialist Revolution in the first place).
(2) The “producer class” of a society does not necessarily produce for the sheer love of hard work. Productivity is closely tied to the pursuit of profit -aka money. Money is a powerful incentive- it brings comfort, status, recognition, influence, and just-plain-more-choices to whoever has it. If the incentive-to-produce is removed, production will drop; and when production drops, there is less for the Beneficent State to distribute. (And if those who depend on the Beneficent State get hungry enough and angry enough, torches and pitchforks and yet-another-revolution follow.)
(3) The “oppressed” and “needy” need to be kept to a manageable number, or else Need will outstrip Supply. Our dim-witted Socialists never follow the logic of “what you tax, you get less of; what you subsidize, you get more of”. Subsidizing unwed mothers perpetuates the problem of fatherless children, and all the societal ills that follow from that. Rewarding social pathology doesn’t eradicate it; it only leads to more-entrenched pathology. What happens when the majority of your populace has become Needy and there aren’t enough Producers?
I honestly don’t understand how the Lib-Progressive Left can profess belief in the Marxist/Socialist idiocy they spout. There are some very fine minds among them, yet so far as I can tell, not a one has ever sat down and thought carefully about the inevitable results of the programs they’re trying so hard to put into place. They’re not claiming to make mankind perfect, but they DO assume they can create a Perfect Political Institution — which I think is even stupider than trying to persuade us all to follow their Leftist agenda.
