One of the disturbing lines of reasoning the left inevitably seems to trundle down is “the superior being.”
This is, of necessity, baked into the idea that people are despicable, and therefore they need the government to stop them from the truly horrible. Since we know – even the left – the government is made up of people, it therefore must follow that those people who make up the government are really, really important and special, enlightened beings with super-human capabilities.
You see it again and again.
Recently in one of my quests to read back in the history of SF/F, I came across “The Green Man of Graypec” by Festus Pragnell. This was a rip-roaring and not unenjoyable adventure, though the scientific premise is, to say the least, outdated. However, in the middle of it, apropos nothing, there were a few lights of left-virtue-signaling, which for all I know might already have been needed to get through most of the traditional publishing establishment in 1935.
What I found fascinating was that this was before socialism and progressivism had stripped themselves of their eugenics load, and therefore in the middle of the book we are told that if only these civilizations had listened to H. G. Wells (spelled some weird way, since this was supposed to be another world, after all) and implemented hygienic breeding and making sure only the best bred, they wouldn’t be in this trouble.
Now and after the debacle of National Socialism’s eugenics program, the Socialists go a long way to deny any tie to eugenics. Of course, they replace it with tribalism, which is another form of eugenics.
At any rate, their denial of a belief in a superior man is a fig leaf. It’s still there, behind their concept of the perfect society, behind their belief behind how socialism would work out if only it were practiced by the “right people” and behind the doltish hero-worship they fall into when one of their own is president. This, of course, also leads them into ridiculous dynastic-type thought. After all, Hillary Clinton was worthy of the presidency simply because she had lived with that demi-god, Bill Clinton. And who among us hasn’t heard them speak of in hushed tones – or included as a throwaway line in movies – such unlikely presidencies as Michelle Obama, the Obama daughters, or even Chelsea Clinton. There is no logical reason to posit that type of dynasty – the right at least has the decency to be somewhat embarrassed at the party organization’s dynastic ideas, which is why Jeb! was a non-starter – unless, of course, you believe in superior human beings and superior bloodlines.
It is clear that Hillary does. There are people who are supposed to “rule” and plan things for a society and it is essential that people surrender all their trust to them.
Take her very strange ideas about 1984:
Attempting to define reality is a core feature of authoritarianism. This is what the Soviets did when they erased political dissidents from historical photos. This is what happens in George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when a torturer holds up four fingers and delivers electric shocks until his prisoner sees five fingers as ordered. The goal is to make you question logic and reason and to sow mistrust toward exactly the people we need to rely on: our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence, ourselves.
Leave alone the fact that she thinks the villains of 1984 want to make you question the government, an idea so monumentally stupid it makes us wonder what her cognitive impairment is — not simply if she has one.
Note the assumptions in that quote from Hillary: we “need” to rely on our “leaders” and “the press” and “experts.” People, little people, not anointed and special ones like the Clintons and their ilk, are just supposed to trust the experts. You see, you were born dumb. You are not a superior man and can’t possibly aspire to the enlightened heights of Hillary.
If you’re hearing all the dolts proclaiming Obama “kind of a god” (when in fact, he was just a very naughty boy), you are not hearing wrong.
They feel a need to believe their “leaders” or those they’d call their “rulers” (remember, Obama would be ready to “rule” on day one) are special people possessed of mystic powers.
This is necessary because even progressives realize how monumental the task is of being able to divine what you can get from “each” and what each “necessitates.” In fact, it’s pretty much an impossible task for any human being. And yet the left insists on believing people in power have that kind of discernment or ability. It’s just, of course, that the right-wing politicians use it for evil. Which explains how they could blame Bush for things that made no sense whatsoever, including the possibility of an asteroid. (Okay, they ascribed that to global warming, which they ascribed to Bush Potato potahto.) This is also how Romney was accused of giving cancer to someone’s wife.
Then there was this Daily Kos (seriously, is that still a thing?) article, whining that Hurricane Katrina killed blacks disproportionately and was (we presume) racist. It then says that Trump is killing blacks with Harvey…. or something. As most Daily Kos prose, there is a hallucinatory quality that makes it less plausible (or decipherable) science fiction than the Green Man of Graypec. However, despite the fig leaf that Trump isn’t paying attention to FEMA operations, the underlying tone is that Trump has chosen to direct Hurricane Harvey to black areas. (Turned out it was okay since Texans saved each other with no regard for color and no claims of being superior beings.)
In other words, the underlying tone is the same as this piece of insanity that came from Reddit:
I remember reading in I, Claudius Claudius’s objection to the idea they had erected a statue to him in Britannia, and that people would be praying to him to save their children or heal their diseases, because he was just a man.
I suspect when the leftists read that passage they wonder why Claudius was so mean and racist that he wouldn’t heal Britons.
They’re incapable of processing the contradiction at the heart of socialist philosophy: If humans are despicable and can’t be trusted without the supervision of the government, who are we going to find to staff that government other than venal, corrupt and corruptible humans, like the ones who need to be supervised?
It is the inexistence of living human gods that makes socialism not work. So Democrats must invest civil leaders of a civil society with special powers for good and ill.
The admission that all we have are flawed humans would require them to admit that their socialist utopia is a pipe dream and that they, themselves, are made of the same clay as the rest of us.
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