Monday, January 04, 2010

Left Is Religion, Needs To Separate From Politics

Hmm.  Makes sense!

In Horowitz’s book The Politics of Bad Faith, the intellectual companion to Radical Son, he makes one of his most critical diagnoses of the Left in the second essay, titled “The Religious Roots of Radicalism.” Horowitz explains how the Jewish religious concept of Tikkun Olam – the quest to heal the world and pursue “social justice” – was incorporated by Karl Marx and other 19th century radical godfathers into the heart of the socialist cause. The religious became political. This insight has informed all of Horowitz’s work. The Left is a political faith.

This has been the Left’s problem since it began: it has sought to use political tools and government institutions to bring about religious ends. And as such it has failed repeatedly.

(...)

The world could not be effectively changed at the level of government. Merely passing laws, smashing institutions, and electing better politicians would not work to heal the world. To do so was to not really go to the root of the problem. To pursue tikkun olam effectively, to truly be progressive, to be radical in spirit, one must operate at the level of individual people – not governments, laws, and institutions.

This approach takes the Left out of the political arena and returns it to the religious realm from which it originally emerged. Focusing on healing individual souls is the way churches and synagogues function. And here’s the secret: it works. Good houses of worship do heal people’s souls and make them better people.
You know... the Left is always harping about the mythical dogma of "separation of church and state" but doesn't practice what it preaches.  As Leftism is really a religion, a belief, and not founded in the physical world, it has no business imposing its beliefs onto others.  Yet it does anyway.  And we know how badly it turns out when it does.

The Right is about what works, about pragmatism, about realism, the opposite of what the Left is about.

So, logically, political alternatives shouldn't be about Right and Left and Center, but rather about which Rightist party has the credibility, the ideas and the plan for good government.

The Left, bizarrely, wants all political parties to be Leftist, as we see in how they keep telling non-Leftists to "become more moderate" (which means to abandon respect for reality and pragmatism and to become more dogmatic, accepting Leftist beliefs that we already know don't work in politics and government).  Really, the Left should go back to whence it came, the houses of worship, and quit pretending that they've got the solutions to real-world problems.

Leftism is more spiritual and dogmatic than down-to-earth.  But not in a healthy way, as it is with modern, sophisticated JudeoChristianity, what with their pragmatism in dealing with reality. 

So it's no surprise that Free World Leftists are closer in ideology to dogmatic political entities and regimes that don't work as they're supposed to according to their dogmas, than to the Free World Right, which was getting things right before things began to get screwed up in the 1960s and beyond as the Left asserted itself more and more and more everywhere.  After all, it was the dogma of "social justice" that caused the recent global recession, ie. the Democrats' policy of forcing lending institutions to lend huge amounts of money to people who couldn't afford to repay the loans.  Eventually the defaults caused the credit crisis, the downfall of many banks, the global recession, and all that crap.  It's all the Left's fault, and the fault of supposed Rightists (Bush) who succumbed to some of the same seductive temptations as have hardcore Leftists, and failed to halt the growing problem before it became a catastrophe.

It's also a dogma that appeasing evil will make evil good.  History teaches this irrefutable truth, but Leftists deny this, deny that we should fight evil (like when we stand up to, and push back, bullies, as opposed to submitting to their oppression and tyranny!) rather than reward it for being as it is.  Again it's about clinging stubbornly to their dogmas in the face of undeniable truth.  So forges ahead the Left, currently exemplified by Barack Hussein Obama the Hapless and Clueless who babbles lightheadedly about the words "hope" and "change", neither of which apparently mean a thing in reality.  Next thing you know, he'll start performing weird rituals as he delivers his teleprompted sermons via the Big Old Media pulpit.

3 comments:

glacierman said...

Does this ever clear things up in a big way. I was never sure how and why people of faith were able to believe in the policies of the left/Liberal persuasion, but this seems to have turned the lights on for me.
Thanks for the information!
Great site!
How's the storm?

Canadian Sentinel said...

Storm's over where I am. Mild, sunny day today. Big puddles, though.

Anonymous said...

“After all, it was the dogma of "social justice" that caused the recent global recession, ie. the Democrats' policy of forcing lending institutions to lend huge amounts of money to people who couldn't afford to repay the loans. Eventually the defaults caused the credit crisis, the downfall of many banks, the global recession, and all that crap. It's all the Left's fault, and the fault of supposed Rightists (Bush) who succumbed to some of the same seductive temptations as have hardcore Leftists, and failed to halt the growing problem before it became a catastrophe.”


People took the loans because they thought, stupidly, that housing prices always go up and interest rates are always low. Financial institutions made shitty loans because they were basically working with the same crappy assumptions. The financial institutions compounded the bad-loan problem by wrapping shitty mortgages with a bow and pawning them off as reliable investments. And ratings agencies went along with all this. As did insurance companies. Why? Because everyone was making huge piles of cash on this scam. To think that the financial sector was forced to engage in bad lending practices because some politician told them to is laughable. You live in a fantasy world. It’s fascinating in a train-wreck type of way, though.

na