The Irrational And Unscientific Assumptions of Socialism

I like to read. As well, I think it is my duty as a pastor to read. Further, if Spurgeon’s example is any indication, being widely read is of benefit to the spiritual leader as a means of searching out fields of study and thought to which Bible truth and principles can be applied.

It is in that vein that I began reading “Socialism,” written by Ludwig von Mises in 1922. Needless to say, if you recognize his name at all, “Socialism” made a tremendous impact in Europe when it was published and Great Britain and the United States when it was translated into English. Having that in mind as I began to read the book, I was astonished to learn something while reading the preface to the second English edition that explains so many things that had previously puzzled me. Following are a portion of his remarks:

It was at this moment that Marx appeared. Adept as he was in Hegelian dialectic-a system easy of abuse by those who seek to dominate thought by arbitrary flights of fancy and metaphysical verbosity-he was not slow in finding a way out of the dilemma in which socialists found themselves. Since Science and Logic had argued against Socialism, it was imperative to devise a system which could be relied on to defend it against such unpalatable criticism. This was the task which Marxism undertook to perform. It had three lines of procedure. First, it denied that Logic is universally valid for all mankind and for all ages. Thought, it stated, was determined by the class of the thinkers; was in fact an "ideological superstructure" of their class interests. The type of reasoning which had refuted the socialist idea was "revealed" as "bourgeois" reasoning, an apology for Capitalism. Secondly, it laid it down that the dialectical development led of necessity to Socialism; that the aim and end of all history was the socialization of the means of production by the expropriation of the expropriators-the negation of negation. Finally, it was ruled that no one should be allowed to put forward, as the Utopians had done, any definite proposals for the construction of the Socialist Promised Land. Since the coming of Socialism was inevitable, Science would best renounce all attempt to determine its nature.

At no point in history has a doctrine found such immediate and complete acceptance as that contained in these three principles of Marxism. The magnitude and persistence of its success is commonly underestimated. This is due to the habit of applying the term Marxist exclusively to formal members of one or other of the self-styled Marxist parties, who are pledged to uphold word for word the doctrines of Marx and Engels as interpreted by their respective sects and to regard such doctrines as the unshakable foundation and ultimate source of all that is known about Society and as constituting the highest standard in political dealings. But if we include under the term "Marxist" all who have accepted the basic Marxian principles-that class conditions thought, that Socialism is inevitable, and that research into the being and working of the socialist community is unscientific-we shall find very few non-Marxists in Europe east of the Rhine, and even in Western Europe and the United States many more supporters than opponents of Marxism. Professed Christians attack the materialism of Marxists, monarchists their republicanism, nationalists their internationalism; yet they them­ selves, each in turn, wish to be known as Christian Socialists, State Socialists, National Socialists. They assert that their particular brand of Socialism is the only true one-that which "shall" come, bringing with it happiness and contentment. The Socialism of others, they say, has not the genuine class­ origin of their own. At the same time they scrupulously respect Marx’s prohibition of any inquiry into the institutions of the socialist economy of the future, and try to interpret the working of the present economic system as a development leading to Socialism in accordance with the inexorable demand of the historical process. Of course, not Marxists alone, but most of those who emphatically declare themselves anti-Marxists, think entirely on Marxist lines and have adopted Marx's arbitrary, unconfirmed and easily refutable dogmas. If and when they come into power, they govern and work entirely in the socialist spirit.[1]

What does this passage teach me? First, I had not known that socialism was a thoroughly refuted economic and philosophical system, that it had been shown to be scientifically and logically unworkable. Second, I had not known that Karl Marx’s sleight of hand to justify socialism and advance his ideas of communism was to merely deny that logic was universally valid for all mankind and all ages. Brilliant. Diabolical. Secondly, it was ruled (by what authority I do not know) that no one should be allowed to put forward any definite proposals for what socialism would inevitably lead to. Of course, this disconnects activity from future consequences and even the consideration of future consequences.

I have long been of the persuasion that socialism and communism are attempts to create heaven on earth, but I had never before been made aware of the complete disconnect from rational thought that is fundamentally required to be a socialist. I now understand Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Diane Feinstein, and others so much better than I did a few hours ago.

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[1] Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Second English Edition), pages 6-7.

Moral Agnosticism

I recently came across this excerpt from the fine book I read some years back and thought others might enjoy reading it.

Excerpt from “The Church Effeminate”

by John W. Robbins, pages 654-657, published by The Trinity Foundation

Now this is a very important matter. The lack of discernment in today's churches, the reluctance to make distinctions, the antipathy to rendering moral judgments — all of this means that proper distinctions are not being made and righteous judgments are not being rendered. It does not mean that distinctions and judgments are not being made at all. Insofar as anyone thinks at all, he must make distinctions and render judgments. Just as the irrationalist is fatally ignorant of the fact that he must use rationality to propound irrationalism, so the moral agnostic — the man who is opposed to making judgments — is fatally ignorant of the fact that he must make moral judgments in order to state his position. The judgment the moral agnostic unwittingly makes is this: “Judging others is wrong.” But the moral agnostic does not stop with that judgment; he eagerly adds another: “Those who judge others are wrong.” And in these two moral judgments we can see clearly the self-stultifying, self-contradictory nature of the notion that one ought not to make moral judgments. If those who judge others are wrong, as the moral agnostic asserts, then moral agnostics are wrong, for they judge those who make judgments. That is why the Bible neither condemns nor commends those who make no judgments — for there are no such people — but instead condemns those who make false judgments, who call good, evil, and evil, good:

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, who put darkness for light, and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight.” (Isaiah 5:20-21)

By refusing to distinguish good from evil, right from wrong, true from false — that is, by attempting to abandon logic and rationality — a person merely succeeds in making evil judgments. He calls good, evil, and evil, good. It is the man who makes perverse judgments that the Bible condemns. Ironically, the most censorious men are those who condemn anyone who makes a moral judgment.

Scripture repeatedly commands Christians to “test,” to “try,” to “judge,” and to “prove” all things. For example, in 1 Thessalonians 5:21, Paul commands us to “test all things; hold fast what is good.” Isaiah commands us in these words:

And when they say to you, “Seek those who are mediums and wizards, who whisper and mutter,” should not a people seek their God? Should they seek the dead on behalf of the living? To the Law and to the Testimony! If they do not speak according to this Word, it is because there is no light in them.” (Isaiah 8:19-20)

John tells us, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” (1 John 4:1) And in his Gospel, “Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.” (John 7:24) In Proverbs we are commanded: “Open you mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.” (Proverbs 31:9) Paul, giving instructions for church meetings, says, “Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others judge.” (1 Corinthians 14:29) Scripture commands us to be skeptical of everything except the written Word of God, and to judge all things by that Word. The Bereans were commended for testing even an apostle’s preaching by the written Word.

In all this, Christians are exercising their rationality. In his letters, Paul repeatedly makes moral judgments. For example, in Romans I Paul writes: “professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” In 1 Corinthians 5 he writes, “And you are puffed up.” In verses 11 through 13 he gives further instructions:

But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner – not even to eat with such a person. For what have I to do with judging those who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? But those who are outside God judges. Therefore, “put away from yourselves that wicked person.”

Here Paul’s command to judge – to distinguish and evaluate certain persons in the church as fornicators, covetous, idolaters, revilers, drunkards, and extortioners – is followed by a command to separate from such men. It is a command to exercise church discipline. But the moral agnostics in the churches, because they are opposed to rendering moral judgments, are opposed to discipline and to separation as well, a point to which we shall return shortly.

Paul continues his discussion of judging:

Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world will be judged by you, are you unworthy to judge the smallest matters [now]? Do you not know that we shall judge angels? How much more [then], things that pertain to this life?” (1 Corinthians 6:2-3)

Here Paul expects Christians to judge; he demands that they judge. Paul himself calls men “foolish,” (Galatians 3:1) “dogs,” (Philippians 3:2) and “evil workers,” (Philippians 3:2) as well as “saints.”

But what is the motivation of the moral agnostic who urges us not to judge others and who condemns us for doing so? It is not benevolence or tolerance. One motivation is quite clear: The moral agnostic wants to escape judgment himself. He thinks that if no one is permitted to judge others, then he himself will escape judgment. Paul explains in Romans 1 that sinful men suppress the truth (which they know innately) in unrighteousness, for they do not like to retain God in their knowledge, because the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness. Men, “knowing the righteous judg­ment of God, that they who practice such things are worthy of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.” The proscription of moral judgment is a futile attempt by sinners to escape judgment. Paul says that moral agnosticism is futile, whether one condemns or approves the sinful practices of others:

Therefore, you are inexcusable, O man, whoever you are who judge, for in whatever you judge another you condemn yourself; for you who judge, practice the same things. But we know that the judgment of God is according to truth against those who practice such things. And do you think this, O man, you who judge those practicing such things, and doing the same, that you will escape the judgment of God?” (Romans 2:1-3)

One motivation that lies behind moral agnosticism is the desire to escape the judgment of God for one’s own beloved sins. Its purpose is to allow the unrepentant sinner to escape uncondemned and unpun­ished. When a moral agnostic argues that we must not judge between good and evil, his advice, when followed, benefits only the evil and harms only the good. To refuse to judge righteous judgment is not neutrality or tolerance; it is an attack on the good and a sanction to the evil.

There is a related but slightly different motivation as well: Whenever a person makes a judgment, that judgment discloses his own values, his own standard, and opens him to judgment by others. If a man would not judge, the moral agnostic believes, then he would not reveal his own values, and he would escape the judgment of others in this way as well. The Bible's statement of the principle that in judging one discloses one's own values is found in the Gospel of Matthew:

“A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and an evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth evil things. But I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the Day of Judgment. For by your words you will be justified and by your words you will be condemned.” (Matthew 12:35-37)

Once again Scripture teaches that the moral agnostic cannot escape judgment by refusing to judge, for he cannot refuse to judge. Rational creatures must judge, and we will all be held accountable for the judg­ments we make, the words we speak, the thoughts we think. The moral agnostic condemns moral judgment because he hopes to avoid responsibility for his own sins. He does not want to be held accountable by God or by anyone else. He desires to be a law unto himself, a completely irresponsible, a completely lawless, being.

The Plague-Abettors

This will be the first of my blog entries that I have not authored. The reason for posting someone else's work is three-fold: First, what follows illustrates the mainstream media's complicity in a great tragedy. Second, what follows is a catastrophe that most have become so used to as to ignore.  Third, real history is our friend and what follows is a report from a writer who was there, David Horowitz, in his book "The Black Book of the American Left" Volume V: Culture Wars, pages 221-226:

 The Plague-Abettors

        As countless news stories, articles and editorials have reminded us, this is the 20th anniversary of the onset of the AIDS epidemic in America. It is a grim anniversary. More than 450000 Americans, mostly young, are dead. After years of so-called public education efforts, and billions of dollars in AIDS-related government programs, the infection rates for new HIV cases are rising back to their peak 1980s levels. The new infection rates are highest among blacks and Hispanics, who now make up more than half the dead but who were hardly affected in the first years of the epidemic. In those years, when the number of infections was small, and effective public-health methods might have contained their spread, more than 90 percent of those affected were white homosexuals living in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, intravenous drug users in the same locations and a tiny cohort of hemophiliacs and immigrants from Haiti.

On this anniversary, you will read many stories about the medical research on AIDS which, however remarkable in itself, has failed to produce an effective vaccine, let alone a cure for the disease. This failure was predicted at the very outset of the epidemic, a fact I wrote about at the time. The leading experts on the AIDS virus warned then that the only way to stem the tide of the epidemic was through proven public health methods. You will read many stories about the heroic efforts of activists in the gay community to lobby the government for more AIDS money, and to care for the sick and dying.[1] None of these efforts should be confused with public­health methods, which were the only means of containing the epidemic.

What you will not read is a single story about those methods, or how epidemics were combated-often successfully-for a hundred years before gay activists inserted their views into public health policy. What you will not read is how the proven public-health methods were opposed by AIDS activists, and how public health officials surrendered to the activists’ demands for veto control over what methods were acceptable and what were not; in other words, how they colluded in subverting the system that had proved so successful in combating public health threats in the past.

What you will not read is any evaluation of the government-financed AIDS campaigns-mainly in public “education”-that the activists demanded in place of the proven methods. Yet the harrowing figures released on this anniversary show these politically correct billion-dollar education campaigns have failed to contain the epidemic or to prevent it from spreading into other communities, particularly the African-American and Hispanic communities.

As a result of the obstruction of testing, reporting, contact tracing and infection-site closing by gay leaders and their allies in the Democratic Party that controlled the major urban centers, public health officials were unable to warn the specifically gay communities in the path of the epidemic. In fact, because there were politically inspired bans on testing, reporting and contact tracing, they were not able to find out what that path was. As a result, while by the end of the first decade of AIDS Hispanics were 14 percent of those infected and blacks 26 percent, a decade later Hispanics were 19 percent of those infected and blacks an astounding 45 percent.

What you will not read in the 20th-anniversary coverage of the epidemic is any story pointing out that today-as we move into the third decade of the epidemic with infection rates rising and the death toll climbing-the subverted public-health system still does not require reporting of individual cases, testing of at-risk communities, contact tracing to warn individuals of possible infection or the closing of sex clubs and other potential sites of infection.

Thus, in addition to being a grim anniversary from the vantage of the dead and those who loved them, this is a disheartening occasion for those of us who have watched in disbelief the criminally ineffectual efforts that have been deployed in the name of political correctness, and have tried in vain to draw attention to a dereliction that has caused so many needless deaths. This anniversary also makes it clear that, as a nation, we have learned nothing from the follies of the past, and are headed into the next decade still prisoners of orchestrated ignorance and still relying on the remedies that failed.

Typical of the media reports on this anniversary is the lead story in the health section of the Los Angeles Times, written by “health writer” Linda Marsa, which rehashes the party line on AIDS and thus conveys information that is brazenly ignorant and entirely false. In perfect self-parody, the article is titled “A Legacy of Change”:

It was a sheer accident that AIDS first struck a relatively cohesive group: young homosexuals in cities such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, many of whom had honed their organizational and political skills during the gay rights movements of the 1970s. This was extraordinary: Terminal illnesses don’t discriminate, hitting rich and poor alike without regard to ethnicity, geography or sexual orientation.

In fact, the AIDS epidemic is more accurately described as a product of the gay rights movement of the 1970s, inevitably concentrated in the very centers of gay life in America-San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles-and impossible to conceive without the presence and agitations of the radical gay movements that directly preceded it. It was the gay left that defined promiscuous anal sex with strangers in public  environments-the  primary cause of the AIDS epidemic-as “gay liberation.”

It was the gay liberation movement that thought nothing of the massive epidemics of amoebiasis, rectal gonorrhea, syphilis and hepatitis B that swept through gay communities in the decades preceding AIDS, producing astronomical infection rates and depleted immune systems in the process. It was the gay movement that regarded any intrusion by public health authorities to close the public sexual gymnasia called “bathhouses” as a threat to gay liberation, both before and after the onset of AIDS. It was the gay left that successfully prevented the reporting, testing, contact tracing and other public health methods that had been proven effective in combating epidemic diseases in the past. It was the gay left that blocked government prevention programs from targeting at-risk communities, using the same lie as the Times writer, that “AIDS is an equal opportunity disease;” and it was the gay left that persuaded government officials instead to put all the anti­AIDS eggs in the basket of incredibly expensive and-as everyone can now see-completely ineffective “education” campaigns. These campaigns were ineffective because, out of considerations of political correctness, they did not specify anal sex as the primary sexual transmission route and were addressed not to those who were specifically at risk, but to “everyone,” and thus in effect to no one.

The late Michael Callen, creator of the organization People With AIDS and a pioneer of candor in the midst of these lies, described how he had come to New York as a young man from the sticks and heard gay radicals like the writer Edmund White address audiences in the gay community on the subject of sexual liberation. White told one such audience including Callen that “gay men should wear their sexually transmitted diseases like red badges of courage in a war against a sex-negative society.”[2] The ever-courageous Camille Paglia pointed out some years ago the obvious truth: “Everyone who preached free love in the Sixties is responsible for AIDS. This idea that it was somehow an accident, a microbe that sort of fell from heaven-absurd. We must face what we did.”

Callen explained exactly what that meant. “Some of us believed we could change the world through sexual liberation and that we were taking part in a noble experiment. Unfortunately, as a function of a microbiological ... certainty, this level of sexual activity resulted in concurrent epidemics of syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis, amoebiasis, venereal warts and, we discovered too late, other pathogens. Unwittingly, and with the best of revolutionary intentions, a small subset of gay men managed to create disease settings equivalent to those of poor Third World nations in one of the richest nations on earth.”

It was a tragedy that those who pioneered the cause of gay rights should have been swept up in a radical illusion that they could also change the world, including the laws of nature. But that is what happened. This left successfully demanded political control of the battle against AIDS, which sabotaged it from the start, and has been directly responsible for the killing fields left in its wake. This includes especially the spread of AIDS into the black and Hispanic communities, which could have been prevented if traditional public health methods had been aggressively deployed. The Hispanic and black communities are for the most part separated from the gay communities where the epidemic first took hold. If there had been testing and tracing of those infected, and focused warnings to those in their path, who knows how many lives could have been saved?

I offer these observations with no hope that they will have an effect. I have written about this radical holocaust for nearly the entire duration of the epidemic. Many others have since raised their voices as well. Michael Fumento’s The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, and Gabriel Rotello’s Sexual Ecology are two of the books that have made the case for ending the political obstruction of the war against AIDS and for a more scientifically sound approach. Early ACT-UP radicals like Larry Kramer, Michelangelo Signorile and Rotella have had second thoughts about their former attitudes, faced what they did, and tried to turn the tide. But to no avail.

The chief obstacle to any change in this tragic story lies with the media. AIDS is without question the worst-reported story in the history of American journalism. From the press coverage of this anniversary, no one can take any hope that the next 10 years will show any improvement in the mortality statistics, unless there is a medical breakthrough. Without accurate information about this politically induced nightmare, there is no chance that the American public will wake up and finally decide that enough is enough.

June 11, 2001, http://www.salon.com/2001/06/11/aids_9/; http://www.salon.com/news/col/horo/2001/06/11/aids/indel.html

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[1] http://salon.com/2001/05/01/aids_8/

[2] Charles Silverstein and Edmund White, The Joy of Gay Sex, Outlet Books, 1977