I don’t believe in some mystical process of continual human improvement. There certainly has been dramatic human improvement over the last few hundred years, but it has had material causes.Since the triumph of capitalism, the secular trend has been upward, albeit with pauses and jerks backward. We can thank the bourgeoisie for this, as Karl Marx does in the Communist Manifesto.
Don’t confuse evil results, with evil intentions. Hilary is a Democratic hack. Soros had good intentions – spreading democracy to authoritarian regimes, but … he is around 90 years old. I suspect that he has been ‘captured’ by ‘woke’ employees, as Bertrand Russell was 60 years ago.
When i was young … and for the first twenty years of my adult life – I was a committed Leninist, keen to promote the socialist revolution everywhere. Was I ‘evil’ then, but became ‘kindly’ now?
I know several dozen people like me – who were in the same organization I was. Some still are. Some have become conservatives. Their personalities haven’t changed. We all believed that genuine socialism – not the Stalinist version – would be far more democratic than anything possible under capitalism. We were naive, misguided, stupid perhaps … but not evil… We made great personal sacrifices for our beliefs. I risked my life during Freedom Summer (1964) to register Blacks to vote in Fayette County, Tennesse (just over the Mississippi line) – and got chased down a dark road by white racists (but escaped). I spent six months in mlitary prison. Did I do it to promote evil? Again, don’t confuse objective results with subjective intentions.
It’s a Hollywood view of the world, and … pardon me …one shared with religious fanatics as well. The worst thing about it is that it gets in the way of fighting the Left.
We can win over people who are now on the Left, via political arguments and doing things like engaging in joint activity in fighting for things that some people on the Left still believe in, like Free Speech, and against the sexualization of children. But not if we believe people who differ with us politically are necessarily ‘evil’.
It’s actually the same world view that the ‘woke’ idiots have. From their point of view, if you oppose the minimum wage, you must want people to work for slave-labor wages so that the wealthy can enrich themselves even more.
It’s the Hollywood view of the world, and we shouldn’t fall for it. It’s also lazy thinking.
William Buckley went out of his way to bring ex-Marxists into the core leadership of National Review. Were these ‘evil’ people who had somehow become non-evil?
The reality is, we are tail-less, hairless apes, capable of terrible violence against each other. Usually, this occurs in the context of inter-tribal conflict: wars between tribes or countries. Ordinary people commit evil acts, because their tribe or nation is fighitng another tribe or nation.
For an in-depth study of this, see the book Ordinary Men:
[ https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0062303023/ ]
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland – February 28, 2017 by Christopher R. Browning
[ https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution/dp/0062303023/ ]
“A remarkable—and singularly chilling—glimpse of human behavior. . .This meticulously researched book…represents a major contribution to the literature of the Holocaust."—Newsweek
Publisher’s blurb:
"Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews—now with a new afterword and additional photographs.
Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.
*While this book discusses a specific Reserve Unit during WWII, the general argument Browning makes is that most people succumb to the pressures of a group setting and commit actions they would never do of their own volition. *
Ordinary Men is a powerful, chilling, and important work with themes and arguments that continue to resonate today. "
Even people who have been deeply involved in evil acts can change. The best example of this is one Thomas Tarrants, the KKK’s chief bomb-maker. [ I Was a Violent Klansman Who Deserved to Die | Christianity Today ]
(For another example of an ‘Old Leftist’ who is beginning to wake up, see here:
[ The Case for Forcing the Mentally Ill Into Treatment ] )