House of Eratosthenes

One of my Hello-Kitty-of-Blogging friends, knowing of my family’s struggles with the “fAuxtism Spectrum” racket, tagged me yesterday afternoon with this most-excellent video and I couldn’t “like” it hard enough…

But with things working all screwy for some reason, I couldn’t find the e-mail notifying me of it when I got home from work. It wasn’t showing up on my wall, I only knew there was this person and she tagged me with something. So I had to scroll through her own wall to find it. Where I came across something else I liked even more:

If you are a freakin’ Communist, get off my friend list. You are vile, disgusting and evil. Yes, I said it. Yes, I mean it. Go.

Apparently, that had already been done, because there was quite a conversation that ensued and it didn’t have any of the usual rot about “There’s no such thing as communism today because nobody today meets the dictionary definition, which is blah blah blah means of production blah blah blah.” Which, if there are any communists around to interject, that’s usually the first boring-bromide to be tossed into the conversation about communism. Followed shortly by “But it is nothing more than the elimination of classes! You’re not for the preservation of classism, are you?” Those are the two go-tos for communists who’ve been called out for being communists now: There’s no such thing as a communist, and each of us is obliged to be one.

Well, what do you expect from an economic model & political ideology that has to eliminate definitions in order to make itself look good.

Instead, what we saw here, was an enlightening collection of interesting observations. Although nobody outdid this person:

Yesterday, a few of us got together for bible study, and someone mentioned that a friend of theirs said to them that at this person’s church, they all get together and sew outfits for everyone in the church – the exact same outfit for everyone with only size variants – and this person said that they do it seasonally there, so that every season, they have a new assigned clothing item, and that’s what everyone there has to wear to church. This person in our group was talking about how great they thought this was, because then no one looked down on anyone else and they had this apparent unity, this, that, and the other thing, and no one was jealous of anyone else. And my pastor (God, bless him!) just says, “Yeah, that’s wrong. That’s really wrong.” And she was saying, “Well, yeah, but…” And he just kept with it, “But you can see how that would be dangerous? You understand what’s so wrong with that, right? You need to understand…” And he just ripped into it. He said such a thing causes love to be found in jealousy, and true love to run cold. He said a society or social structure which finds its foundation in jealousy encourages jealously, reaps corruption, and causes love to run cold. He said that was one of the most fundamental flaws of communism – that is left no place for genuine love. He got kind of fired up about it and went on for awhile about how communism destroyed the uniqueness, talents, insights, skills, and giftings which our Lord gives to each individual person. He said that it left no room for love, but cast it out for fear of jealousy, really only favoring increased jealousy and ungodliness. He said we have to love people as the people God made them to be and value their uniqueness rather than envying them and despising them and being jealous over what they have that we don’t and getting caught up in materialism. He went into how completely opposite Christianity and the Christian mindset communism is, and said how much the whole thing just repulsed him. He was just really getting worked up about it.

Zappa Someone else came up with a good question: What about moderate-communists? “Sane, mild-mannered communists”? And is there such a thing? Can there be? The time stamps say that this person was kicking off the “early shift” of sorts, the hubbub had died down for the night some six hours earlier as the night-owls finally retired for the evening.

So it was left to me to field that one.

Let’s think through on that, presuming charitably that there can be such a thing as a mild communist. The “Aunt Petunia democrat” does not want to control everybody else, doesn’t want communism to overrun the globe, doesn’t know that much about politics but has some opinions in which the intensity of her passions expand past the breadth of her knowledge. She has no jealousies, she thinks, but worries herself into a state of agitation about all the poor people, and how we aren’t doing enough for them.

“The rich get richer, the poor get poorer,” she says. OOPS. Already, it’s no longer about the poor people not having enough; she’s managed to transform it into a whole new issue, of the rich having too much! I guess crusading for the poor people having a better life gets boring after awhile…always more fun to crusade for stealing loot from the people who have it, playing “Robin Hood.” What did she forget before she got tired of helping the poor people? If you actually KNOW some people who are, or have been, desperately poor, you know “not having enough cash” was not the root of the problem. Someone in their family had a temporary but catastrophic physical illness. Or, a more permanent and mental one. Or they did. Or they lived beyond their means. Or maybe the heartless conservatives were right in this case, they, or someone in the household, didn’t respect the value of hard work. In all these cases, it isn’t accurate to say they’re poor because they don’t have enough cash. The cash comes from the work. And you can skimp when you spend it. Events can disrupt this, but aside from the catastrophic health crises, in three to five years those events are just memories. That’s how “let’s get the government involved in health care” was sold to us, the catastrophic health issues have the potential to disrupt the American dream like nothing else does.

So the bottom line is, there is no, or very little, reason for anybody in America to say to himself “The reason I’m poor, or that that other person is poor, is because that guy over there is rich; we don’t have enough because he has too much.” There is only ONE reason for anybody to say something like that: However long they’ve been trying to make anything better, for anybody, their patience with the effort has been exceeded, they”re tired & bored of doing it, and now they’re into destroying because it’s so much quicker, more gratifying, more fun. That’s the simple truth of it.

Four words explain most of the “unsolvable” mysteries we see in America today: “McCarthy was not wrong.”

Of course, there is a shorter answer: We already know from history that communism cannot tolerate a world, or any sort of geographic region, filled with a disparate assortment of nations that are & are not on-board with communism. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition. You have Country A that is communist and Country B that is non-communist, if there is a point of contact between the two then there is going to have to be a wall. Not to keep people out, but to keep people from leaving.

As the technology that birthed communism forces the world to shrink, such walls become ineffectual, so communism has two choices: Cease to exist, or take over the world.

Also, it’s based on an unworkable contradiction because it’s supposed to get rid of “Keeping Up With The Joneses.” Think about how the Pastor walked through all this. The jealousies are not going away just because you think you eradicated clothes, or whatever else inspired the jealousies. They will not disappear, or even recede a little bit, after they become the fabric from which your new society is woven, or the bricks from which it is mortared. Nothing that important can ever retreat. To the contrary, the jealousies will intensify, engulf, as everybody starts to tattle on everybody else. It’s quite unavoidable.

In fact, what is the ultimate consequence of keeping-up-with-Jones in a capitalist society? Everybody does it, everybody does the same thing, and yes sometimes individual pursuits will be discouraged for just a little while…then someone says, yeah but I’m not making enough at my job to make these credit card payments, so they stop. Or, they start a business or invent something. Maybe some combination of all these things. Meanwhile, in the Fatherland of Russia people are still waiting in line for toilet paper. The point is, “Keeping up with Jones” may be a silly activity at times, but one thing you can say for it is that it IS activity. It is effort. You can get rid of it by getting rid of effort, but ultimately that has to involve getting rid of achievement as well, since without effort there can be no achievement.

This is not theory. We’ve seen it play out like this a few times by now, and there isn’t any excuse left for failing to notice.

See, this is why I sometimes think I’m the only person, on the whole planet, who really believes in evolution.

We are apes, no? Watch a five-minute YouTube video on primate behavior. That’s us. It’s firmware. We can no more overcome this than we can suddenly become silicon-based.

And yet, Marx’s fundamental premise is that people are fungible. That the very same primate impulses — competition, hierarchy, survival of the fittest — that got us here in the first place can be eliminated with a few good classes on dialectical materialism (or, failing that, a few years in the gulag). That’s unpossible. It’s like sending your dog to piano class and expecting him to play Chopin — even if he could understand the material, he still doesn’t have thumbs.

Marx also literally expects history to stop. Remember, Marx is a half-assed Hegelian — he thinks there really is something called capital-H History, that it is a Force of Nature, and that he has discovered Its inner workings. Come the Revolution, History will cease to be. Which is the other absolute precondition for communism. In the real world, people respond to incentives. I’ve read that the Mafia makes like 70% of its income off cigarettes. Cigarettes are still perfectly legal, but government action has priced a lot of smokers out of the market. So they buy the illegal version of a perfectly legal product, because sans government meddling, they can get the product they want at a price they can afford (and thanks to Obamacare, watch antibiotics become the hot new thing on the black market. Why wait six months to see some Haitian with a mail-order MD to get your “free” government penicillin, when Guido has better shit in his jacket pocket at 1/10th the price?).

Five minutes with a Jane Goodall special would’ve told you that, too. But that’s, like, actually applying the stuff you claim to believe in. Which ist verboten.
- Severian | 04/10/2015 @ 06:57
“Also, it’s based on an unworkable contradiction because it’s supposed to get rid of “Keeping Up With The Joneses.”” I would point out that was a latter addition. In the beginning, the start of the Industrial Revolution, running the Country like a factory was supposed to create such abundance that everyone would be “The Jones”. The Monastic lifestyle was bolted on when that crashed and burned……
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 04/10/2015 @ 10:37
Good point. Everyone seems to forget Marx’s prediction that in a communist utopia, everyone would tend his garden in the morning, work in the factory in the afternoon, and critique literature in the evening, or some such nonsense, because real people actually behave like that.
- Severian | 04/10/2015 @ 11:17
fAuxtism “Spectrum” racket.
Ye shall know them when you hear the phrase “May be Boarderline…to the spectrum”
- CaptDMO | 04/12/2015 @ 05:33
[…] is a slightly expanded version of a comment I left at House of […]
- Evolution and Social Justice* | Rotten Chestnuts | 04/13/2015 @ 00:03
Outstanding. I’ve posted this to MY wall: let’s see how many people unfriend me…
I can think of a few people I would mind not hearing from.
- Frank the Wanderer | 04/13/2015 @ 08:33

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