Power Vacuum

While waiting to attend the MSF Homebrew awards ceremony on August 26, I continue to study liberal/leftist thinkers to glean what insights are possible from the lot of them. One thing I have come to understand is that the lack of a set system of morals tends to plague most of these thinkers. With God being dead and all, they have no moral compass upon which to rely, falling back on moral relativism and the age-old "might makes right" axiom. If there is no God (or even a moral system which can be agreed upon that is secular in origin, however plausible that concept is) and everyone should be free to decide on their own what is morally right and morally wrong, what decides whose concept of morality is correct? Why, it must be power!

Most leftists will tell you that the old morals are dead. Many will tell you that the idea of a belief in God should be ridiculed as well. In place of these age-old systems of belief, morality and strictures of social conduct, the Leftist places the idea of a "perfectable mankind". In the eyes of the Leftist, mankind is not flawed (weak and stricken with the inability to make moral decisions on his own) but is-through the use of science and technology-perfectable. The only reason mankind has not solved all of its troubles and created the true workers paradise is because we haven't yet quite figured out how to perfect the one weak cog in the machine: Man.

Marx believed that Capitalism was doomed because it alienated the workers as well as the capitalist from their true nature. In this way people became identified with the products they made and/or consumed. This rather metaphysical concept was called "commodity fetishism". He believed that under communism, a planned and organized system of government/economy, man could achieve what it could not under the unorganized, disparate system of capitalism. Since he has been proven wrong a thousand times, his adherents still insist that the perfection of the weak cog has yet to be achieved. What he failed to understand is that mankind is flawed. Call it "original sin" if you like or say simply that mankind is petty and weak for the most part because, well...it's only human. Whatever your take on the reason for man's fallibility, understand that science can only take man so far. Petty greed, human weakness and prejudice/bigotry will always flaw this grand experiment. Only a system that recognizes that weakness and places safeguards against it, while providing an automatic mechanism for achieving what we want (private property) for ourselves (freedom) without harming our fellow men (rule of law) will ever succeed. Capitalism is the only system to apply these ideals and it works.

Presently in the world we see a strange group of leftist/terrorist bedfellows. In Russia, we have a government that has shaken off the label of communism but remains largely socialist to this day. They freely trade with groups and nations that have stated aims to destroy democratic governments and establish a worldwide theocracy. This is certainly not in Russia's best interest, is it? Take the nations of Iran and Venezuela. The leaders of these two nations are remarkably friendly these days, aren't they? Hugo Chavez sounds alot like Ahmadinajad when he complains about America and its imperialist plans against the rest of the world. Now this complaint is nothing new. Communists have been railing against an invisible imperialism in the USA for nearly a hundred years, now. What is interesting is that Ahmadinajad says much the same when he is asked about America. Perhaps the presence of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan helps to explain this talk of empire but I can't help but think it is a useful appropriation of the old socialist rhetoric.

How does a leader of an Islamic Republic, a veritable theocracy, find a friend in a socialist/communist who doesn't believe in God and wants to erase all religious thought from the world as backward-thinking superstition? It is the filling of the power vacuum, created by the fall of the Soviet Union. Since the fall of the USSR, America's presence in the world as the only super power threatens the world view that has no moral compass to guide it. The communists and socialists, as well as the jihadists, fear the power of the United States because they understand nothing but power: power over their people's ways of life, thought processes and belief systems. If might truly makes right, as we in the USA know is morally wrong, then they had all better work together to make themselves stronger against this powerful foe (us). Don't think for a second that our allies in the European Union aren't thinking along the same lines, either. France continues to trade both weaponry and nuclear technology with Iran, even while working together with the US in the UN to create resolutions to halt the use of these technologies. What does this tell you?

Viewed in this way, the events on the world stage become much clearer, don't they?
As long as we continue to believe in right and wrong, we will be hated by those that think there is only "different", along with their allies who think only Islam is right and everyone else is wrong...or doomed. But take heart because the American liberal establishment is working hard to erase our moral compass so that we can become one with the rest of the world and then we'll be safe...right?