The Leftist corrosion of acknowledged existential dependence by the concept of Rights

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One of the terribly, existentially, damaging effects of Leftism has been to propagandize the falsehood that dependence - actual poverty, sickness, extremes of age, incapacity - brings with it the Right to be supported.

(These Rights being defined and enforced by the state who extract resources from one group of the population, keep some and distribute the rest to those with Rights.)

This large scale and all-but-universal policy of modern societies has inflicted many deep and deadly wounds on the souls of most modern citizens on both sides of the Rights divide - as was no doubt the demonic intention from the start - but one particularly anti-Christian wound has been to remove the spiritual benefits of poverty, sickness, childhood, old age or incapacity about which the scriptures are so clear.

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The spiritual benefit arises from an acknowledgement of our own state of utter dependence.

We can still perceive this in young children. The great spiritual strength of children comes from their knowledge that they depend on their parents for everything, and from this comes trust - and this earthly knowledge of dependence is easily extended into a trust in God.

The spiritual beauty of acknowledged dependence in childhood is all-too-often replaced, and at an ever-earlier age, by that denial of dependence and assertion of Rights which is termed Youth: a state of extreme existential peril from which few seem fully to recover.

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This business of acknowledged dependence is of extreme importance to the Christian life - indeed without a fundamental, bedrock acknowledgement of existential dependence it is hard to see how a Christian life is possible.

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The secular Right have reacted against Leftist Rights-talk with a false and absurd assertion of Independence. This leads to an existential selfishness, a state of Pride in their supposed autonomy, a clinging to what they imagine they posses as of Right. Such Rightist Independence discourse is, then, merely a different form of Rights talk - merely an unChristian and economics-focused reaction against the pecking order of modern Leftism, while retaining the Prideful spiritual defects of Leftism.

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Perhaps dependence is the main lesson we need to learn in our lives of incarnate mortality?

Such a recognition may then lead to choosing to love those (and they are many) upon whom we depend; and to love God.   

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But the Leftist aims to replace this profound recognition of existential reality with an unassuageable resentment against those who do not provide us with what we feel we deserve and are due.

Thus the language of Rights - and these Rights have been extended from our Rights to resources, to a universal Right to high status (!), and since Political Correctness the Right to positive approval.

It is hard to imagine any state of mind better calculated to lead to damnation - that is, to a deliberately-chosen rejection of God - than the Leftist-inculcated rejection of acknowledged dependence and its replacement with a demand for our supposed Rights.

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