The Great Misinterpretation. That crucial, wrong existential choice by the British circa 1800, at the advent of the industrial revolution

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The beginning of the Industrial Revolution was in Britain, and so was the beginning of socialism, communism - political Leftism under its various names (bizarrely, Leftists are called Liberals in the USA).

Britain invented the modern world, and at the same time invented political Leftism.

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I say invented 'political' Leftism, because the deepest roots of political Leftism are in anti-Christian radicalism - which is why all attempts to combine Christianity and Leftism have failed - usually by rejecting Christianity. So, when they were not actual or covert atheists, the early political Leftists were mostly religious radicals (and, of course, often advocates of sexual revolution).

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So. Britain invented modernity and Leftism at about the same time. But was this a necessary co-occurrence? No it was not - Leftism was an error - a wrong and false interpretation of the facts - and often a dishonest error.

Specifically Leftism was an error of:

1. Misinterpretation

2. Attitude

After which, the error of attitude sustained the error of misinterpretation - as it so often does.

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(The attitude prevents correction of error, because the error is moralized. To challenge the error is the interpreted as advocating evil. For instance, my thesis will seem evil to Leftists: because pointing at the factual or logical errors of Leftism, or its bad outcomes, is always interpreted as advocacy of... well... advocacy of whatever-Leftism-currently-happens-to-regard-as-the-ultimate-sin. What this ultimate evil actually is, has varied a lot over the years.)

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Back at the beginning of the industrial revolution in England, around 1800, there was a point when large numbers of the poor who would have died before adulthood and failed to raise any children, did not die but instead stayed alive.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/who-are-poor-traditional-poor-versus.html

Increased efficiency of first food production, then production of industrial products, meant that people, and especially children, on the edge of death - in ever larger numbers - were fed, sheltered and sustained enough that they lived instead of dying.

The population began to grow, bigger than it had ever been. And there were lots more poor people - also, the poor people began to be more noticeable to the rich by becoming concentrated into cities instead of being hidden in hovels spread thinly across the countryside.

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The rich and middle classes were the first Leftists - and these people misinterpreted the existence of more poverty as meaning that the industrial revolution created poverty by making the poor poorer.

Upon this error was erected the wildly-false theories of Engels and Marx and, and the many other early Leftists and proto-Leftists which became visible in the middle 1800s - Owen, Ruskin, later Hyndman, Morris, later the Fabians and so on.

Some were honestly mistaken - such as Morris, who was a very decent man; others, like Marx seem to have been self-servingly dishonest (certainly, Marxism seems to have been poisoned at source such that it went to the bad much more rapidly than any other brand of socialism).

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The Leftists said that the industrial revolution had created mass poverty by making the poor poorer. But the reality was almost the opposite that the industrial revolution 'created' poverty by making the poor richer, by keeping them and their children alive, rather than dead.

In fact, in stark biological terms, the industrial revolution benefited the poor and it harmed the middle class and rich.

This is an objective fact, as should have been obvious by the rapidly increasing population - and indeed it was obvious from the later 1800s: the poor were very clearly out-reproducing the rich, and they were not dying en masse, but surviving en masse to create a new hereditary class.

This was of world historical significance: in Britain in the early 1800s and soon after in Western Europe and the USA, and for the first time ever, generation upon generation - the poor began to out-reproduce the upper and middle classes: the poor had what biologists term 'higher reproductive success'.

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It seems that people became aware that 'something was happening'.

And throughout the nineteenth century, as the-penny-dropped here and there, for one person then another, the British people were confronted with a choice: the choice between either feeling grateful for what they had, or resentful for what they didn't.

The mass majority chose resentment, and gave their souls to the politics of resentment - that is to Leftism.

The same happened, sooner or later (it was later in the USA) everywhere in the developed world. And resentment is close kin to hatred.

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And so, for eight or nine generations and increasingly, the population in the Western world has been taught the Leftist error and falsehood that the industrial revolution created poverty by immiseration.

And the West has been taught that the proper response is resentment: the indoctrination in resentment is so vast and intricate as to be un-measurable: modern man has been trained in victimology, and lives and breathes the ideology of resentment.

Why? Because Leftists are resentful of what they have not rather than grateful for what they do have; and this because they cannot be grateful because gratitude requires an object; a person to whom gratitude is owed; and Leftists (being necessarily and implicitly secular) do not acknowledge anybody to be grateful to.

In theory, Leftists are supposed to be grateful to abstractions such as The State, The Proletariat, The Party, The People or whatever. In practice, this is meaningless nonsense. So Leftists are not grateful but resentful.

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And resentment - with its companions and consequences of pride-full hatred alternating with submissive despair - is the characteristic affect of modern political and public life.

No matter how much people have, no matter how comfortable and convenient are their lives, modern man feels entitled to more. Leftism is the public summation of millions of personal grudges and entitlements into the demand for ever more rights. 

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The industrial revolution has come, and it will surely go, and the social leadership and the mass majority of people they have indoctrinated will never realize what hit them or what really happened. They have resented the industrial revolution, especially the good things it produced (life, rather than death), and they will resent - even more - the end of the industrial revolution.

Once established and inculcated, resentment is insatiable - it consumes all experience and evidence. Long ago, Britain made the wrong interpretation and the wrong choice, and Britain taught it to the world.

And this is what must be repented, individually and collectively. And it ought to start in Britain, since that is where The Great Misinterpretation began.

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Britain was where the cancer of Leftism began, Britain is where it should first be ended. 

However, I see no sign of this at all - indeed quite the opposite, as the tone and content of public discourse relating to the recent referendum on Scottish independence showed. Nonetheless, that is what should happen.

But this cannot happen without first a Christian revival - positive reform is on-the-other-side-of repentance: we must start with repentance of Leftism (must start with repentance) - including Leftism's deepest roots in anti-Christianity. 

Because if gratitude is to replace resentment - and gratitude can only be accorded to a person, and no human person is an appropriate recipient of gratitude - then gratitude can only in practice and legitimately be to God.

And the British have locked-out God, and barricaded the door against Him.

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