tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post1774064766762854978..comments2024-03-29T12:03:37.344+00:00Comments on Bruce Charlton's Notions: Old Left-New Left... Modernity-Postmodernity - surface changes masking a constant deep motivation against GodBruce Charltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-30403639990251610002018-12-11T02:55:48.842+00:002018-12-11T02:55:48.842+00:00Generally people believe what they want to believe...Generally people believe what they want to believe.<br /><br />They don't believe it is possible because they don't <i>want</i> it to be possible.<br /><br />Such has ever been the case. In former times, "faith" was considered nearly synonymous with <i>belief</i> not because people weren't intelligent enough to explicate the difference but because they were practical enough to realize that the overlap was far more significant. Bad people more often hid their lack of belief to obscure their lack of faith, in some times.<br /><br />But not all. Not even close.Chiu ChunLinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03519192610708043962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-52382257380982488932018-12-10T14:16:40.645+00:002018-12-10T14:16:40.645+00:00@William - Yes indeed.
It is this blindness to th...@William - Yes indeed.<br /><br />It is this blindness to the evil which is so concerning from a Christian perspective. <br /><br />As you know, I think that 'salvation' (although not theosis) has been made very 'easy' for us by God; however we do at least have to want it, to 'ask for it'. But when so many people are so self-blinded, so deeply confused, have such grossly wrong priorites and no sense of balance or proportion... well, the situation looks like one in which most people would neither want nor ask for salvation - would instead actively reject it. <br /><br />As an example; for most of human history it would have been an obviously attractive things if Heaven was depicted in terms of an ideal loving extended-family; but many modern people have come to regard The Family - even a perfected Family - as unbearably dull, boring, crushingly-oppressive, childish, low-status etc. Likewise an ideal Christian marriage. <br /><br />To Normal Modern people, it is self-evident that a lifestyle of promiscuous sex/ drugs/ rock and roll - travel, holidays, glamour, wealth, fame, status, exotic culture - youth/ health/ beauty/ fitness - is *far* superior. <br /><br />Such 'normal' people (and surely there are very many of them) would reject Jesus's offer of Life Everlasting even if they believed it to be true, and easily obtainable (which, of course, they currently don't). Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-12078066677384969472018-12-10T12:03:40.053+00:002018-12-10T12:03:40.053+00:00I think this is a very important post, Bruce, in t...I think this is a very important post, Bruce, in that it pinpoint the evil (there is no other word) that is behind the Left in all its manifestations and which uses the seeming good to eradicate the real good. Unfortunately those who really need to see it never will and would completely reject it if they did. But it's still true!William Wildbloodhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13231219533755925897noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-52114171141921224542018-12-10T11:15:25.909+00:002018-12-10T11:15:25.909+00:00@Wh - Yes, it really is 'staggering'; and ...@Wh - Yes, it really is 'staggering'; and what I find most worrying is that so many people seem to accept such things blandly, with a shrug... "what can you expect?" - yet many things that are thus accepted are extraordinary and inconceivable in any other time or place (the ainstream, legal, mandatory 'trans' agenda is so far off the scale of sanity and coherence that even to discuss it demonstrates - or induces - incipient lunacy). In short, this is, objectively, a genuine form of societal insanity. Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-54366950063406071992018-12-10T09:00:06.233+00:002018-12-10T09:00:06.233+00:00Excellent piece. Wholeheartedly agree. Interesting...Excellent piece. Wholeheartedly agree. Interesting point about eugenics. Fascinating to note that in Sweden were I live, they had a eugenics program of forced sterilization imposed upon those considered inferior up until the mid 70s. This included even racial deviations. A friend even described to me a doctor drowning a Thalidamide baby. They kept it alive for three months in the hospital order not to negatively effect the results infant mortality rates. The same leftist mindset has now morphed into suicidal compassionate, pathologically altruistic, multicultural madness intent on the destruction of the native population. Staggering to behold. A nation with even an oounce of faith the divine would surely be incapable of such action.whitestonehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16325872604015572514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-60555522571779811992018-12-10T07:04:48.952+00:002018-12-10T07:04:48.952+00:00@Avro - It is very important; but we must not forg...@Avro - It is very important; but we must not forget the incrementally increasing bureaucracy as well, a huge fact of life. Both are happening. Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-91066011455163068602018-12-10T03:51:03.761+00:002018-12-10T03:51:03.761+00:00"…And from the beginning the sexual revolutio..."…And from the beginning the sexual revolution was a strong element, although initially only among the upper class radicals (e.g. Lord Byron, Shelley); who immediately used a political rationale for advocating their own practice of unbounded sexual relations outside of religious marriage.”<br /><br />Here, I think, is the root of our current oppression under anti-Christ, leftist materialism. I think it is derived less from the liberalism of the non-conformists or from, say, traditional working people’s movements than from the at first quiet but now over-bearing and inescapable manipulation of our souls by vastly powerful people and institutions that share Shelley’s and Byron’s fancy that they are smart and rich enough to effectively evade or buy exemption from the moral law. They know that to perpetrate their filthy deeds in peace they will need to dethrone, if it were possible, the Lord Jesus Christ from his position of sovereignty over the world and to deface his image in mankind, which is to say our reason and morality. It seems those in the grip of this mania inevitably seek to propagate it to all people everywhere. What’s new is that today’s maniacs have manipulation media far more potent than poems and novels.Avro Ghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00005144579985210348noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-47605077428078196122018-12-09T14:42:07.084+00:002018-12-09T14:42:07.084+00:00Thanks Jonathan - BTW there were a couple of Jonat...Thanks Jonathan - BTW there were a couple of Jonathan commenters from the early days of this blog - but I seem perhaps to have conflated the two of you... Are you the coffee expert Jonathan? Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-57868129932629125232018-12-09T11:31:23.002+00:002018-12-09T11:31:23.002+00:00A great, profound post. The contradictions you po...A great, profound post. The contradictions you point out in Old Left and New Left beliefs, and the ease with which they reversed themselves, is the smoking gun that their "values" are built on shifting sand and are not genuine values. I remember you making a similar argument years ago that, years ago, convinced me that much of Leftism really is evil, and that its real motivation is simply to destroy the Good. Nowadays, I'm already convinced, but this is perhaps your best articulation of it yet.<br />Jonathanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07029216921002682219noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-12996967051294328222018-12-09T09:48:39.705+00:002018-12-09T09:48:39.705+00:00@William - Well Moldbug is wrong about that (he ha...@William - Well Moldbug is wrong about that (he had, at that time, near zero understanding or knowledge of Christianity, as he'd be the first to acknowledge; and none from the inside) - fundamentally wrong; although there are of course superficial consistencies. <br /><br />But I've argued this so many times that I can't be bothered to go over it again - it is in Thought Prison and to an extent in Addicted to Distraction, as well as all over this blog and other blogs. <br /><br />But in Thought Prison I also argued that Leftism (which is Western) could be traced to the Great Schism. <br /><br />HOWEVER, nowadays I see Leftism in context of the development of human consciousness (Steiner/ Barfield) - so these early stages (Great Schism, Reformation, Nonconformism etc) were a necessary development...<br /><br />It was really only from the advent of Romanticism (c1750-early 1800s) that genuine Leftism emerged due to the failure of Western Man to take the right path: God/ Christ/ the spiritual was rejected and instead the Romantic-Christian impulse split into the (Ahrimanic) path of politics/ bureacracy on the one hand, and the Luciferic path of the sexual revolution (plus drugs, intoxication etc) on the other.<br /><br />WHich is where we are... <br /><br /> Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-45171343207125210022018-12-09T07:50:38.415+00:002018-12-09T07:50:38.415+00:00Of course Moldbug uses the same sort of evidence -...Of course Moldbug uses the same sort of evidence -- that people seamlessly transitioned en masse and without resistance from the one to the other -- to argue that Leftism is essentially a form of Protestantism. By contrast, the previous two transitions, from Paganism to Christianity and from Catholicism to Protestantism, were not seamless and did meet with violent resistance -- perhaps indicating more fundamental metaphysical overhauls.Wm Jas Tychonievichhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07446790072877463982noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-71325330805107007172018-12-09T07:41:39.150+00:002018-12-09T07:41:39.150+00:00@Zamfir - Materialism is just a term (others are P...@Zamfir - Materialism is just a term (others are Positivism/ Reductionism/ Scientism) for the mainstream modern metaphysics. <br /><br />There's no point on getting bogged down on definitions; it is what it is - and we all know it if we reflect and bring it to awareness. Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-23614335112359370482018-12-09T02:17:45.274+00:002018-12-09T02:17:45.274+00:00"other-people's emotions do not exist acc..."other-people's emotions do not exist according to materialism, being objectively unobservable"<br /><br />Why would materialism imply that things we can't observe don't exist? We don't observe atoms but those are presumably real (or potentially real) things under materialism. Even if it turns out we can't observe them, they might still be real consistently with materialism. Isn't materialism a claim about the kinds of things that exist--material things--rather than our capacities to observe these things? Of course emotions, whether other people's or my own, seem to be impossible under materialism simply because it's incoherent to identify an emotion with a material object or state of affairs; but that's a different issue altogether.Zamfirhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09429916493028697389noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-21144303209487317092018-12-08T21:46:54.366+00:002018-12-08T21:46:54.366+00:00@CCL - Being British, the place where socialism wa...@CCL - Being British, the place where socialism was invented and has always thrived, I don't confuse it with Marxism. Most British socialism is not Marxist, and from roots that precedes Marx. I was myself a serious socialist as a child and in my teens, but always hostile to Marxism - the roots of 'my' kind of socialism was (variously) in Nonconformism, the Fabian Society gradualism and William Morris's neo-Medievalism. Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-43571241972958569102018-12-08T20:24:30.699+00:002018-12-08T20:24:30.699+00:00When you attempt to trace "Leftism" back...When you attempt to trace "Leftism" back that far, it becomes imperative that you identify it as Marxism, rather than leftism, because reaching a century or more back you get to the etymological roots of why it is called "leftism".<br /><br />Marxism is stated simply as, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Contained within this statement is the <i>implication</i> of the superior moral authority of need <i>over</i> ability. It is not for the able to decide what is prudent and possible for them to give to the needy, as is the case when <i>God</i> is the most able.<br /><br />The expansion of Marxist thinking from being merely economic to being about <i>all</i> human needs, and each being considered and redressed <i>independently</i>, so that billionaire moral imbeciles have as much a right to demand the families and children of middle and working class people who dedicated themselves to seeking such things in ways that actually <i>worked</i>, is indeed a logical extrapolation of economic Marxism. Insane, of course, because the logical extrapolation of an unsound premise will be an unsound conclusion.<br /><br />But while it is true that the anti-slavery movement was seated on the left back when slavery was a live issue in the Western world, it is not at all true that they went on to embrace Marxism, the initially economic Marxists then going on to embrace cultural Marxism. That is a Marxist lie, and it is appalling that anyone, let alone educated people dedicated to study of the history of modernism and post-modernism, should fall for it. Slave ownership <i>is</i> Marxism. Marxism is advocacy of slavery. The actual anti-slave movement sought that the able should be free to decide the limits of their own ability and impart voluntarily to the needy, rather than be compelled to do so by law.<br /><br />It was the slavery apologists, not the anti-slavery activists, who worked out the argument that the able should be compelled to labor at the behest of the needy. And, going back to when nations did not have anti-slavery activists, either having no significant people opposed to slavery or having no significant slavery for them to be against, the implicit assumptions of society one way or the other went unchallenged and thus unargued, but it was the free nations that developed the modern world.<br /><br />Modernity is a response to the vast economic improvement wrought by the modern world, and it is specifically the response of those who do not understand <i>how</i> the modern world came about.Chiu ChunLinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03519192610708043962noreply@blogger.com