‘FREEDOM’—Chapter 8 The Greatest, Most Heroic Story Ever Told
Chapter 8:16K Socialism and Communism
These collectivist movements denied the notion of a perfecting God and avoided the depressing recognition of a prophet’s world of soundness, and instead dogmatically demanded an idealistic social or communal world—and, in doing so, denied and oppressed the whole reality of the individualistic, freedom-dependent, knowledge-finding, creative, egocentric, corrupting, unavoidably-variously-upset, competitive, combative, materialism-compensation-needing, self-distraction-necessary, human-condition-afflicted world. As was pointed out in par. 299, Karl Marx, the political theorist whose mid-nineteenth century ideas gave rise to socialism and communism, argued that ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is [not to understand the world but] to change it.’ By ‘change it’ Marx meant just make it cooperative or social or communal, but he was wrong—the whole ‘point’ and responsibility of being a conscious being is to understand our world and place in it, ultimately to find understanding of the human condition. The attraction—and inherent lie—of socialism/communism was that you could support and live the ideals without acknowledging the reality of the human condition and its struggle.
