Socialism: the fantasy of slothocracy

Submitted by D.R. (United States), Mar 28, 2003 at 16:37

What is interesting is that the socialist-fantasizing leftist, while elevating the much balllyhooed Worker, is in practical fact in no way eager to share his labors. The leftist seems to derive almost his entire world view from a mental state of enervated, sullen inertia; and an obscure but persistent sense that this is Man's natural state.

The Worker must be a victim, in the eyes of the leftist, because work is an intolerable burden. A society founded on self-agency and individual enterprise, therefore, is an evil one, since it commits the mass crime of subjecting the entire population to the evils of work. When it becomes hard to justify this idea empirically, as Dr. Pipes points out, the leftist must find some mythical beast for whom this oppression is in constant effect. Enter the Third World.

The main interest of the Third World for the leftist is that it is somewhere else and that it is remote enough to be obscure. This being the case the leftist is free to idly fantasize about the "good people" of the Third World who are being processed by the necessity of work in much the same way as camp inmates were processed by the Nazis. The leftist is utterly averse to self-exercise, except when it comes to exercising his capacity for political fantasy and indignation. The leftist's chief psychological problem is basic sloth.

For a slothful person, the world is an importunate and barren place. The slothful idler feels deep down that there is an answer to this unrequited hell on earth. When he comes to hear about socialism, his mind siezes on is as a God-send. The ideology of socialism allows the leftist to persist in his laziness while at the same time exerting his victim-imagination, albeit unoriginally. He seizes on the people of the Third World - conveniently remote - as brothers in suffering, since he cannot help but notice that large numbers of his compatriots seem "deluded" enough to be content with working. The leftist's fantasy is of an institutional science fiction world where Mankind is liberated from the chains of work. I.e. mass welfare. In the meantime, the leftist seeks an environment as remote from real work as possible, and usually finds it on the university campus. There are those who would say that liberals and leftists have "taken over" the academic world, but for someone with considerable direct contact with this world it seems inescapable that academia - consisting as it does largely of cerebral blitherings and enervated venality - is intrinsically antagonistic to the activity-oriented constitution of the conservative. As a general rule, a conservative is someone whose personal economy is dominated by activity; a liberal or leftist is someone whose personal economy is dominated by idleness.

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