http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/865

Kindergartens and elementary schools can be added to that list – what do you want to be when you grow up little boy?

- Policeman
- Soldier
- Fireman
- Teacher
- Doctor
- Nurse
- Mailman
- Politician

All jobs currently controlled by the modern state. I suppose something like “software developer” could be a bit of a reach for a four year old, but “cook”, “builder”, “shopkeeper”, “cleaner” are all just as easy – even “businessman” is fewer syllables than “politician”.

Why the past tense J.P.?

Certainly the words “Marxism” and “Communism” have less appeal than they did. However, the basic Marxist doctrines (without the use of the word “Marxist”) are in the foundations of most of the stuff taught in schools and universities in most of the Western world – and in the mass media that this education system produces.

Many years ago Ludwig Von Mises noted (repeatedly) how many times even enemies of Marxism de facto assumed the truth of various Marxist doctrines.

Nor is this any great surprise as these doctrines (normally without the word Marxist) are to be found in the way most subjects are taught. Not just politics and sociology and history, but even subjects like medicine – the-true-cause-of-much-ill-health-is-inequality.

And on and on.

Lessing’s own political and philosophical ideas are largely dangerous nonsense. But her portrayal of the mental state of people who believe in those ideas seems very penetrating to me, and not least because it’s drawn with great sympathy.

Marx famously said that religion is the opiate of the masses. Well, in our age, state control seems to have become the opiate of the masses. And in this market, you have both the power-hungry exploiters who benefit from peddling the opium, and the deluded who buy it, at a greater cost than they know, because it gives them a sense of hope.

That hegemony has not yet failed totally, and while receding in degree of controls and influence over parts of its periphery, its sustaining force lies in its utility for maintaining centralized political power for a “ruling coalition.”

The original reasons (and needs) for the hegemony in the southern and eastern marches are well known historically, as is the slow absorption of western forms of social organization, and the deficiencies of internal responses to internal problems.

Those latter deficiencies apparently continue, but not quite at a level to disrupt the current coalition.

The “end” is probably not in sight quite yet.

Unidentified individuals have let me know how unhappy that made them. Other unidentified individuals expressed their respect. Takes all kinds.

There are people who do “street theater” for spy cams.
I’ve made myself a certificate of membership in the “Unpaid Actors’ Guild”. One member, no dues, fond memories.

Some smart people want to be obeyed because they think they know best and they are selfish. They’ll use any method they can to achieve this obedience – politicial ideology, religion, wealth, the cult of royalty or nobility etc.

The current methods the clever and powerful are using to control us are high taxes to avert an eco-apocalypse and all kinds of suveillance to ensure our health and safety and freedom from terror.

Anyone seen the report in today’s Mail about the pregnant woman reported to the social services by the police for having a home unfit for her baby because it didn’t have waallpaper on the walls? It’s all part of the same need for control that communism once was.

The Doris Lessing book that William mentions was the Golden Notebook, or at least she covers the same thing there.

Many a newspaper-reading progressive of those days were swayed because the information coming out of the USSR (and regurgitated by journalists) was one-sided propaganda – all glowing successes, and not a word on the purges, gulags, oppression, etc

I’d argue that we’re seeing much the same phenomenon taking place today with China. Consider the fourth estate’s near uniform parrotting of China’s dodgy GDP figures, and the wholesale acceptance of Beijing’s propaganda regarding its stimulus package*, and how it delivered China from the GFC. Practically every mainstream western journalist who’s written about China regards this bilge as unquestionable fact.

*money that was earmarked to be expended on infrastructure anyway, repackaged as a “stimulus” – and quite amazing how it somehow stimulated the economy before it had even been spent?

Stop and consider the multitude of bizarre and bloodthirsty lunacies that have been held dear by any and all human cultures for millennia, from the isolated headhunters and cannibals to the living gods and anointed autocrats who ruled major civilizations well into the 20th century.

By the middle of the 19th century, at least in Europe and North America, the idea that some hereditary superiority justified a few to lord it over the many had seriously begun to unravel.

The American and French revolutions, for good and ill, had elevated the concept of the equality of all people, and the existence of rights inherent in even the most lowly peasant.

The Christian religion had shattered into dozens of competing variants, and the endless wars of the doddering autocracies had shattered several of the remaining aristocratic regimes that had ruled the world for centuries.

Into this turmoil, both cultural and spiritual, came a doctrine which seemed to draw together several disparate strands of modern western thought, and weave them together with some age-old hatreds and prejudices.

Marxism was, and is, alluring because it is complete.

Everything is explained, everything is accounted for, the criminal unfairness that allowed some to have while so many had not is exposed, the glorious future is prophesied.

Generations of intellectuals, disgruntled youths, angry malcontents, starry-eyed secular saints, well intentioned dreamers, and those lean and hungry types the poet warns us about, all found something they could latch onto to give meaning and value to their assorted needs, desires, hatreds, illusions, visions, and ambitions.

A Christian heresy, yes, and more—a faith that doesn’t just proselytize, but justifies the sword. No turning the other cheek, no meekness, only flaming grievances, and a blanket justification for whatever needed to be done.

Whatever needed to be done.

Luther’s famous difference with Catholic dogma was the belief that faith alone justified salvation. Marx and his disciples did indeed turn something on its head when he posited that salvation, utopia, justified anything required to achieve it.

This was a faith that could not only move mountains, but create them from the bones of its enemies.

What is the lure of collectivism, whatever the variation?

In an intellectual and spiritual desert, it is a pool of cool water, an oasis which allows all the ancient hatreds and envies and covets to wash over and through the believer’s mind and soul.

Redemption doesn’t require denial, but indulgence, not meekness, but action, not reverence, but smashing irreverence.

And, in the end, the self dissolves in the loving mass of the collective. No more troublesome thoughts or doubts, no more worries, no more striving to be something, to live up to something, no more that terrible, endless struggle to be something, someone, distinct and individual.

What is the lure? Nirvana in a factory, a communal field, a great hive of a city.

Total belonging is an ancient dream, here dressed up in modern sounding rhetoric and calls to a higher morality, a higher consciousness.

What would you give, to be one of the Chosen?