The cancer infecting the political Left

[Bob Butler 54]

Einaige

I generally work with a system that puts turnings, ages, civilizations and behavioral psychology together.  Of these, ages and civilizations are fairly common partitions in the academic study of history.  This site is generally centered on S&H turning theory, so I usually don’t have problems with people taking this seriously.  Behavioral psychology isn’t as popular as it once was, but generally if you talk about hunter gatherer behavior or the behavior of other hunter packs people follow along without too much of a quibble.  If you just quote the biblical line about behold the land of milk and honey, slay the men, enslave the women and children, that is all you need to remind people of what mankind evolved to be.

My major possibly new thought in combining these perspectives is if you cross a border in turnings, ages or civilizations, that which you thought you learned by examining reality is not to be trusted.  This mostly manifests in that which you learned in the Industrial Age is not to be absolutely trusted in the Information Age until the pattern observed has been seen to reproduce in the Information Age.  

For example awakenings in the Industrial Age generally took the form of religious revivals.  In the Information Age, the one example we have was much more to protest politically.  I expect the next awakening to more closely resemble the 1960s than the older religious awakenings.

More or less where I am coming from.

Now once in a while I wind up debating a Marxist or a fundamentalist who believes in the absolute Truth of everything in the writings of Marx or the Bible.  These are remarkably similar mindsets.  What I have found is that I am never as good with the other guy’s preferred Book as the other guy.  I did my Saturday classes with the Catholic nuns, was a regular with the Christian Fellowship at Northeastern, took philosophy courses that covered Marx as well as a Russian history course.  I'm no slouch, but not a match for someone who has made one of these Books the core of his world view.  The debater keeps pulling everything back into his Book which he believes in with absolute certainty.

On the other hand I see the Bible as a historical document which shows how one culture evolved and changed over many years.  You can see how that conflicts with someone who believes that it is a unified book with no conflicts or corrections, but deletes in his mind the phrases which cause contradictions.  As the book goes from an eye for an eye to turning the other cheek, you can see the problem.  The Jews of the Bible are evolving and transforming their culture into the Christian view.

And Marxism?  A pretty good understanding of the division of wealth problem for the time of its writing.  A pretty bad solution to the problem.  They have not and I believe can not put the solution into practice.  Every time one starts to walk down that path, you wind up in the valley full of milk and honey, killing the men, and enslaving the women and children.  It is damn hard not to wind up in that valley.  We have spent ages in that valley before slowly learning to climb out.

So pardon if I do not worship your holy words.  To me they are not so sacred.  They are an obsolete error not worth repeating.  If you find something in all that garbage that seems to resemble wisdom, show it to me manifest in the real word.  That it came out of the old books is more a handicap than a sacred blessing of holiness.

Back to my synthesis…

In the recent 3T, it was the red and blue values that were debated.  Always before the newer values came to overwhelm the old when the crisis heart arrives.  With both the virus and the Black Lives protest favoring the blue values, history is seeming to repeat.

Marxism was last an almost pertinent value set in the 1930s, and is not a modern contender.  By almost pertinent I mean Hoover represented the old Gilded Age perspective, and FDR the new.  It resolved in FDR's favor.  There was a significant minority who believed that the combination of capitalism and democracy had failed, and took on a Marxist perspective, but they never became dominant and the New Deal perspective won out.

While Marx may have been good in predicting automation and computers, he did not predict the Information Age lack of crisis war triggers and thus revolutions.  Just not there.  Stop pretending it is.