Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
I recently read an ABC news article which asked if, in the name of fostering equality, the family should be replaced by the state. The author wrote with horror that some parents disenfranchised the children of others by reading their privileged children bedtime stories. They recommended that an all-powerful state could raise everyone’s children in a more egalitarian fashion.
Oh, for the love of God, what a load of Commie Crap! Believe it or not, this is as diplomatic as I can possibly be when faced with such utter nonsense. Equality is a utopian ideal that cannot ever exist. This Siren Song is used by ideologues to batter against Western Civilization and more. These would-be demigods see any naturally-evolved human society, anywhere on Earth, as their chief enemy.
These avant-garde zealots imagine that they know better how we might live our lives. Their monomaniacally crabbed utopian visions involve reducing absolutely every human complexity into a slogan: INEQUALITY IS UNJUST AND CAN BE ELIMINATED, IF WE ARE ONLY WILLING TO TRY!
In place of societies built upon the nuances of tensions between human consciousness and our subconscious drives, they would build a crystalline edifice reflecting their own personal sensibilities. The pyramids of Egypt were less relics to the vanity of their builders than is this type of utopianism.
Today’s Tower of Babel is the conceit that any human being (or that product of the mind of Man: Artificial Intelligence) can even imagine perfection, let alone chart a course from here to there.
We cannot imagine paradise, we cannot build utopia (a word that literally means “nowhere”), and even, if we could, absolutely everything not approved of by the ideologues would have to be trimmed, as if society were a topiary or bonsai tree. In a century of Socialist “innovation”, well over 100 million civilians were murdered by their own totalitarian governments in peacetime; all to construct paradise on Earth.
Have people really so closed their eyes to the victims of genocide, purges, man-made famine, Great Leaps Forward, Cultural Revolutions, Killing Fields, and ethnic cleansings? Did those countless men, women, and children die for nothing?
The State is a necessary evil. Empowering it invites slavery-by-any-other-name, Thought Police, Gulags, Concentration Camps, and Death Camps.
The state wields coercive power in order to foster, maintain, and protect civilian life. It makes and enforces laws to protect us from criminals, just as it maintains armed forces in order to guard society from the external enemy.
Our Founders understood the dangers of the state. The Constitution that they produced is designed to constrain the “demon” government; insuring that the government serves the popular will rather than overrules it. Wise people never, ever give the state an iota more power than it absolutely needs to do its job.
Government can enforce conforming behavior. But, it cannot and should never be permitted to regulate thought in order to save us from the scary ideas of creative individuals.
And, these worthies always try to replace the family with the state, the party, and the Leader for what? EQUALITY? What a nonsensical goal! Replacing the basic building block of every human society from the Siriono of the Amazon to the Mongols of Central Asia with an omnipotent state in order to enforce compulsory mediocrity… REALLY?!
In their utopia, will there be an Inner Party that perpetuates its own aristocracy over the rest of a humanity which has been reduced to the status of livestock? Of course! Unaccountable elites always turn a human hive into a variant of the worst aspects of Feudalism.
In their paradise, will there be lobotomies of the naturally brilliant, and a reduction of what constitutes intelligence to encompass the mentally challenged? Absolutely! Livestock need not understand. They need only obey.
Consider Communist China’s Social Credit System as an example. Ubiquitous propaganda, surveillance, and terror can suppress genuine human expression, which can stymie the natural growth of personal intellect.
We are not equal. We can never be made equal in any fashion, other than in a near-universal slavery. Some of us are beautiful, others ugly. Some of us are graceful, others clumsy. Some of us are brilliant, others are stupid.
Even if the bulk of humanity were replaced by genetic clones raised to a common curriculum, the moment that the drones began to experience heterodox life events, they would, of necessity, diverge.
We human beings are individuals. We each have a divine spark in us. There is nothing worth having which is worth the loss of our own selves. We are unfit for utopia, and its values. More precisely, utopia is unfit for us!
