A rambling and interesting essay by David Wemyss: Collectivist Dreams - The Russian Soul - A Turbulent Priest - Marx and Engels - Insouciance and Despair. One quote:
...charity and compassion are always the actions of autonomous people acting as individuals. And, however much intellectuals try to argue otherwise, socialism in the end has to trade on envy and resentment, just as surely as tentative lovers discover that they cannot after all confine themselves to just holding hands, or a stolen kiss. Soon enough people are taken to be good or kindly only if they espouse the correct socialist opinions - we see this all around us in the present age - and human sympathy gets redefined in doctrinal terms.
Yet although left-wing assumptions have captured the intellectual elites of the western world - the humanities are almost dead - they have had limited impact on older people untouched by the bureaucratic and academic caste.
In my little old conservative Connecticut town, people help eachother every day. In fact, we do everything we can to assist eachother. The beauty of collectivism, charity, mutual help, etc. lies in its voluntariness, its mutuality, and in its local-ness. When there are guns and jails behind it (as via government), all of the beauty and love are lost and it just devolves into political power and into legal, armed plunder.
Infantile utopian dreams, in real life, quickly turn into real nightmares. They scare the heck out of me.
Image is via our friends at Western Rifle Shooters
