Socialists Right and Left- Same Difference

In yesterday's post I used the expression 'national corporate socialism' to describe the mentality that drives the coalition of leftist and corporate interests now working together to promote the government takeover of control and costs in the health sector of the U.S. economy. This expression naturally calls to mind and invites comparison with the 'national socialism' from which Adolf Hitler's Nazi party took its name. The major difference between the two lies in the fact that both the leftists of the Obama faction, and the big business interests working with them appear to believe that scientific materialism is an acceptable basis for dealing with human affairs. They accept approaches based on the premise that on the whole human beings are material objects, essentially no different than rocks, hammers or electrons.

Because the enormous evils the Nazis perpetrated so consistently involved dehumanizing the people they sought to exterminate, we tend to forget that the core of the Nazi ideology involved the concept of the 'volk', which derived its existential meaning from the occult and mystic qualities of the blood. According to the Nazis, the essential traits that distinguish one race from another reside in the blood, establishing the hierarchy of inferior and superior beings. According to the Nazis, it was from its blood that the Aryan nation derived its unique role in humanity's journey toward perfection. Unlike the scientific materialists, who ultimately rejected all vestiges of Immanuel Kant's effort to take account of the mysterious, non-material aspect of man's consciousness of being, Hitler embraced Schopenhauer's exaltation of the will as the locus and expression of that mystery. Essential to the will is the goal, which makes it possible for man to become what Nietzsche called an "arrow of longing", aimed toward a moment of perfection comprehensible in action, but inexpressible in purely material terms.

The possibility of total commitment that arises from this exaltation of the will sweeps aside the boundaries implied by objective reality, and with them the limits upon human will that arise in good conscience as we deal with individuals whose existence demands respect for those boundaries. The commitment to reach for unbounded perfection informed by merely human will plunged the German people into a vast sea of evil, stained red with the blood of the victim millions they sacrificed on the altar of self-worship. But despite their disregard for humanity in others, the Nazis acknowledged in themselves the truth of its subjective being, the indefinable something that elevates humanity above the flotsam and jetsam of the materialistic universe.

To do evil the Nazis dehumanized others, whom they then sacrificed for the possibility of self-willed human perfection they idolized in themselves. The scientific materialists who now seek to supplant constitutional self-government in the United States act on an understanding that denies the relevance of man's subjective perception of existence. They pretend that science has demystified existing things, among which they include human beings. Where the Nazis exalted human will, these national socialists exalt human knowledge in its scientific form. Where the Nazis denied the boundaries on human will implied by objective reality, the contemporary national socialists deny the boundaries on human action implied by the subjective perception of meaning we derive from our experience of willing. The result: the new national socialists exempt no one from the dehumanizing paradigm of scientific understanding. In principle, therefore, they dehumanize not this or that group of human beings, but the whole of humanity.

In some of my speeches over the years, I have made bold to predict that because we are discarding the moral principles that allow us to recognize and acknowledge the evil that we do, evils will be done in the twenty-first century that make the holocausts of the twentieth look like a dress rehearsal. As Americans consider the struggle now taking place, I hope a saving remnant will look beyond the details of the particular issues we debate, and reflect on the general import of the choices involved. For I believe that the American people could have a special role to play in the human journey. However, it is not a role determined by materialistic and impersonal accident, nor set up by the committed force of human will. The great principle of our beginning allots to us the task of acknowledging the true source and mainstay of both objective reality and the subjective meaning our will ascribes to it. That source is the being-in-itself whose goodwill determined and daily renews the possibility of both, the Creator God whose authority our Founders respected as the basis for human rights and justice. Their respect for God's will distinguishes them decisively from both the 'right wing' national socialists of old, and those of the left with whom we now contend. I believe it is imperative for true Americans to join together now to preserve the work that reflects their wisdom, uniting for God, for Liberty and the Constitution in order to preserve both conscience and humanity.