Today, I wish to discuss something that’s been on my mind off and on for a very long time. Pardon me if I stumble around it, for sometimes it is difficult to put a concept into words. I’ve discussed it on The Declination on more than one occasion, though perhaps clumsily. Nonetheless, I suspect it will be of vital importance in the days to come.
Leftists often compare Rightists to Nazis. It’s beyond cliche, these days. It is tiresome and it hinges on the most flimsy of rationalizations. Yet it begs the question: how do you know if you are becoming a tyrant? How do you know if your ideology has slid into evil?
Surely, even Nazis were once children, cared for and loved by someone. No doubt their parents had hopes for at least some of them. Dreams for them. As Tolkien explained for us in The Lord of the Rings, nothing is evil in the beginning. Not even Sauron himself. So how did they become evil? What led them there?
If you analyze tyrannical ideologies and the sort of mass mob insanity behind them, you will see a common thread: purity. Nazis obsessed over purity of race. Stalinists obsessed over purity of political beliefs. Jihadists obsess over purity of religious belief. But purity is always there. And purity can twist good into evil, or render a lesser evil into a far greater evil.
What is purity? The dictionary tells us that it is “freedom from adulteration or contamination.” For our purposes, we may use the synonym ‘perfection’ with some utility. The point of purity is to identify impurities and eradicate them. The Nazi will eradicate the racially impure, the Communist will eradicate the impure Capitalists, and so on.
The utility of quests for purity to a tyrant should be obvious. For what is more impure than man? A quest for purity is carte blanche for never ending power over others. Progressivism itself admits this even in the content of its own name. Progress toward what? Purity. Progress toward the perfect society, in which poverty, disease, war, and a thousand other such ills have been eradicated.
Never will you hear the Progressive say “this is good enough, we can stop now.” For them, there is always a new impurity to eradicate. The movement is like the terminator of movie fame:
Kyle Reese: Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
Social Justice is like the terminator in other ways, too. It cloaks itself as one of us. It wears the skin of our institutions in an effort to disguise itself. But always, its mission is to eradicate us. We are the impure. We cannot be permitted to exist.
And when a round of impure are disposed of, new impure are found. Today, it is Rightists. Tomorrow, Centrists. The day after that, Trotskyite Leftists. The terminator never stops. Ever-greater demands of purity are made. Like the Third Reich, the gas chambers never stop. The ash falls from the skies, forever. At least until someone puts a stop to it all at gunpoint.
Purity spirals work so well because fault can always be found with man. Every single human being in the history of our species, save one, has done wrong; has sinned. We all deserve death. That is a fundamental tenet of Christianity. It is also true even if you are the most ardent of atheists. Man is imperfect. And so it will ever be.
Yet, is it the SJW’s responsibility to act as the judge, jury, and executioner? Shall the Nazi do it? Shall the Stalinist? The Jihadist? Not only is there no one among us who could ever make demands of purity upon us, these cretins are the worst of the worst, the most evil among us. And it is they who always lead the charge to purity. The nuts are running the nuthouse.
Rationalizations always exist for why we are bad people. Why we should be punished, why we should give up everything, why we shouldn’t even exist. ALWAYS. Here we are, in America, the most prosperous nation to have ever existed in the history of our species. This is a place where starvation is virtually unknown. Where even the poorest among us possess wonders. And yet our debate constantly shifts toward America as an unjust nation that loves reducing its citizens to poverty, as if we were like Somalia or Haiti. Similar arguments are made for racism, sexism, homophobia, etc…
There are some poor people in America (though they do better here than in most places), thus we are impure. And in the minds of the purity-seekers, this means there is no fundamental difference between us and Haiti. Disagree? You want to push granny off a cliff, you Nazi! Ironic, I think, that the Left names us the Nazis when the modern purity-seekers are almost invariably Leftists.
Purity spirals are how evil manifests itself in its most concentrated human form. It is where humans go collectively insane, where they can rationalize the most hateful and destructive things. When the SJW says that you are a racist for X, he is almost always saying you are impure. They even police their own, thusly. They are always on the lookout for manifestations of impurity even among their own. They are political cannibals, as purists necessarily must be.
Had the Third Reich been permitted to continue, it would have invariably turned its genocidal hatred upon its own, sooner or later. Indeed, we saw signs of this even during its short life. Just as the Soviet Communists ate their own, and the Maoists, and the Jihadists killing other Muslims… this is always how it goes.
The terrifying aspect of it is that before purity-seekers consume themselves in an orgy of hatred and death, they bring us down with them. At least, if they are not stopped first.
That’s what our conflict is all about, underneath it all. Purity, and those who use purity as an excuse for tyranny. Far from being the good guys, they are the most evil among us (though we all have at least some evil in us). Far from being those who will usher in an age of peace, love, and tolerance, they are those who will usher in an age of death, war, hatred, and intolerance.
It is always this way with them. When they call you a Nazi, remember that though they have little or no political connection with them, their underlying drive for purity means that, of all modern political ideologies, they (and perhaps the Jihadists) most closely resemble the behavior patterns of Nazis. For all of them are, like the Nazis and Stalinists before them, seekers of power through purity spirals.
I may be wrong but the most graphic manifestation of the purity complex is Pol Pot and the killing fields. Islam is being obscured for political reasons and the various inquisitions are to far back in history to get that emotional horror.
Even Star Trek of TNG failed and they had erased poverty on Earth, but of course not disease because nature abhors a vacuum.
Eventually however the purists are stopped by Robert Heinlein’s “Bad Luck”, of course there is a lot of death and destruction before that. I would suspect that those who frequent this sight would send many purist to hell before having to live with Bad Luck.
Excellent article and even if you were fumbling around for it you still hit the nail pretty squarely…
I have found something that makes a pretty good ‘warning sign’ for those who would push things along down the Purity Spiral you mention and that is people who say things like ‘there oughta be a law’ or ‘the government should do (fill in the blank)’ or ‘the government should prevent (fill in the blank)’. They aren’t evil people, they don’t want anyone sent to the ovens, they just don’t see anything further than the very next step. They are the people that were described in the “First they came for..” poem.
Great article and why we need to rein the Reactionary Wing of the Republican Party as well as the Progressive Wing of the Democratic Party, They both exhibit the same quest. Well Done!
“[T]he Reactionary Wing of the Republican Party”? C’mon Mark, Jesse Helms has been dead for 10 years. Didn’t anyone tell you? Besides, he wasn’t the boogey-monster his Leftist detractors (and cynical Democrat Party fundraisers) made him out to be. Meanwhile your “Progressive Wing of the Democratic Party” is about 3/4ths of their delegation in Congress and most Democrat officeholders in California, New York, and Texas.
Your attempt at drawing an equivalence failed.
“…we need to rein the Reactionary Wing of the Republican Party as well as the Progressive Wing of the Democratic Party, They both exhibit the same quest.”
No, the Reactionary Wing of the Republican Party, as well right in general and the far right, just want to be left alone to live as they want to live. Leftist want power over others, the right just wants to free in general and free of leftist power mongers.
The answer to the question “when does the purist stop?” is easy. They always have themselves as the end point. For it is they who assign pure and non pure status and in the end only themselves can be the truth.
Best goddam essay you’ve written yet. Hands down. GRAND SLAM.
SPREAD IT AROUND. Sarah Hoyt needs to post this on Instapundit. It will spread like a California Wildfire, like VD and sewage in an Antifa protest camp, like joints at a Grateful Dead concert.
1 comment only:
The Purists subconsciously hate themselves. Transferring this hate to others in order to make them targets is what is fundamentally driving them.
And in support of Thales point on purity we have Daniel Greenfield over at Frontpage Magazine with an article titled Will the Left Rename America. He doesn’t use the word purity until the last few paragraphs. http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270896/will-left-rename-america-daniel-greenfield Worth the read.
Social Justice, especially ‘microaggression’ theology, attacks the very being of the individual. It demands through its bellicose nitpicking that the offender not be allowed his own perspectives, understanding and ideas. This is extremely damaging to young people who haven’t solidified and established their own personhood: they must become clones, allowed to feel, think, say, and ultimately, to BE only what is approved by their masters.
It is a form of psychological terrorism and can lead, in the most vulnerable, to an eventual mental ward.
Agreed.
Just saw “Death of a Nation.”
See It.
Dovetails indirectly with the essay.
Are you talking the Dinesh D’Souza book or the white supremacist video? There are five different versions on Amazon.
Dinesh D’Souza’s book is now a movie, now showing in theaters:
https://youtu.be/UXPhLXuJ90I
You could have distilled this entire column down to this phrase: ” It cloaks itself as one of us. It wears the skin of our institutions in an effort to disguise itself. But always, its mission is to eradicate us. We are the impure. We cannot be permitted to exist.”
But what you are looking for is not a Social Justice Warrior. It does however, wear a skinsuit, which it removes when convenient to rail against Europeans and dons it again when it must chameleon its way back into being ‘white’.
When you are ready to take the step to enlightenment and truth, you will have peeled the scales from your eyes. In the interim, you are dancing around the third rail like so many indians at a campfire on a solstice night.
Purity is the excuse but the driving force is nihilism. There are always people who want to destroy everything but are reigned in by society by one means or another. But when you get an unholy confluence of circumstances nihilism can spread via mob psychology and that’s when you get the ovens and killing fields.
I think you will find these very nihilists are already acting. They are undoubtedly in leadership positions in Antifa, BLM, the DNC and parts of the MSM, including people who work for outlets such as Daily Kos, DU, HuffPo, NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC and the many fringe neo-maoist weblogs and other social media outlets (Twitter, FB and Google being prime territory for them.)
I don’t think I’m exaggerating in the least when I claim that there is a real 5th column out there that means to do us and the entire nation nothing but the worst of which they can conceive.
“Seekers of power through purity spirals”.
This needs to be emphasized, though you did say it pithily at the end.
The ultimate goal is power. Purity is a means to that end.
As I marvel at the glee of censoring Alex Jones by some I can’t help think that I am witnessing what people in Europe witnessed in the years and months leading to the debacle that was Hitler. When I see “anti-fascists” who in fact are fascists beating people who they view as less than human and deserving because those people hold a different opinion I think this. When I see Rosie fired but Sarah Jeong made excuses for I know that “racist”, “sexist”, “transphobe” are meaningless slurs except for their desired effect to shun and cause self-censorship. When I see lunatics demanding that I refer to a person as Xir because that person is either mentally ill or simply a bully trying to see if they can make me do it I know something is terribly amiss. I know when Jordan Peterson, a philosopher put in our time for a reason, is labeled an “alt right” demon because he is a purveyor of a mantra that our boys will become men only if we value them as having a destiny grounded in responsibility I am sure we are in dangerous times.
I’m not sure but I think the answer is in us. We must openly reject this insanity. Not quietly either.
Our schools and colleges are producing these brainwashed acolytes.
That’s where the work needs to be done.
Every single X Studies (gender, race, LGBTQ, what have you) dept in every single college and university in America needs to be cancelled. The administrators and politicos who resist must be immediately and publicly tarred and feathered.
The Progressive Left is quite openly and deliberately producing a cadre to fight. Unlike many, I don’t see them as Hitler’s brownshirts, though they strongly resemble them. I believe a more complete and accurate description would be to call them America’s version of Mao’s Red Guards.
If they aren’t stopped TODAY, we’re going to have another civil war.
Y’all need to accept the absolute, unavoidable truth of this.
Also, we need a true independent media. The MSM defined by social media (FB, Apple, Twitter, Youtube, etc) and the more mainstream HuffPo, WaPo, NYT, CNN, ABC/NBC/CBS, MSNBC, along with the progressive internet sites like DU, Daily Kos and the like, have one purpose – to chain and break us or, should we resist, purge us. Libertarian and right wing bloggers & vloggers need to move en masse to another channel or channels – Liveleak is one. There’s others.
George Soros is financing a considerable chunk of this. No, I’m NOT a conspiracy kook. He’s made his wealth thru vulture-like exploitation of the complete ruin of people and nations. Destroying America and the West would be his ultimate harvest.
It has to be stopped RIGHT NOW. We might be too late already.
Very reminiscent, oddly enough, of Mary Douglas’ book Purity and Danger.
There is nothing new under the sun. C S Lewis gave us the seminal quote on this topic in 1948:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Don’t let them immanentize the eschaton
This is precisely the situation that Orwell was referring to in 1984 when he has his hero Winston Smith say “I hate purity. I want everyone to be corrupt.”
In our domestic situation, the manifestation of the quest for purity melding into evil can be seen at the EPA:
Having remove 97% of the exhaust impurities (pollutants) from vehicles since the implementation of the Clean Air Act, they have become evil in demanding that the last 3% be eliminated even if it means the end of personal vehicles.
Excellent post,Thales, but why should this information come as a surprise or revelation to anyone?
Examples of the evil of piety are as old and predictable as history.
Torquemada the Grand Inquisitor kills and tortures thousands in the name of Christ.
Robespierre: “Terror compels Virtue”
Victor Serge (anarchist, Russian contemporary of the Bolsheviks, coined the term “totalitarianism”) “The worst in man is always that which is corrupted from the best”
Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 Chapter 2: “I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.”
“Gott Mit Uns” slogan stamped on World War 2German infantry belt buckles.
Himmler: “To have stuck it out (extermination duties) and at the same time – apart from exceptions caused by human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard;” and (from the Posen speech to SS officers-6 October 1943) “Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology, it is a matter of cleanliness. In just this same way anti-Semitism for us has not been a question of ideology but a matter of cleanliness.”
Nathuram Godse, Hindu lawyer who assassinated Gandhi, wrote a 30-page brief explaining why Gandhi had to die: he was evil. ” I do say that my shots were fired at the person whose policy and action had brought rack and ruin and destruction to millions of Hindus;” and “My confidence about the moral side of my action has not been shaken even by the criticism leveled against it on all sides.”
Pol Pot slaughtered 25% of the population of Cambodia. “I did not join the resistance movement to kill people, to kill the nation. Look at me now. Am I a savage person? My conscience is clear;” and “I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country.”
Of course his conscience is clear. He’s on the side of righteousness.
Evil is misplaced good,
Everybody is on the side of the angels (at least in their own minds).
Uncounted millions can and should die to make the world a better place.
Break eggs, make an omelette.
Where’s the omelette?
Perhaps we should show more kindness and less righteousness?