The Tyranny of Idealism
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Of all the Alinsky rules, the most relevant one is,
"Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
But he simply codified and made pragmatic the most
destructive of the left's rules which is, "Make the
enemy live up to his ideals." Even if those ideals
are often the invention of the left.
Ideals are by definition impossible to live up to.
Human societies aren't ideal, they're real. Ideals
are absolutes and an unfliching attempt to live up
to them destroys individuals and societies. More
subtly, the failure to live up to them justifies
hatred and self-hatred toward nations and peoples.
People naturally want to think the best of their
creeds and cultures, their societies and their
states. This is both the best weapon and the best
breeding ground of the left. There is nothing that
creates leftists and draws them like the accusation
that a nation is failing to live up to its ideals.
Absolutes are a goad, but they are not an answer. A
nation is not an ideal. It is a structure that
allows people to live. A nation pursuing an ideal is
a prison. It is the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. It
is North Korea. Or it's Europe swamping its cities
with Muslims or Israel pursuing a "purity of arms"
that its enemies do not abide by. The pursuit of
such ideals is a death wish. It's a totalitarian
suicide.
Religions embody ideals. Nations do not. A religion
is built around a deity that can forgive its
worshipers for their flaws. The wheel of sin turns
toward redemption. Failure in religion is itself a
learning experience that allows for
self-improvement. Unless warped, it does not lead to
a state of self-hatred, self-destruction and death.
But the state has no God. It is a bureaucratic idol
composed of activist politicians and their clerks.
It cannot redeem itself. Only damn itself. When it
pursues an ideal, it borrows the narrative of
religion without any divine understanding. Fanatics
stand at the helm who are corrupt and goaded to
extremes by their own failures, made incapable of
forgiveness by their own human weaknesses.
The ideal state is a cult. At its head is the cult
of personality. It ends with Jim Jones dispensing
the Kool Aid. Or Rabin shaking Arafat's hand. Or
Merkel opening the borders. Or Obama rattling
through another teleprompter speech filled with
borrowed inspirations and empty hopes.
The ideal state can only find its redemption in
death. The death of states is the grand gesture that
inspires leftists to believe that "Imagine" is the
anthem of the future. What the state cannot do, the
planetary collective will somehow accomplish. And
yet the ideal state was the collective that was
meant to accomplish what individuals could not do.
A state in pursuit of an ideal must always fail and
in its failure discredit itself. The process of
failure teaches self-hatred.
Think about how each American or Israel struggle to
conduct a moral war that kills the fewest enemies
possible only intensifies the wave of hatred and
self-hatred indoctrinated by the left at each
failure. It is the pursuit of an impossible ideal
that feeds the hatred. The closer we come to an
impossible notion of a pure war, the more our
failures are used to spread shame and disgust.
In the tyranny of idealism, superior morality is not
rewarded, it is punished.
Those closest to the ideal feel the failures most
keenly. Those furthest from it are completely immune
to them. A nation that genuinely values ideals can
be taunted for failing to live up to them. It is the
nation's own weakness for exceptionalism that makes
it vulnerable. Once the exceptionalism is made
conditional on impossible ideals, then it can be
goaded to destroy itself by trying to live up to
them.
There is nothing that saps morale and clouds
decision making like the failure to live up to one's
ideals. Once ideals define perspective, then the
nation begins the race to the abyss of those ideals.
Functional nations pursue practical goals that are
in the interest of their peoples. Ideal states are
gulags, concentration camps, where human beings are
tools for achieving ideals. A functional nation can
be free, but an ideal state must be totalitarian no
matter how often it prates about freedom. A nation
can only be free when it accepts human flaws and
frailties. An ideal state loves freedom, but hates
free people. It cannot accept individualism or the
wisdom of crowds. It bends them to its ideal.
The only way to escape the tyranny of idealism is
for a nation to accept its flaws.
Once a people become susceptible to the tyranny of
idealism, they begin to accept that their lives are
conditional on the fulfillment of a set of ideals.
And that they can therefore be sacrificed to them.
It follows them that America and Israel must accept
the death of its people at the hands of terrorists
rather than violate some impossible ideal about
civilian casualties when fighting terrorists. Scale
that moral calculus up to the nuclear and this ideal
mandates that nations must die rather than fight
back.
Likewise, Europe's refugee idealism demands that it
accept hordes of invaders even at the cost of its
existence, because its existence is conditional on
ideals rather than realities. Survival by violating
ideals becomes a fate worse than death. Religious
martyrdom becomes a secular national suicide.
In this environment, the left thrives. Every failure
of ideals becomes a cause for self-hatred. The
peoples of the free world are taught that they
violate their own values by living. Even their
passive existence is a carbon crime, a volitional
act of white privilege, that can never be wiped
clean. Every attempt at self-defense, every attempt
at existence, deepens their crime. The only escape
is death.
Leftist politics pretends to offer ideals it is for,
but it most acutely campaigns not for, but against.
The leftist activist knows the society that he hates
better than the one he loves, he has a much clearer
understanding of the world that he wants to destroy
than the world he wishes to create.
His politics are not creative, they are destructive.
He has been nurtured on the foul milk of
self-hatred. It has taught him to love himself by
hating others. His arrogance is a contempt for an
ordinary mass of people he fancies himself superior
to because he wishes to destroy their way of life
and remake it along some impossible ideal. The
remaking cannot be done, but the destruction is
always feasible. The leftist is always destroying
someone else to atone for his own failure of ideals.
This is the way of the left. Its leaders and
societies are predatory failures, consuming and
destroying the life force of their peoples, and then
expanding to destroy their neighbors and the world.
The collective buck is always passed to some new
group of victims and suckers. It will be their job
to make the failed ideals of the past viable through
sacrifices, self-hatred and self-destruction.
What the leftist does best is teach self-hatred. It
is the main course in our educational system today.
Its students are taught to despise their family,
their culture, their religion, their way of life and
their nation for failing to live up to the tainted
ideals of the left. And to gain their self-worth
through a rejection of these things and the embrace
of their destruction. And so the leftist is born.
A set of ideals whose fulfillment requires our
destruction reveals either our falseness or their
falseness. The answer distinguishes the fanatic from
the philosopher. Only the fanatic demands that
people pursue ideals which will destroy them, whose
terms make their existence impossible.
Our leftist philosopher-kings are not philosophers,
they are feudal fanatics who bind peoples to ideals
that destroy them because it feeds their twisted
madness and their sense of superiority. They are not
interested in the terms on which people can actually
exist. They are not interested in people at all
except as subjects for their gleeful malice and as
puppets for their political psychodramas.
The absolute is never the answer except to the
tyrant. And only a madman filled with hatred demands
that a nation choose between self-hatred and
self-destruction.
Human existence is the only possible resistance to
the inhuman demands of the ideal state. This is the
restating of the Declaration of Independence that
governments exist for the life, liberty and
happiness of human beings, not for the fulfillment
of ideals which would destroy them.
Governments are not meant for angels, but for men. A
state exists to enable, first the existence, second
the freedom, and third the happiness of human
beings, in exactly that order of importance.
A state whose policies destroy human existence has
nullified itself. A state may only nullify their
freedom if the very question of their existence is
in question. And it may only nullify their happiness
for their freedom. These are human terms. No other
terms are either wanted or acceptable.
Governments are not religions and no political
movement can place its pet philosopher in place of
God. No man can demand more of other men. Only God
can demand the impossible because He can also grant
the impossible. No political system can forgive. It
can only amass more guilt and sin, more hatred and
self-hatred, more madness and destruction. Human
beings cannot exceed themselves.
A healthy idealism aspires to a more human state of
living. It does not demand absolutes. An idealism
that demands absolutes is a trap. It is easy to tell
the difference between the two.
Human ideals feel better about themselves as they
improve. Inhuman ones feel worse because the ideal
is never meant to be reached. An irreligious
absolute offers no redemption. Instead the failure
to do the impossible becomes the means of breaking
people of their human qualities and making them into
monsters.
We can only achieve human terms of existence for
nations and peoples by accepting our flaws.
Perfection is as impossible for a people as it is
for a person. And within our flaws, we create an
existence that is not based on the collective
impossibilities of an ideal, but on the realizable
goodness of our human flaws. Instead of seeking to
create a perfect state, we individually become
better people. Instead of the tyranny of idealism
creating monsters, we give ourselves the freedom to
be human beings.
Instead of building suicidal ideal states, we create
societies in which we have the freedom to be good
while refusing to lapse into a self-hatred borne of
frustrated idealism which prevents us from seeing
the goodness of our fellow men and the evil of our
enemies.