Ask yourself a couple of simple questions. How could a governor coldly announce the end of the internal combustion in 15 years without any recognition of the upheaval – i.e., human cost – that it’ll create? In September of 2020, Governor Newson of California did:
“In the next 15 years we will eliminate in the state of California the sales of internal combustion engines. We will move forward to green and decarbonize our vehicle fleet … substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as oxide nitrogen, in so doing, we’ll improve air quality and improve the economic climate here in the state of California.”
How could Black Lives Matter declare economic war on white-owned businesses? Oh, but they did on Twitter in December 2021:
“Time to: #BuildBlack – Support Black-led-Black-serving organizations. #BuyBlack – Skip the Black Friday sales and buy exclusively from Black-owned businesses. #BankBlack – Move your money out of white-corporate banks that finance our oppression and open accounts with Black-owned banks. . . . White-supremacist-capitalism uses policing to protect profits and steal Black life. . . . Let’s use every tool in our toolbox…including our dollars…to end white-supremacist-capitalism.”
When not announcing an end to the traditional family, calling for the death of cops (“fry ‘em like bacon”), or excusing riots and murder in our cities, they applied the same old tired rhetoric in declaring their own version of apartheid nirvana.
What’s happening? Well, it’s what happens when a person becomes incapable of examining their own assumptions. They blindly accept a set of propositions and then act upon them.
Something is missing from their mental comportment. The thing that is absent is the life of the personal. The life of the personal – also referred to as interiority – involves reflection, comprehension, and the private space to do it. For these avatars of a new world order, no time for that. That private space is to be treated as suspicious pods of conspiracy to stop them. The personal life is branded “counterrevolutionary”. For them, it’s time to light up the Molotov cocktails and torch the entire civilization and end the life of the personal.
However, it’s out of the life of the personal that arises all those things that we call private. You know, the private sector, private property, civil society, church. The life of the personal is more than emotions and the arts, even though it certainly encompasses them. It incorporates our tendency to gravitate to form family, a deeper form of intimacy than mere eroticism can satisfy. It includes our personal choices to make a living, whether to follow in the footsteps of mom and dad or not. It encompasses the natural inclination to acquire things unto ourselves – private property, private enterprise. It embraces the grappling to understand the nature of things, which includes the spiritual. Thus, churches arise.
All these things lie outside the revolution, because revolution is what these people are all about. They’re not into deep private reflection. They are consumed by ends (a complete revolution) sanctioning means (unbridled callousness). They desire to let loose an eruption to overturn nearly everything to make life conform to their unexamined vision.
No better illustration can be found than in a clip from director David Lean’s film from 1965, “Dr. Zhivago”, based on Boris Pasternak’s novel. In the scene, Dr. Yuri Zhivago is brought before the revolutionary commander Strelnikov in the heady days of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War (Whites vs. Reds). They met earlier before the Revolution but only briefly. The exchange is enlightening. Please watch the clip.
RogerG