In some places and states across America, affordable, reliable energy isn’t an option. People are punished with higher rates for a reluctance to install solar panels on their roofs. By government command, transportation is increasingly restricted to EVs or public transit. A simple plastic bag to carry your groceries to the car is outlawed. Freedom of conscience is under assault in school curriculum and pedagogies, and in the government empowerment of ideologically driven hypersensitivities in a broad censorship (“cancelled”). Any competing spheres – church, family – are left to atrophy.
What’s all this about? It’s about the end of the individual, a surrender to the state, a reduction of nearly everything to the politics which is the mother’s milk of the overarching state.
It’s stifling; it’s smothering; it forges malignant and distorted personalities. A callousness is turned loose. Others have written about it, particularly those who had a front row seat at the dawn of its appearance in the late 19th and into the 20th centuries, people like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arthur Koestler, Boris Pasternak.
Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” is an autopsy of this deformed personality. Watch this scene from the film version of “Dr. Zhivago”. In it we see an accidental meetup between Zhivago and Strelnikov, a radicalized former student who is now a full-fledged commander in the Red Army, a committed Bolshevik, and utterly heartless: “The private life is dead.” Watch the interaction between a man with the full complement of human sensibilities and the stunted psyche of the ideological zealot. It’s frightening, and more common today than you think.
It’s found on the streets (torching Teslas, riots, leftist antisemitism, Antifa, BLM), on our college campuses, in K-12, in Hollywood, in the supermajorities of the California legislature, the Democratic Party base, throughout the expanding administrative state, throughout the commanding heights of the culture. No, it can’t be dismissed as a mere Soviet artifact. It’s a personality disorder engendered by a monstrous belief system. Sadly, the ill-consequences and sufferings of people, intended or not, are made irrelevant.
Please view the accompanying clip.
P.S.: After Zhivago leaves Strelnikov’s presence, a soldier says to Zhivago, “You’re lucky!”
RogerG