Yesterday we
looked in general at how to start your own religion for fun and profit. The issue today is how to make certain you do
it successfully, or at least until people start thinking for themselves and
realize what’s going on. Since people
without property tend to think the way those in power tell them to think,
that’s usually not a problem once you’ve abolished property.
Just in case
people do start to think, though,
it’s a good idea to manipulate the symbols with which people think:
language. Once you can seize control of
language, you can dictate what people think, or whether they think at all, as
George Orwell tried to show in 1984.
People have a
natural loyalty to old ways, or at least a certain laziness that often keeps
them from doing something stupid just because it’s New & Improved. Get people confused enough, however, and
people will gravitate to new things at first because it just has to be better
than the current mess, but ultimately because change for the sake of change has
become an engrained habit.
At that point
you’ve won. People will accept anything
you say simply because you are The Authority, and whatever you say, goes. And if you think that’s farfetched, just look
at the following extract from the opening passages of John Maynard Keynes’s A Treatise on Money (1930), a work he
intended as his magnum opus:
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| Keynes: absolute power to the State |
It is a peculiar characteristic
of money contracts that it is the
State or Community not only which
enforces delivery, but also which decides what it is that must be delivered as
a lawful or customary discharge of a contract which has been concluded in terms
of the money-of-account. The State, therefore, comes in first of all as the authority of law which
enforces the payment of the thing which corresponds to the name or description
in the contract. But it comes in doubly when, in addition, it claims the right
to determine and declare what thing
corresponds to the name, and to vary its declaration from time to time — when,
that is to say, it claims the right to re-edit the dictionary. This right is
claimed by all modern States and has been so claimed for some four thousand
years at least. It is when this stage in the evolution of money has been reached that Knapp’s Chartalism — the doctrine that money is peculiarly a creation of
the State — is fully realized. (John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Money, Volume I: The Pure Theory of Money. New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930, 4.)
And what does
that passage mean in plain English? That
the State has the power to change reality itself simply by seizing control of
language and “re-editing the dictionary” so that words mean what the State
wants them to mean.
Nonsense, you
say? But isn’t that what Orestes
Brownson and G.K. Chesterton said socialists do? Change the meaning of words until they get
what they want? And Pope Pius X,
referring to the modernists, claimed they presented their teachings in so
confused a manner and with vague meanings, so that nobody could figure out what
was going on. And the New Age? Try and pin down something with a specific
meaning. The New Agers will simply laugh
at you, and declare you’re so stupid that you can’t understand them just
because they won’t tell you what they mean in any coherent fashion.
All three groups
— socialists, modernists, and New Agers — excel at doubletalk. Back in 1909, the Fabian socialist George
Bernard Shaw, claimed that the Fabian’s greatest strength was the fact that it
was easy for the Fabian Society to raise money because nobody could figure out
what they were talking about:
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| "Socialism is that thing, you know, that thing that isn't that thing." |
No
doubt the Fabians have made an impression in London and in England that is not
recognizable as their work. By the very
law of their being, these Opportunists are not to vaunt themselves openly —
least of all to claim the exclusive leadership of the social movement of
British politics at present. At a recent
meeting, quite fully reported in the official organ of the society, Mr. Bernard
Shaw congratulated the Fabians on there being in most people’s minds a certain
vagueness and confusion as to what the Fabians really stand for: “You get a
good many subscriptions [i.e.,
donations] from people who would not subscribe if they were entirely clear on
the subject,” he said, “and you also get a certain width of sympathy, a broad
idealism which is helpful.” (“The Fading Fabians,” The Boston Evening
Transcript, November 27, 1908, p. 10.)
Shaw then said
that this vagueness was also a danger to the Fabians. It might even (gasp) divert them from their
goal of imposing socialism on the world, just as (in his opinion) Christianity
wasn’t Christian because it wasn’t socialist:
As
there are all sorts of stripes of Liberals and of Conservatives, there are of
Socialists. He [Shaw] admits that there
is this danger to the Fabians in their vagueness, that such a society may be
captured for purposes foreign to its ends, “just as Christianity has been
captured by commercialism, so that there is nothing in the world less Christian
than what is called Christianity.” (Ibid.)
Interestingly,
Shaw then declared that even Chesterton not only didn’t know what socialism is,
he never did know, even when he was a socialist!
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| Gladstone: "How did I get dragged into this?" |
But
these quips and brilliants of Shaw’s cannot conceal his real concern, showing
throughout this address, over the schisms and secessions that have taken place
among the Fabians. With his
characteristic candor he owns up to the loss of half a dozen sorts of Fabians —
one typified by the prominent member who “left us because we did not adore Mr.
W. E. Gladstone”; another who wanted the abolition of marriage in their
programme; and another (the son of a clergyman) who wanted anti-clericalism
made a part of the faith. Mr. Gilbert
Chesterton, it appears, once called himself a Socialist, “but he did not know
what Socialism was then, and he does not know now when he says he is not a
Socialist.” (Ibid.)
Of course, the
jab at Chesterton comes across as not only weak, but a bit malicious,
particularly since at no point did Shaw himself demonstrate that he knew what
socialism is, and had just declared that nobody else did, either! It would seem safe to conclude, then, that
socialism is whatever you need it to be at the moment in order to get what you
want . . . just as religion is whatever you need it to be, and anything else is
whatever you need it to be.
At some point,
then, you necessarily cross the line from mere expedience over into pure moral
relativism and, finally, nihilism. And
why? Because once you’ve changed the
definition of private property, or even property, you have changed what it
means for something to be a right, or even to be true.
Anything goes. Your new religion turns out to mean nothing
more than Might Makes Right.
#30#
