In case you
haven’t noticed, it has become increasingly frequent over the past couple of decades
to demonize anyone who disagrees with you on virtually any subject. We’d say, “on any subject,” but there must be
some things that people don’t disagree on.
Somewhere.
In our opinion,
this tendency is a direct result of the growing powerlessness of the average
person and the frustration people feel when they have little or no control over
their own lives. This problem will only
accelerate as technology continues to advance and displace more and more people
from wage system jobs, disconnecting people from the opportunity and means to
be productive members of society.
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| Yeah, we know, you thought this was 1789. No, it's 1848. |
This has happened
before, causing massive social changes and disrupting life to the point where a
prevailing sense of nihilism, the belief that life is meaningless, spreads and
seems to take over as the predominant philosophy. Two centuries ago as the Industrial and
Financial Revolutions hit full stride, matters reached a crisis.
For reasons that
continue to baffle traditional historians (but that become obvious when
analyzed from the perspective of the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism),
the French Revolution exploded on the scene, cutting the last ties with the old
European world of “Christendom” and it’s focus on the human person (admittedly
honored more in the breach than in practice at times), and replacing it with a
virtual obsession with the collective, especially as manifested in the Nation
State.
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| Total War |
Nor did matters
improve any with the advent of Napoléon Buonaparte and the growth of the
concept of “total war” as national policy to replace the more limited concept
of war as the final recourse when politics and diplomacy fail. Ordinary people became cyphers, mere cogs in
the economic machine or interchangeable and indistinguishable members of the
collective, pawns in the economic and political games played for the benefit of
others.
The situation
deteriorated even further following the Napoleonic Wars. As a result of the demands on governments to
finance total war from an inadequate tax base, government debt became
increasingly viewed not as a barely tolerable substitute for private sector
hard assets to back paper currency issues, but as the only proper backing for
the money supply. In extreme cases, such
fiat money became viewed as the only legitimate form of money, and government
as the only legitimate money creator.
In concert with
this major shift in the understanding of money and credit, there arose what
Pope Gregory XVI called rerum novarum — “new things” — that would soon
become known as socialism, modernism, and esoteric or “New Age” thought. The new things were not merely innovative
theories about economics, politics, religion, marriage, family, and everything
else under the sun. They represented a
shift in thinking completely alien to a personalist understanding of human
beings.
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| More than a televangelist |
No longer was the
individual important, but humanity as a whole.
Many people today fail to realize the danger of such a shift, but it changed
completely how people viewed reality.
Instead of the actuality of the human person created by God as the
reason for society, the abstraction of humanity created by human beings became
the all-important focus of all human endeavor.
As Fulton Sheen explained in his first two books, God and
Intelligence in Modern Philosophy (1925) and Religion Without God (1927),
this put Collective Man in the place of God.
The social and
economic effects of socialism were profound.
First promoted as “the democratic religion,” socialism was specifically
intended to replace traditional political, religious, and domestic forms of society
with a single monolithic entity that controlled all life.
The only problem
was, which system to implement? Some
forms of socialism wanted only local society, others national, still others
global. Fabian socialism would fragment
over the issue of local versus national, while Nazism and Marxism would go to
war over national versus international.
The only thing common to all forms of socialism was the denial of
individual sovereignty and the glorification of the abstraction of the collective,
summed up briefly as “the abolition of private property.” As Alexis de Tocqueville noted of the 1848
Revolution in France,
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| "It's socialism, mes amis." |
From the 25th of
February [1848] onwards, a thousand strange systems came issuing pell-mell from
the minds of innovators, and spread among the troubled minds of the crowd. . .
. These theories were of very varied natures, often opposed and sometimes
hostile to one another; but all of them, aiming lower than the government and
striving to reach society itself, on which government rests, adopted the common
name of Socialism. (Alexis de Tocqueville, The
Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville. Cleveland, Ohio: The
World Publishing Company, 1959, 78-79.)
Socialist,
modernist, and New Age assumptions became engrained into the human psyche as
the “right” way to think. Even
capitalists began taking the new things for granted. As a result, when Pope Leo XIII issued a new
kind of social encyclical in 1891 presenting a social program along with his
social doctrine, he was completely misunderstood by almost everyone. Although he explicitly called for widespread
capital ownership as the best arrangement of society, all the experts insisted
that what the encyclical, Rerum Novarum, was really about was “the
living wage” and “labor unions” — expedients that tried to make the
capitalist-socialist wage system bearable, but did nothing to address the
underlying problem of widespread powerlessness.
The problem was
that people had confused expedients intended to keep things together until society
could be put back on a truly human and personalist basis with the proposed
solution. Wages and labor unions were
interpreted as absolute mandates, while widespread capital ownership was
dismissed as “prudential matter.”
As a result,
nothing was really changed, and capitalism, socialism, and the other new things
tightened their grip on the whole of human life. Leo XIII had given a part of the answer, but
two-thirds of the solution was still missing.
#30#
