Thread by @EveKeneinan

The error is the guilt transference from persons to groups.

“An eye for an eye” is a very crude way of expression the demand for JUSTICE AS RESTORATION.

The folks counter to folk idea of “an eye for an eye” is “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Aristotle noted long ago that folk wisdom usually expresses a half truth, but there is also usually an opposite bit of folk wisdom that says the opposed truth, e.g.

“jackdaw to jackdaw” but also “opposites attract.”

The problem with thinking it terms of SYSTEMS is that, when one assumes that the SYSTEM is the problem, and wants to abolish the SYSTEM—well, there MUST BE some SYSTEM, since “system” is just “the way things are put together.”

On the classical understanding in the West, at least since Plato, and clarified by Christian understanding of man’s fallenness, HUMAN BEINGS can neither PRODUCE nor MAINTAIN a SYSTEM OF PERFECT JUSTICE.

We can kind of vaguely IMAGINE one though.

One of the main tropes of modernism and Enlightenment was the claim we CAN build a SYSTEM OF PERFECT JUSTICE.

I have many times called this “the most wrong thing a great thinker ever said”:

So after CENTURIES teaching us that EVERY attempt to REALIZE THE SYSTEM PERFECT JUSTICE on earth INVARIABLY results in a hell-state on earth … only two conclusions are possible, the RIGHT and the LEFT

Right: It can’t be done
Left: the bad people keep preventing us

This leads to a broadly right-wing view of “utopia is impossible. Stop murdering people trying to fulfill a fantasy that can’t exist”

And a broadly left-wing view: “the bad people preventing utopia must be made to stop their preventing, by being eliminated if necessary"

Which leads eventually to

Right: Stop what you are doing. We’ll have to kill you to stop you if need be, since you are hell-bent on destroying everything good

Left: We’ll have to kill you to stop you stopping us, since we are bringing about perfection

Right: you should side with the good in human things, because only God is perfect; we humans cannot achieve the perfect

Left: you should side with the perfect, since the perfect is better than the merely good; we humans must achieve the perfect, even if most must be forced

From the point of view of the right, the left’s pursuit of perfect is MANIFEST NONSENSE, and can be shown to be such by the left’s UTTER INABILITY to say what “perfection” or “utopia” LOOKS LIKE, except in the vaguest of terms.

But the left thinks like this FOR SOME MAD REASON:

“Perfection doesn’t need to be built. It will just happen, if you remove all the obstacles—those being everything that ACTUALLY exists.”

Right: Destroy your own house, and you’ll have no house and be homeless

Left: Destroy your house, and a palace will “emerge” from history!

This is why the left, broadly speaking, is AT WAR with reality in the sense of actuality, that is, with everything that ACTUALLY EXISTS.

Some of the Marxist philosophers, such as Marcuse and Adorno, are candid enough to admit that the goal is utopia and the enemy is the real.

Most are NOT so honest.

In the end, to allow man PERFECT freedom, one must either kill him or enslave him.

It is not a coincidence that the idea of human dignity as inviolable is bound up with this Kantian notion of perfection.

This is why “misuse” of freedom in the form of “hate speech which injures someones dignity” CANNOT be permitted.

I remind everyone of the sociological study that put forward the thesis we are entering a VICTIM culture from a prior DIGNITY culture which superseded an older HONOR culture.

Read Haidt’s summary if not the paper itself:
righteousmind.com/where-microagg…
academia.edu/10541921/Micro…