Communism Ethically Considered

 

Prager U released a video on 4/12/2021 entitled Is Communism Moral? Dennis Prager narrated the video, and I took some notes on it and will respond to his narrative: “Motives are much less important than behavior. We all know this. If someone has good intentions but treats people badly, those intentions mean nothing.”

 

My response: Prager is wise: what we intended is significant and might have moral import, but what matters is how we act, and how we act is our motive and or ethical stance, not noble intentions with lousy consequences, damaging people, and it matters not if the consequences were intended or not, if our actions make the world a worse place.

 

Prager: “This is true of individuals as well as governments. Under capitalism where we are allowed to pursue our own happiness, it does sound less noble than communism where everyone shares everything equally.

 

Motives aside, capitalism has provided millions with riches and freedom, and all communism has given people is to be poor and tyrannized. Despite its good intentions, communism leads to evil. People ignore or deny the evil of this ideology. Either people are ignorant of Communist evil, or it is willful blindness, know that Communism is bad, but the truth is so painful that it is to be ignored.”

 

My response: Another reason that millions stand by and still favor wicked Communism is that by nature we are  groupist and collectivist, so we naturally like what the Communist give to us, and that preference is sick and self-destructive.

 

Prager: “ We have a moral obligation to the victims of Communism not to forget them. The best way to prevent an evil from recurring it to confront it in all its horror.”

 

My response: A great point.

 

Prager: “Most evil people that tortured, murdered and oppressed under communism were normal people, only a few were psychopaths.”

 

My response: This last point about the banal ordinariness of vicious, criminal evil carried out mostly by normal people is a stark warning to us all, that anyone of us, groupist and group-living as we, from birth, determined to conform in lockstep by doing most anything the group or state demands that we commit, to get and keep group approval and status, we will do the terrible deeds demanded of us by the ferocious state.

 

Prager: “If we do not confront real evils like communism, we make up fake evils like global warming, capitalism and white supremacy to rail against.”

 

My response: This is so true and so ironic.