The Danger

 

There is always a danger that the suppression of a clearly defined evil will result in its replacement with an evil that is widely diffused—one that infects the whole fabric of life.”

 

My response: For example, the Prohibition Movement in US: no one drank less after the anti-booze crowd outlawed drinking: it just gave organized crime a chance to become a permanent fixture in our culture, and criminalized the behavior of millions of ordinary, functioning citizens.

 

When Marxist decry the injustices of capitalism, and then introduce the greater evil of totalitarian Leninism into a conquered society, limited evil is not eliminated, but has morphed into something far more pervasive, cruel, and dangerous on many levels. These are the destructive, ineffective techniques employed by these destroyers: fanaticism, extremism, arrogance, incompetence, absolutism, the collectivized, universal application of their “solutions”, their violent, brutal, cruel enforcement methods—all these strengthened means of growing evil in authoritarian society gravitate towards making a smaller evil into a greater evil inflicted involuntarily upon unwilling society.

 

Hoffer: “Thus the suppression of religious fanaticism usually gives rise to a secular fanaticism that invades every department of life. The banning of conventional warmaking may result in an endless undeclared war. The elimination of the conventional employer gives rise to a general monstrosity that bosses not only our working hours but invades our homes and dictates our thoughts and dreams.”

 

My response: Hoffer is warning society at idealists, true believers, and fanatics, are authoritarian and intolerant, and they always seek to take over the government and all the social institutions, running them with the heavy hand, the iron fist. Their nationalizing moral solutions makes their terrible solutions universal and now enforced by the secret police, through out every corner of society. None are left unscathed. Evil has not been eliminated but has been give several shots of steroids. These murderous reformers seek to wipe out all vestiges of personal liberty in society in the name of bring justice to society; they are the cruelest enemies of humankind, and their damage is deep and wide.

 

We must not give up on humanity. I know I assert all the time that people are born sinners, postlapsarian, morally defective creatures. Yet, paradoxically, I know that there is not any moral reform possible if it is not shouldered by each agent voluntarily and consciously, without external pressure, deception, empty promises, threats or flattery or bribes.

 

Reform must be a personal choice and is best achieved—by individuals on an individual basis--not by seeking to be perfect, but instead to love the self and others, to seek to be at peace, while simultaneously struggling each day upward and forward by self-actualizing. One works with all that what has as one’s disposal, both one’s defects and morally questionable properties.

 

A society of such reformed and self-reforming individuating supercitizens could then unite to come up with answers to mitigate socially and collectively and democratically, what linger social ills as need addressing still.

 

Evil is with us always, even after Jesus comes back to earth and brings heaven to earth. Evil is embedded in all of us, all the time, ineradicably so. Total, permanent, unending moral victory is not achievable or desirable because uncompromising absolutists and idealists with the purest motives, are haters and killers and poison all wells that they drink from. They collectively cannot make things better, but will make things much worse.

 

By contrast, willing individualists and individuators can make themselves and the world a little bit better, if they try real hard, and that is as good as it will get.