Mark Levin, in American Marxism, on Page 14, writes this: "Almost a decade ago, and before Antifa was widely known and Black Lives Matters (BLM) was established, I wrote of mass movements in my book Ameritopia in the framework of utopianism. Utopianism, whether in the form of Marxism, fascism, or some other form of autocratic statism, is alluring to many because at their core they make glorious claims of a paradisical future and the perfectability of man, if only the existing society and culture are radically transformed or abandoned altogether, and the individual surrenders more of his liberty, free will and security to the cause. Such is the nature of mass movements."
What can we take away from this paragraph? The people are goaded, made fearful and aroused to join a radical mass movement to overturn government and culture, violently if necessary. They are deceived, and what they come to support is a severe, impoverishing cruel police state, that, once installed, is about impossible to dismantle and to discard. The individual loses his liberty, his free will, his right to speak and think freely, his wealth, his happiness and perhaps his life.
What caught my eye especially in this paragraph occurred where Levin writes that autocratic ideologues "make glorious clams of . . . and the perfectibility of man."
Ideologues, postmodernists and Marxist like to go on and on about the anti-essentialist nature that people all share. People are perfectible because they are basically good and because what constitutes their nature is the expression of the socially constructed environment from which they emerge. Revolutionaries deny that there is one human nature, fixed and immutable over time. They imagine that human nature is pliable and that the masses are docile, pawns and puppets to be reprogrammed to match whatever ideal role that the totalitarian masters in a specific government determine for them and envision them as. People's roles, identities and very natures are shaped by the culture and the party that rule that country, and its people by means of their wielding absolute power over the government and the people.
We are born depraved, with a stubborn, fixed nature. If we are perfectible, and we are to some great extent, it is done one individual at a time, of her own free will as she struggles mightily to tame her bestial nature, while growing up to become a good, self-disciplining person, and contributor to society.
By nature we are more willless, passive and other-determined than willful, vigorous, ambitious and self-determining, but paradoxically, it is the human condition that practicing at free willing and self-controlling are acts that strengthen the will and make it strong, powerful and free. This state of moral and ontological being is a value as much as a choice. As the citizens becomes rational, moral, conscious, and alert, her will is free and durable, so with most moral choices, from then on, she will usually elect the moral option. Such strong, ethical citizens do not join mass movements, nor do they want anything but limited government, flattened hierarchies and upper middle class majority running things, one populated by the best kind of people. These countries are comprised of classless society.
It could be that applied virtue ethics training could help each child grow in goodness and self-perfecting, a lifelong struggle at best. Each citizen is self-perfectible, but it is heavy lifting and takes decades to bring about. It can only be brought about one citizen at a time; there is no other way. As maverizers, the participants would improve very much, impressively so even.
We worked so hard to build up this American way of life and civil society in free market, and constitutional republican America, that revolution is very risky and dangerous. Reform yes, but quite slowly to avoid smashing what we spent so long to build up.
We would require individuating supercitizens to insist that all structures and hierarchies be flatttened as much as is feasible to make room for maverizers exercising their right and duty to enjoy their liberty to do their own thing in grand fashion.
I believe that human nature is fixed, universally applicable to all humans, in all nations, over the centuries go backward and forward.
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