Robespierre

 

My son sent me another video the other day, which I looked at this morning, and enjoyed. It was a one-hour overview of the rise and fall of brilliant, lawyer and one of the primary leaders of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre.

 

I do not know much about this man, but he was called the “Incorruptible” because his idealism was so pure, and he would not take bribes. He wanted the will of the common people to run society. He wanted the poor to all have jobs, and all, the men at least, to be able to vote. These ideals are commendable.

 

Robespierre believed that he had a right to use Terror to inflict his revolutionary ideals upon society, and he took the corrupt and unjust ancient regime and replaced it with a socialist dystopia that was far more lawless, cruel, and vicious. Revolution, done wrong, makes things worse, much worse.

 

This goes back to my axiom of moral moderation: it does not matter how noble one’s ideals are; what matters is that one is ever, immediately, consciously aware, that one cannot—like Robespierre and Lenin, take over the government, and use terror, executions and torture to force terrified, cornered people to conform and immediately adopt the dictator’s desired, virtuous behavior due to external coercion from the state, not from their own, individual free choice to model an expected behavior.

 

Notice how the threat of violent punishment for refusal to accept the reform is threatened and used on dissidents if they refuse to go along. This bad means to achieve a good end always makes the whole process sick and pure evil. The bad means always corrupts the good end sought.

 

People must choose goodness and God from their own free will, or forced collective obedience to some lofty ideal makes the world a much sadder, painful, malevolent place, every time.

 

Federally legislating morality by totalitarian idealist produces purges and reigns of terror.

When totalitarian governments are attacking their own people in the name of ideological and moral purity—supposedly for the good of all—this is where we identify evil at is most potent—when the following play out: tyranny, top-down-enforcement, fanatically pure standards, zero tolerance of deviance or intellectual objection, totalitarian intervention and control of private lives, full-bore existing collectivism, and wickedness and suffering arising from mass self-hatred, the product of pure altruistic practices.