The Lies of the Left and the Right

The Lies of the Left and the Right
by Ed Thompson

While Ayn Rand was thought of fondly by some conservatives, she was not, herself, a conservative. In fact, when asked who she liked the least -- liberals or conservatives -- she said it was the conservatives who deserve the most criticism. She said that the liberals were more honest about what they want from you (either partial or full human slavery in exchange for a utopian ideal), and that you don't always know where you stand with a conservative. A liberal will straightforwardly cause economic disaster (such as the one we got from them in 2009), but the conservative will often half-heartedly defend principles or beliefs -- leading to the same disaster, but at a slower, and therefore, less issue-revealing, pace.

The analogy from Glenn Beck is that you can boil a live frog slowly, as long as the temperature doesn't increase too fast. Being cold-blooded, the frog will not notice that it is being boiled to death, if there is no clear spike in temperature. With humans, you can eventually enslave them if you do it slowly and apologetically. This is what we were getting with George W. Bush as our president -- a slow descent into a slave society.

With Obama, however, the purpose of government controls is more clear. It is more of a straight-forward (if not outspoken) goal to silence opposition, to pit neighbor against neighbor, class against class, and race against race -- in order to enslave the majority of the population for the supposedly-enlightened purposes of the elite residing in ivory towers or the halls of Harvard. It isn't a coincidence that Obama's appointees don't typically work for a living, but rather come from academia or related institutions. They are thinkers, not doers. They are not even non-contradictory thinkers.

So let's revisit the question: Who's worse? It turns out that liberals and conservatives are both probably equally dishonest, but dishonest on different levels. The liberal speaks of a hyper-intelligent or hyper-moral elite who can and should enforce imagined rules and regulations, in order to bring us closer to a utopian ideal. There will be victims. There are always victims with left-liberal politics. It is a predatory politics by nature. It is not ever "of the people, by the people, and for the people" -- even if it is sometimes as much as 2 out of those 3 items. It is not a 'live-and-let-live' politics, but a 'sacrifice-for-someone's-questionably-legitimate-notion-of-justice' politics.

So what is their lie? The liberal lie is three-fold:

1) Man is depraved, but we can create utopian "social justice" -- if only with the use of centralized force and fraud.
2) Utopian "social justice" would be good, or at least right, for human beings on earth.
3) Good ends can come from evil means (the ends will unqualifiedly justify the means).

So the liberal lie is as much a lie to oneself as it is a lie to others. You have to work to get yourself to believe that your 'injustice' feelings are legitimate calls to power over others (in order to benefit those others, who are virtually all otherwise-hopeless criminals and victims in your mind). In doing so, you have to ignore or evade data of individualistic people doing well, because it is something that contradicts your grand idea of mankind. You have to ignore how you cannot defend that man is by his own nature depraved, but that some of these depraved have to be given power over the other of us depraved ones -- in order to reduce that very depravity. That our salvation will come from a 'proper' form of slavery. And the list goes on.

But what about the conservatives? What is the nature of their lie or lies? Again, I see 3 lies that mutually reinforce each other:

1) That man is depraved.
2) That God makes him better.
3) That God likes free markets.

The implementation of a political system whereby you claim that God believes the same things that you do -- and that God is specifically on your side -- will, if followed thoroughly, result in despotic rule at the end of a barrel of a gun. But, on the surface, it appears well-intentioned -- just like the lies from the liberal left can appear well-intentioned. The crack in the foundation occurs with the legislation of morality. With the power of God behind you, why not implement laws that restrict the freedoms of others? After all, who can disagree with what it is that God wants? This is the thinking of an Islamofascist.

So Rand was right, you cannot defend freedom via an appeal to mysticism -- you can only slow down a national descent into hell. Also, there is something more straightforward about socialists who overtly seek to silence opposition and enslave citizens. It is a kind of brutal honesty not found on the Right. The rhetoric, however, is another story:

While conservatives are more dishonest in terms of actually being freedom fighters (they either don't know enough or don't care enough about how to actually go about defending freedom), liberals are more dishonest in terms of rhetorical idea-mongering. They use all manner of utilitarian deceit in order to achieve their utopian ideal. A recent example was a school-utilized cartoon depicting capitalism as back-breaking toil and slavery, and communism as an easily-obtained, blissful equality, sprinkled with ample prosperity. No imagery is given regarding the millions upon millions of people who suffer and die under communism. No imagery is given regarding the ascent out of slavery and poverty that was caused by capitalism more than by anything else.

If I were a post-modern, existentialist liberal -- where my feelings reign supreme over reality -- I have to say that I would rather live under the conservative's lies in the beginning of the country's demise (while we're still rich from capitalism), but that at a critical point, I would like to switch and live under the lies of the liberal in order to speed up our country's collapse (and subsequent rebuilding). I am not a post-modern, existentialist liberal, however. I am not even a conservative, mystical idealist. It really sucks being a metaphysical realist when a lot of the people around you aren't.

I guess the only way forward is the philosophical education of the citizenry, doing at least one small thing in order to improve our country's culture. I hope that this essay counts as a start ...

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