Joseph Goebbels was Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. His strategy was to tell a big lie, then say it loud and a lot, until the ignorant populace begins to believe it. The contemporary strategy, since rational people often do not believe the first lie, is to switch to a second lie, and then to another, and then another.
Switching generates confusion and a disbelief in the possibility of truth. The postmoderns, of course, have been teaching for many years that reason, logic, and truth are out, leaving each of us with our own “narratives,” which I prefer to call fictions.
Facts, to most of these “thought” leaders, don’t matter.
Yesterday, the “lethality” of a coronavirus was the message of the day. Today, it is “defund the police.” Tomorrow it will be something else. An underlying theme for decades has been “America’s systemic racism to protect white privilege.” As with Goebbels, today’s leftist propaganda is agenda driven—to destroy capitalism and now to remove or defeat our current president (who represents capitalism). But I want to identify a more fundamental point driving the agenda: the ethics of altruism, the doctrine of self-sacrifice.
“Compassion” is the buzzword used to intimidate and silence anyone who may object to this leftist propaganda. “You’re not compassionate toward the poor, the black, women, LGBTQ’s, etc.” Why? “Because you can’t feel what they feel. You enjoy white (rich, male, straight) privilege.”
The problem with this ruse is that too many rational people (non-leftists) don’t buy the alleged discrimination the propagandists say these groups of people (Marxist classes) are still experiencing in the year 2020. Rational people also therefore do not buy the guilt trip that is being laid on them.
The left now has to go further down the rathole to find additional “classes”—criminals and terrorists—to feel compassion for. This goes beyond societal status to blatant immorality and injustice, stretching the rational person’s credulity. (A rathole, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a seemingly bottomless or unfillable hole.” Leftists who wear the environmentalist hat have moved further down to the unhuman and inanimate: trees and rocks that we must feel compassion for. Have we hit bottom yet?)
If you object? “Well, it’s obvious you have no compassion! We must have compassion for the least well off and that includes illegal aliens and nonviolent criminals.” Looting and burning buildings? “That’s just property. We have to understand the looters’ plight.”*
Where does this come from?? It comes from the epistemological requirement of consistency and the ethical and political “maximin” principle of Harvard philosopher John Rawls.
The doctrine of self-sacrifice means to give up a higher value to a lower or non-value. As I wrote in Independent Judgment and Introspection (pp. 43-44):
Self-sacrifice means, for example, the pursuit of a career to please one’s parents instead of the career one truly loves and wants. It means marrying a person one does not love—again, to please those “significant others” who may disapprove of your choice’s religion, social class, race, or ethnicity. It means doing your job because it’s your duty, not because you enjoy it. It means giving birth to a child you do not want and enslaving yourself to a mistake or accident that occurred when you were young.According to altruism, all of these actions are moral, making you virtuous. To be consistent, it also means you must care about and give up your values for the sake of those who are less well off, even if the sacrifice drags you down to their level. That is the ultimate goal of altruism and it is the goal and meaning of Rawls’ maximin principle.**
“Maximin” means to maximize the minimum. It does not mean to raise the least well off up to the level of those who are in a better situation. It means, if necessary, according to Rawls, to drag those in the middle and upper social regions down to the level of the lower. This would then make society truly just—socially just—and equal, that is, egalitarian. Rawls states (p. 227):
All inequalities should be arranged for the advantage for the most unfortunate even if some inequalities are not to the advantage of those in the middle positions.It is not just a redistribution of wealth, but also of social position. The poor are not just to be given some of the wealthy’s money, but also their status.
This is Marxism and Marx’s updated determinism. The fundamental assumption is that all social and economic positions in society are dealt to each of us at birth, but some, those in the higher positions, acquired additional status and wealth by stealing from the poor and downtrodden. Such people, whether bourgeoisie or white, straight males or capitalists must be punished to rightly achieve justice.
In today’s world, the worst off “poor” are not those who live in slums, but those who have been prevented from coming to this country or who loot and destroy property. The least advantaged, when the altruist premise is pushed to its most consistent extreme, are illegals and criminals—and terrorists.
Sacrificing everything we have worked for and earned is the ultimate giving up of higher values for the sake of lesser or non-values.
As I wrote in 2016, the reductio of bureaucracy (Applying Principles, pp. 117-21) is the concentration camp. Because, as Victor Frankl wrote about his experience in such a camp, “the list had to be correct.” Totalitarian societies are massive bureaucracies and the camps are just one more bureau.
So similarly, the reductio of altruism is the sacrifice we must all make to criminals and terrorists (and trees and rocks).
Says who? The left. The preaching of sacrifices is how they seek and, if not stopped, gain power.
Ayn Rand warned us: “It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”
Rand also taught us that the smallest minority on earth is the individual, not groups or Marxist classes (or trees or rocks). This means, simply, we should all be advocates and promoters of philosophical individualism! This also means we each can then work hard and strive to lift ourselves up beyond our “original (Rawlsian) positions.”
Our current president, incidentally, is not an altruist, which is why he is so hated. He does not want to sacrifice anyone’s interest, including our national interests, to anyone else. He in fact wants every individual to be able to lift him- or herself up to as high a level as possible!
* One synonym of compassion is pity and one definition of pity is “a somewhat disdainful or contemptuous feeling of regret over the condition of one viewed by the speaker as in some way inferior or reprehensible.” An appropriate description of leftist condescension.
** Rawls apparently did not like the maximin designation, since he saw it as coming from rational choice theory. He does, however, spend several pages discussing it in his major work, A Theory of Justice (chap. III, sec. 26). The words have become associated with his theory.
