Hamlet’s father was supposedly killed by poison poured into his ear. In the same way, the toxin of liberalism is poured into the ears of the young and credulous. It sinks into the bones and forever ruins the tender apparatus of logic, questioning and belief. In fact, many of today’s youth are passing out of schools with an almost complete inability to think independently. Additionally, an unparallelled amount of pressure is being laid upon members of society to acquiesce to pre-determined beliefs, under the rubric of Political Correctness, etc. So increasing numbers of our society are in the perilous position of not being able to defend themselves against false ideas, forced to carry the heavy yoke of ideology they are in no way prepared to understand.
Let’s recall that philosopher John Locke, arguably the American Founder’s chief intellectual influence, went to a school where the headmaster “taught his pupils to think for themselves and to beware of the influence of propaganda.” And yet today, the media, university elites, and political class all have a huge investment in the propagation of large, and often spectacularly creative works of propaganda, such as the cult of Global Warming. For the sake of brevity, the phrase “modern liberalism” is defined as being indistinguishable from socialism.
I. How Poison Works
If liberalism is a perniciously false and wholly injurious system of thought, we can rightly claim it affects a poisonous impact upon its consumers. Poison is itself dangerous because it takes the place, on a molecular level, of something important for living organisms. This harms or kills the recipient, as explained by one site:
Although every poison works differently, they all do the same thing. Poisons get into your body and gum up something essential in your body’s cells. Without that essential something, your cells die, and so do you.
Take, for example, the gas known as carbon monoxide. This poison is produced when things burn. Car exhaust contains carbon monoxide. When you inhale carbon monoxide, it enters your lungs. Inside your lungs, the goal is for red blood cells to release carbon dioxide and to pick up oxygen. But if there is carbon monoxide in the air, it locks into red blood cells at the place where the oxygen normally attaches. And once in a red blood cell, it is very hard to get the carbon monoxide out. Eventually, if you breathe enough of it, all of your red blood cells get polluted with carbon monoxide and cannot carry any oxygen. At that point, all of the cells in your body suffocate from lack of oxygen, and you die.
The application here is that modern liberalism takes the place of something necessary, such as effective political theory, or the naturally propensity towards religious belief. Further, and like a dangerous poison, liberalism takes the place of useful, safe and effective ideas and beliefs, and replaces these with opposition to natural rights, a fixation on tyranny, and a miss-education over what is most important in life.
II. Liberalism as Pseudo-Religion
The term liberalism is used in many different ways, and so must be defined. First, “liberalism” today is not defined how it was a hundred years ago. Around 1900, Marxists—who were frustrated at not being taken seriously, decided to purposely morph their image. They decided to usurp the term “liberal.” This is ironic, since modern liberalism concerns using the state to impose change from the top down, the very antithesis of individual freedom. The term “liberalism” comes from the same root as “liberty,” and so the original liberals, were followers of John Locke, best known today as Conservative, or Classical Liberals. Ralph Raico writes of this change in Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School,
The “Old” vs. the “New” Liberalism: It is not disputed that the popular meaning of liberal has changed drastically over time. It is a well-known story how, around 1900, in English-speaking countries and elsewhere, the term was captured by writers who were essentially social democrats.
In one of the most unusual and dismaying developments in history, the mentally unmoored philosopher Auguste Comte (see Sources of Madness‚ÄîThe Insane Thinkers of the Modern Age) decided that religion caused more harm than good (Of course, Karl Marx was greatly influenced by Comte’s ideas). Instead, Comte—who had gone insane, was institutionalized, then released officially uncured by his doctor—demanded a new religion based upon only the tenets of humanism. Andrew Wernick, inAuguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity, The Post-Theistic Program of French Social Theory, states,
At the heart of Auguste Comte’s program for resolving the `crisis’ of (early) industrial society and explicitly so with the publication, in 1851, of Systeme de politique positive ou Traite de sociologie, was a project for `positivising’ religion by instituting (as its subtitle announced) la religion de l’Humanite.
In fact, after explaining his new idea, Comte was accused of attempting a secular Catholic Church. Another writer describes this religion:
The positivist “Religion of Humanity” was essentially an attempt to take out all transcendence and superstitions of religious doctrine while keeping ritual, ceremony and ethical teaching. It sought to discard the remnants of the two more primitive stages of society, the Religious and Metaphysical stage, while cultivating the values of the Positive age.
There were no supernatural entities in the Religion of Humanity, and the only afterlife it promised was the reputation of one’s life carried on in the memories of relatives and friends and commemorated in the Church’s rituals. But it had some other bizarre characteristics, which many of his earlier followers found disturbing. He proclaimed himself “the High Priest of Humanity”, demanding to be obeyed without question by his followers. T.H. Huxley expressed a popularly held view when he claimed that the Religion of Humanity was little more than Catholicism stripped of its Christianity—a kind of pseudo-secular “revival of Catholicism.”
Bear in mind Karl Marx was highly influenced by Comte, in both his religious views, and also the demand for society to be run by scientists, which he Comte termed Positivism. Socialism, essentially indistinguishable from liberalism, creates a demand for a religion of humanity, wholly opposed to biblical beliefs based upon revelation. This is echoed in the writing of the First Humanist Manifesto. But liberalism has become the intellectual poison which blocks the average person from thinking clearly, understanding printed word or persuasive speeches, or detecting propaganda when exposed to the mind.
III. Man, the Measure of All Things?
Do liberals believe in anything beyond themselves? It was Greek philosopher Protagorus who claimed, Man is the Measure of All Things. In many ways, modern liberals have not progressed much beyond this, as described here:
Protagoras is known primarily for three claims (1) that man is the measure of all things (which is often interpreted as a sort of radical relativism) (2) that he could make the “worse (or weaker) argument appear the better (or stronger)” and (3) that one could not tell if the gods existed or not.
If modern liberalism rejects God, like Comte, Marx and Protagorus before, what are the effects of this refusal? In essence, this is not just a total rejection of religion, but of all traditional and received wisdom—for religion often is the main carrier of such wisdom. Therefore, in essence, liberalism worships the modern age and defaults to the novel in such a manner as to create great danger for all.
For instance, Marx referred to his ideas as “scientific,” when he apparently had no real understanding of the term. Likewise, when Mao brought in his reforms during the Great Leap Forward, he supported notions he admittedly had no working model for, such as the communes, spread across the country to house displaced farmers. Today, we again see the mindless effects of liberalism, in its apocalyptic form, in the Global Warming cult which not even the coldest of seasons can displace.
Further, and for whatever reason this takes place, when societies turn increasingly to humanistic standards, they become increasingly brutal and arbitrary. One need only look at the various ways people meet an early death in our society. Abortion is an obvious example. But, increasingly in Europe, we see not only abortion, but euthanasia, and now even support for killing terminally ill children. One news site described this:
The Belgium Parliament has passed a highly controversial law allowing for the killing of children and patients with Dementia and Alzheimer’s. The Bill was passed on Friday 14 February by 86 to 44 with 12 abstentions. Belgium now becomes the first country to allow for sick children to be killed. Public opinion polls revealed that the Bill had the support of 75% of Belgians. Doctors are now permitted to kill their child patients if the child is in unbearable pain, is in a terminal condition, has requested it repeatedly, has parental consent, has been seen by a psychiatrist and a psychologist and the killing is approved by the patient’s doctor. Doctors kill their patients with a lethal injection.
Of course, this is nothing compared to the genocide of communist governments last century. There were hundreds of millions of innocent civilians murdered by government, often for no obvious reason.
IV. Return to Sanity: Real Liberalism—Liberal Arts & Trivium
One of the great milestones of classical liberalism is the old foundation of education, the Trivium which focused upon the skills of composition, logic, and rhetoric. Reinstating this one element back into the curriculum of the youngest students would do more than anything to turn back the tide of illiteracy and illogic.
The Trivium isdescribed here:
Training in the skills of Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric should be the central focus of elementary education. The goal of the Trivium is to prepare students to be masters of language so that they understand with precision what they hear and read, and speak and write with precision what they think with clarity
Dorothy Sayers, famous British witter, described the importance of this here:
The whole of the Trivium was, in fact, intended to teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning, before he began to apply them to “subjects” at all. First, he learned a language; not just how to order a meal in a foreign language, but the structure of a language, and hence of language itself—what it was, how it was put together, and how it worked. Secondly, he learned how to use language; how to define his terms and make accurate statements; how to construct an argument and how to detect fallacies in argument. Dialectic, that is to say, embraced Logic and Disputation. Thirdly, he learned to express himself in language—how to say what he had to say elegantly and persuasively.
At the end of his course, he was required to compose a thesis upon some theme set by his masters or chosen by himself, and afterwards to defend his thesis against the criticism of the faculty. By this time, he would have learned—or woe betide him—not merely to write an essay on paper, but to speak audibly and intelligibly from a platform, and to use his wits quickly when heckled. There would also be questions, cogent and shrewd, from those who had already run the gauntlet of debate.
Conclusion
Modern humankind has been poisoned by the ridiculous, failed, yet highly emotive ideology called liberalism. Until we have the common sense to want to train our children how to think, we cannot be surprised when generation after generation are manipulated, twisted and poisoned to meet the desires of the Marxist elites. Let’s pray this changes before the entire world becomes enslaved under the whip hand of humanist tyranny.
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