ILLUSIONS,
HALF-TRUTHS AND MASKS. Keywords: God is Dead, Religion is the opium of the
masses, Marx-Engels, Materialism, Reductionism, moral choice, free-will, Solzhenitsyn,
Human Action, Mises, Animal Farm, Hayek, Ayn Rand.
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| Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation. Former KGB officer. Infiltrated the security forces of the Yeltsin democratic government, by 1996 he was the head of the Federal Security Forces. By 1999 he was appointed Prime Minister. After the forced resignation of Yeltsin he assumed the Presidency. He was been in power since then, after several election cycles and changes to the new Constitution. In this photo, the former communist-atheist is shown leading in a religious ceremony. |
ILLUSIONS, HALF-TRUTHS AND MASKS
A meditation about
the new rise of communism in America
By Xuan Quen Santos
PART V
“Over half
century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people
offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen
Russia: -Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened-. Since then,
I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our revolution; in
the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal
testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the
effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked
today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous
revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put
it more accurately than to repeat: -Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this
happened.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
Templeton Address in London on May 10, 1983
God is not
dead, just forgotten.
This was the
conclusion that Solzhenitsyn reached about the cause of the Russian Revolution,
the emblematic example of the communist system created by the Marxist ideology.
He had served the totalitarian Soviet state as a soldier in WW II and ended up arrested
and in prison for criticizing Stalin in a private letter opened by censors.
Sent to the Gulag prison camps, he met Christian prisoners. Their examples and
faith led him to find God. Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in Literature
in 1970. He was released from prison after eleven years and eventually exiled
in the West. As a lecturer and writer, he
was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union and the barbarism of atheistic
totalitarianism. Among his most significant publications are “One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich” (1962), “Cancer Ward” (1966), “The Gulag
Archipelago” (1973), and “Warning to the West” (1976).
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| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) Prisoner of the Soviet Gulag, dissident writer Nobel Prize in Literature 1970 |
Solzhenitsyn is
not alone. For more than a century, generation after generation of Russian
writers have described life under totalitarian regimes, Imperial Russia and Soviet Marxism. Names like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol,
Pasternak, Sakharov, Shcharansky and many others, have laid bare the permanent
struggle of the common person that lives under continuous repression, poverty
and constant scarcity, fear of death, depression and a negative outlook on the
future. But none have made a clearer connection to the atheist, and more
clearly anti-religious character of Marxism. After living in the United States
for many years, Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after the fall of the Soviet
Union. He received many honors, prizes, medals and awards as an honored
citizen. He died in 2008, only to see the new Russian Federation abandon its
opportunity to develop as a free society of free persons, with a representative
government, and install Putin, blessed by the Orthodox authorities, and perform
re-election after re-election until his mask fell off. A new flag, a new
constitution, a new despot, but the same political scheme after all. What would
Solzhenitsyn think of his country now? Was he used by Putin as propaganda? His
family stayed in Vermont and became US citizens.
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| Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Controversial philosopher. Ill since childhood, drug-addict, suffered severe illnesses throughout his adult life, with periods of severe depression. His poor health culminated in a complete mental and physical breakdown in 1889, ending in a decade of dementia. |
Solzhenitsyn’s
remark is a hopeful response to the phrase made famous by F. Nietzsche, who wrote
“God is dead” in “The Gay Science” (1882). He explained that the
belief in the Christian God had become unbelievable, thus, everything that was based
upon this belief, including the whole European morality and Western traditions
of jurisprudence and law are bound to collapse. This created a need for individuals
to create their own values of morality in a secular society. Nietzsche’s
remarks evidenced a process that had taken place during the previous two
centuries. Marx was already a product of that trend.
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| Karl Marx (1818-1883) Obsessive worker but hardly ever completed anything. Socially awkward, had difficulty establishing personal relations. Instrumental rather social learner; isolated. His father criticized him for his "ignorance of other people's feelings". Focused on details, Slovenly, oblivious to his appearance and the filthy living conditions of his own family. Had difficulties accepting personal responsibilities. Are these symptoms of the Spectrum of Autism and ADHD? |
Karl Marx wrote “Religion
is the opiate of the masses” in “A Contribution to the Critique of
Hegel's Philosophy of Right” (1843). He had recently graduated from university
where he had been active as a radical Young Hegelian interested in applying
Hegel’s dialectics to political and social conditions. In context, the quote
reads: "Religion is the consolation of the oppressed, the heart of a
heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the masses."
How much did his family’s break from its orthodox rabbinic tradition influence
his views has not been considered by his biographers. Ostracism from a
traditionally very supportive social group has consequences, particularly if
you commit apostasy and adopt Lutheranism but not obtain full acceptance, as
was the case in conservative Prussia. Regardless of whether or not this
psychological predisposition influenced his work, anti-church and eventually
anti-God were already trends resulting from the times.
Richard Rothe, a
Lutheran Theologian and Ethicist wrote “God is dead” in his
theological text “The Beginnings of the Christian Church and Its Constitution”
(1837). He argued as a warning that the state needs the church to reach its
goal of demonstrating moral conduct. He had studied in Berlin University and
was also a follower of Hegel, but did not deviate from the idealism of the
master. He may have been the first to recognize the changes resulting from
secularization that were taking place.
G. W. F. Hegel wrote “God is dead” in “The Phenomenology of Spirit “(1807)) as an important part of understanding the nature of the divine in the Christian faith, not as negating its existence. In discussing religious beliefs he attempted to stay away from the specifics of religious dogmas, definitions and imagery. This led him to create a Hegelian language on religion that needs to be mastered ahead of any consideration of his ideas. For the layman, it is enough to discover that modern Judaism is much influenced by Hegel’s abstract ideas. Hegel also proposes that religion, particularly Christianity with its Jewish ancestry, represents a culmination of the union of the divine and human nature in a way that neither purely symbolic nor doctrinal conceptions of God can achieve. The essential idea that is the basis for this conclusion is the recognition that the human person possesses self-determination, agency, it is capable of thoughtful and deliberate actions, and thus capable of moral behavior. This is what the faithful believe with the phrase “created in his image”. It is also the essential idea that led to the discovery of the economic laws that govern the free market economy, the free enterprise economy, or just plainly, the market. Adam Smith had described it as just “an extension of our natural liberty”.
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| The Cult to Reason during Robespierre's period of the French Revolution |
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| God is Dead...He is Risen |
Since Medieval
times, writings using the phrase “God is Dead” or a similar reference about the
death of Christ had centered on its meaning as a component of his humanity, the
cycle of redemption, and the passing to an afterlife. That is, an affirmation
of the faith. Eighty years passed for the same three words of Hegel to change
their meaning into Nietzsche’s opposite. Marx has much to do in the process and
the explanation is in the one word that also turned Hegel’s dialectic idealism
into its opposite: materialism.
Marx baptized his method as “dialectical
materialism”. He borrowed the first word from Hegel but applied it to
formulate a model to explain the causes of history. I have discussed how limited
it is and its main flaws as it was based on insufficient and incomplete
historical data, it lacks predictability, it was based on erroneous economic
science, and it contradicts the open-ended principle of an evolutionary process
which generated the model. The second word, materialism, shaped his
proposed communist vision into what it actually becomes, as all the evidence
shows, and not in the workers’ paradise he promised. Solzhenitsyn claims that
sixty million people died in the Soviet Union as a result of communist
policies. The Washington D. C. Museum of the Victims of Communism places the
number world-wide at more than one hundred million. Independent estimates that
include proxy-wars, terrorism, guerrilla wars and famines in failed communist
states, raise the number of victims in 125 years to more than 250 million people.
How many more have been added with the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
The word
“materialism” is now commonly used as in “Material Girl” (Madonna 1985),
describing an extreme inclination to consume, to buy, or to have wealth at the
expense of other forms of personal satisfaction such as love, relaxation,
friendship, visiting a museum, listening to music, or just reading. In
philosophy it refers to a current of thinking that developed in the XVIII
century during the early part of The Enlightenment. As incredible as it may
seem to some, its essential idea developed more than 25 centuries ago when a
Greek called Democritus conceived of “the atom” as a universal component of all
matter.
Materialism as a
philosophical doctrine proposes that only material beings exist. Its opposite
is idealism. Materialism includes living beings, such as humans. It
was particularly influential in France. It challenged traditional views of
human nature and morality, suggesting that everything from our nervous system
to our thoughts and emotions could be explained by the physical sciences, such
as electrochemical processes in the brain, or hormones and essential minerals
in our body. It is obvious these beliefs leave out of existence anything
metaphysical or spiritual. This led to a conflict with traditional religion and
morality, as it seemed to leave little room for God and free will. It also
destroys the fundamental idea behind the science of economics. Man is moral
choice, says an old aphorism. I can add from personal experience that definitely, Woman is shopping choice. Human
action, deliberate and purposeful, is the source of ethics as much as it is the
foundation of economics and other behavioral sciences. Materialism, in its
essence, sees the universe operating like a machine governed by unalterable
laws, which also apply to human beings. The first qualities that are denied of
us are our free will and our individuality. We are to obey invariably to the
same stimuli; we respond like programmed robots. "Religion is the
consolation of the oppressed, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of
soulless conditions” really means in Marx’s ideological construction: God’s
grace is a useful fiction that keeps quiet those in need. God’s love is used to
control those that suffer. God’s mercy is used to redeem the fallen.
Robespierre, Lenin and Mao tried to destroy God, religion and the churches.
Marx did not call for that. That is why Putin rebuilt the Orthodox churches and
finances their operations. That is why the Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow blessed
the invasion of Ukraine. That is why all religions in China are controlled by
the state. That is why Jesuit Pope Francis allowed Xi to appoint the bishop of Lüliang.
That is why Jesuit Marxists came up with the phrase “preferential option for
the poor”, led young seminarists into the path of Liberation Theology which
inevitably took many to become guerrilla warriors in the less developed
countries of the world and kill in the name of Christ, the revolutionary.
In the
unidimensional material world, the human person does not exist. Only the
collective of equal bodies is recognized, very much like an anthill or a
beehive. They behave either controlled by DNA, or by instinctive reactions to
the environment. Science has provided a new option of controlling human
behavior: conditioning, brainwashing. The state controls education. The sole
purpose of existence of the parts is the functioning and preservation of the
whole. Society exists with immutable laws and disposable humans. That is why
the role of the proletariat is to produce more workers for the factories of the
beehive. Their life has no meaning beyond their reason to exist which is to
support the state. That is why they will be provided with what they need, but
they are expected to give all they can according to their ability.
By having taken
the route of materialism, Marx-Engels reduced the multidimensional and holistic
complexity of the human person to that of a grain of sand in the ocean. They
committed the same error, but multiplied it a hundredfold, when the complex
social order is reduced to a pile of sand without accounting for the ocean, the
sun or the weather. This reasoning error is called reductionism. Today, the
social sciences recognize that their object of study, the social order, is a
complex phenomenon that although it results from human action, is not the
product of human design. The appearance of market prices comes from the future
as interpreted by the individual expectations of all buyers and sellers. They
are constantly changing. No one can possess the timely information to emulate
this process. It is not a matter of having all the data of past prices, or the
size or speed of the computer. Supply chains in an ever changing world market
would be another example. Humility has yet to come to the attitude of most economists.
There is another
error. The Marxist model ends at the revolution with little to say as to what
would come after. Engels tried to fill the blanks, but it was not enough. Their
followers have been trying to formulate an economic theory ever since without success.
A century of failures proves it. No one ever explained how the ants are
supposed to be organized. Who is going to organize it and how? This naivete was
exposed by Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, when he lauds the
superiority of the Marxist system.
“At normal
times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that
there is always wasted surplus, and always unemployment.” On socialism: “On a socialist economy these
problems do not exist. The State simply calculates what goods will be
needed and does its best to produce them. Production is only limited by the
amount of labor and raw materials. Money, for internal purposes, ceases to be a
mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued
in sufficient quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be available
at the moment.”
Did you know
that for decades the Soviet spies transmitted to the Moscow bureaucrats detailed
information about the prices of commodities and of thousands of consumer goods
usually found in any American supermarket? Do you remember the newspaper
inserts with special offers and coupons? Now they are in your smart phone. Think
of what happens every day in the specialized markets: the stock market, the
bond market, the commodities market, the precious metals market… Are market
prices totally predictable?
Marxists do not have a theory of prices, they
never developed one; and even in the age of supercomputers, the market prices
are changing by the second. Prices are not coming from the past; they are not
history. Prices are coming from the future. Without real market prices,
industry cannot have the information as to what to produce and how much. Consumers
cannot distribute their limited income efficiently. The history of economic
miscalculations of the socialist regimes all over the world are abundant and
tragic. What do you know about the ecological and economic tragedy of the Aral Sea? Check it out. It is so gross that it changed the map of the world. The next time you see on the TV a nation starving and asking for free
food from the United States, research first if it has property rights as the
basis of its agriculture, or whether it is governed by socialists or Marxists,
or under attack by them. It should not surprise anyone that intentional famine
has been used in the past as a method to control the obedience of the
population. Stalin, Mao, North Korea, Pol-pot, Congo, Nigeria, Ethiopia,
Somalia, Sudan, Yemen… What about Gaza? Who is blamed for the famine? Most
likely climate change!!! Of course, it is caused by capitalism.
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| After the failure of the collectivization of farms in Mao's China, between 15 to 20 million people died of starvation. This marked a similar episode in the Soviet Union. Famine is a policy under communism. |
Blair-Orwell’s naivete was also exposed by providing the answer to who is going to organize the communist society in such a way that it will create the workers’ paradise. First sold under the banner of equality, the communist system necessarily has at least two classes of people. One class is the proletariat majority that obeys. The other class is the membership of the CP, the Communist Party that rules. Blair-Orwell wrote “Animal Farm” (1945) as a criticism to the Stalin regime that by then had been exposed for its brutality and failure. As a naïve socialist, he probably never thought he would be describing the final stage of any and all socialist experiments.
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| A XX Century classic, a portrayal of Stalin's Communism How the promise of equality degenerates into totalitarianism |
One of
Blair-Orwell’s most famous lines and my favorite of his many artful insights
into the totalitarian mindset is "All animals are equal, but some
animals are more equal than others". After revolting against the
farmer, the animals initially approve the principle of equality in sharing the
benefits of their labor. However, as the pigs take control, they re-write the
commandment "All animals are equal" and justify their own privileges exercising their power over the
other animals. What Blair-Orwell believed, as do most socialists, or at least
they pretend to believe, is that the regime of the Soviet Union was a deviation
from socialist dictum and Marxist “purity”. Science says it was an inevitable consequence. It was the destination of The Road to Serfdom.
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| Animal Farm (1945) is a satirical allegorical dystopian novella. Coming to New York streets soon! |
Theory and
history have proven that socialism inevitably ends in a totalitarian regime,
regardless of its name or banner. Theory and history prove that the economic
conditions of any and all socialist regimes seem to work and last until the
previously accumulated capital is depleted, worn out or destroyed. When the last communist leaves, he does not need to turn the lights out. They had been without power for months.
Marx-Engels began to publish their ideas of what their economic system would be and how it would operate between the 1870s and 1880s. This is more than 25 years after they had inspired the labor unions to declare the revolution against capitalism. Marx died in 1883 and Engels in 1895. The substantive work of Engels is really the backbone of what is known as Marxism, the source of all forms of modern socialism. It did not take long to be debated and debunked. Austria had then a renowned faculty of economics at the University of Vienna, then also the center of the powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire. Their academic rivals were part of the Historical School of the German universities who had been attacking the world trend towards free trade that the Industrial Revolution had promoted and was moving into Europe from America and England. Marx is a deviate product of the German focus on history. It did not take long for the Austrians to confront the Marxist-Engels schemes. The names of Menger, Wieser, Bohm-Bawerk, Schumpeter, Mises and Hayek are associated with the Austrian School. Unfortunately, what happened to the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of WW I, sent the Austrian scholars on a diaspora. Austria went from being one of the most expansive political countries in the world to being one of the smallest, broke and isolated. Schumpeter was the first and he became identified as a scholar with Harvard. Mises taught in New York and was a beacon at the Foundation for Economic Education, now in Atlanta. Hayek moved first to London, then moved to Chicago where he had a very productive career, before moving back to Austria and Germany. The Austrian School has flourished in America. These economists are making significant changes to the prevailing thinking in economic theory: Kirzner, Rothbard, Sennholz, F. A. Harper, Boettke, Ebeling, Selgin, L. White, and Roger Garrison, among others.
It was Eugene
Bohm-Bawerk who debunked in 1898 the Marx-Engels theoretical propositions for
socialism shortly after they were finally published in 1894, just before
Engel’s death. A graduate in law and economics, after serving in the civil
service, he taught at the University of Vienna. He was appointed Minister of
Finance for several periods between 1995 to 1900. At the time of WW I he had
returned to teaching. The collapse of the Austrian Empire sent the Vienna
school into oblivion. The work of the early Austrian academics was not
available in English until decades after WW I. The work of Schumpeter, Mises
and Hayek only became known until after they moved to the West before the start
of WW II.
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| HAYEK'S WARNING - CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW |
Nothing I have
written in these pages is new. One does not need to know advanced mathematics
to understand the flaws of socialism in any of its forms, regardless of the
masks that conceal its true identity or the language its mobs are chanting. It
is not necessary to discuss the details or get involved in endless debates
about the doublespeak that was invented to disguise its lack of substance. It
has been debunked before and the arguments are the same.
Five easy-to-read books go directly to the heart of the matter. They are: “Bureaucracy” (1944) and “Socialism” (1922) by L. von Mises; “The Road to Serfdom” (1944) and “Fatal Conceit” (1988) by F. A. Hayek; and “Atlas Shrugged” (1957) by Ayn Rand. They are all in print and also available in the thrift market.
Rand wrote for the general public from the perspective of a victim of the Soviet regime of terror, but very alarmed about what she was witnessing in America as it plunged into the masked socialist regime of FDR. She provides in her novels the illustrations to Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom”. Several of her novels were made into movies.
A note of interest is that Ayn Rand was originally a refugee from the early days of the Soviet Union. She made her life in New York. Her real name was Alissa Rosenbaum. She was born on February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, she witnessed the first shots of the Russian Revolution from her balcony when she was 12 years. She moved to America in 1926. Her books and lectures became a significant force in the American Libertarian movement. In a way, she is the American Solzhenitsyn. In 1988 she wrote: “There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism - by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide”. In my opinion, the acclaim and following she received early on turned into a cult. She began to lecture on her views about the nature of the world and humanity. In fact, she developed a doctrine that opposes Marxism that turned out to be another materialistic proposal she called “objectivism”. Many of the commentaries made about extreme egoism, or unbridled laissez faire, as reflected in the phrase “greed is good, greed is right” of the character Gordon Gekko, are really responding to Rand’s reductionist ideas. When you debate Rand’s views you are not considering the holistic, ethical and even spiritual aspects of the economic system that can just be called “the market”, without any other qualifications. The market is free, or it is not.
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| Ayn Rand on Park Avenue, NY |
In a collection
of lectures given in America and in England titled “Warning to the West” (1975),
Solzhenitsyn wrote: “There is not even a single precise definition of
socialism that is generally recognized; all we have is a sort of hazy
shimmering concept of something good, something noble, so that two socialists
talking to each other about socialism might just as well be talking about
completely different things…But socialism defies logic. You see, it is an
emotional impulse, a kind of worldly religion, and nobody has the slightest
need to study or even to read the teachings of the early prophets…Socialism is
defended with a passionate lack of reason.”
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| Solzhenitsyn, prisoner in the Gulag |
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