Posted by
The Proud Liberal on Tuesday, October 09, 2007 11:13:40 AM
Socialism is an abstraction, just as the free market is an abstraction. Neither exist as entities in nature but only in the mind of man; man the maker of abstractions that help him simplify the over abundance of information about the nature of reality. This simplification, this abstracting creates categories in the minds of men. But outside of our minds reality is not divided as the categories imply that reality is divided. One such category is "government."
In reality government is not a separate thing or entity, with definite borders. It is not cut off from the flow of life, the flow of reality, but interacts with the life of America, dynamically, flexibly.
Conservatives make their first ignorant mistake by assuming that the category "government" is a separate entity and that it is a bad separate entity. Conservatives think that government is separate from the free market, that it is separate from individual people in the United States, that it is one organic entity with one mind and will that thinks and acts against the interests of all the people in the United States.
Without this basic understanding of how human beings think conservatives will never be able to think intelligently about anything, including socialism.
In general, conservatives are confused about how the world is and how it got to be the way it is. Intellectual conservatives ascribe our present Western Christian Society to an error that occurred somewhere between the 9th century and the 20th century. The error is that man began thinking that he could create God's transcendental realm here on earth. This is called Gnosticism or the Gnostic Heresy.