The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere “understanding”. Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.
CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
I have never heard a sermon against envy. A sin remains a sin no matter how pretty a wrapper we place over it. Politics in this Vale of Tears can do many things, but it can never make sin into virtue.
Liberals do their evil, the utopian salvation of mankind, by aggrandizing themselves in the virtues of mercy and justice, playing the role of God, while actually doing the work of the devil.
Reminds me of how often I see screeds against libertarianism on many blogs. Not that it’s a perfect political philosophy either, but the USA is in as much danger of running off that extreme as a drowning man is of dehydration.
Back when he was sane, Jonah Goldberg described this as the “auto-immune disease of society.”
For reasons I’ll get to later, we have gobs of material coursing over our Fakebook wall from Bernie Sanders and allied sorts. Very little about domestic populations with problems in living, much less about how you might address such problems with the utmost efficiency; a great deal of complaint about someone else’s assets. It’s all along the lines of “X has assets of $15 bn, so why can’t we raise the minimum wage?”.