Wojtek Sokolowski:
> That is the grossest mischaracterisation I've seen for some time. It fits
> Marx's characterisation of religion (and economic theory): ours is
> god-given (or natural), theirs is man-made. We the lefties are for all the
> good things, they the rightwingers are fore all the bad thing .... gimme a
> break. Where did you see any self-respecting rightist openly defending
> authoritarianism?
Any corporate president. Mussolini. The Roman guys in the movies.
God is in the grammar, and I don't know how to get him / her / it / them out, but speaking as materialistically as I can, my "justification" for preferring and struggling for freedom and equality is not that they are good in some supernal way, but that I prefer them personally. Many people prefer other things. Many of the things I have heard would put God on the other side. (But it is true that, if driven into the jungles of metaphysics, I would have to give religious answers to make the universe support my prejudices. I doubt if I am the only one who would have to make that confession.)
> The righwingers are also defining themselves as a party of freedom and
> equality - except that they define freedom as economic pursuit free of
> social intervention and equality as the ability to make a judgment on one's
> own - precisely the same kinds of thing on which the anti-treatment crowd
> base their claims. The left defines freedom and equality differently, not
> as freedom from intervention, but as freedom to develop ones full human
> potential - which can be guaranteed only collectively and equality as as
> equitabele distribution of all social resources. In a word, the difference
> between left and right is not that between freedom lovers and freedom
> haters, but between socialists and individualists - and that goes to the
> quintessence of the debate on the "rights" of people with mental disorders.
If the contemporary Right, which, as I said, constructs a _simulacrum_ of personal freedom, were actually interested in the sacred individual, then they would not be so fond of capitalism, which is the most powerful system of collectivization and disindividuation ever seen on Earth. But the individual and the communal are not opposing forces: it's evident from even casual observation that they are two aspects of one human nature. What is the purpose of splitting this unity apart, if not some kind of fraud? And, sure enough, in the land of "individualism" every city is full of endless hives of atomized workers, one very like another, constantly probed, adjusted and pressured for the sake of industrial abstractions, whereas in the times and places of collectivism, the faces of mighty individuals are erected to stare down at the multitudes.
The Right constructs simulacra of freedom because of a tremendous advance of the Left: after thousands of years of almost unremitting defeated revolts against the practice of slavery and its manifold ideologies, the idea of freedom began to gain effective political ground a few hundred years ago. Those who wanted to get or stay in the rightist business had to change their game, to pretend to be more Left than the Left. It's too bad leftists don't make it more difficult for them.