Those who subscribe to the Left regard themselves as having special insights, a particular progressive morality and a deep authenticity. Here we will show how this outlook is really a narcissistic temptation in the tradition of Babel and a manifestation of what the Greeks called hubris.
The building of Babel in the Book of Genesis was a Hebrew tale of what the Greeks would call hubris. It was a belief Man could build the perfect globalist city without God. In that sense it was a Promethean project - that which the ancients understood was doomed to failure.
When we come into this world, thrown in Heideggerian terms, we find a world around us and at a deeper level we encounter in its hiddenness, Being itself. This is a very Heideggerian account, but that is because we need to highlight the inauthentic nature of Left wing politics and Left wing movements.
The Left is motivated by a sense of outrage, indeed it is moved by what it sees as the call of justice. In this it is imposing a veil of meaning over the world that clouds our capacity to uncover Being. We are determining how the world should be and not respecting what it actually is, how it presents itself to us.
The world is full of mystery, tragedy, beauty, goodness, evil. The desire to impose a new world order is a wilful denial of what is there to be discovered and uncovered. There is an impatience and arrogance in declaring this theoretical alternative is how the world should be, in accordance with my imagination of a system.
Again the same mistake is being made in the very idea of justice. Of course the world we discover is full of cruelty and injustice, but a systematic replacement through drastic and violent revolution or even progressive reforms is a particular idea of justice that is inauthentic. We see now the rejection of the world we uncover in the promotion of denial of gender, but that is only the latest and most absurd manifestation of a journey into denial of formal categories or reality as preceding us. Justice itself pre-exists us in a formal sense and it is manifested in prescriptive rights and religious dogma prior to our theories. Here English common law is a useful illustration, based as it is upon precedent. Nonetheless even Justinian’s codification looked to precedent and the divine - that which is before us.
History shows how alienating and perverse supposedly enlightened ideologies turn out to be when imposed. The theory quickly dehumanises and destroys the very human aspects of culture. Family, friendship, loyalty, respect are usually undermined in favour of an abstract theory. The Communist guest in a bourgeois household finds he likes these people, but then must remind himself for the sake of the revolution they must be liquidated. He understand the family is a capitalistic imposition of domination, but finds himself loving his own parents and children. Either he allows his own family to be the exception or he crushes the feelings of human sentiment for the sake of progress. He falls in love with one woman, but continues to advocate for free love and the abolition of marriage.
This is the inauthenticity of the Left - the progressive putting his own theories above his personal interactions, his encounter with the real world. And for the sake of progress he works to destroy all that is most sacred to human beings. And all for his own theory of a just system.
He renounces the call of his own family, his own fatherland, his own gods of his home. In all this he imagines himself somehow superior to the reactionary mass of men, not realising he himself is becoming ever more alienated from the authenticity of Being and becoming less and less human, while loving Man only in the abstract.
Political shibboleths become the idle talk of the they-self, which exists in the inauthenticity of Being that precludes real life. As long as the correct opinions are held one is not at risk of becoming real - which is a terrifying prospect.
We see this trait not only in the murderous Marxists of the Twentieth Century, but in the progressive Fabianism of Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer, a man who cannot relate to his own people, his own customs and traditions - instead in a move of deep authenticity he places a veil over the human life he is born into with all its particularities and calls to affection. The veil is a system, a system that produces justice in the abstract, but miserable resentment and conflict in reality. Ideology, particularly from the Left is as great an imposition clouding our vision and breaking our connection to the authentic world as any scientism or codified and rationalist theory of religion. The only authentic politics is the defence of that which makes us human - the politics of reaction.
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