Paradigm Shift
Let me draw your attention to this conversation. I found it insightful to the point of vertigo.
Andrew Jones in this forces me to reconsider my zeal for the Enlightenment project of individualism, individual rights, and a franchise extended to all and sundry — the idea that big government and big business, historically speaking, are coconspirators, nor competitors, makes a mockery of the Right-to-Left political spectrum I have used my whole life as the lens to view the world.
Left and Right agree on an axiom of individualist collectivism (ironic as that sounds) which the Catholic Church denies.
Recent events, the rise of socialist plutocracy, totalitarian anarchy, atheist jihad, antiracist racism, misogynist feminism, democratic fascism, and sleepwalking woke-men seems to me more than normal human hypocrisy. It shows the underlying and unchanging form of a ever-changing shape-changer, a hydra-headed creature of a million masks but one heart, who adopts the name of its antithesis every new generation.
This creature is, in fact, the Beast from the Sea, with its seven heads and ten crowns, carrying the harlot of all worldly lusts on its back, ere it devours her. In these columns on these pages, I have and must call it “Leftism” or “Gnosticism” for to coin a new term would obscure the meaning here, despite that the shapechanger can dodge and elude those labels adroitly. Who would think of Bud Lite beer, for example, when I speak of “Gnostic” or a “Leftist”? Yet the megacorporations are just as much a part of the fascist incest between big business and big government as the Federal Reserve, or Facebook, or the World Economic Forum.
Back when I was a most ardent Libertarian, I recognized the monopoly was a threat to liberty, but I thought that giving the government the logically absurd and notoriously unjust truncheon of antitrust laws was a greater threat. See the antimonopoly cases against General Electric, Alcoa Aluminum, International Shoe, Ma Bell for details. Under anti-trust laws, raising prices is evidence of monopoly, lowering prices is predatory pricing, keeping prices the same is evidence of price fixing with competitors: there is no way to obey this law.
But now I think the threat is the same either way, for the very idea of classical liberalism ensures that the merchant class, rather than military aristocrats or any other major faction in society, will and must have undue influence over the laws and constitution, and their natural interests are adverse to family life, women as wives-not-taxpayers, the family farm, the family business, the small town. Classical liberalism, by promoting individualism, renders collectivism unavoidable.
Or so it is beginning now to look to me.
Something like the social teaching of the Catholic Church, in particular the principle that power is to be kept as local to the persons governed and influenced by it, needs to be explored, reduced to an actionable theory, and enacted. The “Distributionism” of Belloc and Chesterton is merely too vague to act upon. A sort of economic federalism where each community had legal safeguards, not just sentiment, protecting local interests against continent-striding world-girdling monopolies would seem to be necessary.
Otherwise, rightwingers censored by Youtwitface-style social media, because it is a private company taking direction from coreligionists in the Deep State, cannot admit to themselves they are being censored. “It is a private company. It may do as it likes.” These words are written on the tombstone of the First Amendment.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
