Gustave Dore, Dante encounters the Envious
John C. Wright quotes the acute observations of his commenter Tom Simon.
Discrimination (to the Modern Leftist) is the ultimate sin. All cultures, all behaviours, all plans and courses of action, all people and all nations, are inherently equal. Therefore, no matter what anybody does, they ought always to get equal results. This does not happen. Therefore, there must be some swindle going on — in some unseen way (‘systemic’ is the usual word), those who succeed are taking away success from those who fail. To you and me, who look at facts and evidence and reason, it is obvious that a man who works twelve hours a day at productive employment will do better than the man who spends those twelve hours drinking whisky. But to the Modern Leftist, there is a priori no reason to prefer work to whisky; therefore the man who works is robbing the drunkard.
Therefore, the Modern Leftist is committed always and everywhere to favour those who fail over those who succeed. It is a five-year-old’s view of reality, if five-year-olds were susceptible to paranoia and capable of advancing complicated conspiracy theories. If somebody has a pony, he took it away from somebody else, and that should be my pony, and I want my pony, I want my pony, I want my pony! The fact that ponies come from somewhere, and not everybody automatically has one, does not impinge upon these people’s consciousness. It cannot, because that knowledge contradicts the doctrine of equal results and is therefore thoughtcrime. The idea that actions have consequences, the idea of cause and effect, the idea that ponies are in limited supply and you have to do some particular thing to get one — these ideas are anathema; they are Kryptonite to the Modern Leftist mind, and they will contort their thoughts into the most idiotic forms rather than admit these things.
Read the whole thing.
ThomasS
Marxism would be just a bad economic theory w/o christian altruism.
“Pope Leo XIII picked up the phrase Social Justice in his 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which formed the cornerstone of modern Catholic social teaching, a body of official documents setting forth principles for a moral social, economic, and political order achieved through both “public and private institutions.” The encyclical, although severely criticizing socialism, encouraged the fair treatment of the working class, and declared that “[a]mong the many and grave duties of rulers who would do their best for the people, the first and chief is to act with strict justice – with that justice which is called distributive – toward each and every class alike.” Later popes, such as Pius XI, followed Leo’s lead by condemning “the huge disparity between the few exceedingly rich and the unnumbered propertyless” and suggesting that social justice demanded remedying this disparity.
Paralleling the evolution of Catholic social teaching, the secular idea of social justice began to veer away from the traditional, historical meaning of justice, and instead began to focus on a philosophy which encouraged equality through the redistribution of wealth.”
http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/library/history-philosophy/social-justice
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