Daily Verse | Psalm 100:1
Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth.

It’s Wednesday and the last day of June, meaning we’ve hit the mid-point of 2021. On the downside, it means we’ve survived only one eighth of Resident Biden’s reign—seven more to go (grrr!). On the upside, we’ve completed one quarter on our way to the 2022 mid-terms. Only three quarters to go until we place a check on the junior commies in the White House. So there’s that.

Yesterday I started what will be a short series of posts (inspired by a chapter in Andrew Breitbart’s Righteous Indignation) in which I want to explain the source of the insanity currently gripping our country. It’s called cultural Marxism, and it has deep roots reaching back to the Enlightenment (or the Age of Reason) from about 1685-1815. If you missed yesterday’s post, you can read it here: CULTURAL MARXISM GOT ITS START IN THE 1700s.

To quickly recap, Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) posited that human beings are basically good but that “society” corrupted them. The overriding concern of his work was,

“to find a way of preserving human freedom in a world where human beings are increasingly dependent on one another for the satisfaction of their needs. This concern has two dimensions: material and psychological, of which the latter has greater importance. In the modern world, human beings come to derive their very sense of self from the opinion of others, a fact which Rousseau sees as corrosive of freedom and destructive of individual authenticity. In his mature work, he principally explores two routes to achieving and protecting freedom: the first is a political one aimed at constructing political institutions that allow for the co-existence of free and equal citizens in a community where they themselves are sovereign; the second is a project for child development and education that fosters autonomy and avoids the development of the most destructive forms of self-interest” (emphasis mine).

In Rousseau’s mind, the solution was a new “social contract” based on the “general will” which embodied the entire will of the people (RI, p.108). The idea of changing society interested Karl Marx (1818–1883), who picked up on Rousseau’s philosophy and made it his own.

Marx saw all of history as a series of “class struggles” but, contrary to Rousseau, believed that human nature was formed by the surrounding society. This led him to believe that if “human nature was to be changed, it could be changed only by destroying the surrounding society” (RI, ibid.).

In addition, Marx incorporated Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic theory into his philosophy. The term “dialectics” means a process of resolving conflict between two opposing sides that results in a “linear evolution or development from less sophisticated definitions or views to more sophisticated ones later.“

For Marx, that meant that “capitalism carried the seeds of its own destruction—capitalism (thesis) would be faced with the wealth gap that capitalism creates (antithesis), and that wealth gap would be solved by socialism/communism (synthesis)” (RI, ibid.).

In sum, Rousseau believed that men and women were basically good, that society corrupted them, and the solution was to form a different kind of society. Marx picked up where Rosseau left off, believing that society corrupted human nature but that the solution was to destroy the surrounding society. In both cases, Rousseau and Marx believed that the current society had to be replaced, and that “communism” was the solution.

You can see the faintest forms taking shape in their philosophical viewpoints that we recognize today. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at how this thinking came to America.