Saturday, December 11, 2010

Is the Left suicidal?

At the end of Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky gives a quotation from Bertrand Russell in which he says that peace will come when the evolutionary process carries the Earth clear past the era of humanity.  That is, peace will come when humans are finally gone.  How nice.  The quotation does not really fit Chomsky's context, because he is saying that peace will come when, or we will survive if, the American "quest for dominance" has ended.  So it is a sort of a Freudian slip, an indirect indication, that he would put such a statement at the very end of his book. Perhaps, then, the overall resistance from the the Left to authority, to leadership (which is part of the meaning of "hegemony"), is a resistance to human existence itself, or to the God who has put us here to develop into the stewards of the Earth.

As such, this would be a way of dealing with guilt:  position yourself with those who see how bad we are really, but don't see yourself as bad, because it is the Right, the Structure, Capitalism and global Business, that are evil, while the Left prides itself on having positioned itself against all of this

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