I have three relatives who voted the America-hating, America-destroying bastard in. At least one of them donated over $200.00 to his campaign. Two do not speak to me. These two have brilliant minds, so they have to know it is the enemy they were helping to infiltrate into my America. The other one is plain stupid. This one gave me a lecture on why I’m wrong. It stood there spewing out every platitude ever uttered by any slimy leftist. My response to that was, “Did you say something? I didn’t hear it.” It gets information from the films of Michael Moore and who knows what modern rap “music” and other junk. I count these relatives as evil people – enemies whom I cannot relate to. Because:
“Today, we live in the Age of Envy.
‘”Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify….
“Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves . . . . That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.”
–Ayn Rand, “The Age of Envy”, Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 152.
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Where did this evil originate? How does it manifest itself? These answers can be found in an article “Villainy: An Analysis of the Nature of Evil” by Andrew Bernstein.
The following are some passages from this rather long important article. He says there are three variations on it, all contributing but only one the source of the evil in today’s world. The other two share many components, but are simply derivatives. They are the common criminals, the religionists and the collectivists.
Bernstein writes:
But where does this view originate? How did truth become a matter of what the group believes? What about an individual discovering reality as it is and on his own, regardless of the group he belongs to? How did truth become social?
The answer lies in the theories of the German philosopher who dominated the thinking of the nineteenth century in general and of Karl Marx in particular. That philosopher is G.W.F. Hegel.
Hegel applies [Immanuel Kant's] social primacy of consciousness view to politics. If the collective creates the world, Hegel argues, then it is logical to conclude that the collective must be the source of right and wrong and that it must be all-powerful regarding social issues. The group as a whole, and its emissary, the state, gives orders and the individual obeys. This is the birth of state-worship in modern Western culture.
This is the essence of Kant. This represents an all-out attack on the mind and on man. What logically follows, and what historically does follow, is a culture of destruction; an orgy of hatred, a full-scale war on every requirement of man’s survival. Kant and his heirs attack the mind, the root cause of all human values. His contemporary followers necessarily attack every consequence of that cause. The statists attack freedom; the socialists attack the profit motive; the ethnicity-worshippers and racists attack individualism; the multiculturalists attack Western Civilization; the modern artists attack objectivity; the feminists attack masculinity; the environmentalists attack science, technology, progress and prosperity.
The modern collectivists are nihilists. Nazis and Communists slaughter millions and lay waste to continents. Their purpose is neither to steal money nor to exalt God. Their purpose is to destroy the mind and to rain destruction. In The Ominous Parallels, Leonard Peikoff gives an eloquent description of the modernist mentality:
The term that captures twentieth-century culture – the term that names the modern soul is: nihilism.
“Nihilism” in this context means hatred, the hatred of values and of their root, reason. Hatred is not the same as disapproval, contempt or anger. Hatred is loathing combined with fear, and with the desire to lash out at the hated object, to wound, to disfigure, to destroy it.
The essence and impelling premise of the nihilist-modern is the quest for destruction, the destruction of all values, of values as such, and of the mind. It is a destruction he seeks for the sake of destruction, not as a means, but as an end.
The essence of the struggle between good and evil is summed up in Hank Rearden’s words from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:
He was seeing the enormity of the smallness of the enemy who was destroying the world.
Little Men
Robert Tracy
Watercolor
11½ x 14¼”
1991
Collection: National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, Chicago.
“Little Men” was slang for Vietcong or North Vietnamese Soldiers.
He felt as if, after a journey of years through a landscape of devastation, past the ruins of great factories, the wrecks of powerful engines, the bodies of invincible men, he had come upon the despoiler, expecting to find a giant – and had a rat eager to scurry for cover at the first sound of a human step. If this is what has beaten us, he thought, the guilt is ours.
This is the deepest reason why the modernists are, without exception, collectivists in their politics – because these are the politics of enslaving and destroying the good.
Villainy: An Analysis of the Nature of Evil
By Andrew Bernstein
Be sure to read Bernstein’s last paragraph first, because his article is non-fiction. Then read the article and see if he’s made his case.