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Hrvatski Noahid:
While the post-Renaissance period in the European continent and its colonies catalyzed the destruction of traditional lifestyles, the curtailment of human autonomy, and the perversion of folkloric knowledge systems, this time was also marked by trends towards democracy, egalitarianism, and universal human rights in Western thought. The triumphs and achievements of Western philosophers during this time, which included concepts like John Rawls’ original position, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract, and the metaphysical claims on life, liberty, and happiness made by the Declaration of Independence.

However, as observed by luminaries like Dr. Martin Luther King, the West’s stated values and principles are like a generous cheque that has come back marked “insufficient funds” for many demographics. Aside from the obvious prejudices and challenges faced by racial minorities throughout the history of the West, progress towards the ideals of life, liberty, and happiness has been marked by tremendous setbacks such as Apartheid, Jim Crow, and the Holocaust, all of which were, in a significant sense, products of democracy.

Additionally, the post-industrial West has always characterized by significant wealth disparities which manifest themselves in differentiated access to education, influence, and opportunity across social groups. During the Industrial Revolution, owners and executives of corporations enjoyed a tremendously higher quality of life than their workers, and wealthy landlords consolidated their share economic gains of the Industrial Revolution while depriving the working classes of leverage. The working conditions of many jobs were filthy and dangerous, particularly for miners and blue-collar workers responsible for making the high modernist visions of that time into a reality.

Even in the present day, the promises and dreams of technological utopia that could be found in the World Fairs of the early 1900s have given way to a dystopian present marked by overwork, mental illness, and information overwhelm. In such a world, particularly during the early stages of industrialization where coal mining, unsafe construction methods, and heavy factory labour were claiming the lives of countless workers, some Western thinkers became disillusioned and began to question the viability of the entire project.

Indeed, it was during the early decades of the Industrial Revolution that Karl Marx, a German philosopher and sociologist, began developing the ideas that would later come to be known as communism or Marxism. Inspired by the ruthless efficiency of French revolutionaries like Robespierre, as well as their values of liberty, fraternity, and equality, Marx and his collaborators fused the ethics of revolution with sophisticated economic critiques of post-Industrial Europe to produce the most compelling – and destructive – alternative to Western capitalism ever conceived. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 52)

Hrvatski Noahid:
Unlike the unfettered forces of free market capitalism, which Marx correctly observed have the effect of concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the already wealthy and powerful, a communist society would transfer ownership of the factories, apartments, and farms to the proletariat, or the classes of common workers and everyday people who were otherwise being exploited. By giving everyone a share in the wealth generated by the industrial economy, Marx envisioned a higher quality of life for everyone, less wealth disparities, and especially a degree of workplace satisfaction.

The solution proposed by Marx, Engels, and the intellectuals that followed them was to overthrow the capitalist system, by force if necessary, and institute a centrally planned economy where the citizen-workers were the primary stakeholders of the factories, resources, and land. By abolishing private ownership of land and buildings, they claimed everyone would have a fair chance at decent living conditions. By abolishing inheritance, they claimed that wealth would no longer concentrate in the hands of families like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds. These, and other promises like free education, formed the core pillars of the communist plan, which generally failed to gain traction in the West but became extremely popular in Asia.

On its face, Marxism is not an unreasonable proposition given the colonial-industrial violence that has been committed against indigenous peoples, folk lifestyles, blue-collar workers, and even linguistics in the name of the Western utopian vision, as well as the economic exploitation that is an unfortunate reality in even contemporary capitalist systems. Contemporary management research has also consistently revealed that employees given autonomy, a genuine stake in the business, and the power to make meaningful decisions are both happier and more productive.

However, there are many issues with communist philosophy and economics, perhaps most importantly the mathematical impossibilities of central planning. Despite Karl Marx’s sophisticated ideas about capital, labor, and economic value, there are so many things happening within an economy, with so many variables and minor setbacks that require ad-hoc corrections, that it becomes mathematically impossible to measure the entire economy, process that raw information, and then make timely and effective decisions.

In much the same way that early foresters cleared away the most valuable parts of the forest in their attempt to standardize and optimize timber yields, the simplifications that inevitably must be made in centrally planned economies have the unintended effect of creating bureaucratic inefficiencies and bottlenecks throughout their systems. Indeed, at the height of the Soviet attempt, it is estimated that there were 46,000 industrial enterprises and 60,000 agricultural collectives, all desperately trying to maintain control over a chaotic quasi-ecological system. Of course, after decades of killing whales for no reason and delivering a substandard and anemic quality of life to citizens, many of whom were desperate to escape in some form, it collapsed in spectacular fashion in 1989. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 53)

Hrvatski Noahid:
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, communist philosophies had a tremendous impact on the political and social landscape of not only the West, but the East as well. As mentioned previously, the Bolsheviks of Russia overthrew the tzarist-capitalist system and instituted the Stalinist-Leninist attempt at communism, with death tolls in the tens of millions. The People’s Republic of China is estimated to have killed tens of millions during their Great Leap Forward. Over three million people are estimated to have died under North Korean communist rule, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia claimed over two and a half million lives. Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and many other countries have similar stories.

Indeed, the overwhelming trend is that communist revolution leads, one way or another, to mass graves and overwhelming government oppression. By the middle of the nineteenth century, this had become apparent to Western intellectuals through the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other whistleblowers from the Soviet regime, which presented communist-friendly thinkers and Marxist activist with a series of very difficult challenges.

The first challenge, obviously, was to reconcile the genocidal outcomes of every single attempt at communism with its stated goals of equality, social engagement, and neighbour-love, a feat that many avoid even attempting by claiming that “no true version” of communism has yet existed. The second challenge, and a more achievable goal, was to somehow advance Marxist objectives despite growing popular awareness of its deficiencies.

Fundamentally, Marxism is a group-based philosophy that divides society roughly into a binary class system consisting of the working-class proletariat who are subjugated and exploited by the capitalist bourgeoisie. Therefore, to continue their project of overthrowing the capitalist system, Marxist intellectuals injected their ideas about group-based conflict into pre-existing conversations about sex, race, the environment, and other social issues to attack the capitalist machine from new fronts.

To accomplish this goal, Marxist intellectuals leveraged European philosophical works on skepticism and epistemology to construct wickedly sophisticated critiques of not just Western economics, but their philosophical substructure. As the twentieth century continued, Marxist influences on social and artistic commentary gave birth to the school of thought now known as postmodernism. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 54)

Hrvatski Noahid:
Over the last century, especially following the counter-cultural movements in 1960s America, these criticisms of Western traditions, values, economics, and socio-political structures became mainstream, eventually working their way into Western postsecondary institutions and into the minds of the last two generations of teachers, journalists, politicians, social workers, lawyers, and business leaders. These cynical ideas have proven to be a destabilizing force in the West, leaving North America mired in a “culture war” characterized by political brinksmanship and a lack of dialogue between parties. Many in North America and Europe, particularly the younger generations most influenced by these ideas in their schooling, have come to reject Western society in part or in whole, the most prominent targets of criticism being capitalism and whiteness.

Despite elements of validity contained within the writings of anti-Western theorists like Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, upon deeper investigation they represent a dangerous return to premodern superstition, original sin doctrine, sacrificial atonement rituals, and caste systems that claimed millions of lives throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, the philosophical tradition of Critical Theory, Postmodern Neo-Marxism, or Critical Social Justice is wickedly sophisticated, deeply resentful, and much like Christianity, colonialism, and industrialization before it, dangerously out of touch with reality. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 54-55)

Hrvatski Noahid:
The philosophical school of postmodernism, with early iterations developed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and intellectual giants like Michel Foucault advancing more sophisticated versions in the 1960s, can be most elegantly expressed as a skepticism of grand social narratives – especially the narratives that are most dominant in a culture or society. By framing Western notions of progress, justice, and equality as bourgeoisie constructions designed to pacify an exploited populace, the postmodernists injected the Marxist class struggle into cultural discourse with explosive effect.

In postmodernism’s artistic manifestations, which were some of the first salvos from the intellectual Bolsheviks, traditional Western assumptions about beauty and artistic value were boldly challenged by works like John Cage’s 4:33 and Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a tradition which also includes Andy Warhol and one of the most confusing ballets ever choreographed, known to many internet users through memes and clips.

The intellectual vanguard of postmodernism, of which Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida were the most influential proponents, launched assaults on the Western concept of reason, pointing out errors and limitations in scientific and rational ways of knowing with significant help from phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl. This allowed them to cast the folk knowledge held by minority groups as distinct in structure and equal in value to dominant Western narratives and systemic knowledge, giving rise to the high levels of cultural relativism in the modern West as well as presenting unexpected philosophical challenges for Western thinkers.

Much like the sophists of Ancient Greece who believed that language was merely a tool for obtaining power, the postmodernists advanced the idea that reality was more socially constructed than anything else, pointing to the world’s overwhelming cultural diversity as evidence. Leveraging philosophical ideas like John Locke’s tabula rasa and the evidence for psychological malleability being accumulated by early psychologists, postmodernists staked out a powerful claim that Western values are merely arbitrary constructions, a notion that became quite popular in Western academic circles throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. By attacking the philosophical justifications for Western civilization and documents like the Declaration of Independence, postmodernists were simultaneously able to absolve themselves of responsibility for underperformance, reject Western standards of behavior, and set themselves up for a philosophical revolution led by university-educated teachers and journalists. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 56)

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