Strange Views From Another Star.

On the eve of the First World War the German author Herman Hesse published a book of short stories called “Strange News From Another Star”. These were a set of fairy tales which implicitly challenged orthodoxy.

Fairy tales in essence are simplistic and rather childlike views of how a moral society should operate, and they always conclude with a “happy” ending. However in reality moral ambiguity exists within every human society as our nature is flawed and not one view of how we should live has ever succeeded in achieving happiness for every individual or community.

Political ideologies that set out to unify all of the world`s people in peace have admirable intentions but they are simply doomed to fail. Ideologies like socialism presume that all humans are the same as they are all inherently noble and pure. However our experience informs us that no mortal human could be regarded as a saint, this is just idealistic thinking.

Also, every civilisation upon Earth is organised in an attempt to promote peace and harmony, but not one is perfect. Again this is just wishful thinking. Socialism, historically utilised a kind of brainwashing or “social engineering” to convince people otherwise and this is the reason why this philosophy is wrong.

It is frightening that this regressive ideology has enjoyed a resurgence when so many people have suffered and died opposing it. When Left-Wing mobs rampaged the streets this summer there were two platitudes that were continuously parroted and never challenged.

I found that these were the most irritating and untrue statements that were uttered. The first one was that “we learn from our history to become a better society”, which is the contemporary equivalent of “they all lived happily ever after”. We don`t learn FROM our history we learn ABOUT it. The second one was that “white people cannot understand racism because they haven`t had the lived experience”.

There is a degree of condescension in this ideology which states that owing to the historical crimes of slavery Black people will be permanent victims of white people. Most of the greatest triumphs in our society have in fact been achieved by individual merit rather than any notion of shared racial “privilege”, or lack of it. Of course racism is a bad idea, but this inverse racism that denigrates another set of people is equally bad. It also diminishes the power of human imagination which contrary to Leftist dogma has the capacity to understand human suffering in all of its manifestations.

Sometimes this absurd expression of “white guilt” can backfire with devastating consequences. In the early twentieth century a young American Anthropologist called Margaret Mead visited Samoa, ostensibly to write a book about the culture of the island. She conducted a series of interviews with local women and asked them rather personal questions. However some of the younger women were embarrassed and sensing her naivety and gullibility made jokes about sex. Mead evidently took their responses seriously and compiled a book about their supposedly liberated sex lives, and as a result the Samoan people were deeply offended and felt disrespected. It seemed that Mead had projected her own self-loathing as a privileged white woman and idealised other cultures without really thinking.

Conclusively the better approach to life is to both acknowledge our shared imperfections and to not attempt to change the religions or philosophies that so many people throughout history have relied upon to give their lives meaning. Socialism subverts this approach and has kept people oppressed and voiceless, it should be avoided if we really want to be free.