We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Imagine a race-based government.  Imagine a governmental panel set up to decide which of its citizens belong to the special race and which do not.  Imagine public schools that only special-race children can attend, and elections in which only special-race citizens can vote.

It sounds like some nightmare from the past, perhaps something from the Jim Crow South, or from some third-world hellhole, or from the distant past.  But this isn’t just our past, it may well be our future, right here in the United States of America.

Sen. Daniel Akaka has long been pushing for just such a government for native Hawaiians.  As explained here and here, the Akaka bill is coming up for a vote yet again.

It’s difficult to overstate how disastrous this bill would be, both practically and symbolically.  Suffice to say that the bill’s supporters openly admit that the bill could permit the new Hawaiian government to secede from the Union.  Didn’t we resolve that question back in 1864?

I don’t yet believe that this bill has a serious chance of succeeding, but it astonishes me that the Democrats would spend any political capital on it so close to a presidential election.  The more attention they call to this bill, the more attention they will call to just how far left they really are.

Once upon a time, the socialist utopians could pretend not to know that their experiments and revolutions would become the bloody horrors that they eventually became.  In an age of industrialization and rapid change in how people lived their lives, I can understand how people could have believed that an all-powerful government, armed with this new scientific knowledge, might have discovered the secrets to peace and prosperity.

But the modern left doesn’t have any of that.  They don’t even bother claiming it any more.  It has all been tried before, on grander scales than anyone today is willing to contemplate.  Socialists used to be like snake-oil salesmen: They would coax power from the people with elaborate and compelling stories about the wonderful modern world of universal happiness that was always just around the corner.  Today they’re just thugs who hope to scare you into giving them what they want.

And like most groups of thugs, modern liberalism is essentially a death cult.  Liberals don’t know what the future will bring, nor do they care.  They have surrendered to the primal despair that weighs on us all, the belief that life isn’t worth living.  The mild version of this despair is hedonism: We might as well have a great time before we all die.  But deeper levels of despair go beyond the hedonism into an embrace of death itself.

One’s own death isn’t enough under this death-cult mentality.  This despair’s internal logic apparently requires that the followers share the pain and suffering before they take their own lives.  Self-hatred gives them meaning, and that meaning energizes them to spread the word.

I think that the psychology is the same for jihadis, Earth liberation types, and racial separatists like Akaka.  To the outsider the movement seems bizarre because it so obviously can’t survive.  But to the believers, the certainty of doom is precisely the point.  If you’ve given up on life, then you have nothing to look forward to but a glorious, meaningful death.  The psychic satisfaction is the same whether it’s self-detonation in a crowded restaurant, laws that ensure California wildfires, or sending an entire state back into racial strife and separatism.  (If the Akaka bill passes, maybe next the Hawaiians will try to legalize slavery.)

I blame it mostly on poor theology.  We all have an urge to die.  We all feel the despair to some extent.  And our societies work best when we recognize that despair and push back against it.  But socialism has taught us otherwise.  It told us that our minds were blank slates, blobs of Silly Putty waiting to be molded into whatever shape our political masters decreed.  In truth, it was all just wishful thinking from the socialists; their utopian project wouldn’t work unless our minds were blank and malleable.

Today the trend is away from that socialist nonsense: How many people today really believe that boys would cuddle dolls and girls would play with dump trucks—and that this would be a good thing—if only we tried a little harder to reshape society?  But the collapse of socialist thinking doesn’t automatically bring back the old Christian theology that really worked.  Instead we just have a void.  We have no particular understanding of good and evil, right and wrong.  And people have tried to fill that void with searches for meaning like tattoos and piercings or inventing their own nonsensical religion on the fly.

And then there’s tribalism.  When people don’t have a mature religion to turn to, they can give themselves over to that primal instinct of group unity and hatred: We’re the good people, and all others are the bad people.  Or as a major far-left group puts it: “Para la raza, todo.  Fuera de la raza, nada.” (For the race, everything.  For those outside the race, nothing.)

It shouldn’t surprise us that large numbers of people embrace death, destruction, and chaos for their own sake.  It was always thus, and it will always be thus.  The best we can do is to see this profound despair for what it is, take power away from its followers to minimize the harm that they can do, and urge those followers to turn back towards life.