OPINION:
The news from France last week was not lacking for images of insanity. Who among us did not hang his head in utter despair as we watched a nation’s youth dance on their own culture’s grave?
How do we make sense of the madness? How did we get to this point?
The answer: the hatred and self-worship that undergirds secular socialism.
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The Russian philosopher Semyon Frank once captured this perhaps more clearly than anyone else: “Sacrificing himself for the sake of this idea, [the socialist] does not hesitate to sacrifice other people for it. Among his contemporaries he sees either the victims of the world’s evil he dreams of eradicating or the perpetrators of that evil. … This feeling of hatred for the enemies of the people forms the concrete and active psychological foundation of his life. Thus, the great love … of the future gives birth to a great hatred for people; the passion for organizing an earthly paradise becomes a passion for destruction.”
Benjamin Wiker, author of “10 Books That Screwed Up the World,” concurs: “[Socialist] hatred [is] directed at a real object: the people who [stand] in the way.”
Mr. Wiker goes on to contend that the civilizational suicide we are presently watching “is caused by notions that the world [needs] be saved from and for something. To save the world from political impotence, Machiavelli would have us embrace effective brutality. To save the world from skepticism, Descartes would have us become both more skeptical and more dogmatic. … To save the world from industrial oppression, [Karl] Marx and [Vladimir] Lenin would have us annihilate half the world in revolution. To save the world from disease, poverty and every social ill, Margaret Sanger and Adolf Hitler would have us eliminate the hordes of ’unfit.’ To save the world from male oppression, Betty Friedan would have women kill their offspring.”
He adds that socialism’s self-destructive duplicity is obvious. All we must do to see it is juxtapose our utopian dreams with the haunting reality that we all still know “something is wrong and it needs to be righted; [that] there’s something profoundly wrong with us, some crack or deep taint … a terrible twist that begins in the soul and curls its way outward.”
“The cracks in the soul,” argues Mr. Wiker, “become more visible when they are ignored. They become most visible when the twisted soul tries to rid the world of the very idea that each individual has a soul accountable to God. The twisted soul does this in order to deny its own twistedness. … [Those] who have taken a turn at twisting the screws that have screwed up the world all have this in common. They all deny sin” — and thus Paris burns.
He goes on: “The ideas of God and sin might all seem too mythical for this scientific age until we recall that … if we create ourselves in the image of the savage, we end up with unimagined savagery.”
Still, there is always hope.
A last word from Mr. Wiker: “When much of the world lies convulsed and broken upon the rock-hard certainties of so many secular political utopian schemes … the old ’myths’ now seem to have a curious ring of truth. … Perhaps by reversing the image of insanity and holding it up to a different light we can recover some outline of sanity. Perhaps we are not merely animals as Darwin would have it. … Perhaps we are not ghosts in machines, as Descartes contends, but some other strange and glorious creature, something godlike but with two feet on the ground.
“Yet, being something god-like, we are not, as Nietzsche would have it, gods ourselves, but something far less, a faint but glowing resemblance to Someone else infinitely more resplendent.
“Perhaps there are dark corridors of our hearts that must be uncovered and exposed to light … the light that comes from another heart illumined by puncture and resurrection.
“Perhaps we do need a final revolution, [but not one] as Marx and Lenin would have it, but a revolution from within and from above. …
“Perhaps, as Nietzsche howled, God did indeed die, but rose again, an Ubermensch of a very different kind, one that can save us from the madness of our own making.”
If the current situation in France proves anything, it is this: A socialist revolution will never save us from ourselves. The only thing that will “reverse this image of insanity” is a Christian revival.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). He can be reached at epiper@dreverettpiper.com.
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