Saturday, February 19, 2011

Theory: insecurity in one's own philosophy is the root of all evil

I blogged recently about how various patriarchal cultures are operating suboptimally essentially as a result of the patriarchs' insecurity in their own philosophy.

It occurs to me that many of the evils of the world are the result of powerful regimes being insecure in their own philosophies.

I was recently in a conversation with someone who felt the need to expound at length upon why communism is bad. But none of the examples they gave had anything to do with the actual social/political/economic practises that constitute actual communism. Instead they were on about stasi and gulags and propaganda - things that communist countries did because they were insecure in their philosophy. If they had trusted their philosophy, they wouldn't have needed all this stuff that they used to hurt people and ruin people's lives. And if they weren't pouring so many resources into assuaging their insecurity, they'd have had more to put into making their actual social and economic model work.

The evils that result from religion are similar. The problems happen when religions try to force themselves on people who aren't interested, start wars with other religion, and try to colonize countries and impose their values upon legislation. If they truly were secure in their dogma, they could just quietly go about life, letting the benefits of their religion speak for themselves. And if religions didn't go around trying to force themselves on others, there fewer people would perceive other religions as threats. Even I, as a recovering catholic, think I could appreciate the beauty and history of my former religion if it would stop trying to infringe upon my life as a private citizen.

2 comments:

laura k said...

Excellent theory. It works for capitalism, too, which has also set out to crush and smother any other system, with its emissaries jamming the system down people's throats by force.

impudent strumpet said...

Yeah, I was also thinking about that thing in that book you recommended about the south american country where they tried to impose capitalism and it ended up with people getting disappeared etc. But since I seem to have forgotten so many of the keywords that I can't even google it back up, that doesn't make a very good example.