Dostoevsky's Take on Socialism and Do-Gooders

“Having detached themselves from the people, they naturally also lost God. The restless among them become atheists; the apathetic and placid ones waxed indifferent. For the Russian people they felt nothing but contempt, believing, however, that they loved the people and wished them the best of everything. But they loved the people negatively, conceiving in their stead  [italics mine] some ideal people, such as according to their notions, the Russian people ought to be (Diary, vol. 1, p. 5).”

Substitute the word ‘American’ in the place of ‘Russian’ and one has the sense of a “putative liberal”---perhaps of the Clinton stripe---but actually quite broadly the very type of the “cool” , agnostic, well educated, post-1970s american--- And this applies to all the races in america, the common feature tends to be higher education. Enlightened liberals should be ---well ‘liberal’! They should be open-minded toward all gender transfiguration therapies and other alternative lifestyles...because...because...it’s the right thing to do! One has the sense that we care more about Caitlyn Jenner and Ellen Degeneres than the old lady on the corner of the street.

Back to Dostoevsky’s quote: for actual existing american individuals these people feel nothing but contempt or a patronizing pity. But man do they love mankind---they are committed to the wellbeing of every village, shanty, hamlet...from Syria to Timbuktu ”I am a socialist---I vow to love humanity once they are formed in a reasonable user friendly way and brought up to snuff with our cultural ‘best practices’.” Never mind that this is profound form of disrespect for the actual culture of the actual existing human beings and moreover is a reproach to God, the Creator. "Yahweh, You could have done a better job, so we are going to have to take over and fix things up." By the way, that is the core definition of the mission of one aspect of the Catholic Church. The new twist is that the new church is a global science of “helping” everything and everybody to get better! Until that day when these poor, pathetic individuals can be brought up to speed, with technology and the same kind of hopes and dreams that liberals everywhere enjoy. This is the essence of socialism thanks to the dynamic duo of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg---I want to save the world, we are the world, but my neighbors are idiots, oh wait since I became a billionaire, I haven’t actually had to rub elbows with the proletariat, I haven’t actually spoken with a real existing individual who does not share my identical social metrics, etc... That’s OK, surely Elon Musk, Obama, and Eric Schmidt will save the day! 

Allow me to take the liberty of using the term do-gooder in a qualified and operational sense. I recall a little coin box on our family dinner table in the ‘70s---my brother was putting $2.36 as the value of his meal into the box which would raise funds to feed a starving child in Africa. This practice surely had an impact in planting the seeds of what would later become a prevalent attitude toward doing good deeds for people half way around the world. Meanwhile no one noticed that our customs were slipping away just as fast as the globalist aspirations were being formed. Fast forward to 2017 when nearly every american is uprooted---call it social mobility---but having left behind the soil of their youth to greedy capitalists and corrupt local bully polluticians (let it stand)---the overall destruction of the american soil and water is thanks to the diaspora of small town boys and girls to urban centers in the ‘90s and after---this paints a picture of the type of person I describe as a ‘putative liberal.” This class of folk tend to be friends of the world, globalists, techies and do-gooders who loyally believe in global warming because the scientists and academicians and TED talkers say so. They also therefore “believe in” (fall hook, line and sinker) geoscience, solar geoengineering (chemtrails)---they might even have a suspicion that the 9/11 truthers might be onto something, but they are more inclined to believe the “climate scientists” more than the truther physicists. After all no one has to feel guilty for the planned demolition of WTC 1, 2 and 7 Buildings. But as for global warming---it cashed out in individual moral responsibility (carbon ‘footprint’). 

Can anybody else see that two ‘sciences’ are being practiced? Empirical science which requires evidence for truth (such as physics-when a physicist tells you that the WTC buildings fell at free fall 9.8meters per second per second, this means that it is a physical impossibility that the Official Report account is true. And this means that this NIST scientists who corroborated this finding are either lying or incompetent or both). Next we find the term ‘science’ being used in everything from kids ‘science’ camps, to Bill Nye the ‘science’ guy, to the Big Bang versus Creation Science, to climate science and many other dubious practices many of which are simply “pseudo-science.” Such ‘science’ is non-falsifiable as in Global Warming Theory---it requires a meta-narrative---for example, anthropogenic global warming in order to cash out the kind of plan of action called for. Science refers here to a global governance, a kind of Brave New World Church. It is a belief system that is widely accepted as truth by do gooders and putative liberals everywhere. So, there is no question that when an option for doing something (anything) rather than nothing is available a do-gooder will opt to take it or sponsor the idea. For example if aerosol spraying of the atmosphere is required to try to save the planet from extinction even if the odds are less than one per cent of it happening then this demands that a risk be taken to “research” chemtrails, even if the risk is greater than the risk which justified them taking this course of action in the first place. :) If there is a snowball’s chance in hell of doing some “miraculous” medical intervention on a kid, then by golly, we need to do that.

Ah, but this is a diversion, I am talking about do-gooders tendency to believe in whatever kind of theory (science) that their culture presents (transgender science, bioevolution and the proliferations of meta-sciences) hence making them susceptible to chemtrails and not the kind of socialism Dostoevsky wrote about in the passage above. But I am making the claim that the person he is describing above is of the same stripe. It is not the right of an enlightened liberal to question Global Warming or any other globally sanctioned, peer reviewed science---any more than a good catholic should question the virgin birth--- so there!

Commentary: 

In F. M. Dostoievsky’s [sic] Diary of a Writer (2 volumes, tr. Boris Brasol) in his publication of the diary in 1873, Dostoevsky squarely relates a profound fact about globalism and socialism. In this remark concerning  ‘gentilhomme russe et citoyen du monde’ [“a Russian gentleman and citizen of the world”] he reveals that for the socialists the “... last ties with Russian soil and Russian truths had disintegrated (Diary, vol. 1, p. 5).” This citizen of the world calls to mind two references: firstly, in the sacred scriptures Jesus warns against being a “friend of the world” which is precisely what ‘citoyen du monde’ echoes. The second suggestion to be drawn is the idea of a diasporic  ‘cosmopolitan, deracinated Jew.