Tuesday 22 August 2017

The Rebellion of the Left


Here's a question. As ideas pertaining to the left are fundamentally anti-God (which they are since they replace the centrality of God with the centrality of Man who is regarded as sufficient unto himself, effectively his own creator with responsibility to no one but himself and free to make his own decisions based on his own desires and will), are people on the left bad people? As they have turned their faces from the true good to a false good does that make them bad?


We live in a world where everyone has the right to be what they want as long as they are not (apparently) harming anyone else, and so it is very hard to say that someone is a bad person who isn't obviously so because of cruelty or extreme selfishness. Live and let live we say, and that's a good thing up to a point. But I think that anyone attracted to left wing ideology, especially as it is now when it is no longer the economic thing it largely was in the past but goes right to the roots of what a human being is supposed to be and to think, does have a spiritual defect which, when analysed, can often be seen as rebellion against the Creator. And this I'm afraid does have the potential to make them a bad person inasmuch as anyone can be described as that. At the very least they are spiritually deficient and seemingly celebrating that rather than seeking to redress it.


Now I don't say this applies to anyone just mildly left wing in their approach because we live in an ignorant age when people are largely cut off from the truth and fed lies, and most follow the status quo. But it does apply to many activists of the modern left. These people are basically rebels against God and you can clearly see this since their prime motivation, when you strip away the fine words on the surface, is often a mixture of hatred, resentment and anger. Their urge is to destroy even when they are being creative (see much 20th century art and philosophy), and what they seek to destroy is the natural order of the universe.


Before I go any further I should acknowledge that we are all sinners. We all have the stain of egotism. That's a fact of being born into this world. But some of us attempt to put that right by following spiritual teachings designed to help us out of this situation. We recognise that we are not right with our Maker and try to put ourselves right. But others, and this very much applies to those on the left in my experience, do not acknowledge this and actually regard their sinful separation from God as a virtue. They are the wise and noble and truthful and good ones. I fear that in this deluded posturing they follow the first leftist who sought to justify his rebellion against God as something heroic.


How does what I am saying here differ from someone who demonises his opponents in the attempt to justify destroying them? We know where that leads. Am I not doing that or else what the left does when it paints its ideological enemies as either mentally ill or wicked? I don't believe I am. I am not trying to slander or silence the left but to point to the roots of their failings and to say that these are spiritual. As I have said, we are all sinners but there is a difference between acknowledging your sinful state and representing it as virtue. And then there is the matter of truth. Not all points of view are equal. If one person argues from truth and another from falsehood they are not doing the same thing and cannot be given the same consideration. You might say that motive matters and so, of course, it does but I would submit that anyone who takes a stand against truth is by that very fact ill motivated. The truth is in us and it is proclaimed loud and clear in religion. We have no excuse to reject it. Naturally earthly religions are far from perfect but most have enough of the truth in them to guide us to some kind of understanding. To reject that is to reject truth and a person of sound mind and good heart cannot reject truth. He can misconstrue it or misinterpret it due to personal limitations but, if his heart is true, he cannot totally distort it.


Who's to say what is truth, you might counter, to which I would respond that truth proclaims itself. It is of our nature. It is not an ideology or a relativistic point of view but the very fabric of our being. If we are true, we know the truth, to an extent at least. Jesus said that those who were his would recognise him, and he was the truth. But if we, or something in us, are false, well that's another matter. And that is my reproach to the left.


Besides leftism cannot be true due to its origin.For it is basically a reaction to something, inspired by hatred of that thing, whereas the spiritual understanding that opposes it comes from love of something, something higher than ourselves. The left recognises nothing higher than ourselves.


So when I point to what I regard as the moral failings of the left I am not speaking from hatred of the left but from love of God  or as much of that as I am capable of responding to. So I am saying that those who follow the ideological precepts of the left are spiritually deficient and usually that is because of a perversion of the will since it is the will rather than the mind that is at the heart of everything we do. That's why God seeks people of good will before those of high intellect. After all no one is smarter than Satan in a strictly intellectual sense. The ideological left does not have good will, though that is hidden behind its outwardly fine sounding humanitarian agendas. But how can you be a humanitarian when you are denying that which fulfils our true humanity which is God? To be a real human being always requires going beyond the merely human since the real human being is a multi-dimensional creature, one not restricted to material levels and appetites, aims and goals. The real human being has his home and his destiny elsewhere than here.


Therefore I do condemn those on the left because they have departed from the path of truth and, worse, seek to drag others with them. But there is a way back for them. The same way back that there is for all of us. It is repentance. However to repent you have to accept that you are in the wrong, and how many on the left ever do that? They are too enamoured of their sin, too identified with the false virtues of their rebellion, to acknowledge its rotten roots. So there is hope, there's always hope, but to avail themselves of it they will have to become humble, like little children, and return to their Father with a chastened spirit. They will have to acknowledge their perverted will. Then (who knows?) they may be amongst the best of God's servants.



3 comments:

Bruce Charlton said...

@William: That seems profoundly true - and beautifully-stated.

William Wildblood said...

Thank you Bruce. I was trying to get beneath the surface motivations of those who seek to remake reality without God at the centre because their false version of reality is increasingly seen as the default model to which everything else must correspond. But it is built on a lie because they do not have love of truth.

Avro G said...

The virulent leftist, Saul Alinsky, dedicated his book, Rules for Radicals, to Lucifer, the first rebel. Lucifer rebelled out of pride and his children do likewise. Like Lucifer, the leftist would rather rule in Hell than serve our Lord Jesus Christ. Hence the left's pig-headed refusal ever to admit, even after repeated, catastrophic failure, to own up to its folly and sin. This Luciferian refusal to repent is the sine qua non of all leftisms which makes leftists especially resistant to the work of the Spirit.