Our dystopia and how we got in it. If you had a time machine and went back to the late 20th Century, then wrote a book giving an accurate depiction of life in America or Europe today, it would be classified as a work of dystopic fiction. The book would be compared with 1984, Atlas Shrugged, or any number of novels depicting a dystopian future. Most of the people that read it would hope that our society and culture would develop along a better, saner path. It’s to the point where one could swear some people today see Orwell’s 1984, not as a warning to humanity, but as in instruction manual. We now live in the type of world that authors like Orwell, Rand, and Huxley tried to warn us about.

How did this dystopia come to be? It’s important to understand that we didn’t get here overnight. In fact, our current situation has been over a hundred years in the making. Over the last century, a group we would now refer to as the “Left”, spurred on by two philosophies, collectivism and postmodernism have been vying for and gaining political power in the world. Collectivism is the idea that man’s highest purpose is to serve the needs of society. The individual’s needs are subordinate to those of the collective. Examples of collectivism include communism, socialism, and fascism. The ends the Left have in mind is some sort of collectivist Utopia. Before they can build their brave new world, they must tear down the old one. Postmodernism is a philosophy that refutes the notion of objective reality. It refutes the Enlightenment notion that Man advances his situation mainly though reason. Enlightenment philosophies are the basis of modern Western democracies in general, and of the United States in particular. Enlightenment thinking stands in the way of establishing a collectivist Utopia, and so must be supplanted in the body-politic by the post-modern viewpoint. Postmodernism can be said then, to be the philosophic means to that collectivist end.

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Until next time,

Stay happy, healthy, and free!

-JP Mac