Nazism, Marxism and Political Correctness

There are all sorts of ideologies out there, and most of them are easily found to be flawed. I will write about three obviously wrong ideologies that have had – or now have – vastly more power than they deserve to have had. These are neo-Nazism, Marxism and political correctness.

Of these, Nazism is the easiest one to refute. There is no such thing as a master race. For 1000 years that were the Dark Ages, the white man was at the bottom of the world, and China was the world's greatest country. The Jews are not a uniform entity; there are all sorts of differences among the Jews, with Orthodox Jews behaving much like the Muslims, the Conservative Jews much like the Americans, and the Reform Jews much like the French. Finally, if Jews had, as Nazis claim, all the power, and if Jews had been, as Nazis said, evil, then the Nazis would be facing a firing squad. That they are instead free to spread their rubbish shows either that Jews are not in control, or that the Jews are so good as to tolerate even the people who want to kill them. In either case, the claims of the Nazis are obviously false.

Marxism is also not that difficult to refute. Central to Marxism is the obviously wrong concept of historical inevitability – that the history is inevitably working toward creation of worker's Utopia. This claim is likewise easily refuted. There is no such thing as historical inevitability; all sorts of orders rise and fall for all sorts of reasons. The businessman is not a thief; he is someone who assumes the financial risk for a project and gets things done. And class struggle – a believable concept in rigidly stratified societies such as Tsarist Russia and Confucian China – becomes much less believable in places where there is social mobility, and where someone can rise from humble upbringing to become a billionaire or President of the United States. The problems that the Marxist wants to solve through class struggle are solved much better through social mobility; and this is the reason why America has resisted Marxism as something that's inconsistent with American values.

Political correctness, for its part, encourages a lazy-mindedness which shames wrong ideas – as well as ideas that are not as wrong - instead of refuting them. This is entirely against what academia is meant to be about. University is meant to be a place of education, not a place of indoctrination. Wrong ideas are meant to be confronted by better ideas. And if it as easy as it has been for me to make effectual refutations of two major hostile ideologies, then shame it be on the academia to not be able to produce the same.

The real way to refute stupidity is through intelligence; and that is the case with all of these ideologies. Real intelligence should be cultivated, not shamed or attacked. The smarter people are, the greater becomes their ability to resist foolishness and evil. The better decisions made, the better the life for everyone.