| | I don't think every irrational thought or evasion results in violence against innocent people. However, I think that violence against innocent people is always the result of irrationality.
Since I believe in the fundamental unity of mind and body -- of thought and action -- I've been puzzling over the ethics of those who advocate statism.
I believe that statist intellectuals like Karl Marx are what laid the foundation for statist mass murderers like Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Josef Stalin to come along. If not for those like Marx, then the world's Lenins and Stalins wouldn't have had as easy a time coming to power. In that sense, I see statist intellectuals as complicit in the evils that are done when their statist doctrines are actually implemented in the real world.
However, I have extreme difficulty in saying that just because Marx helped make Stalin possible, that Marx is necessarily as evil as -- or more evil than -- Stalin. It was with conscious deliberation that Stalin implemented the policies that murdered 40 million people, and he knew he was killing people.
Marx's ideology contributed to the intellectual respectability of the political apparatus that empowered Stalin to do this -- and Marx even advocated the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie -- but seeing that Marx did not actually plan any specific murders or sign anyone's death warrant or pass any laws, I have trouble saying that Marx's evil is on par with Stalin's, or that the law should consider Marx an accessory to mass murder.
I have trouble with saying that pro-totalitarian rhetoric is just as evil as the state-implemented murder committed under statism, because it seems to me that if speech advocating physical force (in the abstract) is a physical jeopardy -- and a degree of evil -- that is equal to the physical implementation of force, then such pro-force rhetoric can be justly answered with government force.
If the implementation of Karl Marx's exhortations lead to censorship, then is government censorship of Marx simply justifiable retaliatory force? Would it be on the grounds that Marx espousing his pro-violence ideology itself counts as an initiation of force? I think not.
I think Marx's rhetoric helped make Stalin's murderous policies possible, and I think Marx's rhetoric deserves some moral blame, but I still think that Stalin is significantly more evil than Marx. Further, violence can be justly used against Stalin's communist policies, but not against mere rhetoric in favor of communist policies.
But if, in the long term, all political actions proceed from irrational thoughts, and mind and body are one, then how can we make moral and political distinctions between government force and pro-government-force rhetoric?
I think I have an answer.
I would say that a deliberate action is a completed action and a completed thought. A thought is not fully implemented or complete unless and until it is carried out in the physical realm.
Therefore, if someone talks a lot and advocates many totalitarian policies -- but does not do anything to implement them in physical reality -- then that advocacy remains a set of uncompleted thoughts or uncompleted actions.
Thus, if Marx advocates totalitarianism and violence, but does not actually bring them about or plan their implementation, then his advocacy remains an uncompleted action and is not of the same ethical magnitude as the actual installation of totalitarianism.
By that same token, when Stalin carried out those mass murders, he completed Marx's thought by translating it into a complete action in the real world.
Even though pro-totalitarian rhetoric contributes to making totalitarianism possible in the real world, the mere rhetoric remains an uncompleted action, while the full implementation of totalitarianism is the completed thought and completed action.
I think that to phrase it this way shows how the advocacy of force is still morally wrong, and of how actions are ultimately determined by the extent to which people do or do not exercise their rationality, but that totalitarianism's reliance upon pro-totalitarian philosophy does not necessarily make the pro-totalitarian philosopher as evil as the actual totalitarian dictator.
What do you think?
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