jannotes

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/grand.htm

Here is a one of the most important critiques of the totalitarian mentality claiming benign purposes. Though ostensibly a criticism of the Catholic Church, Dostoevsky also by implication is alluding to the revolutionary Marxist-Leftist utopians of his day. But his insight into the need for most people to be slaves, who fear their freedom, who eschew it in favor of elites who will make them feel comfortable in their slavery can now also be applied to the multitudes of people who nowadays follow the Kochs and the Evangelical Plutocratic ministers with the false belief that they are the favored of these elites and that they somehow will do well by them. Ivan, who tells the tale, believes the Grand Inquisitor in fact loves mankind and believes the imposition of totalitarian belief, through the Church’s control over miracles, mystery, and authority keep the slavish hoi polloi blissfully believing they will be loved by God. The important point is that individual responsibility and freedom is for the average person terrifying, and the higher powers he or she subscribes to through the leadership of the Church and being abjectly subservient to it gives that person the feeling of power, however vicarious. In this country at the present moment, there is a strange, one might say unholy, alliance between the Evangelical churches and the powers of corporate avidity. They split up the duties in which the power of hyper-wealth allies with the power of religious ideology to gain full control over the vast amounts of slave-types who represent the larger portion of the human race. Thus, what was a Catholic/Revolutionary Marxist issue for Dostoevsky has now become a corporate/Evangelical issue in our own time. The purpose and the human nature involved is the same. It’s called Totalitarianism, and it is on its way soon if we don’t wake up.

It tells us a lot about the Right when whenever a person stands up to the inequities (and iniquities) of the wealthy class and their influence on political power that they bring up class warfare and envy. It is a simple case of projection: they themselves are by nature envious of others, envy of others is what motivates them, drives them, towards their version of success (material only) and they assume that any criticism of their injustices comes through envy, which then promotes class warfare. Libertarians, who self-righteously claim self-responsibility as the primal master virtue, are the first to claim victimhood (an abrogation of self-responsibility by pointing the finger at others for one’s own failings) which comes out in their pathetic appeal to class warfare and envy as the umbrella excuse for their immoral behaviors and ideology. When I take you to task for your bad behaviors, it is a despicable lie for you to claim I merely envy you, and thus by implication, that if I were in your position, I too would be happy with the inequalities that exist in this society. You mistakenly believe that all human beings share your perverse understanding of what it is to be moral. But your resentment of just criticism shows that you are far from the ubermenschen that Nietzsche spoke of – resentment for him was the arch-flaw in human behavior. Claiming envy is what consumes the “lesser” people (Ayn Rand’s “parasites”) and to claim victimhood (resentment’s progeny) from that is just more evidence of the utter lack of moral fiber or insight of the Right Wing in America these days.