Monday, October 29, 2012

Economic Justice, Social Justice, & FACIAL Justice

Reading some Murray Rothbard.  And I wanted to share an excerpt from one of his essays because I found it not just to be incredibly insightful, but incredibly eerie.   Specifically, the book he cites and how the book, though intended to be fiction when written, is sadly too close to being a reality today.

Older egalitarianism stressed making income or wealth equal; but, as Helmut Schoeck brilliantly realized, the logic of their argument was to stamp out in the name of "fairness," all instances of human diversity and therefore implicit or explicit superiority of some persons over others. In short, envy of the superiority of others is to be institutionalized, and all possible sources of such envy eradicated.

In his book on Envy Helmut Schoeck analyzed a chilling dystopian novel by the British writer, L.P. Hartley. In his work, Facial Justice, published in 1960, Hartley, extrapolating from the attitudes he saw in British life after World War II, opens by noting that after the Third World War, "Justice had made great strides." Economic Justice, Social Justice and other forms of justice had been achieved, but there were still areas of life to conquer. In particular, Facial Justice had not yet been attained, since pretty girls had an unfair advantage over ugly ones. Hence, under the direction of the Ministry of Face Equality, all Alpha (pretty) girls and all Gamma (ugly) girls were forced to undergo operations at the "Equalization (Faces) Centre" so as all to attain Beta (pleasantly average) faces.

What it goes to show you (which is the whole point of Rothbard's essay) is how liberals, leftism and socialism are not just for the equal redistribution of wealth, but the equality of EVERYTHING.  Status, power, looks, etc.  Nobody can be better or worse than anybody else in any regard.  And the only way to achieve that is to kill the individual and replace it with not just economic communism, but social, psychological and personal communism.  Nobody is unique, everybody is the same.

Rush Limbaugh and his "Uglo-Americans" was not a bit. It was great insight.

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