I had a bit of an epiphany and I’m not sure where to post this. This is my sincere effort to not be a troll and post the clearest version of the leftist’s world view as I can - AND it’s consequences. Here goes.
Undeserved suffering is evil. Undeserved suffering is the only evil there is. Deserved suffering is fine, so you can torture Nazis - they deserve it. You can also suffer to get a better job or position in life, that is wanted suffering. While it isn’t good, it isn’t evil.
Since undeserved suffering is the ultimate evil and the only evil there is, we must rearrange government and society to eliminate all unwanted suffering. You can change your body, change your sex. You can decide to be anything at all as long as it alleviates or removes unwanted suffering.
Abortion is seen as a heroic act because it removes the unwanted suffering of the mother, and the child growing in a disadvantaged household will suffer undeservedly so aborting the pregnancy is a doubly heroic act. Suffering is the only evil. Even if it is murder they don’t care. Murder isn’t evil, only suffering is evil. Murder is only evil if it causes someone to suffer, the same with lying. Lying is only wrong if it makes someone suffer.
Here is the poison in the ideology.
Are you going to suffer things in life that you don’t want to? Yes. With almost absolute certainty you will suffer things you don’t want to. Suffering is the only and ultimate evil.
They might not say it explicitly but since suffering is evil and all who exist are almost guaranteed to suffer - existence itself is evil. They will deny this, but the rampant nihilism on the left all but proves my point.
The left believes that the very act of existing is evil.
Need a carbon tax to save the planet but it will kill a billion people? Not really a problem because you are ending their suffering - existing is evil and with fewer people we will be better able to mitigate their suffering.
Thank you for your thorough response.
Just one question. Why is oppression bad?
I can only speak for myself, not for “the left” overall, because again, a Marxist for example would not say that “oppression is bad”, they have a more materialist and anti-moralist view.
I would say that oppression is generally bad because it violates people’s autonomy/personal liberty. So why is that bad? Or rather, why is personal liberty/autonomy good?
Well in my view, personal liberty is one of the few things virtually every human wants for themselves, it’s one of the few things we can “agree on”. Nobody likes to be a slave, nobody likes to not be in control of their lives. There are some people, for example some people who are into S&M, that do like to give up their autonomy and “be a slave”, but at the end of the day, they are still the ones who make that decision on their terms.
Even the dictator or king or whatever wants autonomy, at least for themselves. The reason why they don’t want autonomy and freedom for others is often because they believe that restricting other’s freedom gives them even more personal freedom to do whatever they want to do.
But the thing with personal liberty/autonomy is that from a leftist perspective, it has to be “equally distributed” to people, otherwise it’s not really freedom. If you give people not only the freedom to control their own lives, but the “freedom to control other people’s lives”, we aren’t talking about freedom anymore, we are talking about oppression or even tyranny.
To use an extreme example, if there is a country where there is only 1 person with complete autonomy/personal liberty, we wouldn’t call that region “free”, we would probably call it a tyranny. It means that one person is calling all the shots and does whatever they think is correct without having to consider anyone’s opinions.
That person could argue that they are “the most free person ever” because that person has more “freedom” than anyone in a society where freedom is distributed equally. For example, that person could have “the freedom to just have someone executed” randomly in the streets, but again, we wouldn’t call that freedom, we would call that oppression or tyranny. So in order to have a free society, everyone has to be equally free, so to speak.
To come back to your question, why is oppression bad?
On a personal level, because I, like pretty much all people, want to be in control of my own life and I don’t want my life to be determined by somebody else against my will.
On a more societal level, I would say that oppression is bad because it leads to tensions and conflicts between “oppressor and oppressed”, which leads to instability and violence. Because of that, it’s bad for everyone, even for the oppressor, because in many many cases, the oppressor will end up either receiving retaliation for his oppression or spend the rest of his life being paranoid about retaliation by the people he oppresses.
But we oppress some people. Criminals for one are people I would say are oppressed. Even if they amend their lives, integration into society is very hard. Yet we oppress them pretty freely in this society. This is one area where I think we need a better prison system.
You presented oppression as a bad thing. If it is bad then society widely does it. Over all I don’t view it as a bad thing. It is certainly not always evil. If it is not always evil, then how is it a substitute for undeserved suffering in my previous example?
That’s exactly right. Crime, punishment vs rehabilitation and the prison industrial complex are big topics on the left. Nowadays, it’s popular even for people on the right to criticize the “prison industrial complex”, but the left has been criticizing it since at least the 70s. The most radical leftists even argue for the abolishment of prisons and pretty much every leftist advocates at least for prison reform and focusing more on rehabilitation as opposed to punishment.
Yes, I would say oppression is generally a bad thing. To explain further, I would also say that people shooting people is generally a bad thing, but I think we can all agree that in some special situations, people shooting people is a “necessary evil”, for example when there is no other option and you need to defend yourself. I still don’t think you shooting someone in self defence is “good”, I think it’s a situation that sucks for everyone involved, but you had no other choice, it was necessary and the best possible option.
I look at prisons in a similar way. I don’t think people should be locked up for non-violent crimes or in cases where they are clearly not a danger to anyone, I don’t think people should be tortured in prison as punishment, but I do think that in order to protect the lives (and personal freedom) of other people, we need to sometimes separate dangerous people from society.