Solzhenitsyn, Communism, Miracles & The Imposing Your Beliefs Fallacy

Words and phrases can drift over time, as you all know, sometimes coming to mean even the opposite of their original definition. Like awful, meaning first something worthy of awe, now describing something disgusting or terrible and not awe-filled. One must therefore be careful when reading older material and interpreting it in a modern context. There was recently a certain authoress who learned after the release of her book, on a live radio interview, that she got the main word around which her entire thesis relied entirely wrong. Luckily for her, this did not diminish her enthusiasm.

Consider communism. It originally meant community of property (as I have reminded us innumerable times), the direct and logical deduction from egalitarianism. Which is to say, the state of no private ownership of property, everything kept in common, and all administered by an elite who have no more right to lord over the people than anybody else, except that they possess greater willingness to use violence to ensure their preeminence.

Strict communism in this sense is impossible. Which is to its benefit, because no matter how far down the path of stealing from others you have gone, there will always be something left to take. Including, of course, the lives of the people themselves. This provides a perpetual reason for the continued existence of communism’s elites.

This long-winded introduction is to remind ourselves that by the 1970s communism was not a word to describe what we now call Equity, i.e. the ideal state in which all have exactly the same amount of, well, of whatever it is that takes the fancy of the elite at the time. A current synonym for Equity is right, as in this person or group has the right to be given some thing, the thing drawn from or paid for by community property.

Communism in the 1970s meant something like brutal repression for the sake of repression. That the communist regime in Russia repressed its peoples in the name of socialism was not, however, why communism was disliked. Elites in the West loved the idea of socialism, and looked forward then, as now, to complete top-down control. A full Expertocracy. Communism is now You will own nothing and be happy. Communism then was You will own nothing and be unhappy. Under its new name, communism is welcomed now, but was then feared because elites in the West were not sure that if communism came to their lands, and imposed from outside and not administered from inside, that they themselves would remain in the elite.

Too, everybody naturally was frightened of the horror stories of the kinds of repression being used. Brutal starvation, murder, gulags, collectivization—which were logical; given all are Equal, people could be moved about like Legos under scientific mathematical utilitarian formula. The West did learn of these horrors before 1940, but then pretended to forget about them so that they could have their Good War. After that war, Western leaders pretended again that they weren’t pretending during the war, when it became too clear to continue to deny that Stalin was ready to take over all of Europe. And, through his agents inside the White House and environs (which our elites pretended weren’t there), take over even the USA.

Again, my apologies for failing to get to the main point. But I want us to know that our elite have not given up on the idea of total control, which they call Equity and Expert rule, which is only communism (in its original sense) by another name. It’s only that they have decided to go about it not in the quick efficient manly way of Stalin and his successors, who used bullets in the backs on necks, but in a leisured chaotic womanly manner, with its perpetual nagging (nudging), shaming and shunning.

I submit that it was the implication of violence in communism in the 1970s that carried most of the weight of the word. Which needs to be understood before we read a New York Times editorial in reaction to a speech made by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the man who re-taught the West of the horrors of industrial socialism.

The speech was the infamous Harvard World Split Apart event, which pops up every now and then, and has again recently. You simply must read it in its entirety. Do not be satisfied by summaries; they are insufficient. I trust that before reading further, you will read the speech.

Perhaps the best of the many analyses of the speech was by Peter Kreeft, who had the good fortune to be there (audio recording of Kreeft speech). Kreeft, only lightly joking, called Solzhenitsyn a prophet. This he was. Kreeft also did us the service of analyzing the reaction to Solzhenitsyn’s speech, which is (at last!) our point.

Incensed mildly hersterical sniffing dismissal is likely the most apt term to describe the bulk of the reaction. See if you don’t hear the voice of a superior (barely) closeted homosexual as portrayed in any 1940s movies as you read “The Obsession of Solzhenitsyn” in the NYT from 13 June 1978 (I have corrected the errors in the digitization).

If anyone has earned the right to call the West to moral reckoning, it is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The high courage and conviction which sustained him in the Soviet Gulag have captured the admiration of all free people. So his criticisms of America, excerpted on this page, compel attention and cut deep. Yes, our laws are used by the rich and powerful to gain more wealth and power; our press is often irresponsible; television is swamp of nonsense; pornography does flourish; and, yes, the nation is in thrall to material things. But given all that, Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s world view seems to us far more dangerous than the easygoing spirit which he finds so exasperating.

You will recall Mr S said this “far more dangerous” thing:

Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development.

Mr S got the censorship and violence part correct. Then. Alas, things have changed. Censorship is now hard upon us. And the elite are content to allow mostly peaceful voter-riots and murders when it suits their purposes. Yet they are still squeamish about carrying out open violence themselves (in their own names). I find this strange—Stalin was not so shy—and can only account for it because of our Great Effeminization.

The Closeted One continues:

The argument he raises is not new; it goes back the beginnings of the Republic and has never disappeared. At bottom, it is the argument between the religious Enthusiasts, sure of their relationship to the Divine Will, and the men of the Enlightenment, trusting in the rationality of humankind.

Although Mr. Solzhenitsyn comes out of a very different tradition, he has this in common with the Enthusiasts: he believes himself to be in possession of The Truth and so sees error wherever he looks. The True Believer views the world as a conflict between light and darkness, God and the Devil…

The trouble is, of course, that life in a society run by zealots like Mr. Solzhenitsyn is bound to be uncomfortable for those who do not share his vision or ascribe to his beliefs. 

This is the Imposing Your Beliefs Fallacy (blog/Substack). Closeted says Mr S believes he has the Truth, which frightens him, because he frets Mr S’s Truth might be imposed. Yet Closeted implies his own beliefs (which you notice he does not award a capital T) are superior, and he would impose his beliefs on us. Only he would lie and claim his imposition was not an imposition. I have told us hundreds of times that somebody’s beliefs must be imposed. Better they are ours, than theirs.

But notice the more subtle Fallacy, the one that might have slipped by and escaped your notice, it being so common. Closeted says we must trust in the rationality of humankind even as he condemns a rational argument.

Closeted has thus just accused Mr S of being irrational. While, of course, implying he himself is rational. It follows the Enlightened believe in miracles just the same as the Realists, only they believe in different miracles. The Enlightened say man was mired in mindless irrationality, having untrustworthy false thoughts, until one day, quite suddenly, a light in the earth appeared—a miracle!—and man became rational.

Only after the miracle could man’s thoughts be trusted. It has to be a miracle, because how else can you claim that then man was a slave to the False but is now a servant of Truth? What happened to change man? It cannot be a discovery made by thought. Because, of course, that “discovery” might itself be irrational, because man was in a perpetual state of irrationality. It’s true that many might call the “discovery” a truth, but how can we trust that it was a true discovery? We could not.

Yet somehow Closeted, and many like him, believe he has had this miracle happen to him. And that is has bypassed others, like Mr S.

This could happen if the miracle was of the Julian Jaynes bicameral-mind type, some new quirk of biology that transformed the mind of man, preventing him from being irrational. If so, that mutation has clearly not spread to all men equally, and (implies Closeted) certainly not to Mr S (or to us).

This puts Closeted in a hard place. He either has to admit to a miracle or to claim that s0me are biologically superior, which means that some are biologically inferior. The inferior have, as Closeted tells us, bad ideas. Ideas which should not be allowed to be imposed. But at the same time, Closets must avow egalitarianism, which says that this mutation must be present in all (or that the miracle happened).

And that’s the solution. Closeted, and all those like him, will avow Equality, but they won’t believe it. If pressed, and in private, they will admit espousing irreconcilable arguments. But life is not a course in logic. They use their hypocrisy to great effect, all to further their goal of being in charge and imposing their beliefs.

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