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Merker: How the Left Exploits the Morality of Ordinary People
B2P2S5 Björn Merker in Perishing Promise reminds us that the Western Enlightenment has failed to achieve a cultural capture equivalent to Christianity in the High Middle Ages. The reason is that the Enlightenment is divided.
One is more emancipatory and revolutionary, labeled the Continental branch in the foregoing, while the other is more everyday and reformist, represented in the main by philosophers of the British Isles.
What is the difference?
[T]he British Island philosophers leaned to caution and meliorism, while les philosophes on the continent tended to more drastic modes of renewal, up to wholesale revolutionary overthrow.
And this has prevented the Enlightenment from “coalescing into a coherent ethos… preventing the West from fulfilling its civilizational promise”. In the last century the British branch has been in constant retreat from the Continental branch that tends to oppose “existing societal arrangements”.
In brief, the British Victorian ethos
channels the exertion of ordinary people… into socially constructive deployment by upholding ideals of personal responsibility, prudence, earning one’s keep by earnest work, and cultivating reliability and rectitude in one’s dealings with others as a means to earn their respect.
But that ethos has been crumbling, particularly since the 1960s, and as the left’s culture has irradiated the initial success of the welfare state with cheating and fraud.
Merker sets forth a table in which he contrasts “Ethos 1”, the British culture, and “Ethos 2” the culture devoted to taking Ethos 1 down. Examples include:
Negative rights vs. positive rights
Technological optimism vs. technological pessimism
Distinctions between class and race should not be enforced vs. Enforced distinctions
Two sexes vs. many sexual orientations
The differences have tended to emerge in the context of some issue “pressing for remediation and reform in an ambience of other-regard”. And it is also misunderstood because of the characterizations of the two ethoses as “left” and “right.” In fact, most people, from “progressive activists” to “devoted conservatives” agree on moral issues such as “Care/Harm” and “Fairness/Cheating”. But the “left” differs from the rest of the West when it comes to “Authority/Subversion” and “Loyalty/Betrayal” and “Purity/Disgust”. The left is against authority, loyalty, and purity.
In Merker’s analysis
what goes by the names of conservatism in the West aligns well with what we might call “the common sense of mankind”[.]
Left and right are not polar opposites. Instead the values of the left “represent a unique Western departure, a deviation, from a widely shared human sense of the values underpinning political morality across cultures”.
But the deviation of the left makes sense. If you believe in overthrow then you wouldn’t respect authority, loyalty to country, and moral purity.
The actual opposite of the left’s “focus on care and fairness” is, of course, fascism, which downplays “care and fairness while embracing respect for authority, loyalty, and norms of purity”.
But ordinary people respect all the five types of moral concern: care and fairness and authority and loyalty and purity. The difference is that the left downplays authority, loyalty, and purity.
The problem, for Merker, is that the left defines morality solely in terms of “other-regard” while the rest of mankind balances its morality between “other-regard”. “self-regard”, and “prudence”.
And the left exploits the natural human instinct of other-regard to power its program of overthrow. Back in the day, Lenin talked about “useful innocents” and Marx wrote about using the workers to demand concessions from the bourgeoisie.
Whether this is other-regarding morality or just power politics is up to the future to determine.
More to come.
| Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:08:24 GMT |
The Essence of Leftism in Feuerbach’s “Species-being”
B2P2S3 There have been two strains of the Left that have come down to us. One is the social democracy of Bebel, Lassalle, Liebknecht, and Kautsky, that culminated in the welfare state. The other is the politics of overthrow that we associate with Marx and Marxism.
Of course, Marxism is built upon a fundamental conceptual error, Marx’s “theory of surplus value,” that is founded upon a muddle in the classical economics of 1776 that was not cleared up until 1870 and the marginal revolution.
Marxism is an exploitation theory.
Exploitation theories of wage labor claim that the exchange of labor for wages in a market transaction hands the worker a wage whose value is less than the the labor that is performed in exchange for the wage in fact is worth[.]
That means that the employer profits from the work of the laborer. And that is exploitation and injustice. This interpretation issued from the two value systems in classical economics: use value and exchange value.
In the marginal revolution use value and exchange value were merged into the fact of prices in the market. The difference between the laborer’s wages and the employer’s product price is simply explained by the operation of the market in labor. The worker accepts or refuses the wage he is paid from prices in the market for labor, and the employer accepts the price he gets for selling the product to a buyer in the market for products.
In the Marxian understanding, “profits are obtained by what amounts to theft”. But what if the employer doesn’t make a profit, and has to sell at a loss? What then?
For Marx and his followers the difference between wages and prices meant that the laborer would become more and more impoverished, and the capitalists would get richer and richer. Obviously, this would end in “a bitter class struggle… [and] a violent overthrow of [the] exploiters [in accordance] with historical necessity”.
Marx’s analysis of labor exploitation benefited the alliance between social democratic parties and labor unions. If worker poverty was “intrinsic to the industrial mode of production” then systemic remedies were called for, and this was executed in the special privileges of labor “instutionalized in welfare state polities.” In addition,
The Marxian and socialist account of profit as concealed theft… has tainted the very concept of successful enterprise with connotations of ill-gotten gain, extortion, and parasitism in the popular imagination.
And if so, then nothing less than the overthrow of the capitalist system is required. If the current system is “sustained by a systemic mode of exploitation” then “overthrow” is the only solution.
The politics of overthrow experienced a headwind by the end of the 19th century as
industrial workers experienced improving conditions… and the middle classes, instead of disappearing, kept growing.
Thus, in 1899, Eduard Bernstein wrote
a virtual prospectus of the reformist path to socialism through parliamentary participation and legislative reform[.]
And so
the labor movements of “most countries on the Continent” secured their interests on a path of reform rather than by the violent revolution to which Marx was wedded[.]
In response, the Marxists had to reinvent their philosophy of revolution and overthrow. Lenin, in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, proposed that the capitalists had evaded disaster “by ‘bribing’ the proletariat at home with a portion of the proceeds from colonial exploitation abroad.” This postpones “the inevitable demise of capitalism” through the “ruthless exploitation of colonial peoples.” We can see why the Left has railed against colonial imperialism ever since. But “history proved Lenin’s theory wrong”, so another justification for revolution and overthrow was needed.
Enter the critical theorists and the Frankfurt School, from Lukacs to Gramsci to Horkheimer to Adorno to Marcuse, who generalized the exploitation theory from the workers to the exploited in general.
The goal is an “organization of society that will meet the needs of the whole community”… in which “mankind will for the first time be a conscious subject and actively determine its own way of life”.
They used a theory developed by Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity where he developed the ideas of “species-being” and “species-life”.
Species-being has to do with humans being “aware of themselves as a species.”
Species-life is only for humans and means “thinking, speaking to oneself, loving, willing, doing science” in addition to the simple animal life of “mating, rearing, hunting” with other individuals.
But for Marx, the only way that humans can acquire species-life is “to demolish in its entirety the order that thwarts it at every turn”. Revolution, baby! And this:
For Marx the species-being was a “godsend”: on its wings soared his hope that rising form the rubble of the toppled house there would emerge, Phoenix like, a new and pristine order of human creativity free of conflict and the pressure to earn a living.
On to Frankfurt School headmaster Horkheimer, imagining
a state of affairs in which there will be no exploitation or oppression, in which an all-embracing subject, namely self-aware mankind, exists, and in which it is possible to speak of a unified theoretical creation and a thinking that transcends individuals.
“Self-aware mankind” equals Marx’s “species-being”, and Marx had developed this ideology of revolution in the 1840s in The German Ideology: “Proletarians and Communism”.
For Marx the proletariat had by this time emerged as the ideal proxy for the species-being.
If you want “the complete redemption of humanity” then the “universal sufferings” of the proletariat was your excuse for revolution in the uncertainties of the 1840s.
All this had been unpublished until the 1930s and was developed and used by the Frankfurt School intellectuals to develop a universal justification for revolution and overthrow when the proletarians no longer available as helpless victims.
Horkheimer and colleagues developed their “praxis” to crafting diverse and ramifying discursive “critiques” to undermine and stigmatize various facets of the world they inhabited, found wanting by species-being standards (Horkheimer’s “all-embracing subject” of “self-aware mankind”.
Or, if you like:
the prevailing mode of production systematically dictates and poisons every aspect of the life it supports[.]
Or this, from Adorno:
We, however, know what is at stake!… Namely, earning a living, which commandeers all activities as mere means[.]
If you want to know what Marxian “alienated labor” means, it is “the need to earn a living”! The ideal, a quote from The German Ideology, is the famous quote: to be able “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner”.
Critical Theory rests its faith that the radical abolition of “all that exists” will be followed by a spontaneous order of harmonious benevolence.
Replacing the inevitable revolution arising from the immiseration of the proletariat is the notion that capitalism, after an initial advance, will corrupt into “a new oppression, mandating the emancipatory revolution Critical Theory meant to promote”.
The impact of Critical Theory is “to supply inspiration and ideological weapons for a heterogeneous amalgam of partisans of overthrow” in any context in which oppression can be imagined to inspire revolutionary impetus.
And so the context between the Continental and the British Enlightenment continues.
| Tue, 01 Sep 2026 04:06:43 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
The ruling class used to be a warrior class. Now the ruling class is an educated, intellectual class. Explain.
Reynolds’ Laws: 1. Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them. 2. The more a government wants to run its citizens’ lives, the worse job it will do at the most basic tasks of government. 3. Whatever politicians control, they will use against you to get what they want. 4. Longevity of political service does not make a politician more qualified; it only ensures they are more corrupt 5. Proposed legislation will fail if there is not enough opportunity for graft or control.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: An Analysis of Curtis Yarvin's Three Layer Theory
