Mike Holmes via e-mail points out the opposition of political correctness in universities to diversity: “…today’s SJW PC environment…promotes a unitary Stalinist form of thought control and behavior punishment. ‘Diversity’ doesn’t apply to that.” Diversity in the sense of diverse ideas within universities, i.e., a panarchic character of universities, is being destroyed by the SJW PC push.
More generally, the democratic socialism of the party of the same name promotes the opposite of panarchy, namely, uniform social structures, while they claim to want individuality. Some of their platform is examined briefly in an earlier blog. Here’s a bit of further criticism.
The Democratic Socialists aim at nurturing individuality:
“A democratic community committed to the equal moral worth of each citizen will socially provide the cultural and economic necessities—food, housing, quality education, healthcare, childcare—for the development of human individuality.”
However, they plan to accomplish this aim by a structure that eliminates individuality by submerging (eliminating) individual decision rights and freedom of choice within collectively-made decisions, called “democratic”:
“Achieving this diversity and opportunity necessitates a fundamental restructuring of our socioeconomic order. While the freedoms that exist under democratic capitalism are gains of popular struggle to be cherished, democratic socialists argue that the values of liberal democracy can only be fulfilled when the economy as well as the government is democratically controlled.”
Individuality can’t be achieved by means that destroy individual decision rights. The Democratic Socialists do not understand that their vision is self-contradictory, destroying what it sets out to create.
This flaw is joined by a second. They have no vision of freedom of choice in governance or competition in governance. They picture “the economy”, “the government”, “a democratic community” and “our socioeconomic order” being replaced by another one. They imagine only single units that are large-scale aggregates. They fail to imagine diversity at these high levels of aggregation. They fail to envision competition, and freedom of individuals cannot be enhanced without such competition.
The latter flaw is joined by a third. The word “democratic” is their magic wand by which all is made right. Democratic control of economy and government is their aim, and whatever this is, it’s supposedly productive of individuality. Democratic control of economy is inconsistent with both individual decision rights and an economy with decision-making that satisfies people’s wants, the latter two being indissolubly linked.
6:08 pm on January 13, 2019
