Theos-Talk Archives (August 2002 Message tt00045)

leonmaurer@aol.com wrote:
> materialist concepts behind corporate greed promulgated by business schools
> (such as the one at Harvard) -- as being the "left hand" or "sinister" path?
> Since they also serve the "right wing" (conservatives) I thought the
> misdirection implied through the misuse of such potent mantric words in
> different contexts was worth pointing out as food for thought... (Don't we
> all write our comments hopefully for the benefit of the lurkers on these
> lists? :-)

As the motto of the Perl language goes, there is more than one way to
do it. And one can find greed and selfishness on both the political left
and the political right, as well as people with altruistic motives.
Unfortunately, the most selfish of those on the political left use
emotions to overcome people's logic; they push the idea that if you
don't agree with their methods, then you can't possibly agree with their
goals. If you don't believe in giving money to hungry people for them to
buy food, then, by that logic, you must believe that they should starve
to death (as opposed to believing that, for example, you might just give
them food). 

The altruistic right wing members do not believe that people should
starve to death, but they DO believe that, when one gives help to those
who choose not to help themselves, then one should do it in such a way
that self-help is preferable, and for those who cannot help themselves,
to attempt to put them into a position where they can. But those who
choose the political right wing path for reasons of selfishness get all
the press. And the most prominent representative of the right, Rush
Limbaugh, is the hero of the selfish. The selfish representatives of the
left tend to be less obvious. They tell you how good they are while
stealing from you to pay for your own subjugation. Hillary Clinton wrote
a thesis on methods of doing just that (and fought a battle to illegally
keep it quiet). Unfortunately, it is the selfish who fight the hardest
for power; that is the major flaw in the Communist system, which
contains the inbuilt assumption that under Communism, selfishness
doesn't exist. 

Bart Lidofsky