I have to add some of my own cents/sense here, everyone. Victor, all ideas have consequences. That is why some should absolutely be feared. Bad ideas have bad consequences when put into practice, simple. Good ideas that get perverted also have bad consequences when put into practice, more complicated, and tending to disillusionment with the original good idea, even though it was misrepresented to begin with.
Socialism and Communism are ideas which subdue the productive and positive elements of the human spirit. It is ingrained in us to do and make for ourselves, and to protect and provide for those we love. This makes even more than intellectual sense to you, now that you have a (beautiful!) family. Another ingrained facet of the human spirit is compassion. Until circumstances and training beat it out of us, people do rise up and tend to care for one another, and so capitalism and self-governance can and will cultivate and sustain a healthy society.
The two -isms mentioned operate by stripping away and discarding ANY spiritual/theological/religious view that might uphold the individual in a course of charity, selflessness, etc., and replaces it with the STATE. When these ideas get control of education, it becomes indoctrination: people are questionably the highest-evolved animals, incapable of doing any real good without exploiting other people and raping the planet, and unfit for life, to the point that you should let us, the ones in power, take your money, your land, your children, and put them where we think it will do the most good. When these ideas get control of business and commerce, they shackle it with regulation designed to stifle it, thereby punishing any positive growth that actually would "trickle down" to benefit society, through job opportunities, dependable wages, the 'job security' that those of my grandparents' generation last could count on. When these ideas get control of people's very personal lives, the state is now managing women's ovaries (as in China), selectively murdering unborn "minority" children (Margaret Sanger's great vision for Planned Parenthood being to stop the Blacks from "breeding like rabbits" in the inner cities, as she said with all possible venom), and selectively weeding out those who are "no longer useful to society" (the whole eugenics movement). ....That, for the bad ideas. They have consequences, and we are living with many of them.
As to good ideas which can and have bad consequences (Let's pick on capitalism, isn't that the favorite punching bag?) because of corruption in how they are applied: there are some ingrained facets to human nature that are not so nice, too, and this has to be said. Back when our nation was founded on a solid set of moral convictions stemming from a common religious outlook, de facto capitalists were trained up and built a flourishing country in which even the "poor" lived a life of wealth compared to the poor elsewhere in this world. These capitalists operated in charitable fashion, by and large, and far less people were left behind than are today. Admittedly, life was more about getting food and maintaining shelter and clothing, before the Industrial Revolution hit the world, and so there was less room for hatching all the graft that came in since. I hope you can see that capitalism bounded by its original moorings meant to do good, and did, and that since our nation has banished all public morality (and is now going after private morality - check out parentalrights.org) and hung on to just capitalism based on greed, we have been propagating and exporting only the worst aspects of our culture that this can produce. But capitalism was never posited as a tool of greed; it was hijacked in the vacuum of moral responsibility that we have allowed our legislators to create little by little. And we cannot blame it solely on our legislators, since we (as a whole) put them into office.
One idea that has had horrific consequences is Charles Darwin's whole theory on the origin of species. He posited that all life evolved from a single cell, putting man at the top of the chain. Those who wanted to pursue this theory used it to misinterpret centuries of human remains as representing different stages of this 'evolution'...and social Darwinism's racist implications were born. Necessarily, in this point of view, some humans must have evolved more or less than others. H.G. Wells, a disciple of Darwin's writings, wrote his history of the world in just those terms, citing the darker races as the least evolved, and putting the fairer races at the top in virtue and value. A totally repugnant idea, and one to which we are not as immune as we think, and which should be a terrible embarrassment to all mankind. Margaret Sanger was another disciple of Darwinian theory, and used it to build her vision of Planned Parenthood already mentioned. The organization had nothing to do, as the name suggests, with the freedom to plan the size and timing of your family, but it had to do with aggressive advertising in areas of non-white concentration, providing abortion and harmful 'birth control' methods, all wrapped in the disguise of healthy living. Thomas Huxley fired up the whole eugenics movement based on a social Darwinist idea that old people, infirm people, or mentally-impaired people merely drain society's resources and should therefore be despatched...and so we have Dr. Kevorkian 'helping' people to 'dignified' self-destruction. Adolf Hitler was a social Darwinist to the extent that he set out to exterminate everyone he didn't see as an asset to his perfect, Aryan super-race.
No fear of socialism or communism or any other idea? Just let our living out of 'better' ideals be our witness? Two problems: 1) the present state of world society is that their are no moral underpinnings that have not been attacked in the name of 'tolerance', upon which we used to be able to hold to our ideals and not cheat in living them out, thus acheiving a winsome proselytization. 2) Socialism and Communism are not producing happy, healthy people. Chinese and Mexicans alike want to come to the U.S., what they see as the last bastion (albeit a crippled one) of freer living, with a possibility of dreams coming true with honest hard work. The people who live regular lives, not the rich, in the socialist oil countries, are not being uplifted by generous socialistic regimes...they are being neglected while their elite leaders who possess the oil fields drive in air-conditioned cars to western-style casinos and worse.
I am terribly afraid of the encroachment of these ideas on our "free-speech" political system, and of the consequences they have already had for my family and will have: I belong to a growing 'fringe' of the population that educates our children at home, where they can actually have a free flow of ideas, and learn objectively the virtues and vices of each. I know that a crack-down will come, and soon. Home schooling has already acheived enough success to attract the attention of the ruling elite the world over, who see this as a threat: we produce free thinkers, who know things and know to question and evaluate things. We will be persecuted, in fact it has already begun, but there is no other place to stand and live with our consciences.
Perhaps (actually, I know) I have hit upon the root of all our problems: conscience is what is stifled in our education, politics, and the rest by the prevailing currents of ideologies. Conscience, [a moral feeling of right and wrong, with a compulsion to do right] is the antithesis of today's "tolerance" stance. To be tolerant by today's standards, is to avoid offending anyone else by stating and standing on convictions. In the absence of conscience, ideas will tend to serve the baser human impulses. That is when we do indeed have much to fear.
(And I know that's a heaping helping of Sunday sermonizing...but I can't be outdone by my little brother's succint version.)
Well said!
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