Let's Destroy The Land!
Won't That Be Fun?
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Academic types tend to think up grand ideas which they believe will fundamentally transform America for the better. Sure, millions may die, maybe the economy will be destroyed, but utopia is on the way.
"Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream" ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
Consider the Cloward-Piven strategy, an idea so bad only an intellectual would think of it. It proposes to overload the welfare system to such an extent that it falls apart and universal basic income is instituted, but more likely the unspoken intent was to leave us with no choice but to adopt Communism. What could go wrong?
https://www.cairco.org/reference/cloward-piven-strategy-fundamentally-transforming-america
And from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy
The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. The strategy aims to utilize "militant anti poverty groups" to facilitate a "political crisis" by overloading the welfare system via an increase in welfare claims, forcing the creation of a system of guaranteed minimum income and "redistributing income through the federal government".[1][2][3]
Strategy
Cloward and Piven's article is focused on compelling the Democratic Party, which in 1966 controlled the presidency and both houses of the United States Congress, to redistribute income to help the poor. They stated that full enrollment of those eligible for welfare "would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments" that would: "...deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the working-class ethnic groups and the growing minority poor. To avoid a further weakening of that historic coalition, a national Democratic administration would be constrained to advance a federal solution to poverty that would override local welfare failures, local class and racial conflicts and local revenue dilemmas."[5]
Somehow it seems reasonable to such people that creating chaos and misery on a wide scale is not a bad thing, presumably the ends justify the means. The amazing thing is that they don't recognize the possibility of true chaos, that things may spin out of control. They seem to think that they can predict and control essentially all outcomes, and oddly enough, that they will be not be personally affected. The saying is that no plan survives contact with the enemy, and it’s as true for the social engineers as it for generals.
Cloward and Piven released the strategy into the world in the magazine The Nation in May of 1966 in an article entitled The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.
In their article they said that they thought that poverty could be eliminated by this process, and maybe they thought this would work. But then, if you could use this simply to bring in universal basic income, why stop there?
We've recently been saddled with an administration that looks to have been using a modification of the Cloward-Piven strategy; bring in untold numbers of unvetted foreigners and swamp the US as a whole, not simply the welfare system.
The effect of a successful Cloward-Piven operation could well be an equality of wealth, with most everyone but the leaders being equally poor, as in Communist countries.
I always wonder what kind of person would seriously consider foisting such things on the rest of us. The idea that one has the right to destroy lives wholesale due to some half baked theory that it will make things better in the end is just over the top, but there's never a shortage of them.
Communism is such a beast; we'll just confiscate everything, enslave everyone, organize it ourselves and it will be great. It would be okay if such thinking was limited to a few pointy headed intellectuals, but it got turned into a mass social movement, and when the dust had settled there were vast numbers of corpses. I know that people were rightly concerned by abuses by employers, but really!
"I believe that he who sows utopia will reap reality." ~ Carlo Petrini
We should look at an expanded view of the Cloward-Piven strategy, think of all of the myriad ways in which a country can be intentionally overloaded beyond that of the welfare system. The idea can be used in areas other than the welfare system, it's basically the idea of forcing a crisis so that one's proposed solution is accepted, and I always wonder what kind of person buys into these things: Let's propose a policy that will probably cause poverty, death and the breakdown of civilization, but it might lead to our imagined but maybe incorrect view of improvement once it's over. The phrase “for the greater good” seems like the most chilling phrase in the English language since you can use it to justify anything.
"Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to our ourselves, How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?" ~ William Golding
Utopia
The academic mind as found in much of academia is subject to the seductive appeal of utopian fantasies. After all, if only they, the hyper intelligent, were in charge they could make all of those nasty little difficulties of life go away. And who better than them? They looked around and didn't see anyone better; and their arrogance allows them to dismis…
The broader problem is the hubris many people have that allows them to concoct plans that may well cause misery and death for millions and not think twice about it. How can this be? Quite possibly many of the academics who propose wild, Earth changing ideas are only really aiming to be heard and recognized by other academics, it's just part of the academic game of intellectual oneupmanship. They might be appalled when people begin dying by the thousands or being shipped off to certain death in Siberia; they didn't really mean that to happen. Others would not be bothered at all, but would feel pride in seeing the massive events they have had a hand in. That's a spiritual issue.
And if you want to change the world, change yourself. That's the only thing you have much control over.
"Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality." ~ Albert Camus
Stay Brave, Stay Free
communism is great. Workers in Cuba get 25 usd/month. castro dies with a net worth of 400 million usd. Beria would drive around moscow and select a young woman, take her back to his luxury home, rape and sometimes murder her. Pol pot murdered a third of his country. The mostly jewish bolsheviks murdered 65 million Christian Russians. Vasily blokhin personally murdered 20 thousand Polish prisoners at Katyn Forrest. He shot them three at a time, took months. Hard work, you know. This is only a small accounting of the misery, murder, death and starvation caused by communism over the entire world. I agree with Rafal Gan Ganowicz when he was asked what it felt like to kill someone.
If one studies the roots of Communism the foundation of the Cloward/Pivens Strategy is the Karl Marx "Proletariat Revolution":
Marxists see capitalism as an unstable system that will eventually result in a series of crises. The more that capitalism grows, the more people take advantage of it, and the more oppressed, degraded, and exploited the proletariat will be (Marx, 1873). Eventually, capitalism will result in a revolt by the proletariat, according to Marxists. This will lead to the dismantling of capitalism to make way for a socialist or communist state. Cloward and Pivens morphed Marx from the 19th to the 20th Century.
In the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, Marx and Engels proposed that the proletariat revolution was inevitable and would be caused by the continued exploitation of the capitalists. The workers will eventually revolt due to increasingly worse working conditions and low wages. Marx argued that a social revolution would mean changing the existing social and political system from a capitalist to a communist society. A communist society means there are no social classes or private property. The result of the Communist revolution is that private property and capitalism will be replaced by a classless society in which private property will be replaced with collective ownership. This will mean that society will become Communist. similar to China and North Korea.