Where Chairman Mao and Teenage Nihilists Got Their Motivation

CEH ^ | November 12, 2009

[GodGunsGuts]

Nov 12, 2009 — What propelled Mao Zhedong to become the biggest mass murderer in world history?  Let a professor of Chinese history answer the question.  James Pusey (Bucknell U), writing in Nature this week for a series on “Global Darwin,”¹ was explaining the vacuum left by the collapse of the reform movement in the early 20th century.  A “group of intellectuals” found Marxism attractive.  It was the fittest ideology:

Many tried to fill it: Sun, Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kaishek) and, finally, the small group of intellectuals who, in indignation at the betrayal at Versailles, found in Marxism what seemed to them the fittest faith on Earth to help China to survive.
    This was not, of course, all Darwin’s doing, but Darwin was involved in it all.  To believe in Marxism, one had to believe in inexorable forces pushing mankind, or at least the elect, to inevitable progress, through set stages (which could, however, be skipped).  One had to believe that history was a violent, hereditary class struggle (almost a ‘racial’ struggle); that the individual must be severely subordinated to the group; that an enlightened group must lead the people for their own good; that the people must not be humane to their enemies; that the forces of history assured victory to those who were right and who struggled.
    Who taught Chinese these things?  Marx?  Mao?  No.  Darwin.

The ideology that led Mao to murder 77 million of his own people (11/30/2005) began with a view of nature that values struggle and fitness over the individual.  Though acknowledging that the political currents in China were complex, with reformers like Yan Fu and Sun Yat-sen incorporating Darwinian principles without radical revolution, Pusey placed the worldview that empowered Marxist ideology squarely at the feet of Darwin.  Darwin was Mao’s ideological mentor.
    Darwinian ideas can produce murderous results in individuals, too.  The Sunday Times Online printed an article that described the Darwinian motivations behind some of the serial killers of recent memory.  “The naturalist [Darwin] outraged the church, prompting a bitter debate that still sets creationists against evolutionists,” Dennis Sewell wrote.  “Now a sinister link has emerged between his work and the recent spate of high-school killings by crazed, nihilistic teenagers.”  Despite Darwin’s personal reputation as an “amiable Victorian gent,” Sewell continued, he “has been fingered as a racist, an apologist for genocide, and the inspiration of a string of psychopathic killers.”  The shooters at Columbine High School, for instance, saw themselves as eliminators of the weak.  Harris wore “Natural Selection” on his T-shirt the day of the shooting spree.  Many other artifacts gathered afterwards, described in the article, uncovered the boys’ fascination with “survival of the fittest.”
    In 2007, detectives intercepted a school shooting in Pennsylvania.  They “discovered that their suspect often logged on to a social networking site called Natural Selection’s Army,” the article says.  Sewell discussed a personality cult around Harris and Klebold in certain chatrooms and websites, including a computer game that lets the player act out the massacre.  “Natural Selection” apparel is hot with these aficionados, and “‘Natural Selection’ is the name of a popular computer game in which competing teams attempt to annihilate one another – a sign that Darwin’s term is still associated by many teenagers with sudden and extreme violence.”  Another case is the killing spree in 2007 in Finland by Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who declared in his manifesto before the event that he was a social Darwinist wanting to weed out the unfit.  In his words: “It’s time to put natural selection and survival of the fittest back on track.”
    Sewell acknowledged that Darwin himself would have been horrified by all this.  He knows that other great figures have been used by murderers as their inspiration.  Still, he was not ready to let the bearded old man off the hook.  “One conclusion implicit in evolutionary theory is that human existence has no ultimate purpose or special significance.... Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved,” he continued.  These simple (and simplistic) ideas are certainly accessible to disturbed adolescents who feel nothing stops them from taking natural law into their own hands.  And Darwin himself wrote in 1881, “Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”
    Sewell is author of the book The Political Gene: How Darwin’s Ideas Changed Politics.  His Times article was published on the Science page, not the Opinion page.  On page 2, he continued supporting his premise that Darwin’s views feed into the nihilism behind high school shootings – and political genocides – because it destroys all moral restraint.  One particular example shows this is not an isolated interpretation.  He said, “Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang ‘Randomness is good enough for me, If there’s no design it means I’m free’ – lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel.”  With a gospel like that, no wonder some go beyond the mere abandonment of sexual mores taught by their parents.  “But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.”  Sewell ended by pointing out that we cannot begin to address the issues when presented only with a “bowdlerized account of Darwin’s work” – i.e., a sanitized version portraying Darwin as a scientific saint.  He said, “The more sinister implications of the world-view that has come to be called ‘Darwinism’ — and the interpretation the teenage nihilists put on it – are as much part of the Darwin story as the theory of evolutions [sic].”

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1.  James Pusey, “Global Darwin: Revolutionary road,” Nature 462, 162-163 (12 November 2009) | doi:10.1038/462162a.

You have just seen what two scholars said who were not intelligent design leaders, creationists, or Bible-thumping preachers.  If you will not listen to the latter, then listen to the former.  You heard them saying what the preachers would have said anyway.  Let’s recap the list of principles that Pusey said you have to believe in to be a Marxist:

1. Inexorable forces push mankind to inevitable progress (are we there yet?)
2. There are set stages of progress (which can be skipped; e.g., by revolution).
3. History is a story of violent struggle (i.e., violence, not peace, is the ultimate reality).
4. The struggle is between classes or races (meaning, genocide is sometimes a moral obligation).
5. The individual must be severely subordinated to the group (so you are just a pawn in a game played by forces of nature).
6. An enlightened group must lead the people for their own good (e.g., the Communist Party leaders, who lived more royally than Czars, while their people suffered in famines and cramped apartments or in prison camps).
7. People must not be humane to their enemies (or to the unfit).
8. The forces of history assure victory to those who struggle (i.e., evolve or perish; eliminate the Mother Theresas and hospitals who unnaturally prolong the life of the unfit).

Again: who taught the Chinese these things?  Marx?  Mao?  No.  Darwin.
    What a world we live in.  On one side you have radical revolutionaries and teenage nihilists killing for Darwin.  On the other you have radical Muslims killing for Allah.  What to do?  Run not to the poorly-named Scientific Gospel, or to any self-proclaimed messiah who’s dead, but to the true gospel of the risen Lord Jesus Christ.  Run to the true Messiah who gave his life for his friends.  Run to Teacher whose two greatest commandments were to love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself.  Notice how un-Darwinian his Sermon on the Mount is.  The truth, not randomness, will set you free.  The truth will lead to a flourishing free society based on individual responsibility and charity.  You will know teachers of lies and teachers of the truth by their fruits.

[GodGunsGuts]

For the record, Chiang went on to reject revolutionary evolutionism and fought the commies with every fiber in his bing.

[GodGunsGuts]

Ping!

[donna]

“All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when development, evolution, is a scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.”
- Woodrow Wilson

[M-cubed]

Only when he saw which way the bread was buttered...
but now we’re are back to Darwin!

[mc6809e]

What a bunch of garbage.

If anything communism was partly a reaction against the Darwinism of Capitalism.

But more than than that, communism tried to morally justify theft. That was it’s real attraction. Pent-up envy and hostility towards those better off was let loose.

[Sherman Logan]

a nation is a living thing and not a machine.

How about neither?

Although it is strange that liberals seem to think they can upgrade society by unplugging part A and plugging in part B without any negative side effects.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Mao was clearly caught up in the Chinese Way. For well over a thousand years, all Chinese, including the Emperors, were taught that Emperors come in a cycle of four different kinds, associated with the four elements. And each Emperor was raised to behave according to his role in the cycle.

The first in the cycle was the “builder” Emperor, who would create China anew, from scratch. His successor would be the “maintainer” Emperor, who would get the rebuilt China functioning smoothly.

Then his successor would be the “degenerate” Emperor, who would pull the government into the Forbidden City, and let everything go to heck. His only real job was to keep anybody else from improving things. The “Last Emperor” of China was a degenerate Emperor.

When Mao took over, he all sorts of ambitious plans, but as far as China was concerned, he was the final Emperor of the cycle, the “water” Emperor, aka, the “Destroyer” Emperor. His job was to tear down China so that it could be rebuilt by his successor.

In Chinese history, when a water Emperor happened, LOTS of Chinese died. Usually in very brutal ways. So this is what everyone expected of Mao as well.

So Mao was caught in a predicament. When he issued an order that a water Emperor would issue, it was carried out instantly, and in as bloody as manner as possible. When he issued an order that a water Emperor would *not* issue, it would hit a solid wall of bureaucracy and go nowhere. Literally *nobody* would carry it out properly.

Eventually even Mao figured out that he was an Emperor, whether he wanted to be one or not. He even took to standing on a particular stone in the Imperial Palace that only the Emperor was permitted to stand on, as it was theoretically the center of the universe.

And since his time, the Chinese General Party Secretaries have once again conformed to the popular expectation of what they are supposed to do, were they Emperors.

[AndyJackson]

who taught the Chinese these things? Marx? Mao? No. Darwin.

Oh good grief you have just sounded new depths in stupidity. Do you really believe that Darwin left England, took up residence in China and became a new kind of Zen master, teaching his students "the way of of the murdering nihilist evolutionist, creating a cult following where he executed those who deviated from The Word of our Sublime Master."

Man are you ridiculous.

[Natural Law]

I thought I had seen it all from you but like I said in another thread it is impossible to underestimate you. Now you are blaming Mao on Darwin? That is stooping low even for you. We get it, you have a problem with Darwin, not evolution. If you have a problem with evolution you need to take it with the author of evolution, God.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[count-your-change]

Then I wonder if you know who proclaimed:

“Chinese socialism is founded upon Darwin and the theory of evolution.”

[AndyJackson]

“Chinese socialism is founded upon Darwin and the theory of evolution.”

So sayeth MAO, but that does not make it so. I can as well write that my murderous regime is founded on the teachings of Thomas Jefferson,and even quote a lot of Thomas Jefferson in defense of the thesis. The whole fraud would, however, be nothing but a libel against Jefferson who never instructed me to murder a large part of my own citizenry.

I seriously doubt that Darwin endorsed MAO's conduct. Indeed, he could not have since he was dead, not that that diminishes the libel and scorn you are willing to heap upon the man.

[rae4palin]

Beautiful.

[count-your-change]

Darwin understood the implications of his theory if applied to humans as a plant or animal breeder might to improving the stock. The only restraint was human sympathy and conscience but even that he had just theorized arose from evolution of social mores.

“So sayeth MAO, but that does not make it so.”

No, it doesn't, but his actions do.

[RoadGumby]

Man, was it said anywhere, that Darwin went to China and taught? However, the philosophy that he espoused was spread through (gasp) teaching. Therefore, it can be said that Darwin ‘taught’ the Chinese. Kinda simple if one just Thinks a bit.

[RoadGumby]

This is just a natural progression that starts with the idea that we are just descendants of pond scum, no better than a snail darter, man is JUST an animal anyway.

IF we are JUST and animal anyway, that paves the way for any number of de-humanizing philosophies and actions.

Survival of fittest - let the old die, they are just a burden anyway, useless eaters; kill the unborn, they are not wanted anyway, an inconvenience, a ‘punishment’, they are just a tumor, a mass of tissue.

No individualism - you are part of a ‘hive, no personal property, it ‘belongs’ to everyone, your children b’belong’ to the village, you Must think as we do to have proper diversity.

You have no Value beyond what you can give to society. When that ability is gone, you are worthless, disposable.

Mao, Lenin, Marx, Obama, Chavez all make use of this idea in their quest for power and control.

[FreedomProtector]

To carry a line of thinking, a philosophy of life, a worldview, to its logical conclusion is a powerful argument...

The truth of God is reflected all over in creation. The probably of even a single enzyme, much less a single cell, arriving by chance and natural process is so incredibly low even given the largest amounts of time and space suggested so far that it is irrational faith.

When ones presuppositions, the logical conclusions of those presuppositions conflict with the world in which they live and their conscience (laws of God written on their hearts Rom 2:15), there is tension, then they build walls of protection to shield themselves from the tension. As the fairly tale of evolution is exposed, the truth of God's creation will shine on hard hearts.

Thanks for posting.

[ElectricStrawberry]

PURE INTELLECTUALLY DIHONEST CLAPTRAP

[Natural Law]

"I seriously doubt that Darwin endorsed MAO's conduct."

Not possible since Darwin died in 1882 and Mao wasn't born until 1893. Nor would he have. There is nothing in the record to indicate that Darwin in anyway embraced or endorsed socialism or communism.

The problem that the YEC's have with Darwin is that they really believe that Darwin invented evolution instead of merely observing and reporting it.