#daniel walden

In Christian theology, our inescapable tendency to fall short of moral ideals is called original sin. It’s one way to make sense of an undeniable set of facts: that we know what kinds of measures need to be taken to alleviate the suffering of our fellow human beings, and that we are for the most part unwilling to take those measures. The lives of saintly people, however, open our eyes to how wicked we really allow ourselves to be. Many religions have traditions of such exemplars: Buddhist bodhisattvas, Taoist sages, and legendary rebbes of Hasidic Jewish traditions all illuminate qualities that those communities consider integral to living a good life. Notably, virtually all such people were extremely weird and frequently very annoying by the standards of the times and places in which they lived. Socrates himself was such a pest that it earned him multiple lawsuits and eventually execution by the state.

"Jesus was not a socialist. But socialists, I think, understand something about Jesus that libertarians, even Christian ones like Lawrence Reed, do not: that the world at which we aim, the kingdom whose coming Christ proclaimed, will not settle our debts and contracts but abolish them completely; that even those who didn’t join the struggle until the eleventh hour will be welcome at the feast; that the moment at which love appears utterly defeated, when it looks to the world like a victim crucified by state violence, will in the end be revealed as love’s final, all-embracing triumph. In the capitalist logic of debt and property, there is nothing more foolish than the love that gives all for one’s enemy. But remember what the Apostle Paul says: that 'God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.'

The term for this that St. Augustine coined is libido dominandi, the lust for ruling. It’s a deeply unpopular fault to admit to in a democratic culture, but this doesn’t mean it has disappeared; we just have more innovative ways of disavowing it. One of our most effective tricks is to convince ourselves that we’re simply holding firm to a principle: it is the principle, we say—the principle of piety, for example, or of party discipline—that everyone should honor. We abstract our desires and make little idols of them, because if we dress them in sufficiently regal and impersonal costumes, they will not look so much like us.