It was toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy. Their bread, their work, their private lives began to depend on this or that decision in disputes on principles to which, until then, they had never paid any attention. In their eyes, the philosopher had always been a sort of dreamer whose divagations had no effect on reality. The average human being, even if he had once been exposed to it, wrorte philosophy off as utterly impractical and useless. Therefore the great intellectual work of the Marxists could easily pass as just one more variation on a sterile pastime. Only a few individuals understood the causes and probable consequences of this general indifference.
— The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1980)
Societies are the result of human action, and human action is the result of ideologies.
The supreme role ideas play in human existence can be seen no more starkly than in the fact that people subscribe to them without any hesitation, wavering, or scruples.
As captured so perfectly in the Czeslaw Milosz passage quoted at the top of this chapter, societies and any concrete order of social affairs are the direct outcome of ideas.
Ideas have consequences, both for good and for ill, and the determining factor is the truth or falsehood of the ideas being propounded.
The following is a real-life illustration — writ sickeningly large — of what can happen when false ideas grip a society. In this case, it is the false idea that individuals do not exist but are merely parts of a collective. This is what can result when the idea of individuality, individualism, and independent thinking are not regarded as primary but replaced instead with the ideology of egalitarianism by force:
When the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975, they did so with the intention of obliterating its hierarchical political culture in order to reconstruct Cambodian society from ground zero as the world’s most egalitarian, and therefore revolutionary social order.
That passage comes from historian Karl Jackson, in a heartbreaking book, published by Princeton Press, called Cambodia 1975 – 1978. In this book, Jackson describes the Khmer Rouge (which was the name of the socialist-communist-Marxist party that took over Cambodia in the mid-1970’s) as “sectarians and radical egalitarians [who] saw the diversity and differences between people as the root of all evil.”
This ideology was extrapolated directly from the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
The Khmer Rouge was led by a cult-of-personality named Pol Pot, Western educated, who was also the architect of the Killing Fields – a seemingly incomprehensible genocide where Cambodian cities were systematically depopulated, and the entire Cambodian citizenry was enslaved on collective farms with a horrifyingly draconian ideology-of-equality imposed upon all.
“Typically, the slightest dissent would be punished by the offender getting clubbed or starved to death, and so many Cambodians were dispatched by such methods (approximately 1.7 million between 1975 and 1979 according to one estimate) that fields filled with corpses became the macabre hallmark of the regime” (Ibid).
From the Journal of Asian Studies (1998):
“First, they tried to eliminate the use of linguistic registers that connoted kinship, age and other social differences. The word comrade, mitt, was suppose to replace titles, honorifics and even kin terms. Second, many non-verbal cues that connoted status, such as polite greeting forms and bending down before superiors, were also discouraged.”
A historian by the name of Jay Jordens writes that the “Khmer Rouge realized Buddhism was at the core of Khmer ideas of social hierarchy. Thus by abolishing religion and destroying all vestiges of Buddhism; monks, texts, images, rituals, and so on, they might destroy the moral underpinnings of the beliefs in ‘unequal souls'” (Propaga