Just finished watching "V for Vendetta" and found it to be a very ideologically powerful narrative, that would be both inaccurate and harmful to apply to our modern situation in the USA. It seems like a dramatization of a type of "Anarchist Manifesto" where government is the big bad evil unit that the people must destroy with no thought of the aftermath. It's a one-sided reductionistic argument that reduces the complexity of the many facets of government to some monomaniacally power-hungry monolith completely devoid of rational justification for what it does and purely tyrannical. It pretends that government control is always evil and therefore finds its justification for violence.
When ideologies are quick to view violence as the solution, they have gone off the deep-end into extremism. When ideologies get obsessed with grand narratives of "good" and "evil" they tend to become more blind to counterarguments, since every argument from the other side is necessarily evil and therefore not worthy of consideration. When you are blind, you fail to see good and evil accurately. As a consequence, you then commit violence against something that you imagine to be evil, yet you find yourself to be the evil one when you realize that you were wrong in assuming your target was evil.
Marxism is blind to the benefits of income inequality since it obsesses itself with a grand narrative that the upper class is evil and the lower class is righteous. Marxism consequently concludes that the poor are justified in destroying the rich. This murderous ideology imagines up a collective guilt on the heads of the rich, which fails to appreciate nuance between individuals within the members of that class. By collectivising guilt, Marxism fails to accurately determine which rich people are evil and therefore murders the innocent rich people. By collectivizing guilt they commit classicide.
Nazism is blind to the benefits of diversity since it obsesses itself with a grand narrative that the Jewish race is evil and that the German race is righteous. Nazism consequently concludes that the Germans are justified in destroying the Jews. This murderous ideology imagines up a collective guilt on the heads of the Jews, which fails to appreciate nuance between individuals within the members of that race. By collectivizing guilt, Nazism fails to accurately determine which Jews are evil and therefore murders innocent Jews. By collectivizing guilt they commit genocide.
Revolutionary anarchism is blind to the benefits of government since it obsesses itself with a grand narrative that the government is evil and that the people are righteous. Revolutionary anarchism consequently concludes that the people are justified in destroying the government. This murderous ideology imagines up a collective guilt on the heads of those in government, which fails to appreciate nuance between individuals within the members of the branches of government. By collectivising guilt, revolutionary anarchism fails to accurately determine which members of government are evil and therefore murders innocent members of government. By collectivizing guilt they commit regicide.
There are many ways to collectivize guilt, whether by political party, class, religion, age, race, or gender; but all of them appear to be noxiously wrong and deserving of constant rebuttal until their grand narratives are replaced by a cautious investigation of nuance.
