I had a bit of an epiphany and I’m not sure where to post this. This is my sincere effort to not be a troll and post the clearest version of the leftist’s world view as I can - AND it’s consequences. Here goes.
Undeserved suffering is evil. Undeserved suffering is the only evil there is. Deserved suffering is fine, so you can torture Nazis - they deserve it. You can also suffer to get a better job or position in life, that is wanted suffering. While it isn’t good, it isn’t evil.
Since undeserved suffering is the ultimate evil and the only evil there is, we must rearrange government and society to eliminate all unwanted suffering. You can change your body, change your sex. You can decide to be anything at all as long as it alleviates or removes unwanted suffering.
Abortion is seen as a heroic act because it removes the unwanted suffering of the mother, and the child growing in a disadvantaged household will suffer undeservedly so aborting the pregnancy is a doubly heroic act. Suffering is the only evil. Even if it is murder they don’t care. Murder isn’t evil, only suffering is evil. Murder is only evil if it causes someone to suffer, the same with lying. Lying is only wrong if it makes someone suffer.
Here is the poison in the ideology.
Are you going to suffer things in life that you don’t want to? Yes. With almost absolute certainty you will suffer things you don’t want to. Suffering is the only and ultimate evil.
They might not say it explicitly but since suffering is evil and all who exist are almost guaranteed to suffer - existence itself is evil. They will deny this, but the rampant nihilism on the left all but proves my point.
The left believes that the very act of existing is evil.
Need a carbon tax to save the planet but it will kill a billion people? Not really a problem because you are ending their suffering - existing is evil and with fewer people we will be better able to mitigate their suffering.
But we oppress some people. Criminals for one are people I would say are oppressed. Even if they amend their lives, integration into society is very hard. Yet we oppress them pretty freely in this society. This is one area where I think we need a better prison system.
You presented oppression as a bad thing. If it is bad then society widely does it. Over all I don’t view it as a bad thing. It is certainly not always evil. If it is not always evil, then how is it a substitute for undeserved suffering in my previous example?
That’s exactly right. Crime, punishment vs rehabilitation and the prison industrial complex are big topics on the left. Nowadays, it’s popular even for people on the right to criticize the “prison industrial complex”, but the left has been criticizing it since at least the 70s. The most radical leftists even argue for the abolishment of prisons and pretty much every leftist advocates at least for prison reform and focusing more on rehabilitation as opposed to punishment.
Yes, I would say oppression is generally a bad thing. To explain further, I would also say that people shooting people is generally a bad thing, but I think we can all agree that in some special situations, people shooting people is a “necessary evil”, for example when there is no other option and you need to defend yourself. I still don’t think you shooting someone in self defence is “good”, I think it’s a situation that sucks for everyone involved, but you had no other choice, it was necessary and the best possible option.
I look at prisons in a similar way. I don’t think people should be locked up for non-violent crimes or in cases where they are clearly not a danger to anyone, I don’t think people should be tortured in prison as punishment, but I do think that in order to protect the lives (and personal freedom) of other people, we need to sometimes separate dangerous people from society.