When he died in 2011, Christopher Hitchens was a recovering Marxist

In a society where people don’t like to commit themselves to being “atheists,”Hitchens declared himself an “antitheist.”

Hitchens declared not only that he was an atheist, but that religion itself was a bad thing. He called himself an antitheist. His book on this subject was called, “Religion Spoils Everything.”

After a lifetime of watching people creep around issues, the simple fact that he dropped all the crap and said it bluntly was a relief to a lot of people like me. I did not fall into a goofy love affair with him the way respectable conservatives did, but I was impressed by this.

Of course those in recovery never use the term “recovered” alcoholic.  It’s always “recovering,” and I think we all know why.

Hitchens also said that he understood how becoming atheists can be hard on them psychologically. Rejecting their version of God robs a person of the central theme of his life.

Hitchens explained that he knew this agony because Marxism had been his religion.

The fact that Marxism is a religious faith is something Marxists hate to hear.

Like all religious fanaticism, Marxism declares that it is against all OTHER religions.

But the most basic tenet of the Marxist Faith is that Marxism is NOT a faith.

But Hitchens was a recoverING Marxist. It is possible he would have taken the next step in his recovery had he not died of cancer at 62 years of age.

He had realized that Marxism was silly. But given time, he might have seen the basic fault of Marxism. It might have occurred to him that there is something wrong with countries that have to use walls and machine guns to keep their people inside as all Marxist states must.

When he denounced all the horror of the Stalins and Maos, he still made the fundamental error converts from Marxism make. He admitted that Marxism was not just an intellectual mistake, but was also causing horror after horror in the name of humanitarianism, just as other religious faiths had done throughout history. He never saw the fundamental error Marxism represents.

Like every anti-Communist who wants to be “fair,” he said that anti-Communists were often just as bad as Communists. His favorite examples of an anti-Communist error was apartheid.

In saying apartheid was as bad as Stalin, Hitchens spoke like a good conservative.

And a good conservative always makes the same fundamental error: To be respectable, conservatives are like every other elitist:

They do not understand the difference between freedom and a prison.

For me, and for those who wrote our Constitution, what one wants is not a country that is dedicated to Ideals that the intellectual elite agree on.

The aim of our Founders was to create a country they would want to live in, ideals be damned.

The Founders had had quite enough of Great Ideals, thank you very much. The example of Evil that towered over their tie was the centuries of European Religious Wars that had slaughtered a third of Germany’s entire population in the century before the Constitution was written.

The Founders were all too familiar with how people tortured and slaughtered each other in the name of Love and Brotherhood.   The last thing they were obsessed with was the Ideal of Equality or some other abstract. They only put that crap in the Declaration to appeal to Europeans to take their side in the war against Britain.

Jefferson would have been appalled if someone making POLICY in America actually took this “all men are created equal nonsense” seriously.

That crap was for Europeans, and none-too-intelligent Europeans at that.

So Hitchens’s talk about apartheid showed that he had not yet taken the critical step in recovery from his Marxist faith.

Apartheid was a system that survived the acid test that Marxism always fails.

There was no fence around apartheid South Africa. Illegal IMMIGRATION was their only problem in this respect. A major complaint of actual South African Blacks was that the apartheid government did not enforce IMMIGRATION laws.

With Whites in power, cheap African labor coming into South Africa was encouraged, just as our ruling money men are all for cheap labor coming into America.

The acid test of any society is not whether it fits in with the Ideals laid out by the “Intellectuals” and “Idealists.”

The acid test of a country is whether people want to live there.

Communist countries all had to have walls and millions of men to keep their people IN.

America needs walls to keep people OUT.

Hitchens’  recovery from Marxism never reached the point where he saw this most fundamental reality of all.

A society where the people must be fenced in or where Whites have to be chased down in the name of Diversity is failure, Idealistic nonsense be damned.

Artificial Intelligence repeats the discussion of automation that was all the rage about half a century ago.

The problem as the professors saw it was that the working clahss would have nothing to do and lose all virtue.

Professors looked at the working class in exactly the same way that their New England predecessors did. They felt that automation would make them lazy and degenerate.

Eric Hoffer, being a workingman himself, went back over history and pointed out that the great breakthrough was made during playtime, not during worktime. This was a truy heretical repudiation of the Puritan Ethic, which says that mankind only makes Great Advances when it must do so for survival.

Under this Puritan Ethic, the only people who should get paid just to think were the professors, the heirs of the Puritan preachers.   This Hoffer piece may be hard to find, for the exact same reason that my stuff will be hard to find:

When Mommy Professor gets really put down, the arguments that put him in his place are carefully forgotten.

The only book that Hoffer wrote that is easy to find is The True Believer, which does not criticize Mommy Professor from the point of view of an actual working class spokesman.

It exposes the so-called Working Class Marxism for the silliness it is without even discussing it.

Hoffer said that the general population with more playtime would outthink the Mommy Professors.

That commentary,  like the rest of Hoffer’s real breakthroughs, are now in The Silence.

The True Believer is his only book that gets mentioned.

But unlike automation, AI involves not only artificial, nonhuman work.  it also means Artificial Will.

This is the old Frankenstein Complex that AI will produce genius machines who want what they want rather than what we want.

All the commenters asked for was commentary on the old automation idea that AI would take over the WORK.

If you can find it, Hoffer already covered this.

But artificial will is entirely different.

You will have enough trouble finding Hoffer’s common sense approach to automation.

Lots of luck. The Silence is very effective.