For the right, change is life. For the left it is death. It demands the death of societies and people, of nations and beliefs, it is a beast that is constantly hungry for blood, always baying with outrage at the moon. For the right change brings continuity, for the left, utopia. It is this utopia that they worship at the altar of change. This Moloch of hope and fairy cloaked dreams scribbled on scraps of notepaper, signs and slogans which scream that if you want a better world badly enough, then sheer outraged optimism will bring it about.
The old order must die, says the left, for a better world to be born. Sooner or later we must all mount the altar of change and let our blood drip beneath the shaman’s knife, so that the green world may renew itself. Some must be euthanized, others aborted, we must pay more and give more, we must volunteer and donate our times, our lives and our minds to the new order. Our beliefs, our nations and our children, these too we must offer up to the fire.
And when all of it has been burned away, everything but our dream of a perfect world, then the gleaming new world will emerge out of the ashes, a world too wonderful for us to look at. And if that world seems like a dark age, where savages prowl the streets, knives are sharp, services are lacking and there is a man with a whip on every corner, that is because we are too reactionary, too full of the old world to see the glory of the new world for what it is. To rejoice in its bestial scream, to dance mindlessly as the ages are swept away beneath the dead moon while the ashes of burning books and paintings rain down on us and civilization is rubble under our bleeding feet.
Better or worse? It all comes down to how much you have to lose.
Originally published at Sultan Knish, under the title, “Better or Worse.”