The following is by David Chilton, from his book Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt Manipulators. It is from chapter 10, titled "Cultural Bone Rot." It accurately describes the politics of the Left, which is socialistic. I encourage you to read the whole chapter! Chilton writes:
Now Isaac sowed in that land, and reaped in the same year a hundredfold.
And the LORD blessed him, and the man became very rich, and
continued to grow richer until he became very wealthy; for he had
possessions of flocks and herds and a great household, so that the
Philistines envied him. Now all the wells which his father's servants had
dug in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines stopped up by
filling them with earth. (Genesis 26:12-15)
Envy is the greatest disease of our age. It is often confused with
jealousy and covetousness, which have to do with wanting the
possessions and privileges of others. Envy is much more insidious
- and deadly. Envy is the feeling that someone else's having
something is to blame for the fact that you do not have it. The
principal motive is thus not so much to take, but to destroy. The envier
acts against the object of his envy" not to benefit himself, but
to cut the other person down to his own level-or below. The
American Puritan divine Samuel Willard defined envy as "a
man's repining at his neighbor's Prosperity, looking upon himself
to be Hurt by it."1 In his massive study of envy, Helmut
Schoeck points up this central factor: "the envious man's conviction
that the envied man's prosperity, his success and his income
are somehow to 'blame for the subject's deprivation, for the lack
that he feels.' 2 It can be summed up in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's famous epigram: Property is Theft! 3
This explains why "Envy and Malice are inseparable"4; as we
can see from the example in Genesis quoted above, the envier's
goal is destruction. Henry Hazlitt writes: "The envious are more
likely to·be·mollified by seeing others deprived of some advantage
than by getting it for themselves. It is not what they lack that
chiefly troubles them, but what others have. The envious are not
satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and
revenge."5
And it is this envious, destructionist mentality, nursing itself on
the notion that ''your wealth is the cause of my poverty," that is the
basic ethos of socialism. 6 For socialism does not..... and cannot
- build up capital. It seeks only to expropriate or destroy the
capital of others. It exalts a malignant, misanthropic disposition
into an article of political economy, a machine for tyranny. Socialism
is institutionalized envy.
1. Samuel Willard, A Compleat Body of Divinity (New York: Johnson Reprint
Corporation, 1969), p. 750.
2. Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, Inc., 1970), p. 17.
3. James Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith
(New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1980), p. 290. Art Gish, a modem evangelical socialist,
makes a similar statement: "Capitalism, that is, the system of private
property and competition, is itself thievery" (Robert G. Clouse, ed., Wealth and
Poverty: Four Christian Views of Economics [Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press,
1984] p. 76).
4. Willard, p. 751.
5. Henry Hazlitt,The Conquest of Poverty (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington
House, 1973), p. 126.
6. See Ludwig·von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1951), pp. 436, 457ff, 531; see also Herbert Schlossberg's discussion
of resentment in Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with
American Society (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1983), pp. 51.;59, 69-74.
7. Sider, Rich Christians, p. 54 [p. 47].
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