Vom Mann der unter die Räuber gefallen war.
A man was going down from, and he encountered robbers, and they stripped him and beat him, and went away leaving him half dead - and every child knows what happened next: The established bigots come but pass, while the outsider helps. No priest, no teacher, nor philosopher is needed to make clear who is the good one in the story - every person that passes as somewhat sane can tell. The simplicity made the story central for christian theology, but the gist is agreeable for basically any religion and moral system except for some nihilist schools of thought: Even most unpleasant guys as Bentham or Hobbes accepted it as ideal; Nietzsche denied the functionality of the ideal, but not that it would be good if it worked (even though his call to overcome the concept of good and evil since it didn't work out already carried aspects of the catastrophe to come, he still asked for empathy as central virtue of the human to come); this is a idea nearly exclusively propagated by fascist and capitalist theoreticians, and this rejection is the primary link between Chamberlaine, Hitler, and Ayn Rand. So why is it that human societies - consisting of individuals who usually share the ideal and often want to fulfill it - fail miserably to even orient their actions onto these common, and seemingly intrinsic ideals? As soon as we gather, the role within the story most fitting for us seems to be neither the victim, nor the bigots, nor the outsider - but the robbers. Misanthropes of different shade claim that this problem is inherent to human nature - this is the essence of both the clumsy retention of power apologetics of Hobbes, the sardonic remarks of Schopenhauer, and the ornate climax of Burgess Earthly Powers. If one interprets the story of the tree and the snake within the old testament so that not the existence of good and evil but the recognition of those is against god, it would go along with some postmodernists who claim that these values are mere constructions. Socialist theoreticians - especially Rosa Luxemburg - on the other hand claim that the problem is inherent to the specific dominant system of the human society, not to human societies in general. In her theory, capitalism and fascism are different escalations of the same basic principle of reducing a humans worth to his mere productive value. This seems to be true if we regard the existent link between capitalist and fascist theoreticians and is supported by the experiences made at the at least to some extend successful attempts to establish better, humane societies - be it in the SU, Cuba, or Chile. The fact that all of these either failed in cause of corruption or due to being out-powered by their enemies, however, opens up another possibility: What if the establishing of a better world isn't impossible in cause of the flaws of humanity, but in cause of the flaws of a world that fundamentally supports force over friendliness? But even if this should be true: What option do we have left but trying anyway? Is this the true, essential core of any religion before institutionalization compromises it? Even if we, as lefts don't like it: The problem of religious movements to be corrupted in the process of realization is embarrassingly mirrored in most of the recorded attempts to realize our own ideals. Hegel called this the problem of cohesion heat that prevents the pureness of a sound even when material and vibration seems to be perfect - those who faltered in the face of the world and called it critical rationalism had never a chance to understand this. They laughed at Hegel and damned the attempt to pursue the ideal.