{"id":91526,"date":"2023-04-03T15:21:17","date_gmt":"2023-04-03T20:21:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=91526"},"modified":"2023-04-03T15:21:17","modified_gmt":"2023-04-03T20:21:17","slug":"91526","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=91526","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

The Parable of the Drowning Man: Communist Version.<\/a><\/p>\n

We were having an interesting discussion on my FB wall about free will because I made the observation that even God left Man free will, whereas Man would definitely not and it segued into some comments about Christianity. If you read my previous Pretending to Sleep\u00a0posts<\/a>\u00a0about coming to America, I wrote a little bit about my relationship with religion, particularly organized religion (i.e. I am not a fan or a practitioner). Nevertheless, I do have an appreciation for the Great Clockmaker (as my friend Justin dubbed it) and my religious friends with whom I apparently have more in common than not (weird, I admit).<\/p>\n

There is a Christian story involving a flood, called the \u201cParable of the Drowning Man.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0parable of the drowning man<\/strong>, also known as\u00a0Two Boats and a Helicopter<\/strong>, is a short story, often told as a joke, most often about a devoutly\u00a0Christian<\/a>\u00a0man, frequently a\u00a0minister<\/a>, who refuses several rescue attempts in the face of approaching floodwaters, each time telling the would-be rescuers that\u00a0God<\/a>\u00a0will save him. After turning down the last, he drowns in the flood. After his death, the man meets God and asks why he did not intervene. God responds that he sent all the would-be rescuers to the man’s aid on the expectation he would accept the help.\u2014Wikipedia<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The version I was taught is a little different. Now, do keep in mind that I\u2019m paraphrasing, not quoting, and that there are probably variations of this, as there often are (Ivan and the Goat comes to mind for example):<\/p>\n

A boyar (large landowner<\/a>) and a peasant escape a sudden flood and somehow end up in a tree. The flood sweeps everything away, so it\u2019s just the two of them. The boyar filled his pockets with gold; the peasant with bread.<\/p>\n

Time passes and the boyar offers the peasant some of his gold in exchange for the bread, at which point the peasant speaks truth-to-power and lectures the boyar on his choices (something which happens only in parables and revisionist fantasies).<\/p>\n

Weak with hunger, the boyar falls out of the tree and drowns. Sustained by the bread, the peasant survives and when the flood waters recede, he gets down, pilfers the drowned boyar\u2019s pockets for the gold and takes it with him to give to his village to rebuild a new, fairer, equal society or some such BS.<\/p>\n

Like all parables, it has a message: in this case, death to the boyars. Or perhaps, \u201cdon\u2019t worry, in the end, fate (clears throat: some undefinable power in the Universe) will take care of evildoers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The message is not \u201cwealth is bad\u201d because it is wealth that is used to build the new communist society. Now, we could argue ad infinitum about whom the gold actually belonged to (yawn; I\u2019m not gonna convince you and you\u2019re not gonna convince me so let\u2019s just skip ahead to \u201clet\u2019s agree to disagree\u201d) in the first place.<\/p>\n

The ethics of what people would do in a life-or-death situation like this aside (hint: you don\u2019t know what you\u2019ll actually do until you have to, no matter how much you\u2019d like to think of yourself as virtuous), what\u2019s really interesting about this parable is how clearly it announces the intentions of communism\u2014only when the bad people are dead will the downtrodden be able to build paradise.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So don\u2019t say that you\u2019ve not been warned, especially if the 100 million deaths in the 20th century alone are just not proof enough for you. \u201cIt\u2019ll be different this time. We (the ones we\u2019ve been waiting for, the right people) will be in charge.\u201d Sure, sure.<\/p>\n

And please don\u2019t miss the irony of the actual economics that are implied here which is to say that the assumption is that that gold would actually end up doing good in the hands of people who ended up with it, especially the modern version of those people. There\u2019s a reason that the Pareto Principle (power law distribution) is an actual thing that manifests again and again. Just like there\u2019s a reason that collective farms lead to shortages, starvation, and slave labor (the actual result of communism). Somehow (shocker!) it\u2019s always that \u201cwe are the ones we\u2019ve been waiting for\u201d who are in charge when these things \u201chappen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThe problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.\u201d\u2014Margaret Thatcher<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Thatcher was absolutely right and I don\u2019t see her being disproven now or ever. The only error in that statement was the use of the word \u201csocialism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Remember, it\u2019s not like they\u2019re not telling you what their intent is.<\/p>\n

\n

The goal of socialism is communism\u2014Vladimir Lenin<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

You\u2019re just not willing to listen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Parable of the Drowning Man: Communist Version. We were having an interesting discussion on my FB wall about free will because I made the observation that even God left Man free will, whereas Man would definitely not and it segued into some comments about Christianity. If you read my previous Pretending to Sleep\u00a0posts\u00a0about coming … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enemies-foreign-domestic","category-the-violence-inherent-in-the-left"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91526"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91527,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91526\/revisions\/91527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}