[rhinoceros 1]
It just occured to me that someone may compile a list for the death toll of atheism, equality, democracy and several other ideals. Still, I believe that all these are just excuses.
War is common to all, and strife is justice, and all things come into being and pass away through strife."
-- Heraclitus of Ephesus
[kharin 2]
I did review a list of atrocities in the twentieth century a while back. It was arranged by numbers of victims and by state and/or ideology.
[rhinoceros 3]
I wish we had those numbers.
[kharin 2]
The death toll was quite evenly spread, from which the author drew the conclusion that the will to violence was effectively universal and existed irrespective of ideology.
[rhinoceros 3]
If the interpretation of the numbers was correct, that seems a fair conclusion. I would only be cautious with the phrase "will to violence" if that was meant as a cause rather than a description of a state of violence. This conclusion also leaves the door open for non ideological causal interpretations of violence (in which case I might say "I told you so, ideologies are just excuses").
[kharin 2]
That said, all of the worst states remained characterised by some form of utopian idealism (whether religious or something like communism) whose claims to improving the human lot were typically so great that mere humans could not be permitted to stand in its way. The point of this is that 'atheism, equality, democracy' do seem to me to remain difficult to slot into the category; they arguably point to the collapse of utopian absolutes, not their construction.
[rhinoceros 3]
It would be interesting to see what those numbers had to say about the death toll of the ideal of democracy, although I realize that we have been using the term "democracy" for thousands years in very unsimilar situations. It is possible that in the far future, in a new kind of regime enabled by new technology, people will classify democracy as an utopic absolute of consensus and compromise, or something similar, and blame it for a lot of things.
---- This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=26173>
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