Liars book excerpts

Jakob Böhme, was a German Christian mystic who believed that the fall of Adam and Eve was a first necessary stage so that mankind could achieve self-awareness. Man was separated from God, but through evolution over centuries, he could eventually achieve perfect knowledge with science and education.

The Great Lie actually starts with word progressive itself. They constantly mislead about what it actually means. They want you to believe that progressives are basically forward-thinking liberals who believe in democracy, open debates, free thinking, and looking out for their fellow man. They are harmless leftists.

Progressives claim that they stand for the future. The truth is that progressives actually represent the oldest impulse known to mankind: the will to power, to dominate, and to exploit. At the heart of progressivism is a deeply regressive ideology, one that eliminates individual freedom and makes men serfs and slaves.

Progressives claim that they are basically warmed-over liberals. The truth, as you’ve seen in the history of the founding fathers of progressivism, beginning with Hegel through Marx and Wilson through LBJ and Obama, is that progressivism is the opposite of liberalism, at least as it was once properly understood. Liberals—philosophers such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith—invented the idea of individual freedom. This idea captured the imaginations of a generation of freedom fighters born in thirteen colonies some three centuries ago. They took those ideas and put them into practice with two radical documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Theirs was a reaction against centralized government, a revolution of the individual against the collective.

But progressivism stands for the idea that freedom isn’t enough, that voluntary cooperation and the free market and individual rights do not work. To improve the quality of life for everyone, government must intervene with rules and regulations. Progressivism is the salve for the struggle, pain, and anxiety of living in a difficult and unpredictable world.

Progressives claim to fight for the average man. The truth is that most of them have both pity and contempt for human beings. They see the rest of us as machines that can be tinkered with and perfected. They believe they know what’s best for everyone. They think that if we submit to the government expert-determined progressive agenda—which included disenfranchisement of African-Americans in the Jim Crow South in the late nineteenth century, prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s, eugenics and eliminating supposedly defective races (which animated Hitler’s campaign of extermination in the 1930s and ’40s)—we can create utopia. They believe that under the banner of “social justice” we can, in effect, become God, that they can create heaven on earth. It may take centuries or even longer, but gradually, generation by generation, progressives can do it. If patience is a virtue, progressives are the most virtuous people on earth.

Progressives claim to believe in a compassionate, tolerant, live-and-let-live society. But in fact, the heart of progressivism lies in two core principles:

1. Individual and human society is perfectible, and therefore all problems known to man have solutions.
2. An enlightened few can impose these solutions on everyone else.

Both principles are obviously false. The first runs counter to everything most of us believe about human nature, selfishness, and sin—not to mention plenty of historical evidence that men living today are just as capable of depravity and evil as they were millennia ago. The second principle, a kind of tyranny of good intentions, is deeply antidemocratic. It rejects most Americans’ fundamental belief in human equality.

Source: Liars: How Progressives Exploit Our Fears for Power and Control (2016) by Glenn Beck.