Ben Shapiro On Socialism Quotes

Without a clear moral vision, we devolve into moral relativism, and from there, into oblivion.

Never in our country’s history has a generation been so empowered, so wealthy, so privileged—and yet so empty.

A man may be judged by his standard of entertainment as easily as by the standard of his work.

is not right that children be dunked headfirst into the vat of garbage we call popular culture.

Nihilism, narcissism, and hedonism are natural results of the chaotic existential subjectivism popularized by the Left. If the hallmark of the baby boomers was rebellion, the hallmark of my generation is jadedness. Nothing really matters—we’re cosmically alone.

The combination of parental abdication and social liberalism in our schools means that kids are easy targets for nihilism and moral subjectivism.

No picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it.

In place of moral absolutes, they promote moral relativism and sometimes even question the very existence of truth and reality. To them truth and reality are what we subjectively perceive them to be.

But straw men are easier to knock down than real arguments.

greatest films ever made originate largely in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s—a period when Hollywood worked

Tolerance fails as a virtue, first of all, because it is in some ways demeaning to people. It is much better to speak of “respect” or “empathy.” But that is precisely the problem—common sense tells us that there are people who cannot and ought not to command our respect or empathy. We regard what they stand for as stupid, crazy, evil, or all three. To be respectful of them would be to abandon all moral sense, so that a completely tolerant person would be totally passive, without a moral center. Thus we fall back on “tolerance,” which merely means conceding to people the right to be who they are, while withholding our respect. But the determined advocates of tolerance are not content with that and keep slipping back into making tolerance imply the necessity of respect . . . Thus the obligation of tolerance leads inexorably to intolerance, turning the claim to be tolerant into a tautology, a statement that merely repeats itself—“I am tolerant except about those things of which I am intolerant.

As L. Brent Bozell pointed out at the time, just because society is in decay doesn’t mean that Hollywood should be exacerbating that decay.

Baby boomers and their music rebelled against parents because they were parents—nurturing, attentive, and overly present (as those teenagers often saw it) authority figures. Today’s teenagers and their music rebel against parents because they are not parents—not nurturing, not attentive, and often not even there.

The best countries—and the best societies—are those where citizens are virtuous enough to sacrifice for the common good but unwilling to be forced to sacrifice for the “greater” good. Flourishing societies require a functional social fabric, created by citizens working together—and yes, separately—toward a meaningful life.

The new authority figures of the porn generation are many, and nearly all are members of a coarsened pop culture—one fed by the destructive malaise of the relativist world.

The USSR rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, substituting the values of the collective and a new utopian vision of “social justice”—and they starved and slaughtered tens of millions of human beings.

The left is expert at framing debates. They have buzzwords they use to direct the debate toward unwinnable positions for you. They are tolerant, diverse, fighters for social justice; if you oppose them, by contrast, you are intolerant, xenophobic, and in favor of injustice. Now, all these terms are – to be polite – a crock, if considered as absolute moral values. The left is wildly intolerant of religious people and conservatives; that’s why they’re interested in forcing Christian bakers to cater to same-sex weddings. They are anti-intellectual diversity, particularly in areas of American life in which they predominate; that’s why they stifle conservatism on campus and in the media. And as for social justice, if social is supposed to be opposed to individual, then social justice is by definition unjust. The left’s use of magical buzzwords places you in a corner, against supposed universal values that aren’t universal or universally held.

Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the forces of moral relativism, radical feminism, and generational nihilism have gradually destroyed the foundation of our own greatness. Instead of adopting stronger moral standards, our society has embraced the lure of personal fulfillment.

Real-life teens wish they could live like the teens Hollywood promotes. Everyone has sex, and relationships are deep and meaningful, even if they only last a couple episodes. There are never any consequences to any action, except for experiencing the angst of teenage life alongside the characters. When a generation becomes desensitized to the ramifications of the culture around them, it’s natural to seek out any sort of feeling, even angst.

Black culture has contributed hugely to American society: The civil rights movement brought meaning to American notions of equality and freedom; black contributions to politics, science, music, and art have helped enrich all of us. To demean these accomplishments and contributions by listing rap among them is to demean black culture as a whole.

Hypocrisy as humor pushes destruction of standards.

And as for social justice, if social is supposed to be opposed to individual, then social justice is by definition unjust. The

A 1992 survey by the Center for Media and Public Affairs revealed that while 81 percent of the country as a whole felt that adultery was wrong, only 49 percent of Hollywood did. While only 4 percent of the country outside of Hollywood had no religious affiliation, 45 percent of Hollywood was areligious. While 76 percent of Americans believed that homosexual acts were wrong, only 20 percent of Hollywood did; while 59 percent of the American public was pro-choice, 97 percent of Hollywood was. As Schiffer stated, “We’re talking about those who by self-selection and ambition run the institutions of popular culture—in contrast to a traditional cultural elite defined by erudition, wisdom, and taste.

greatest films ever made originate largely in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s—a period when Hollywood worked under the “heavy hand” of the Hays Production Code.

if social is supposed to be opposed to individual, then social justice is by definition unjust.

That’s how social standards work for the left: If you have the right politics, you can get away with anything. If you have the wrong ones, it’ll ignore its own hypocrisy to nail you to the wall.

After nearly half a century, it’s easy to forget that the Hays Code was not some outside limitation imposed by the government. It was a content standard imposed by motion picture companies voluntarily.

The Hays Code stated: “When right standards are consistently presented, the motion picture exercises the most powerful influences. It builds character, develops right ideals, inculcates correct principles, and all this in attractive story form. If motion pictures consistently hold up for admiration high types of characters and present stories that will affect lives for the better, they can become the most powerful force for the improvement of mankind.

1. Why do you think today’s young people are so jaded? Do you feel that the “live and let live” culture has corrupted our moral system? Why do you think American society rejected traditional moral values—the values our founders believed were necessary for our national survival—in favor of moral relativism? How much do you feel our cultural institutions—Hollywood, academia, public schools, and the mass media—are complicit in lowering societal standards?

most professors—and not just those in the political and social science departments—don’t even aspire to present a balanced perspective.

For Democrats, the goal of society should be ensure "social justice"-a nice-sounding abstraction that boils down to ham-fisted government intervention.

These three elements—America’s philosophy of reason, equality, liberty, and limited government; America’s culture of individual rights and social duties; and America’s shared history—define our country.

Everlasting glory didn’t come in the form of military victory in this day and age—it came in the form of everlasting social programs that grew and inured to the benefit of all Americans.

The answer to every “social justice” question is more taxes and regulation, say the professors.

Professor Richard Sklar of UCLA described socialism as a “great idea”3 and communist dictator Mao Tse-Tung as a “great leader.

Implementation of socialism has resulted in more deaths than all the international wars of the twentieth century combined. Is socialism really a “great idea”? Mao caused the deaths of millions of his own people. Does that constitute great leadership?

We need social institutions to provide us the safety to take risks, institutions that help pick us up when we fall; we also need governmental structures that leave us free to take those risks. We need social organizations promoting civic virtue in order to instill individual virtue; we need government to protect individuals’ free right to choose.

The Left had to go searching for a new civil-rights struggle with which to cram conservatives back into their “victimizer” cubbyhole. The Left now pushes against civil rights in its ignorant search for the new struggle. There was, however, one problem: All the good civil-rights issues have been dealt with already. And so the Left, which focuses all of its efforts on social issues, was relegated to pushing crime-increasing myths about the evils of cops; the celebrities were forced to pretend that men peeing next to women was the next great Martin Luther King, Jr.–style struggle.

Avowed Marxist and tenured professor at the University of Texas, David Michael Smith, called capitalism “a system based on exploitation and oppression and domination and racism and war—and lots of other things.”20 Right. And socialism is a system based on pretty butterflies and flowers and tolerance of all living creatures.

So what is the moral case for capitalism? It lies in recognition that socialism isn’t a great idea gone wrong — it’s an evil philosophy in action. It isn’t driven by altruism; it’s driven by greed and jealousy.

Socialism states that you owe me something simply because I exist. Capitalism, by contrast, results in a sort of reality-forced altruism: I may not want to help you, I may dislike you, but if I don’t give you a product or service you want, I will starve.

The universities have instituted a new right: the right not to be offended. When tolerance of every sort of behavior reigns, those who believe in standards and rules are destined for castigation.

The left is expert at framing debates. They have buzzwords they use to direct the debate toward unwinnable positions for you. They are tolerant, diverse, fighters for social justice; if you oppose them, by contrast, you are intolerant, xenophobic, and in favor of injustice. Now, all these terms are – to be polite – a crock,

They are tolerant, diverse, fighters for social justice; if you oppose them, by contrast, you are intolerant, xenophobic, and in favor of injustice. Now, all these terms are – to be polite – a crock, if considered as absolute moral values. The left is wildly intolerant of religious people and conservatives; that’s why they’re interested in forcing Christian bakers to cater to same-sex weddings. They are anti-intellectual diversity, particularly in areas of American life in which they predominate; that’s why they stifle conservatism on campus and in the media.

The Athenian system of thought establishes certain fundamental notions crucial to happiness: the notion of telos, discoverable by us; the importance of reason-led investigation, leading to the birth of science; the recognition that social ties bind us to one another.

Faith provided individual moral purpose; faith provided collective moral purpose. But while individual capacity was bolstered by the doctrinal belief in free will and the value of work, reason had been made secondary to faith; while collective capacity was bolstered by the presence of a strong social fabric, the all-encompassing power of the Catholic Church and the rule of monarchs meant that individual choice was heavily circumscribed.