Salvation and security. It is our common and
chiefest pursuit: to be secure--to be saved. We seek to be spared scarcity, age, disease, death,
hazard, hell, insignificance, and etc. When our own strength won’t carry
us fast enough to overtake salvation, we hitch a ride in its direction with
others, or wait for it, watchfully. We
only differ as to ends: salvation from what?
And differ as to means: salvation by what means?
In 1993, in a National Bestseller, Peter Drucker, a prodigious
analyst, recorded and reiterated what he considered to be a self-evident
observation about salvation:
"The bankruptcy--moral, political, economic--of Marxism and the
collapse of the Communist regimes were not 'The End of History' (as a widely
publicized 1989 article entitled The End of History proclaimed).....But the events of 1989 and 1990
were more than just the end of an era; they signified the end of one kind
of history. The collapse of Marxism and of Communism brought to a
close two hundred and fifty years that were dominated by a secular religion--I
have called it the belief in salvation by society.....Communism collapsed as an economic system. Instead of creating
wealth, it created misery. Instead of creating economic equality, it
created a nomenklatura of functionaries enjoying unprecedented
economic privileges. But as a creed, Marxism collapsed because it did not
succeed in creating the 'New Man.' Instead, it brought out and
strengthened all the worst in the 'Old Adam': corruption, greed, and lust for
power; envy and mutual distrust; petty tyranny and secretiveness; lying,
stealing, denunciation, and, above all, cynicism.....But surely the collapse of Marxism as a creed signifies the end of the
belief in salvation by society".
If the belief in salvation by society was so evidently bankrupt in 1990 to
an observer as astute and as mainstream as Peter Drucker, why do some still look to government as if it was the last best hope for salvation? How is this stinking siren, salvation by society, still sounding? Who exhumed her? And who is huffing on the cold, dry box that was her voice--to again hear and sound her sorry song? Who would follow these pied huffers? Are they
deluded by the falsity of her defunct ideals--ideals that ultimately realized an
equality of misery only? Perhaps they prefer
to spare themselves and others happiness--to be saved from happiness? Or, in her song, do they
hear the promise of self-aggrandizement by force--of personal
salvation in spite of and at the expense of others?
