Quote of the Day

Normally, we have thought outward based on the rules of reason: the law of noncontradiction, modus ponens, Occam’s razor, etc. Not so for the socialist. Based on Bloch, the socialist thinks from utopia backward. Reality is made to conform to the utopian ideal, not the ideal to reality. As the root of all things, all man needs to do is make the necessary changes to bring utopia about. 

Thus, the facts of failure do not matter because, as Kolakowski explains, “‘facts’ have no ontological meaning [to the Marxists] and may be ignored without hesitation: what matters are the premonitions of the anticipating fancy.” Simply put, the socialist puts feelings over facts. If there is sufficient belief, it can be so.

Connor Appelboom
August 6, 2026
Why are socialists unfazed by their abysmal historical record?

This QOTD was specifically to trigger Kathy Jackson (of Cornered Cat fame) “favorite feature” of my blog. She said, “My favorite feature is when you quote the anti-gun folks. Equal parts hilarious and horrifying.”

While this is broader that an anti-gun quote, it is certainly congruent with what appears to be their line of thinking. And while I think it is mostly horrifying, I can see more than a little humor in it.

There is more from the article that particularly resonated with me but needs some more background:

If man is the master of both reality and his own nature, then everything is subject to the collective conscience. If enough people believe and try hard enough, the socialist paradise can be achieved. Past failures merely indicate a lack of one or both.

Back in the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s I subscribed to a magazine called, Skeptical Inquirer. For a few years I even purchased a subscription for the local King County Library in Kirkland Washington a few hundred feet from where I lived.

The magazine still exists. but I expect most people just read it online. Probably the article which stuck with me the most was The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon from the Summer 1985 issue. This phenomenon is also called the Hundredth monkey effect – Wikipedia. The gist of it (from Wikipedia):

The hundredth monkey effect is an esoteric idea claiming that a new behavior or idea is spread rapidly by unexplained means from one group to all related groups once a critical number of members of one group exhibit the new behavior or acknowledge the new idea. The behavior was said to propagate even to groups that are physically separated and have no apparent means of communicating with each other.

That describes the socialist (and to a certain extent the anti-gun people) mindset as explained by Appelboom above.

Grok elaborates:

Both involve the notion that sufficient collective belief or adoption can override ordinary constraints of evidence, transmission, or human limitation:

• In the monkey story, once critical mass is reached, the idea/behavior “jumps” independently of normal learning or contact.
• In the article’s diagnosis of socialist thinking, once enough people share the utopian conviction (and the will to remake human nature), reality itself is expected to conform; historical counter-evidence becomes secondary or dismissible.

In both cases the mechanism is quasi-mystical or consciousness-based rather than strictly empirical or institutional: belief/numbers generate a transformative threshold that ordinary causal processes cannot explain or resist. The article’s emphasis on “if there is sufficient belief, it can be so” and “if enough people believe and try hard enough, the socialist paradise can be achieved” maps closely onto the critical-mass logic of the hundredth-monkey claim.

Of course the domains differ (political ideology vs. a primatology anecdote turned meme), and the article is making a critical philosophical point while the monkey story was more New Age folklore. But the underlying intuition—that a tipping point of shared conviction can magically dissolve stubborn facts or barriers—is recognizably the same.

I find this both horrifying and hilarious.

Prepare appropriately.