by Lars Møller
The sectarian, antidemocratic, and antirational character of egalitarianism has been exposed with grim consistency across two centuries of revolutionary experiment. From the Jacobin committees of public safety to the Politburos of Moscow, Beijing, and their satellite regimes in Africa and Asia, the pattern recurs: utopian doctrine, once armed with state power, converts political disagreement into existential crime and answers it with systematic slaughter.
A political monster from birth, socialism—along with its Siamese twin, communism, the progeny of egalitarianism and collectivism—does not merely fail to deliver abundance; it systematically produces oppression, terror, and bloodshed because its core premises—absolute knowledge of history’s direction, the moral necessity of liquidating class enemies, and the engineering of a purified human type—cannot tolerate the messy pluralism of ordinary social life.
The French Revolution supplied the template. Between 1793 and 1794, the Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre and his associates institutionalized the guillotine as an instrument of political hygiene. The revolutionary calendar, the cult of the Supreme Being, and the Law of Suspects were not accidental excesses; they expressed the conviction that a regenerated republic required the excision of every residual loyalty to throne, altar, or local custom. Enemies were no longer rival politicians but “enemies of the human race.” The same logic later animated Lenin’s Red Terror, the Cheka’s summary executions, Mao’s land-reform killings and Cultural Revolution struggle sessions, and the purges that accompanied socialist seizures of power from Ethiopia to Cambodia.
In each case, the revolutionaries confronted external military pressure and internal resistance; yet the decisive factor was ideological. They believed themselves architects of a flawless social order whose realization justified any immediate cost. Dissent therefore registered not as legitimate opposition but as sabotage of progress itself. Absolute transformation of economy, culture, and personality demanded absolute obedience; terror supplied the short-cut.
This conceited disposition shares the psychological and structural architecture of murderous religious sectarianism. Both rest on a triad of (a) othering, (b) aversion, and (c) moralization. The opposing group is rendered alien, inherently defective, and cosmically dangerous. Language follows: rivals become pests, parasites, or tumors requiring surgical removal. Compromise appears as betrayal; electoral setback or doctrinal deviation becomes an existential threat that legitimates pre-emptive violence. Violence turns inwards as well. Jacobin factions guillotined their own moderates; Bolsheviks liquidated Socialist Revolutionaries and later Trotskyists; Maoists destroyed rival Red Guard units and party cadres judged insufficiently pure.
Charismatic entrepreneurs of radicalism exploit historical grievances, centralize authority, and punish deviation with exemplary severity. Where formal institutions have collapsed or proved incapable of delivering security and identity, the sectarian organization steps into the vacuum, offering club goods in exchange for total submission. History itself is instrumentalized: selected martyrdoms and ancient wrongs are woven into a continuous narrative of victimhood that demands contemporary blood payment.
Socialism dressed this sectarian psychology in the white coat of “science.” Marxism-Leninism presented itself as the exact science of historical development. Once the laws of motion of society were known, policy ceased to be a matter of prudential judgment and became the application of discovered necessity. Disagreement therefore constituted not merely political error but scientific heresy or, in extreme formulations, mental pathology. The claim conferred moral immunity: human costs could be catalogued as the temporary friction of inevitable advance. Forced collectivization in the Soviet Union and China rested on theoretical models of agricultural organization that ignored soil, climate, and peasant knowledge. When the resulting famines killed millions, the doctrine supplied its own alibi—saboteurs and wreckers—rather than conceding theoretical failure.
Lysenko’s rejection of Mendelian genetics in favor of a “Marxist biology” that promised the inheritance of acquired characteristics wrecked Soviet agricultural research for a generation and deepened the shortages that it was meant to cure. Surgical metaphors proliferated: society required cleansing, tumors had to be excised, the body politic had to be purified. The tyrant who claimed mastery of the sciences became the sole legitimate interpreter of reality; all others were reduced to objects of experimental correction.
The antirational core of the project lies here. Rational politics accepts the limits of knowledge, the permanence of conflicting interests, and the necessity of institutional restraints on power. Socialist doctrine denies those limits. It treats human beings as plastic material for the construction of a “new man” free of traditional attachments, religious consolations, and class loyalties. Erasing those attachments requires continuous violence against memory, family, and conscience. Democracy, understood as the institutionalization of disagreement and the periodic transfer of power, becomes an intolerable delay in the realization of the scientifically certified future.
Hence the characteristic sequence of events in the revolutionary seizure of absolute power: control over the state, suppression of rival parties, nationalization of the means of production, and the progressive extension of surveillance and terror into every sphere of private life. The process is not accidental corruption of an otherwise benign ideal; it is the logical working-out of premises that refuse to acknowledge the partial, fallible, and conflictual character of human association.
Conservative skepticism towards such projects rests on a more pessimistic anthropology. Human beings are neither infinitely malleable nor reliably guided by abstract reason alone. They inherit customs, hierarchies, and loyalties that constrain the worst excesses of power and provide the only durable foundations for ordered liberty. Radical attempts to abolish those constraints in the name of perfect equality or perfect community unleash the very passions—envy, resentment, the lust for domination—that the constraints were designed to moderate.
The historical record from 1793 onwards confirms the prediction. Wherever socialist parties have obtained monopoly power, the effect has been the concentration of coercive capacity in the hands of a self-appointed vanguard, the criminalization of ordinary economic activity, and the transformation of political rivals into biological threats. The body count is measured in tens of millions; the cultural damage— the habituation of entire populations to fear, the targeted eradication of spiritual traditions and independent thought, the moral erosion and brutalization of civil society, the corruption of language—is less quantifiable yet equally enduring.
The persistence of socialist temptations on campus and in other anti-Western circles, despite the dystopian record, itself illustrates the sectarian dynamic. Each failure is attributed to incomplete application, external sabotage, or insufficient purity rather than the internal contradictions of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. The next generation of conceited enthusiasts and conspirators therefore begins again, allegedly convinced that this time the science will be correctly applied and the new man successfully forged. The cycle continues because the doctrine supplies both an explanation of all previous disasters and an absolution for the next round of experimentation.
Against the closed system of revolutionary fiction, empirical history and philosophical caution offer the only durable resistance: the recognition that societies are not laboratories, that human nature is not infinitely plastic, and that the price of utopian certainty is ultimately paid in blood.