The way they have set for people has been made to look fair to them

The paths people have set out on have been made to seem pleasing to them, beautiful and right.

This is in the nature of human disagreement in the world and of the ability of this disagreement to continue side by side. No one sets out on a path while thinking that he is in the wrong. It is impossible for a person to walk the path he has taken, especially if that path sets him apart from others, without running it through a filter of justification.

Just as the paths people take, and ideologies, are made to appear beautiful to them, they themselves keep working to adorn the paths they have taken and to make them appear pleasing and charming. A kind of self-persuasion process is always at work. An important part of discourse is devoted to praising and justifying the path walked and the choice made. For the human being needs to be put at ease.

To believe that the choice one has made is right, even merely to avoid the trouble of changing it, is no small need. Belief, in precisely this respect, is a rather strange mechanism, and often a numbing comfort that condemns a person to the path he has set out on.

In this case, a faith that saves a person and brings him success can be expected to begin with a discomfort and to keep on disturbing him continually. The state of being sure of oneself may rest on one's having persuaded oneself of a very wrong idea through good rhetoric.

Good rhetoric is not the criterion of being right. Yet in practice most people fall for good rhetoric and may experience a false perception or feeling of truth in it. But rhetoric is a suitable, even elegant, garment draped over reality; even if it may have drawn a rational, impressive frame, this elegance and suitability is in no way a guarantee that it is a correct picture of reality.

We can also test these statements by asking why people are rightists or leftists. How sure rightists are of their path, how much confidence they live with in their safety. Nothing equals the confidence that comes from being the latest representative or spokesman of the truths of a tradition, repeated and confirmed through trial over generations. For the rightist there is nothing that would require him to doubt his own path. Those who do not see what he sees are merely strayed, self-ignorant deviants. Rightism is the soundest path, and the leftists who deviate from it far exceed the limits of being human. Being a rightist is something like being one of God's loyal servants, a fitting actor in history, a loyal subject of the state and a good child of the father.

But how can leftists have the same feeling too? Perhaps they are not God's believing servants but rather his rebellious servants, but the leftist is in a more correct place in history. He does not see what is as it is; he objects to what is, he is uneasy and makes others uneasy. In this unease there is a distinct peace afforded by not surrendering to comfort. There is an altogether different, privileged position afforded by always objecting, always opposing and always being critical.

Being constantly in opposition would bring one closer to the truth, wouldn't it? But since what we call truth is something unfixable and relative to superstructural institutions, there is a somewhat higher level of consciousness: being able to be critical even of the truth as perceived... What is this about being able to criticize others; we also self-criticize, we criticize criticism itself too.

The critical approach is the most brilliant flag raised by leftist existence and leftist intellectuality, its most widespread habitus. That this criticality, while advancing by constantly surpassing itself within leftist theory, cannot escape turning back and getting stuck on its own ideological identity, community and circle, and that, just when it thinks it has transcended everything, it does not even realize it has returned to the beginning, forms one of the left's most tragic aspects.

The left sets out to oppose power in the given situation and to stand with the oppressed or the exploited.

Is there a demand for power?

Why would it criticize if there were not? Of course there is. But once it reaches power, will the left, by this very definition, have destroyed itself too?

Or will the Marxist utopia have found its historical opportunity to be realized?

It is not that history has not offered some opportunities for this utopia to be realized. But it also immediately gave other people the opportunity to see into what kind of tragedy those opportunities turned.

We often hear eulogies that sanctify opposition in the name of the left and define it as the left's ontological condition. It is of course impossible for such a left to exist without disregarding the Marxist teachings.

For the Marxist left there is nothing virtuous about always being in opposition. On the contrary, Marxism has a tremendous literature that sanctifies the proletarian dictatorship and makes it seem entirely different from, and beautiful compared with, other dictatorships.

Then we cannot help seeing that the literature of those who these days beautify opposition, who see the left as possible only through it, is entirely a sigh for power, an impotence for power, or, in Nietzsche's terms, a discourse of the inadequate, and that it also has, conversely, a dimension of sanctifying power of a different kind.