Hobbesian man acts moved by the passions of pride and fear. His vanity and the joy with which he puts himself above others generate wars. The horror of anarchy and the fear of death makes him seek peace. Leftist politics, repulsive and ubiquitous, now channel these passions into an enormous social engineering project: the construction of the new Tower of Babel.
Fear and pride erected the ancient Tower of Babel, created by anonymous adventurers who wanted to make themselves “a name, so that we are not spread over the world. face of the whole earth”. The anonymity makes sense, because there was then “only one language, one set of words (…) one people” in the world. The Babylonians baked bricks with the earth—“adamah”
in Hebrew, the same substance used by God to create the first human being (“ha’adam”) — and began to “build a city and a tower that would reach to the heavens”. These bricks, like each other, are images of human beings without the divine breath and without individuality.
There have been other attempts to rebuild the Tower, mainly in the Soviet Union and China. Today, an inhumanly egalitarian language asserts itself as the measure of all things and once again threatens to destroy individuality and the many languages of human thought, speech and creativity.
The foundations of the new Tower have already been established. In a recent interview, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei was asked if he considered Donald Trump to be an authoritarian. He said no:
“For you to be authoritarian, you need a supportive system. You cannot be an authoritarian yourself. But in today’s United States you can easily have an authoritarian in power. In a way, you are already an authoritarian state. You just don’t know it yet,” he said.
