Having read and written extensively (for example, here) about the suffering of the Chinese people under Mao, I was horrified and alarmed to listen to this short take by an Oberlin College student shortly after the Charlie Kirk assassination.
The student is an unapologetic Mao-inspired revolutionary who is for more “political assassinations” and anti-free speech for “reactionaries,” and “capitalists.” She wants “some people” to “be afraid to express their opinion in public.”
In a college course, she was taught “how violent revolution liberated millions of people and liberated women” in Mao’s China.
Her views are extreme, but she is not alone. A 2021 “survey of the top 150 colleges in the US found that nearly 25 percent of students said it is acceptable to use violence to shut down a controversial speaker.” At some women’s colleges, 50 percent of students advocated violence.
Invincibly smug and ignorant, if the Oberlin woman had attended a Charlie Kirk event, it’s likely she would not have been moved to reconsider her position. But consider the following facts that Charlie might have shared with her if she had asked him a question about China.
In his book Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine, Jasper Becker explained that one of the Communist Party’s stated goals, under Mao, was to eliminate the family and the bonds that love generates:
We must regard the People’s Commune as our family and not pay too much attention to the formation of a separate family of our own… the dearest people in the world are our parents, yet they cannot be compared with Chairman Mao and the Communist Party… for it is not the family which has given us everything but the Communist Party and the great revolution… Personal love is not so important: therefore women should not claim too much of their husbands’ energy.
Perhaps that Oberlin student sees the destruction of the family as a worthy goal. Because of collectivization and widespread starvation, Becker reported, “Women were forced to yoke themselves to the plough with their wombs hanging down, such was the shortage of draught animals.”
If “liberation” means granting some people arbitrary power to inflict fear and terror, then, under Mao, some women were powerful. Becker reported, “A 20-year-old girl, Huang Xiu Lian, who was president of the commune’s Women’s Association, cut off the ears of four people.”
Mao starved millions, and survivors became slave labor in communist plantations. So many starved to death that Becker wrote, “Few of the bodies were buried. Many simply lay down at home and died.”
Maternal instincts were destroyed. Some mothers kept hidden stores of food from their children, fearing that their children would reveal the food to authorities.
Both Jasper Becker and Frank Dikötter give accounts of cannibalism. In his book, Mao’s Great Famine, Dikötter reported that parents allowed their daughters (males were considered more valuable) to starve to death and then exchanged the bodies with another family for consumption. This was called “swap child, make food.” Mao liberated women from life.
Unlimited power leads to sexual violence, and women were defenseless. Mao’s liberation meant, Becker wrote, “women were humiliated by having sticks inserted into their genitals.”
Dikötter recorded that “pregnant women who did not appear at work were made to undress in the middle of the winter and then forced to break ice.” Miscarriages while working were common.
Among Party officials, Dikötter wrote, “Rape spread like a contagion through a distressed moral landscape.” One official had “‘taken liberties’ with almost every unmarried woman in the village.”
In the cities, Dikötter wrote, “for a ration coupon worth ten or twenty cents or for a pound of rice, they would perform a sexual favour in a quiet corner of a public park. Those who failed faced starvation.”
At one factory, Dikötter recounted, “Local bosses forced women to work naked. On a single day in November 1958, more than 300 went about their jobs in the nude. Those who refused were tied up.” The bosses claimed they were breaking “feudal taboos.”
Becker shared eyewitness reports of dissident Wei Jingsheng. While travelling as a Red Guard, Jingsheng “was shocked to see starving and naked women and children begging for food in every railway station.” A cadre on the train dismissed the humanity of those starving, saying there were “former landlords and rich peasants, or just lazy, and that it did them good to be hungry.”
Like the cadre, the Oberlin student probably won’t see the humanity of others anytime soon.
As Dikötter observed, “Seemingly anything could be justified in the name of emancipation.”
What can we learn about why so many people today hold dearly to opinions that are contrary to facts and reason?
Madness is not limited to those on the left. Today, some believe that Brigitte Macron is a man and that Israel assassinated Charlie Kirk.
The insights of Leonard Read and David Hume help us understand how the human mind works. When people state reasons for their positions, it doesn’t mean they came to their positions through reason.
In his book Who’s Listening, Read explained, “We need but recognize that ideas, good or bad, seize hold of the individual; it is not the other way around. I do not possess an idea; it possesses me.”
David Hume would put it this way: A passion such as love of Mao, hatred of Western civilization, or Jew hatred is adopted, and then reasons are found to justify the passion. When deeply held political beliefs are driven by passion, there is no way to reason people out of their position.
In 1739, in A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume published his theory that our passions (emotions), not reason, are the primary driver of decision-making. Hume’s theory is acknowledged by philosophers as one of the most significant in the history of philosophy. And today, neuroscience is confirming Hume’s ideas.
Yet almost three centuries later, Hume’s insights are not widely understood by the public. We can understand why. It seems to us that we come to our decisions most often through deliberate rational thinking; it’s the other person, not us, who is foolish. We prefer to think we are the captains of our lives, exercising free will through our rationality. Challenges to our belief in our rationality make us very uncomfortable.
So, where does this leave those of us trying to defend liberty against the onslaught of people possessed by illiberal passions?
Read offered a useful analogy to high and low pressure in weather patterns, where low pressure brings on storms and highs restrain lows. He wrote, “In the heat of emotion or battle, individuals tend to create low pressure areas.” He explained:
Analogous to low pressure areas are individuals of little understanding. The nonsense in the minds of men, omnipresent among us if often somewhat dormant, is activated, whipped into a fury, as it rushes into mentalities too empty or depressed to care about the difference between slavery and freedom.
We can’t control the weather. Among people of little understanding, new “low pressure” areas will form every day. Yet with the strength of our understanding, we can create high pressure areas to block illiberal societal passions.
Read cautioned, “Bad ideas cannot be made more sensible by combating those who voice them.” Read advocated for “perfection of self-understanding as against reforming others — the former possible, the latter futile.”
Our purpose, Read explained, “is to grow in awareness, perception, consciousness.”
Liberty’s greatest threat comes from a lack of respect for the humanity of others and passions unchecked by reason. Only by cultivating self-understanding can individuals resist the allure of destructive ideologies. The real battle for liberty is taking place daily in the trenches of our own minds.