I didn’t really know who Danny Kruger was before I read this profile in the Guardian today. It’s pretty wild. Regular readers will know I’m quite interested in socialism and Christianity, and generally speaking a little knowledge of Christianity will expose the hypocrisy of most Christian folk on the right.
Kruger seems to be in a different place, as we see in the paragraph below:
“I think that socialism is in heaven,” he says. “The problem with socialists is they don’t accept the fall of man. They try to create heaven on Earth with the assumption that if we somehow just got our institutions or culture right, we could be synonymous beings and all behave nicely to each other.” Wait, I say, checking I have heard correctly. Heaven is socialist? “Heaven is a socialist state,” he says. “The effort of socialists is to bring heaven on Earth, with the state in the position of God. That is not a good idea. That’s because no state of human beings can be all good or all powerful.”
I completely accept that most systems of power lead to corruption and abuse, but to use the fall of man as a reason not to pursue the improvement of people’s lives through state action seems a pretty extraordinary position for a politician.
I’m probably going to be thinking about this for quite some time…