You can draw a direct line from the French Revolution to Karl Marx. They're both effectively part of the same modernist utopian revolutionary project, and the same progressive project. Marx had a hypothesis about why the French Revolution failed, and his Marxist ideology was designed to try to prevent a repeat performance. Unfortunately for humanity, his hypothesis about what the French Revolution got wrong was incorrect, and so instead of getting the revolution right, it just resulted in the exact same failure modes.
If you think about it, Marx's focus on the bourgeoisie is facially absurd. "Oh, the aristocrats failed, the middle class failed, but definitely the lower classes won't fail!" -- ironically, it's trained centuries of Marxists to ignore that aristocracy even exists, such that they think we just need more aristocrats to protect against the bourgeoisie, as if that's actually superior.
In an interesting point showing LaPlace domain history (Note that while the two are named for the same man, LaPlace domain is a real tool used in the real world, LaPlace's demon is a thought experiment about the predictability of the universe), when China met the west and vice versa, China gained modernism, but Europe gained the bureaucracy. Imperial China has waveforms that echo into Europe, across America, and ends up reinforced by later Modernist China.
Part of the problem is the modernist tendency to want to just knock out parts of the equation to try to change things, but math doesn't work that way -- if you knock out an equation on one side, it just moves that to the other side. Kill all the rich, kill all the powerful, kill all the oppressors, and you get equal rich, powerful, and oppressors on the other side of the equation.
Thing is, this description might provoke modernists into thinking you just need to modify the equation in different ways and you can find utopia, but that's wrong -- like Heisenberg's uncertainty theorem proves you can't know the location and velocity of a particle at the same time, you can't know everything required to create utopia. Laplace thought you could predict the future if you could know the initial velocity and position of every particle and had a good enough model, but the universe literally refuses that concept as a law of physics.
Even Liberalism is in essence proto-modernist, coming from the enlightenment period immediately prior to the modernist period. Is liberty the highest good? Only in plurality with other factors which are erased once you put it on a pedestal. Once you treat liberty as the sold totalizing good, then everything else falls apart -- and it has.
If you think about it, Marx's focus on the bourgeoisie is facially absurd. "Oh, the aristocrats failed, the middle class failed, but definitely the lower classes won't fail!" -- ironically, it's trained centuries of Marxists to ignore that aristocracy even exists, such that they think we just need more aristocrats to protect against the bourgeoisie, as if that's actually superior.
In an interesting point showing LaPlace domain history (Note that while the two are named for the same man, LaPlace domain is a real tool used in the real world, LaPlace's demon is a thought experiment about the predictability of the universe), when China met the west and vice versa, China gained modernism, but Europe gained the bureaucracy. Imperial China has waveforms that echo into Europe, across America, and ends up reinforced by later Modernist China.
Part of the problem is the modernist tendency to want to just knock out parts of the equation to try to change things, but math doesn't work that way -- if you knock out an equation on one side, it just moves that to the other side. Kill all the rich, kill all the powerful, kill all the oppressors, and you get equal rich, powerful, and oppressors on the other side of the equation.
Thing is, this description might provoke modernists into thinking you just need to modify the equation in different ways and you can find utopia, but that's wrong -- like Heisenberg's uncertainty theorem proves you can't know the location and velocity of a particle at the same time, you can't know everything required to create utopia. Laplace thought you could predict the future if you could know the initial velocity and position of every particle and had a good enough model, but the universe literally refuses that concept as a law of physics.
Even Liberalism is in essence proto-modernist, coming from the enlightenment period immediately prior to the modernist period. Is liberty the highest good? Only in plurality with other factors which are erased once you put it on a pedestal. Once you treat liberty as the sold totalizing good, then everything else falls apart -- and it has.
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Although I don't like your use of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle vs. for example (((Hayek's))) extremely solid information theoretic argument against planned economies. Although of course many fewer have heard of the latter; most everyone should read The Road to Serfdom but no modern ruling trash wants that.