I had a bit of an epiphany and I'm not sure where to post this. This is my sincere effort to not be a troll and post the clearest version of the leftist's world view as I can - AND it's consequences. Here goes.
Undeserved suffering is evil. Undeserved suffering is the only evil there is. Deserved suffering is fine, so you can torture Nazis - they deserve it. You can also suffer to get a better job or position in life, that is wanted suffering. While it isn't good, it isn't evil.
Since undeserved suffering is the ultimate evil and the only evil there is, we must rearrange government and society to eliminate all unwanted suffering. You can change your body, change your sex. You can decide to be anything at all as long as it alleviates or removes unwanted suffering.
Abortion is seen as a heroic act because it removes the unwanted suffering of the mother, and the child growing in a disadvantaged household will suffer undeservedly so aborting the pregnancy is a doubly heroic act. Suffering is the only evil. Even if it is murder they don't care. Murder isn't evil, only suffering is evil. Murder is only evil if it causes someone to suffer, the same with lying. Lying is only wrong if it makes someone suffer.
Here is the poison in the ideology.
Are you going to suffer things in life that you don't want to? Yes. With almost absolute certainty you will suffer things you don't want to. Suffering is the only and ultimate evil.
They might not say it explicitly but since suffering is evil and all who exist are almost guaranteed to suffer - existence itself is evil. They will deny this, but the rampant nihilism on the left all but proves my point.
The left believes that the very act of existing is evil.
Need a carbon tax to save the planet but it will kill a billion people? Not really a problem because you are ending their suffering - existing is evil and with fewer people we will be better able to mitigate their suffering.
As a leftist, I appreciate the good faith effort, but as you probably expect, I don't agree with your interpretation.
So to me, the first issue is that "the left" does not have a universal worldview. You have people on the left who have a very materialist view and generally reject concepts like good and evil, you have idealists who focus on autonomy/personal freedom and you have moralists who have more religious and moralist roots and more connected to the idea of "protecting the weak". The last group is probably the group that comes closest to your interpretation. I personally fit more into the second and first group, but obviously at the end of the day, I can only speak for myself.
I would also make a distinction between liberals and the left. Liberals have adopted leftist talking points where they think it helps them, but they don't really believe in them.
Here I already completely disagree. Suffering isn't evil, suffering isn't even bad, suffering is an fundamental part of the human condition, arguably a fundamental part of life itself, it's kinda beyond being strictly good and evil. A human who has never suffered is unimaginable, a world without suffering sounds like a distopia to me.
99% of leftists are against torturing anyone, not because it causes suffering, but because it violates people's autonomy. Many leftists tolerate violence against fascists/nazis, but they see it as self-defense.
If you replace "suffering" with "oppression", you get closer to the real picture. So again, this does not apply to all leftists, but many leftists are focused on "oppression" (which is essentially restricting people's autonomy/personal freedom).
Abortion is not seen as a heroic act, it's seen as a morally grey/complicated act, which is why most leftists want this complicated choice to be made by the person most directly affected by the moral dilemma instead of having the state forcing it's morality onto people by force..
Abortion is seen as different from murder because a fetus is not considered to be an independent person. A human fetus is indeed human, it is indeed alive, but a person only becomes a person once it is born and is able to exist as a seperate entity. That's why we celebrate birthday's as the start of a person's life, that's why we have a birth certificate to document a person's life and give them a name. It's impossible for a fetus to be removed from it's mother without dying, which means a fetus cannot posess any form of autonomy, so in function, it is part of the mother's body.
This doesn't mean that abortion is morally clear or unproblematic, but leftists do believe that the state should not make that decision for the mother.
Nihilists do exist and they do indeed tend to be lefists. But nihilism doesn't argue that "existance is evil", nihilism rejects labels such as "good, evil, rightous, ..." and in a radical form rejects a "higher purpose/higher meaning" in a religious and/or spirital sense. So no, the left or even leftist nihilists don't believe that existence is evil.
This argument does not seem to be written in good faith. People who support a carbon tax don't do so "to save the planet" and they certainly don't do so to "kill a billion people".. Also, carbon tax is not a leftist idea, it's is supported by a wide part of the population accross the political spectrum. 73 of all Americans support a carbon tax, this includes more than half of Republicans.
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/ps_20-06-11_climate_featured/
And the idea behind carbon tax is a pretty moderate one, it has nothing to do with "saving the planet", it's about who pays the cost that is generated by emissing carbon. Without a carbon tax, the cost is covered by everyone, irregardless who produced the carbon emissions. This means that even if you don't produce a lot of carbon, you have to cover the cost.
Most people think this is obviously unfair and believe that the cost generated by carbon emissions should be paid proportionally by those who created the carbon emissions and generated the cost in the first place.
Just imagine you are going out to eat with a couple of people. You just take a water and a salad, most just take an average meal and some just take the most expensive meal on the menu. Do you believe it's fair if the bill is split by everyone equally so that everyone pays the same? Most would say no because it means that those who ordered cheap food have to pay more than they ordered and the people who ordered expensive food have to pay less than they ordered.
I'm not saying carbon taxes are the solution for everything or that they could not have negative impacts, especially depending on how it is put into practice, but implying that "people who support carbon taxes" do so because they think people existing is bad and they want to murder everyone does not seem at all like an attempt to make a good faith argument..
Thank you for your thorough response.
Just one question. Why is oppression bad?
I can only speak for myself, not for "the left" overall, because again, a Marxist for example would not say that "oppression is bad", they have a more materialist and anti-moralist view.
I would say that oppression is generally bad because it violates people's autonomy/personal liberty. So why is that bad? Or rather, why is personal liberty/autonomy good?
Well in my view, personal liberty is one of the few things virtually every human wants for themselves, it's one of the few things we can "agree on". Nobody likes to be a slave, nobody likes to not be in control of their lives. There are some people, for example some people who are into S&M, that do like to give up their autonomy and "be a slave", but at the end of the day, they are still the ones who make that decision on their terms.
Even the dictator or king or whatever wants autonomy, at least for themselves. The reason why they don't want autonomy and freedom for others is often because they believe that restricting other's freedom gives them even more personal freedom to do whatever they want to do.
But the thing with personal liberty/autonomy is that from a leftist perspective, it has to be "equally distributed" to people, otherwise it's not really freedom. If you give people not only the freedom to control their own lives, but the "freedom to control other people's lives", we aren't talking about freedom anymore, we are talking about oppression or even tyranny.
To use an extreme example, if there is a country where there is only 1 person with complete autonomy/personal liberty, we wouldn't call that region "free", we would probably call it a tyranny. It means that one person is calling all the shots and does whatever they think is correct without having to consider anyone's opinions.
That person could argue that they are "the most free person ever" because that person has more "freedom" than anyone in a society where freedom is distributed equally. For example, that person could have "the freedom to just have someone executed" randomly in the streets, but again, we wouldn't call that freedom, we would call that oppression or tyranny. So in order to have a free society, everyone has to be equally free, so to speak.
To come back to your question, why is oppression bad?
On a personal level, because I, like pretty much all people, want to be in control of my own life and I don't want my life to be determined by somebody else against my will.
On a more societal level, I would say that oppression is bad because it leads to tensions and conflicts between "oppressor and oppressed", which leads to instability and violence. Because of that, it's bad for everyone, even for the oppressor, because in many many cases, the oppressor will end up either receiving retaliation for his oppression or spend the rest of his life being paranoid about retaliation by the people he oppresses.
But we oppress some people. Criminals for one are people I would say are oppressed. Even if they amend their lives, integration into society is very hard. Yet we oppress them pretty freely in this society. This is one area where I think we need a better prison system.
You presented oppression as a bad thing. If it is bad then society widely does it. Over all I don't view it as a bad thing. It is certainly not always evil. If it is not always evil, then how is it a substitute for undeserved suffering in my previous example?
That's exactly right. Crime, punishment vs rehabilitation and the prison industrial complex are big topics on the left. Nowadays, it's popular even for people on the right to criticize the "prison industrial complex", but the left has been criticizing it since at least the 70s. The most radical leftists even argue for the abolishment of prisons and pretty much every leftist advocates at least for prison reform and focusing more on rehabilitation as opposed to punishment.
Yes, I would say oppression is generally a bad thing. To explain further, I would also say that people shooting people is generally a bad thing, but I think we can all agree that in some special situations, people shooting people is a "necessary evil", for example when there is no other option and you need to defend yourself. I still don't think you shooting someone in self defence is "good", I think it's a situation that sucks for everyone involved, but you had no other choice, it was necessary and the best possible option.
I look at prisons in a similar way. I don't think people should be locked up for non-violent crimes or in cases where they are clearly not a danger to anyone, I don't think people should be tortured in prison as punishment, but I do think that in order to protect the lives (and personal freedom) of other people, we need to sometimes separate dangerous people from society.