How to defeat Mao's enduring legacy

On the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution - a milestone unsurprisingly brushed off by official China - the world at large is a kind of place Mao Zedong would have liked to see.

The father of the People's Republic and mastermind of the cataclysm of 1966-76 would have been taken aback by the rapid changes in China during the 1990s and 2000s, which made a mockery of his socialist ideals, but he would've been proud of the redistributionist populism which has since become the animating principle of Xi Jinping's rule; and he would have been especially glad to see how this brand of "majoritarianism" is again able to gain traction worldwide - notably in established democracies where perceived capitalist excesses have incited a blowback even as actual socialist excesses have continued to cause far more damage elsewhere.

Mao was truly a prophet ahead of his time - whatever you may think of the moral implications of his prescience. Indeed, the Devil is a far better practical theologian - with a far deeper understanding of the hard truths of human nature which play out in real life - than the vast majority of formally trained religious experts of any creed.

This has meant that decades later, Mao's enduring legacy still lacks an effective challenge, whether in China or the West. Liberal democracy and free markets had a unique opportunity in the wake of the great victories of 1989-91 to reshape the world order in a genuinely humanitarian and humane image. Even in authoritarian holdouts as exemplified by China, the wave of sociopolitical retrogression was at best fighting to buy some more time.

Instead, the intervening generation has demonstrated - perhaps conclusively - that when humanity exercises free choices, it simply doesn't have a natural inclination to do what is right for the whole, but only for its disjointed profit-seeking parts. No, enlightened self-interest simply doesn't equate with the greater good: the latter is ever the product of detached, even otherworldly self-sacrifice and what can only be recognized as a supernatural sensitivity to the long-term consequences of every action and decision for everyone else, not just one's own in-group.

And this means that to defeat this destructive heritage, we as seekers and purveyors of truth must first look within ourselves: we must stop being fooled about ourselves, to think that we're somehow "better" than those who promote night as day, evil as good. Because the reality is, we're not: until we perceive as well as they do the rot within our own belief and value systems - or more accurately, the dead stench of hypocrisy that pervades the gap between what we profess and what we practice - we have already handed ourselves over to the enemy before he has even lifted a finger.

To defeat the legacy of totalitarianism, we must root out this secret totalitarianism of self-preservation that corrupts our inner beings long before our outer shells are rendered useless from the consequences of such an insidious treachery.