[Ascaloth]

Originally Posted by LeoXiao

This is all true. But what I'm saying is that it's practically inevitable for people to follow and yearn for authority, or at least some sense of it.

Spoiler for Long rant on social dynamics:

Let's take revolutionary Russia for instance. The socialist movement was most broadly characterized by philosophers and other educated, often rich people, who were looking for ways to improve the country. They decided that the way to achieve this was by inspiring the rise of the proletariat and overturning the existing social order. Ideally, there would be no more Tsar or nobility after it was all over, and Russia would be a free, prosperous nation guided by the will of the people. And this all made perfect sense at the time.

But things did not go that way. Throughout its entire history, Russia has been a nation and culture with a high emphasis on centralized, royal power. Even in the 19th and 20th centuries when great social and economic changes were happening in Europe, Russia's people were not feeling this change the same way that those in Germany or the UK did. They were indeed unsatisfied by the failing Tsarist system and the irresponsible, out-of-touch nobility, but because of the historical considerations, Russia could not simply change like the West.

So when the Tsar's regime lost legitimacy, the people did rise up, but not as the mainstream socialists had hoped. Instead, the Bolshevik radicals (an offshoot of socialists), in their claim to absolute power, appealed to this cultural and social need for authority, while at the same time promising change and freedom. From the very start, it fulfilled this role of a decisive ruler by making peace with Germany, killing the Tsar, and initiating the so-called "War Communism".

Now at this point, there were still many Bolsheviks and socialists in Russia who were earnestly trying to improve their country and pave the road for "enlightened development" like the West experienced (in their view, communism was even in fact a step ahead of Western capitalism, according to Marx). But with the [inevitable] rise of Bolshevism, the path to authoritarianism was already set. Thus, when Stalin took power in the late 20s and later had all of the Old Bolsheviks purged, he was simply utilizing the preexisting cultural leanings of Russia to make himself into a new Tsar.
Despite claiming to cast off the burdens of the past, the Russian socialists had no way of changing the fact that Russia is Russian, and thus a Stalin appeared. In turn, the rise of this rebellious gangster from the Caucasus was facilitated by the ideology of violent revolution and forced overturn of the the social order espoused by the socialists and then Bolsheviks.

In the end, Russia was not fundamentally changed but through the surface attempt to destroy the past and force a shift to the unattainable dream of egalitarianism, the nation suffered a blow to its historical identity which still ails the country to this day. Even though the original creators of Russian socialism were as rational and critical-thinking as could be, their failure to respect their nation and culture for what it was led to tragedy.

The same thing happened in China, another country with an even longer history of imperial rule. But in both cases the governments in question pretend that they are representing the rational, Marxist creed, and deny the original faces of their respective civilizations.

For those who managed to slog through all that, the moral of the story is that society, people, and the whole world have their own patterns and truths that may or may not be verifiable, and that claiming that the whole truth can only be obtained through empirical analysis (even though, like I said in an earlier post, human beings are imperfect in their perceptions) only leads to a more long-term, underlying blindness and the rise of tragedy.

In my opinion, religion in its ideal form does not claim to know or preach in the same way that science and engineering do, but rather to temper and remind people of what we do not know as tiny beings in the vast existence of the cosmos. Empirical science is but an extension of man's natural physical existence, and we should not be boxed in by its limited scope.

Non sequitur. Marxism was a philosophy, and the empirical method is the collection of data on which to to base a theory or derive a conclusion in scientific inquiry. Therefore, how does the failure of the application of Marxist ideology in real life lead to a demonstrated weakness in the empirical method?

Additionally, Straw Man. Nobody's making the argument that empirical analysis is sufficient to lead to the whole "truth" (whatever it may be), but it is by far our best possible toolbox for the purpose....or to be more accurate, if ever we find a better alternative, it will be incorporated into that same toolbox. So, since you're trying to invoke the "other ways of knowing" argument, why don't you give a few examples?

Try again.