Envy and greed are just two of the psychological vices of humans, lurking always beneath the surface of their natures to be inflamed by the right mixture of irrational ideas. He advocated substituting the worship of Humanity for God, and preached that man's highest moral duty was to sacrifice his desires for Humanity's good. He coined the term altruism for his moral vision. This vision has dominated generation after generation of intellectuals, inculcating in them extreme distaste for any policies that advocate the primacy of the individual, and creating in them moral guilt for their possession of individual wealth, power, and status. If one wishes to grasp the reason for the extreme enmity that collectivist liberals exhibit toward America and capitalism today, here lies one of its strongest roots.
Altruism dominates the collectivist mind.
The number of idlers in America used to be fairly small. Throughout the early part of our history, envy and greed were shameful emotions to indulge. Young people were taught the moral law that a man gets out of life what he puts into it. As a result, strivers are now in the minority in America, and because our country has shifted during the twentieth century into much more of a pure democracy where the largest gang of voters gets to dictate its desires to the rest of the populace - the collectivist vision has become especially virulent. Sluggards, due to their numerical strength at the polls, now have the ability to vote themselves endless entitlements and favors from the pockets of the strivers.