https://www.wsj.com/articles/socialism-is-for-the-incurious-11567460002
I was struck by a news report this summer about Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. It has long been known that he and his wife chose to spend their honeymoon in the Soviet Union. But it was news that he never availed himself of the opportunity to visit Alexander Solzhenitsyn when the great writer and moral witness was living as a refugee in Cavendish, Vt., between 1976 and his death in 2008.
Some comments about that story attribute Mr. Sanders’s negligence to ideology, as if he, being a fan of the Soviet Union, made a silent protest by ignoring the famous anti-Soviet figure in his midst. But I think the deeper reason for his neglect was a quality of the socialist or communist or revolutionary sensibility that is too little remarked. I mean its ingrained, indeed its programmatic, lack of curiosity about other people.
The philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, in a thoughtful anatomy of the French Revolution, is one of the few people to underscore this feature of the totalitarian habit of mind. “This absence of curiosity,” Mr. Scruton notes, “is a permanent characteristic of the revolutionary consciousness.”
An important reason for this lack of curiosity is the prominent role that abstractions play in the mental and moral metabolism of the totalitarian sensibility. This feature was articulated with some poignancy by Rousseau, who, at the end of his life, sadly observed: “I think I know man, but as for men, I know them not.”