United 93: No Heroic Deed Goes Unspoiled by the Left

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I know how to completely eliminate the left. Well, maybe not completely. But at least 75% of them.

Would it be through better education? No, being that wackademia has been hijacked by the left, that wouldn’t help at all. More often than not, the most educated people are simply the most indoctrinated people.

Would it be through the inculcation of religion? No, that wouldn’t necessarily do the trick. After all, the greatest enemy we face is religious, so religion obviously cuts both ways. Not to mention the fact that many Christian believers go in for “social justice” and “liberation theologies” that are simply Marxism with a pseudo-spiritual patina, as is generally true of liberal Judaism, which is often genuine leftism with an imitation Jewveneer.

What if we had better child rearing practices? What if we could try to make sure that children have both a mother and a father and a parent at home to care for them, instead of farming them out to stranger care? Yes, that would produce happier and more emotionally secure and self-reliant proto-conservative children--not to mention fewer criminals--provided that their parents are not crazier than their daycare providers, which is an unrealistic assumption.

And parenting can cut two ways as well, since overindulgence and poor parental boundaries can engender serious narcissism in a child. And there are some difficult cultural issues as well. Cultures, just like people, self-replicate, and some cultures are frankly so pathological that they simply churn out more of the same. To take an extreme case, how would you explain to an Egyptian family that genital mutilation is not such a hot idea? To take a less extreme case, how do you explain to a doctrinaire leftist that boys are very different than girls, and require manly role models in order to become men?

Okay, let’s give liberals what they supposedly really want, their ultimate fantasy: high taxes and income redistribution. Would that work? No it would not. Why not? Because enacting such a policy would simply be treating the symptom, not the cause, because the desire for this kind of heavy-handed “economic justice” is not an economic issue but a thoroughly psychological one. It is simply a smokescreen for the covert operation of that most sinister and destructive of mind parasites, envy.

One of the most important but little known concepts in psychoanalysis is that of envy. It is a term of art, not to be confused with the dictionary definition. Technically, I shouldn’t call it a mind parasite, because it is believed to be innate, not acquired (it probably had to do with evolutionary selective pressures that favored social solidarity in small human groups in the archaic environment.) It is potentially present in all people, but becomes much more problematic when aggravated by primitive defense mechanisms such as splitting and projective identification.

If we could somehow eliminate envy from the human genome, there would be almost no reason for the left to exist. They would instantly lose that which animates them, for example, envy masquerading as justice or economic theory.

In order to be happy, we must all keep our envy in check, because envy is the opposite of gratitude. Envy does not appreciate what one has, only what one doesn’t have. And our capacity to imagine what we do not have--and that someone else is enjoying it--is literally infinite, as is envy.

According to Webster's, envy is defined as "malice," and a "painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another, joined with a desire to possess the same advantage." The psychoanalytic understanding of envy is that it is an unconscious fantasy aimed at attacking, damaging, or destroying what is good, because of the intolerable feeling that one does not possess and control the object of goodness. As such, it is an aspect of what Freud called the death instinct, since it ultimately involves a destructive attack on the sources of life and goodness. Particularly envious individuals cannot tolerate the pain of not possessing and controlling the "good object," so they preemptively spoil it so that they don't have to bear the pain.

What is critical--and so perverse--about envy, is that it is not an attack on "the bad" or frustrating, but a hateful attack on what is good. As a result, the psyche of such individuals confuses what is bad and what is good, and cannot experience a sense of gratitude toward the good, the sine qua non of happiness and mental health. The envious person does not want to have a relationship with the good object, but wants to control or be that object. If it cannot, then it attacks it to eliminate the tension.

By far the best general study of envy is Helmut Schoeck’s classic, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (in sidebar). The only other source I know of that discusses the critical importance of envy is in the psychoanalytic literature, which unfortunately is too technical and specialized for the layperson.

I haven’t read Envy in a while, but it contains many arresting ideas that have always stayed with me. One important one is that envy is ubiquitous in primitive groups, and in fact, is the very thing that keeps them primitive and undeveloped. In order to advance into capitalism, human beings had to get past the “envy barrier” and tolerate the idea that some people will have more than others. In primitive groups, envy is so pervasive that no one is allowed to have more than anyone else--they are trapped in a "zero sum" theory of economics, just as are many liberals today. To naive leftists, a primitive culture may look like an egalitarian paradise, but it is actually a paranoid and envious hell, with everyone fearful of the “evil eye” of his envious neighbor should he acquire more than him. For this reason, primitive groups mindlessly destroy surpluses or engage in sacrifices to their “envious” gods.

Since envy is ubiquitous, we must have a cultural means of expressing and channeling it. This is how I regard the left on a psychological level, as the institutional means through which envy may express itself. For example, this is the role of trial lawyers, who are naturally the greatest contributors to the Democratic party. Most--obviously not all--trial lawyers are free-floating agents of envy, on the prowl for deep pockets that they might empty on behalf of their envious client. The socialist countries of Western Europe are driven by the attempt to placate envy, which only ends up creating more of it. Once you inculcate a sense of entitlement in your people, you have opened the floodgates of envy.

If you have an “ear” for envy, you will detect it everywhere in the liberal world. In psychoanalytic parlance, it is also called “spoiling,” or devaluing. Again, because the envious person cannot tolerate the good, he attacks the good and makes it bad. So even in my crappy little paper, The Los Angeles Daily News, they can’t help themselve. For example, the headline regarding yesterday’s upbeat economic news was “Fed Chief Warns of Stagflation.” This is typical. One could be cynical and say that this is just “spin,” but I don’t think it’s generally conscious. Rather, I think it’s unconscious envy and spoiling.

Even the liberal movie reviewer cannot help himself from getting envious little political digs into almost all of his reviews, including today’s for United 93. Although he liked the movie, in seeing it, “It’s impossible not to think of the image of George W. Bush reading the pet goat story in Michael Moore’s ‘Farenheit 9/11.” This same idiot would never review Farenheit 9/11 and write, “it’s impossible to look at this shrill leftist propaganda without thinking of the image of a stewardess having her throat slashed with a box cutter by a Muslim barbarian that Moore would call a freedom fighter.”

In fact, be on the lookout for envious attacks on United 93, that is, “spoiling.” The envy campaign started early, with the “too soon” meme, but that is simply a case of disguised spoiling.

I’ll be right back. I’m going to go over to Huffingtonpissed right now and prove to you what I mean......

Okay, I’m back. Here are some comments, plucked at random. This first one is not actually about United 93, but it so perfectly demonstrates how envy operates, that I’m including it: “As a nation we urgently need to develop a disdain for people who are transfixed on wealth. We should never allow them to take public office -- never again.” (Leftists constantly project their own greed and envy into the wealthy, so unconsciously she's saying that we should never again allow envious and greedy, wealth-obsessed leftists such as herself into power. Not a bad idea.)

Here’s another good one: “George Bush et al are paying cronies to do fake work in Iraq so that billions of dollars earmarked for humanitarian purposes instead goes to private bank accounts.... here's what we must do.... Tell the story of Bush's crony capitalists using our money to line their pockets in the name of rebuilding Iraq.” Again, the envious person sees envy everywhere, here projected into President Bush and his “cronies.”

With regard to United 93, no one even cares whether or not it is a good film. Rather, the only concern is whether it may somehow benefit the war on terror, and that cannot be tolerated. The movie must be attacked, smeared and devalued. Here are some sample comments:

--“I haven't seen the movie yet, but there's no question in my heart and mind that 9/11 has been grossly exploited for political purposes.”

--“No one should see this propaganda. Maybe there are some patriotic projectionists out there that'll do the public a favor and run one of the myriad 9/11-debunking documentaries instead.”

--“Is it exploitative? Absolutely. Without a doubt this film exploits everyone in the country.... a resounding slap in the face of everyone who was on board that flight and all the families that are/were affected by it.”

--“This film needs to be boycotted, protested, and shunned by the public. To take an event like 9/11 and turn it into a profit center for NBC/Universal (General Electric).... This is just another form of profiteering as far as I'm concerned.”

--“in the movie we see the terrorist in control of the aircraft diving steeply for two minutes or so. Evidently all laws of physics were suspended at that precise moment, since the magic aircraft did not lose a single engine and the passengers were not fatally thrown around the cabin. Oh well, it's Hollywood and it can be as fictitious as it gets, but the 911 Commission wanting to sell us this ridiculous story as what really happened? Not a chance.”

--”Excuse me for not joining in the paeans in honor of a Hollywood film about 9-11. I sincerely doubt that what really happened that day is going to be uncovered by a Hollywood pseudo docudrama or whatever it is. I want to see an independent invastigation on 9-11 and one who will investigate the 9-11 Commission too while they are at it. I'm not buying the bullshit coming from either Washington or Hollywood.”

--“Has anyone checked further into the rumors that flight 93 was shot down by American forces? Apparently that would be more consistent with the wreckage. And it would not necessarily be the wrong thing to do, if we knew that the plane had become a weapon. However a coverup would not only be wrong, but would be entirely consistent with the hatred for freedom that the Bush mob has continually displayed.”

Here’s a commentor who really has the big picture: “The REAL TRUTH would implicate [the White House] in a well conceived plan to create another "Pearl Harbor" event. This event would would scare the s**t out of most Americans, which would allow them to start a "War On Terror" which would lead to invading Iraq where the "enemy" in the "War On Terror" was hiding with "WMD's" and other scary stuff. Then in the name of national security in "wartime", allow an amassing of power in the "unitary executive" which would lead to secret illegal spying on Americans toture, illegal detention and other "suspensions" of the Constitution all in the name of "National Security". Meanwhile fattening all the purses of Administration friends with huge no bid contracts to re-build IRAQ (which we would not have had to destroy in the first place to get rid of Sadaam) .....need I go on?”

No, not at all. I think we got it. Unfortunately he is more paranoid than envious, but I think you can see that the two work together to pack a potent one-two punch of leftist boilerplate.

Envy is such an important but generally ignored concept, probably because people don't want to consider the sinister ways it operates in their own lives. But it is a key that unlocks many mysteries, particularly in politics. So strong and pervasive is envy, that you cannot have a political system that doesn't accommodate or find some way to manage envy. You might say that one party will generally represent the envied, the other the envious. Guess which ones.

More generally, the international left does not attack the United States because they hate us. Rather, they hate the United States because they envy us. Precisely because they cannot tolerate our unparalleled goodness and success, they attack it and turn America into a uniquely bad, greedy and envious object. It is pure projection. In engaging in this projection of their own greed and envy, they damage what is good and conflate good and evil, but at least it helps to temporarily diminish the pain of their own envy. They do the same thing with Israel. But to use one of Freud's most famous phrases, when it comes to the projection of envy and greed, "the one who smelt it, dealt it."