The Leftist Culture of Death: In the Beginning is the Surd

Have you ever wondered why Democrats are the Party of Death? Just what are the first principles of the unprincipled? What animates the insentient?

Now, when I say this -- and this should be obvious -- by no means am I castigating all Democrats, most of whom are no doubt fine people, just confused, uninformed, frightened, seduced, reactionary, bought off, apathetic, fearful of change, or mired in habits of thought that were formed in college and haven't changed one bit since.

We're talking about the true believers, who only constitute maybe 30% of the party, and (to the credit of decent Democrats) have to actually lie about who they are and what they believe in order to get the other 70% to go along with the program.

I can guarantee you that the majority of Democrats are not actually in favor of, say, destroying the Boy Scouts through legal harassment, or banning the ROTC from college campuses, or partial birth abortion, or state control of medicine, or Miranda rights for terrorists, or prosecuting the men and women who play rough with terrorists in order to keep us safe. These are all abominations, and if the majority of Democrats actually favored them, we'd probably be past the point of no return.

The point is, progressivism in its most virulent and pathological form is always a religion. For example, another one of the most prominent religious hucksters of the left is Marianne Williamson, who is on par with Deepak in terms of spiritual stupidity and corruption. She is upset because Obama is not yet governing as a one hundred percent Marxist, as if that is possible given the constraints mentioned above, i.e., that most Democrats would not be happy to know Obama's true agenda. Therefore, it must be enacted with stealth and deceit, protected by a bodyguard of media liars and bouncers.

After all, Obama is not being constrained by Republicans, as Williamson suggests. Democrats control all three branches of government, and can literally do whatever pleases them, including even fundamentally unconstitutional things such as socialized medicine. Indeed, their satanic judicial philosophy conveniently allows them to interpret the Constitution as meaning whatever they need it to mean in order to achieve their statist goals.

In order for the left to succeed, it must necessarily mask its first principle -- that it is the party of Death -- and affirm the opposite. Therefore, Williamson says that her first political principle is derived from "the immense unnecessary suffering in the world." She says to herself, "Wow, it's sad about all that pain people are going through. Let's try to assuage it."

First of all, it's not "let's try to assuage it." Rather, it's "let's you try to assuage it by the government taking enough of your money." The left always talks about the "social contract," but it's not a contract if the other party says to me, "your signature or your freedom. Your choice."

Nor does Williams consider the fact that the majority of human pain is self-inflicted, either due to personal issues or simply the nature of fallen man. To imagine that we could ever eliminate the suffering to which man is heir -- and much of which is actually necessary in order to grow -- is to live as a child. And since suffering can never actually be eradicated, it is to grant infinite power to the state to keep trying. It's like giving the state a mandate to end romantic heartbreak.

And of course, the religious abstractions of the left prevent them from seeing all of the faceless victims of their war on poverty, i.e., the poor. One cannot imagine them ever trying to tally the cost of the broken homes, the urban blight, the criminality, the murder, rape and violence that all skyrocketed when the federal government decided that it knew how to end poverty without causing catastrophic unintended consequences. As it stands, Obama is creating more poor and dependent people as fast as he can, and yet Williamson isn't satisfied. What more can he do?

The empty promises of the left are rooted in false premises about reality, most especially, materialism and relativism. When I say that their first philosophical move is to turn the cosmos upside down, I mean this quite literally.

But after they do so, they quickly adapt to the world they have created, so that it appears "real" to them (very much like the glasses that turn the field of vision upside down; within a matter of weeks, the brain adapts, and the person has no difficulty making their way through the world. But remove the distorting glasses, and they will again be disoriented.)

Now, if matter is ultimate, then relativism necessarily follows, since materialism undermines the very possibility of truth. Please note what necessarily follows from the initial premise: life is actually death; consciousness is actually matter; love is only lust (or some kind of deceptive power game); form is substance; democracy is truth; quality is quantity; existence is nothing; and creation itself is just our bad luck.

And creation is bad in the absence of a creator. How could it not be? This has been addressed ad nauseam (literally) in the existentialist literature of the 20th century, so there is no need for me to press the point. If there is no God, then will and appetite are supreme, and life is a horror.

This is the real reason the left affirms a right to die but not a right to life. They reject the right to life because they hate (or at least devalue) life, while they perversely oppose capital punishment because they are (necessarily) fearful of death.

For when you invert the cosmos, your new absolute is grim death. Death is the only certainty. Furthermore, it is a meaningless death, therefore something to be avoided at all costs -- including the cost of a meaningful life, since there can be no meaning anyway. Therefore, life becomes the avoidance of death at all costs, but for no reason at all. In short, Death rules. Thus, the leftist would always prefer to live on his knees than die on his feet.

For the secular leftist, God does not exist and man is him. But again, in the absence of the true God, man can only be a god of death -- and not just material death. Rather, since the god of death denies the soul, it results in the elimination of the individual, thus the dreary uniformity of the left, enforced by the intellectual brutality of political correctness. Manhood is exchanged for tenure, and ideology becomes the opiate that confers a sound sleep. Ideology is not just the study of idiots. Then again, perhaps it is.

Since the left inverts the cosmos, it becomes "bottomless" -- in other words, the infinitude of God is transformed into the existential groundlessness of the left. This is why, for example, to hear Charles Johnson or Andrew Sullivan or Keith Olbermann opine on just about anything is to hear the cosmic void "thinking out loud." This is not intellectual but intellectualism, i.e., the replacement of true ideas and principles with mere abstractions. That the abstractions are stupid and dehumanizing is beside the point. It is actually Death speaking. And if the secular left is correct, Death owns you.