An Urgent Memo from the Centers for Spiritual Disease Control

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to minimize just how rotten I think mankind is. It's just that the folks are okay. People I like. But mankind as a whole? Rabble. And that's on a good day.

As we all know, the left -- as with everything else -- has it backward and upside down: they are absolutely in luuuv with mankind. It's the people they can't stand.

Conversely, conservatives place little faith in mankind, hence our distrust of various collective schemes and scams, from the UN to Obamacare to the core curriculum. But we love people. Which is why we want to protect them from these destructive schemes and scams.

I think the abstract love of mankind explains the whole basis and moonb'attitude of punitive liberalism. I mean, if Obama loves us so much, why force this punitive legislation down our throats? Rather, why not allow us the freedom to choose it? First and foremost because we would never choose it, since we are not masochists.

At the same time, conservatives who respect our autonomy and maturity are characterized by the left as not caring about us. Thus, common courtesy and respect are indifference, while condescension and pandering are care.

(You know, if only words could be restored to their original meaning, it would go a long way toward arresting this damn FAAALLLLLLL we're in.)

Blacks, for example, are too stupid to choose the best schools for their children. Thus, the decision must be left to compassionate union thugs and their political pawns such as Mayor de Blasio. That's what you call pure, disinterested benevolence: phil-anthropy, love of mankind in action. Duck!

A thought just occurred to me. Is occurring rather. Wait for it... Here it comes... Ouch! It's a big one: LEFTISM PRETENDS TO PROVIDE THE CURE FOR MAN. WITHOUT. EVER. DIAGNOSING. HIM.

To back up a bit, we've discussed in the past how each religion can be thought of as analogous to the practice of medicine, in the sense that each begins with a diagnosis for which it proposes a treatment or cure. Animals have no need of religion, since they don't have the disease. What disease?

Like I said, it depends. For Buddhists it is attachment to desire. For nudists it is attachment to clothing. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is the separation from God implied by the expulsion from Eden.

But the left proposes to cure man without ever explicitly stating what is wrong with man. Marx, for example, didn't think there was anything wrong with man that a little bloodbath couldn't cure. This flagrant misanthrope pretended to believe that the problem was in the capitalist system, not in man (as if some other species invented capitalism). So, eliminate all the capitalists, and problem solved.

Truly, -- and I mean this literally -- the left is the disease it pretends to cure. Again, since it never acknowledges the disease, it just ends up being another iteration of it. This is precisely why all revolutions just end up with a new and usually worse set of assouls in power. Why? Because they are assouls, that's why. What did you expect? Sugar Candy Mountain?

A reader just alerted me to an article by David Goldman (AKA Spengler) which I'll bet is relevant, The Rise of Secular Religion:

"Today’s American liberalism, it is often remarked, amounts to a secular religion: it has its own sacred texts and taboos, Crusades and Inquisitions. The political correctness that undergirds it, meanwhile, can be traced back to the past century’s liberal Protestantism."

Yes, exactly -- except they don't call the disease sin or the cure salvation. Or, they give us the chemo but never call it cancer. So, we lose our hair and vomit all day, but no one knows why, because the liberals won't tell us.

Nor do they call it "religion," even though "the inner life of secular Americans remains dense with spiritual experience," and "post-Protestant experience resembles the supernatural world of the Middle Ages, but with new spiritual entities in place of the old devils and elves."

For the left, these demons are everywhere except in fallen human beings. With one exception to that exception: in demon-ridden conservatives. I can't top Bottum -- not that there's anything wrong with it -- who writes that

"These horrors have a palpable, almost metaphysical presence in the world. And the post-Protestants believe the best way to know themselves as moral is to define themselves in opposition to such bigotry and oppression -- understanding good and evil not primarily in terms of personal behavior but as states of mind about the social condition" (emphasis mine).

"Sin, in other words, appears as a social fact, and the redeemed personality becomes confident of its own salvation by being aware of that fact. By knowing about, and rejecting, the evil that darkens society."

Again: they see -- and feel -- the disease, only they misname and displace it. For if sin is the illness and mankind is the carrier, the left is seen for what it is: the pernicious disease vector of a deadly plague. Like human beings, only worse.