Leftism: Come for the Messianic Fantasies, Stay for the Sadism

Regarding spiritual sickness, we agree with the Aphorist that Conservatism should not be a party but the normal attitude of every decent man.

You can take this quite literally, in that the first function of a society is to perpetuate itself. When Obama promised to "fundamentally change" the nation, he was not only serious, but giving voice to an ideology that perceives a vast system of oppression that must be dismantled from top to bottom.

Speaking of demons in democracy, Legutko reminds us that communists and socialists "sternly and ruthlessly criticized -- just as liberals did -- existing communities with long traditions, and after seizing power, ruthlessly destroyed them."

Leftists everywhere and everywhen are especially contemptuous of what is known as "flyover country," being that more rural areas are "seen as the mainstay of tradition" and "strongholds of conservatism and bigotry"-- bitter clingers, deplorables, white supremacist Trump voters, etc.

Exaggeration? I won't bother tracking down the links, but consider liberal luminaries such as Bill Maher and that actress person who regard the hurricanes in Florida and Texas as just deserts for their ideological deviance. Gaia is a jealous god!

The process described by Legutko is similar to how Democrats use blacks as vote farms while pretending to help them. Just so, communist regimes "systematically did their best to wipe out rural culture while at the same time" appearing to defend them "as victims of exploitation." Even on the face of it, how can a Democrat party that wants to import millions of unskilled laborers to suppress wages, be a friend of the working man?

But the ideologue doesn't deal with the real world, let alone real human beings. Rather, he sees only his projected ideology. There is a word for this: insanity. Except this is a kind of ready-made, off-the-shelf insanity, as opposed to the custom made kind. Give the latter credit: they may be crazy, but at least they think for themselves.

This point is worth belaboring: just as traditional religion provides a way for the average person to be wise, ideology provides a way for even the most intelligent person to render himself an idiot. Let's stipulate that Noam Chomsky has a higher IQ than, say, Margaret Thatcher. Who is the wise one, who the malevolent idiot?

For communists, "the 'proletariat' was an abstract term to which no real community corresponded; it was nothing but a requirement of political strategy" -- like an empty placeholder. Likewise, there are no flesh-and-blood little people who correspond to the left's blather about the Little Guy. To the extent that they exist, they are only there to fulfill a role in the left's existential passion play.

The same can be said of "women," which is just "an abstract concept that does not denote any actual existing community, but only an imagined collective made an object of political worship among feminist organizations and their allies." Actual women aren't even women if they deviate from the abstract ideological ideal. The same can be said of blacks, Latinos, homosexuals, etc. You will have noticed that what the left calls "multiculturalism" is the last word in homogenization -- of herding everyone into the same ideology:

Never before in human history did we see a similar phenomenon when millions of people, indistinguishable from each other, using the same patterns of thinking, politically homogeneous and oblivious to any other way of viewing the political world except according to the orthodox liberal-democratic version, are not only convinced of their own individual and group differences and proclaim the unchallenged superiority of pluralism, but also want to enforce the same simplistic and tediously predictable orthodoxy on the entire world as the ultimate embodiment of the idea of multiplicity.

Something in there sounds familiar... ultimate embodiment. Yes, just as the Incarnation is Word made flesh, the left has its own inverted version of this, in that they want their insane ideological word to be embodied in everyone, without exception. What else to make of UC Berkeley, which absolutely cannot tolerate a Ben Shapiro in its midst?

When we speak of the "body of Christ," we are adverting to a capacity for embodiment that must exist prior to this or that particular case. To make an obvious point, it is possible for the same body to embody something other than Christ; think, for example of cults, which collectively embody lies of various kinds.

Antifa is the embodiment of a (sick) word, just as was Nazism. Therefore, to say that Christianity is the ongoing embodiment of the Word is not in any way some one-of-a-kind miracle. Humans are always embodying abstract ideals. Occasionally these ideals are even true, but not often. Which is precisely why man is in need of revelation. Left to his own devices, he is clearly vulnerable to the embodiment of anti-Words of varying degrees of malignancy.

In a certain way, history is a catalogue of anti-Words made flesh. Clearly, our founders recognized this -- for example, with Madison's crack about government being "the greatest of all reflections on human nature."

This recognition of the priority of the word does not go unnoticed by the left. Indeed, it is why, in the words of the Aphorist, Rather than an ideological strategy, the Left is a lexicographic tactic. In short, their motto might well be: "in order to embody the word, we had to destroy the word."

Words like marriage, truth, normality, freedom, man, woman, constitution, first amendment, etc.

"An intellectual's sharp eye and perceptiveness will always recognize what is politically dangerous: a sentence, a metaphor, a proverb, an incorrect text on the bulletin board, a work of fiction.... there is no shortage of people who ecstatically become involved in tracking disloyalty and fostering a new orthodoxy" (Legutko).

Think of nosy Lena Dunhams everywhere, monitoring ideological conformity, "a moralist, a commissar, and an informer rolled into one." These conforming nobodies help embody the left. They "develop a sense of power otherwise unavailable," and cannot "resist the temptation to indulge in a low desire to harm others with impunity." All with the best of intentions!

There is a Simpson's episode in which Homer dreams of a job that combines his desire to help people with his desire to hurt them.

What is leftism but a way to reconcile an unhinged passion to redeem mankind with a sadistic desire to harm human beings, the former providing ideological rationalization for the latter?