Is Leftism a Lie or Something Worse?

I want to pull a couple more passages from the article cited yesterday, each going to our exploration of the deepest deep structure of the left.  First, for the activist of the left, “to be antiracist is to see all cultures in their differences as on the same level, as equals”:

“When we see cultural difference we are seeing cultural difference—nothing more, nothing less.” It’s hard to imagine that anyone could believe that cultures that condone honor killings of unchaste young women are “nothing more, nothing less” than culturally different from our own. But whether he believes it or not, it’s obvious that embracing such relativism is a highly effective tool for ascension and seizing power (Weiss).

Even on its face the claim is absurd, for in this formulation, isn't the culture that makes no distinctions between cultures the morally superior one? If not, then what are we arguing about?  

My culture, for example, understands that "homosexual marriage" is -- no offense -- impossible in fact and in principle.   But my culture is regarded by the totolerantarian leftist as hateful, whereas, say, Islamic culture is considered beautiful despite sanctioning and encouraging violence toward homosexuals.  In my culture, that would be evil.  Yet, I'm the immoral one.  

Normally -- speaking now as a psychologist -- when a person is able to maintain such starkly contradictory ideas it points to pathology.  This is because the mind as such is designed to seek unity.  A normal person is distressed by contradiction and  attempts to resolve it, either by ruling out one of the theses or integrating them at a higher level.   This being the case, how is it even possible for someone to make the claim that "all cultures are equal except for mine, which is superior to the rest, and yours, which is inferior to the rest"?

This claim is either self-refuting or merely the pretext for a raw power play.  No, it's actually both.  In fact, one of the reasons the left is so furious at President Trump is that he refuses to play by the rules of this corrupt power game.  It's why the very idea of MAGA is a moral obscenity.  For the left, America can indeed be great, but only by acknowledging that it's rotten.  What the left is really saying is:  "All cultures are equal and America is the worst of the bunch."

Exaggerate much, bOb?

This is no longer a fringe view. As the philosopher Peter Boghossian has noted: “This ideology is the dominant moral orthodoxy in our universities, and has seeped out and spread to every facet of American life— publishing houses, tech, arts, theater, newspapers, media,” and, increasingly, corporations. It has not grabbed power by dictates from above, but by seizing the means of sense-making from below.

Over the past few decades and with increasing velocity over the last several years, a determined young cohort has captured nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life. Rather than the institutions shaping them, they have reshaped the institutions. You don’t need the majority inside an institution to espouse these views. You only need them to remain silent, cowed by a fearless and zealous minority who can smear them as racists if they dare disagree. 

Sense-making from below.  Now that is a bingo. For it is literally the imposition of meaning instead of its discovery, and as we will explain, this is the very structure of paranoia and of mental illness more generally.  I read something about this just the other day, but where is it?  I've been cramming so much into my noggin lately that I've exceeded its already limited carrying capacity.  

This also happens to be a VERY LARGE subject, being that it goes to the whole metaphysical question of whether reality is discovered or projected -- in other words, whether common sense realism is the case, or if Kant got it right after all.  If you presume to practice philosophy -- and we all must, on pain of cashing in our humanness -- this is among the very first questions that must be settled: are my concepts about reality true?  Or just forms of my own apperception?  What comes first, the thing perceived or my perception of it?  

One can ignore this question, which is precisely how one is reduced to being the village atheist, e.g., "our minds are totally contingent and that's the absolute truth."  

More generally, materialism is the abstract doctrine that holds abstractions to be unreal.  But like the multiculturalist referenced above, the materialist is too naive or incurious to follow his train of logic until it blows up the tracks.  If you believe that perception is prior to the thing perceived -- pro-tip here -- you have permanently sundered the link between perception and reality.  

Not only can you never get back to reality, but by all rights the word should be abolished from your vocabulary.  To say "perception is reality" is to say "perception is perception," all the way down. It is the negation of reality.  These are nihilists, Donny.  Everything is true because nothing is true.  It's how a mentally ill man who wants to hack off his penis is normal, whereas Amy Coney Barrett is depraved. Come to think of it, it is how Jeffrey "Keep Your" Toobin has the moral standing to denounce ACB.  

The party of science.  Okay, here's a clarifying question: does science deal with the real world, or not?  Are its conclusions purely subjective, or do they describe reality?  Are our minds the measure of reality, or vice versa? 

Not only do we believe science is both objective and true, we don't leave it at that.  Rather, we go to the deeper question of how science is even possible in principle.  So, yes, science describes reality (on its own plane with its own methods, of course).  But by virtue of what principle?  Yes, the principle of creation, through which being bifurcates into intelligence and intelligibility.

But we're getting rather far afield.  Back to the damn quote I'm looking for.  Ah. Here it is: from Sheen's Philosophy of Science (see sidebar).  He notes that the intelligence -- to the extent that it is intelligence and not something else! -- "never communicates to the phenomena an intelligibility which they do not possess themselves."

Example.  Actually, it isn't a perfect example, because the people propagating it presumably know it is a baseless lie, because they can't be that crazy.  Can they?  

I'm speaking of our media and big tech overlords who are trying to pretend this whole business about the Biden Crime Family is just Russian propaganda.  To the extent that someone actually believes this, it is a case of  "communicating to the phenomena an intelligibility which they do not possess themselves."  In short, it is a paranoid delusion. 

Didn't get as far as I'd hoped, but we're out of time.