Wednesday, January 27, 2021

The Most Dangerous Animal: A Bored Leftist

It is not enough for the democrat that we respect what he wants to do with his life; he also demands that we respect what he wants to do with our life. --Dávila

We may need to rethink the truism that a leftist is always some combination of ignorance (whether innocent or culpable), stupidity (whether innate or acquired), indoctrination (including conformity and social acceptance), sociopathy, mental illness (including dysregulated envy), and demon possession. 

Sociopathy is of course a mental illness, but it deserves its own category due to the extent of externalization involved. Sociopaths are "victims" of a mental illness characterized by the compulsive victimization of others. 

One of the appeals of leftism is that it allows sociopathy and selfishness to masquerade as charity and generosity. Those with misgivings about this kind of charitable thieving are called "fascists."

Sociopathy is what distinguishes, say, Antifa and BLM from the typical feminist hysteric or depressive. Feminism is the cause and consequence of personal unhappiness, but its victims don't typically engage in arson, looting, and murder. Soul murder, yes, but not usually the lesser kind. 

But another major component of leftism must be boredom, and for reasons that necessarily follow upon its shrunken metaphysical assumptions. For if life isn't a wild spiritual adventure drawn into permanent engagement with the Transcendent Real, what is it?

There's nothing new under the sun, for every possible alternative to this normative human state has been known and discussed since the time of ancient Greece, from hedonism to skepticism to stoicism, not to mention monism, dualism, determinism, et al. These sophistries are permanent possibilities of the human state, which is why they persist in some form or fashion to this day. For it is written:

It is not so much that men change their ideas, as that the ideas change their disguises. In the discourse of the centuries, the same voices are in dialogue.

Thus,

For man to fall repeatedly into the same trap, just paint it a different color each time (Dávila).

Just paint envy with the bright new color of "social justice," and you can trap millions.  

As the saying goes, freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction. Let's hope generation Z will not prove to be generation Zzzzzzz, and will awaken to this danger before generations X and Y finish the job. (Biden, of course, transcends generations, as his dementia means he was born yesterday, every day.)

A certain type of political activity is a treatment -- not a cure, obviously -- for existential boredom, for it inserts one in the center of an externalized, cosmic Manichean struggle against the forces of evil and darkness -- like an episode of The View, only not as subtle.  

In other words, the religious impulse is denied, transformed, and displaced, which is why one has only to look into the eyes of the deranged leftist to see that their souls are genuinely on fire for their strange gods. They're not faking it.

And what is the impeachment trial but a faux exorcism? If President Trump were dead and buried, they would no doubt want to dig up the body, drive a stake through its heart, and burn it, as they did to heretics in days of old.

Say what you want about revolution, it is exciting, in particular, for a person lacking the intrinsic excitement of being alive and free in the greatest nation that has ever existed.  I've never been sufficiently bored to entertain fantasies of power and control over others to cure my boredom. I don't really care what a leftist does with his life, nor do I wish I had the power to censor or suppress him. Why does he wish to control and censor others?

Thus, we have a vertically asymmetrical situation: if boredom approaches, I grab a book, watch a game, or simply contemplate the magnificent, luminous abyss between ourselves and our creator. But when the leftist is bored, watch out: grab your wallet, your wealth, and your weapon (for defensive reasons, of course)! Many aphorisms apply:

--When one does not concede to the leftist all that he demands, he proclaims himself the victim of an institutional violence that is licit to repel with physical violence. (BLM and Antifa, the fascist militias of the left.)

--Activism is the asylum for one who has nowhere to dwell and nowhere to go. (A folk remedy for boredom.)

--Social problems are the delightful refuge of those fleeing from their own problems. (A large proportion of the left consists of misfits, rejects, losers, malcontents, and paranoiacs of various kinds.) 

--The left is made up of individuals who are dissatisfied with what they have and are satisfied with who they are. (Envy and class warfare.)

--The left calls a critique of capitalism what is merely a lawsuit for possession. (The current name is "equity.")

--Revolutions do not solve any problem other than the economic problem of their leaders. (Sharpton, Jackson, Kamala, and Sandy Cortez will somehow survive the plague of White Supremacy and Privilege.)

--The only man who should speak of wealth or power is one who did not extend his hand when they were within his reach. (We're looking at you, Bernie, Barry, & Bidens.) 


--Minorities that become majorities continue to believe they are brave. (Feminists and left wing homosexuals are the bravest of all.)

Back to boredom. Everything discussed above was in response to the following passage in Transcendence and History, so blame Hughes: "the modern eclipse of transcendence" has

given rise both to disastrously influential visions of historical determinism and to experiences of history as a monotonous sequence of strictly mundane and equally valueless moments (emphasis mine).

Is that it?  No, here's a bit more along the same lines:

all points of view that reduce historical meaning to purely worldly conditions are not only frustrating but finally terrifying, because by removing timeless meaning from those conditions they "empty them of all exemplary meaning," and what results is a "terrible banalization of history..."

The left is nothing if not banal. Which is precisely the problem, for they think activism will remedy the banality. Which it does for a while, until they run out of other people's money. Then what?

25 comments:

Anonymous said...

The left is nothing if not banal

Why then do you feel a need to write about them, week after week, for years? Always with the same utter lack of insight. If they are so banal, why the fascination? As a psychologist, surely you've given some thought to this?

I have a similar problem – I find the right pretty boring, yet I'm also somewhat obsessed with them, can't leave them alone. There must at least be a name for this type of compulsive interest in that which disgusts.

julie said...

Then what?

Oh, the usual: more burning, looting, and murdering, followed by lawlessness, starvation, privation, and of course massive amounts of death.

One of the interesting things about studying early American history has been seeing how often, over the course of those first couple of centuries, people came to colonize this New World and failed, utterly and spectacularly. Part of the problem was of course the sort of communistic mindset the first colonists had, where all the men lived together and owned everything in common. But the other, and possibly even greater problem, was that they kept sending noblemen who a) probably didn't have many prospects back home for running the family fiefdom, b) probably suffered extreme boredom in life as a result, and c) had never done a day's actual work in their lives. So they kept coming over and dying horribly in the midst of plenty, because they didn't expect to work, and had no useful skills whatsoever.

At least back then, the solution to idealistic leftist trustfund kids was to ship them off where they couldn't bother very many people. Today, we just have to live with the blighters.

Gagdad Bob said...

Freedom is the right to be different; equality is a ban on being different; equity is the doctrine that some are more equal than others.

Nicolás said...

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed the post immensely, thank you for putting it out there.

I think the efforts to impeach Trump are driven by a communist desire not to see his name on the 2024 ballot for POTUS. So yes, it is akin driving the political stake into the vampires chest, to use your allegory. But this is not some primal rage, it has a practical purpose.

Your post down-plays past historical happenings as a source of the communist pathology, but I would not be quick to dismiss that.

Prior to about 6,000 BC communist hunter-gatherer bands were all that existed. Then Eridu and Ur arose along the Euphrates and Tigris. Goodbye communism, hello crop surpluses (wealth).

Fast forward to France, 1789. Let them eat cake, said Marie. All of a sudden, boom, communism is back and has been with us ever since. The hand that feeds will get bitten if it stops putting out the treats.

Given this history, communism can hardly be considered a stand-alone psycho-spiritual pathology. It needs cultural pressures in order to form and thrive.

It stands to reason the odious and deluded communist of today was created by recent (so to speak) factors.

For this reason it would not be a bad idea to institute a Basic Universal Income to silence the communists who would finally have a bone to gnaw on perpetually and they could stop complaining. We now have enough surplus to make that happen.


Cousin Dupree said...

Surplus? How about a federal debt of $27,772,359,048,318, or $83,995 per person.

Anonymous said...

The problem with federal deficits is they only become a problem when a socialist is in charge.

Cousin Dupree said...

In our state alone there's something like $800 billion in unfunded pension bribes to government workers.

Anonymous said...

Should we follow China's example? They seem to be doing pretty well despite all the leftism.

Anyhoo... sociopathy is a learned behavior, with a genetic component. Psychopathy is a (currently) incurable genetic condition. Both are considered pathological by civil society.

I know plenty of neoliberals, centrists, Democrats, liberals... none of whom I'd ever consider a sociopath or psychopath. Should that tag be pasted onto the progressives or actual socialists instead?

Petey said...

The amount of psychopathy in a leftist varies from <1% to 100%. As said in the post, other factors may predominate, e.g., stupidity, ignorance, indoctrination, envy, mental illness, and all the rest.

Petey said...

And leftists obviously aren't liberal, rather, the opposite.

Petey said...

Even the worst leftists such as Stalin or Hitler weren't 100% psychopaths, because that leaves no room for the diabolical.

Anonymous said...

Experts are telling us that psychopathy only happens to 1-3% of the total population.

Did you mean sociopathy? Sociopathy is defined as "a pattern of antisocial behaviors and attitudes, including manipulation, deceit, aggression, and a lack of empathy for others". I know a lot of right wingers who're that way. Maybe I'm seeing them wrong?

Gagdad Bob said...

I'm using sociopath and psychopath synonymously.

Anonymous said...

I've known a few psychopaths. The primary characteristics of the ones I knew:

1. supremely confident
2. no agreeableness whatsoever (whatever they initially displayed was fake)
3. utterly incorrigible

I'd add that they had no personal interest whatsoever in any kind of ethical group human activity, outside of what they could gain from it, at the end of the day. IOW, after the public speech where they shout "I love you all!", they turn to their henchmen and say "God, I hate them so much." Their public behavior is as faked as somebody setting out decoys and blowing into quackers for the sake of attracting the ducks which they want to kill.

These are the psychopaths I know. Maybe you know of another kind?

Anonymous said...

My belief is that back in Czarist Russia, violent psychopaths found a home inside of communist movements where they could freely express their sadistic desires. In modern society, less physically violent psychopaths find a home inside of corporations undergoing chaotic change to express their sadistic desires.

Everybody wants control. It’s part of the survival impulse. But psychopaths “don’t have any brakes” as the experts say, so their impulse to control must be checked by something outside of themselves. Things like family, Rule of Law, and society come to mind.

I’d add that psychopaths don’t consider us normals to be too moral or socially ethical for our own good. They consider us normals to be stupid and weak. They’re incapable of knowing (feeling) what “moral” or “ethical” even means.

This is a distinctly separate subject from “right is right and left is wrong”. Psychopaths couldn’t care less about either and will use either/or for their own pleasure. This is important for people to know because it's highly likely they'll encounter one and it's best to be prepared.

Cousin Dupree said...

Read Hayek's essay on why under socialism the worst people rise to the top.

Anonymous said...

I can grok Bob's "psychopathic leftist" to some extent; some of the more emphatic Democrats have a thing about having to be right about everything and very much blinded to any evidence to the contrary. That being said Bob has probably blown the bad Democrat meme out of proportion. For every Democrat of the type I've described there are a hundred who are quite reasonable people. And most Democrats believe in God, which Bob has expressed as impossible; but sorry Bob I done seen it many times and it is a thing.

Bob expresses a persistent and delusional tunnel vision around the Democrat, being obsessed with them. He calls them leftists, a meaningless term if ever there was one. He indicates Democrats are partially demonic but has never admitted a Republican could be partially demonic. That seems hardly likely. And "demonic" itself is a nebulous concept which arguably has no reality in the One Cosmos comprised in total of God's good Self and nothing else.

As far as I know Bob does not believe centrist political views are possible, or admit the existence of people who fall between the Democrat and Republican continuum of opinions, yet these are the very people who keep our culture together in their multi-millions. They get no play on the One Cosmos stage. They are simply not interesting enough.

Anonymous argues that psychopaths are non-partisan and opportunistic predators which possess no real ideology of any kind except a desire for personal gain. I would broadly agree, but I think anonymous does not perceive that the kind of psychopathy Bob is trying to describe is a milder, subtler, yet more insidious form that is very wide-spread, and I can Bob's point there. There are sub-clinical levels of psychopathy.

And I think we should all take a good hard look in the mirror around that point.

julie said...

Apropos nothing, This guy's voice is amazing. Makes you wonder if there's something unusual about his lungs to get that sort of depth of sound.

Nicolás said...

The fool calls “prejudices” the conclusions that he does not understand.

julie said...

In other news, Antifa has been actively trying to recruit children from "High School-Elementary ages."

Nothing to see here, move along, folks...

Anonymous said...

Dupree, according to the Iron Law of Oligarchy, this happens in every system. Hell, ancient philosophers came up with the concept of anacyclosis long before any Communism.

The only answer thus far is the Founders concepts of separations and checks and balances. But the problem is keeping the powers separate and continuously checking and balancing each other for the sake of best fit solutions.

Giving up is only an option if one believes in an End of Days world, and believes their family will be raptured well before any seriously dystopian shit hits the fan. But for some people this is an option...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwK01oJE_UU

Anonymous said...

sub-clinical levels of psychopathy

For most, nuanced semantics only leads to confusion. And this is exactly where real psychopaths want their target normals.

Patriotic Christians marching with Nazis and embracing conspiracy rumors should be evidence enough that most people cannot grok nuance, let alone discern the difference between reality and rumor. Or if this is your pleasure, it'd be BLM embracing Marxism while at very the same time trying to defund the police because many common policeman struggle with discerning nuance.

My man Frank Luntz knew this and worked well to keep it simple stupid for his conservative brethren. But lately, I think he’s learning the hard way that once you’ve got the un-nuanced masses stampeding towards some Trumpian cliff, it’s really hard to stop.

Andrew MacDonald said...

"...or simply contemplate the magnificent, luminous abyss between ourselves and our creator." Love that.

Will the Universal Basic Income, which I think will make The Great Reset irresistible to most, be what leads us into our technocratic cells forever. Is it the ace in the psyop hand?

julie said...

I think for UBI to really grab hold as something needed in America, there first need to be enough people newly suffering poverty with no hope of improving their lot. The technocratic overlords are working on that, of course, but 80 million PO'd Trump voters suggests we aren't there yet.

I doubt very much that even if our technocratic overlords succeed in the Great Reset, it will be forever (though it will almost certainly seem that way for the survivors). Ultimately, God has a say in all this, and I do believe without a doubt that He is paying close attention, and has His own ends in mind.

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