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Thursday, March 01, 2007

Liberalism - Not Funny Anymore

Liberalism, which can occasionally breed great advances, was, in the main, prior to 9/11, only a frustrating form of self-absorbed and emotion-driven drivel that all modern societies must overcome to succeed and to prosper. The Bill Mahers, Ward Churchills and Michael Moores of this world are not funny anymore, and, after 9/11, liberalism has actually become dangerous to the survival of western and American civilization, and must be actively and firmly defeated. The alliance between liberalism and Islamic terrorism has already been described in many places. The first step in defeating this destructive force is to understand it. This piece that appeared recently in the American Thinker does a particularly good job of explaining the root causes of liberalism:

January 21, 2007
The Psychology of the Self-Hating Liberal
By Graham Cunningham

The good news is that, after a whole century of heading in the wrong direction, a moral and intellectual challenge to the bleeding-heart version of liberalism is finally welling up in the West. This is in no small part thanks to the liberating force of the Internet that has made freedom of expression possible again after decades of suffocating mass media orthodoxy.

There is however a tendency to focus only on the effects of the West's philosophical malaise. The rampant spread of our parasitic victim-culture and our impotence in the face of Islamic terrorism - these are both symptoms. The root cause lies in the psychology of sublimated self-hate that has come to be the prevalent psychic condition middle class liberals and especially those in media and academic circles. The truth is that virtually the entire ‘social justice' project of the last century - driven by middle class liberals on behalf of ‘the oppressed' - was motivated not by something noble but by something weak and creepy.

Its roots are a self-hating neurosis that, in different forms has afflicted the European intelligentsia since the time of Rousseau. I first became aware of the strange mind games of the self-hating middle class liberal at university in the 1970's. It is a mindset that did then (and still does) dominate academic life. Students and their tutors alike - mostly the beneficiaries of upward striving family backgrounds - were consumed with a phoney and entirely self- absorbed infatuation with something they called ‘the working class struggle'.

Through its disproportionate hold on academic and media culture this mindset has now become mainstream. As it has spread through our culture it has been diluted and sublimated, Paradoxically this has made it even more poisonous by making it more difficult to apprehend. It has become a gossamer web of vaguely held attitudes. Here are some of them:

Being middle class is something to be slightly ashamed of. Being working class on the other hand - or better still affecting to be working class - makes you seem more heroic......As long as you are ‘left wing' you are not only a nicer person but you are also ‘radical' and therefore not boring. If on the other hand you are ‘right wing', well that means you are ‘reactionary' and mean......Business enterprise is essentially disreputable whereas getting a living off the public purse or in the arts and media is highly civilized. Being an engineer or a scientist is OK too, up to a point - for boring people anyway.....And of course all the problems of people in the rest of the world are the fault, not of those people themselves but of the prosperous West. More specifically, the blame lies with ‘the capitalist system'; not you personally of course. You show how much you care by going to Live Aid concerts and that makes you feel much better about yourself.

In the obsessive struggle to subvert the perceived social hierarchy, a new politically correct hierarchy is rammed down your throat. At its apex would be someone like a Red Indian lesbian; at the bottom of the heap would be a middle class, Southern English male. In the latter half of the last century this mentality spread through all professions and institutions and so has become self-perpetuating. By the time the influence filters down to the population at large it is so diluted as to be just a vague lack of confidence in Western civilization and a linguistic fog of moral relativism which disorientates people and makes them doubt their own common sense instincts about right and wrong.

Of all institutions the most powerful in this respect is the mass media, on account of its insidious ability to drip-drip its influence on every aspect of the way you perceive the world beyond your own direct experience. Everything you know - or think you know - about, Iraq or ‘global warming' or ‘the latest social research' on this or that subject, you probably got via the media. The great media conjuring trick is the illusion that it is merely a transparent window whereas in reality it is a window, richly decorated with mythology. It breathes into your ear things like this:-

All people in the Third World are shouldering with dignity a burden imposed upon them by the West in general and America in particular....All businesses are probably trying to screw you....You as a consumer have plenty to whine about....Politicians should do something about each and every one of the problems you encounter in life....And if you are making a mess of your life its because someone else should have given you more information or more help.

The trouble with all this apparent social conscience is that what really drives it is not some profound humanism but the desire of a highly privileged elite to feel better about themselves and stave off the unconscious and sublimated self-loathing which was drip fed to them at university.

Virtually everyone in the Western world today will have had his or her perception distorted to some extent by this fake but highly seductive fashion-accessory kind of social conscience. By subverting a perfectly valid hierarchy of values in judging human behavior, this fake social conscience has had a hugely corrosive effect on what was best in our civilization. Take, for example, the near universal acceptance now of the notion that to discriminate is wrong.

Wrong. It is bigotry that is wrong. The capacity to discriminate - far from being wrong - is actually vital to civilized society; the more of it the better.

The psychology of middle class self-hate of is complex and multi-layered. It is, in part a mindset of frozen adolescence whereby people never entirely move beyond the inchoate parent-anger of their youth. Even sophisticated professionals can still carry their adolescent baggage, now displaced into a vague resentment against their own middle class roots or against America as the parent figure of the Western world. In part it is Rousseau and D. H. Lawrence: the cerebral intellectual's Romantic infatuation with the primitive. And in part it is perhaps a stray fragment of the shattered star of Christianity - the first shall be last etc. This fragment, detached now from its overall religious context, floats meaninglessly in the post-Christian philosophical ether.

The consequences of this confused and self-indulgent philosophy are full of paradox.

First: when do you ever hear any credit given to the wicked American enterprise culture for the microchip, the personal computer, the Internet, Google, and all the rest of the apparatus that every lefty-liberal anti-globalization warrior or anti-Western terrorist now blithely uses in pursuit of her agenda? In a staggering act of biting the hand that feeds, the liberal intelligentsia sneers at the kind of souls without whom there would have been no Western civilization in the first place. Meanwhile South East Asia is turning out science graduates in the millions.

Second: the spread of attention-seeking, willful victimhood in our culture - the whining, blaming and litigating -has tragically been assisted by the very scruples of self reliant, non-drama-queen type people preferring to just keep their own counsel and say nothing.

Third: Whilst we may not exactly have 1984, we do have plenty of Orwellian Doublethink. Being a ‘radical' means thinking just like everyone else in your peer group. Caring about the catastrophic failure of mankind in large parts of the planet means going to rock concerts.

In challenging this malaise, it is not enough to attack the crazy social policies and the political correctness it has spawned. It is also necessary to challenge the century long myth that a left-wing type of ‘social conscience' is good-hearted even if it is naïve. This is one huge fallacy. The truth is that it is more usually self-centered, self-deceiving and ultimately self-serving.

Final note:
Recent studies and a book by Frank Brieaddy, "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism" (Basic Books), strongly suggest that political conservatives give much more of their own money to charities than do liberals.

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2 Comments:

At 2:27 AM, Blogger Ronbo said...

Russ:

My take on the "Red-Green Alliance" is that the Left will make an alliance with any collectivist group that seeks the overthrow of Western Civilization -- Since the most likely candidates today are Muslims, it stands to reason that they would ally themselves with Islam.

So what we have then is a latter day "Nazi-Soviet Pact" that was created with the idea that the collectivists of the era would join together to joinly destroy Western Civilization.

Of course, we know how that alliance ended -- Hitler stabbed Stalin in the back in order to take the whole piece of pie.

This will be the fate in time of the Leftists....They will be stabbed in the back by the Muslims the day after they think the West is defeated.

Cheers, Ronbo

 
At 9:38 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Humans originally existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters/gatherers.

They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and

Live on fish and lobster in the winter.

The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the
Invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were
The foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting
Of humanity into two distinct subgroups:
1. Liberals; and
2. Conservatives.
Once beer was discovered, it required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture.
Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans
Were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the
Brewery. That's how villages were formed.


Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to B-B-Q at night while they
Were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative
Movement. Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting learned to live off the
Conservatives by showing up for the nightly B-B-Q's and doing the sewing, fetching,
And hair dressing. This was the beginning of the Liberal movement.

Some of these liberal men eventually evolved into women.
The rest became known as girlie-men.

Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the
Invention of group therapy, group hugs, and the concept of Democratic voting to
Decide how to divide the meat and beer that conservatives provided.

Over the years conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful
Land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass.

Modern liberals like imported beer (with lime added), but most prefer white wine or
Imported bottled water. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu,
And French food are standard liberal fare.

Another interesting evolutionary side note: most of their women have higher
Testosterone levels than their men. Most social workers,personal injury attorneys,
Journalists, dreamers in Hollywood and group therapists are liberals. Liberals
Invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn't fair to make the pitcher also bat.

Conservatives drink domestic beer. They eat red meat and still provide for their women.
Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers,
Firemen, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, athletes, Marines, and
Generally anyone who works productively.
Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to govern the producers and decide what
To do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than
Americans. That is why most of the liberals remained in Europe when conservatives were
Coming to America . They crept in after the Wild West was tamed and created a business of
Trying to get more for nothing.

 

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