In case you haven’t noticed, we are living, and have been for some time, in a rolling series of dramatic and chaotic dilemmas. I must now conclude the causes are diabolical. The most enduring of these is expansionist Islam; 1400 years and running. The remainder are intentional, manufactured crises peculiar to Western Civilization. Both are existential threats, with the latter being suicidal rather than murderous. Both these ideologies aim at destruction of the West and share an explicit (and oft repeated) an unnerving ethos: “by any means necessary”. The fact that such ominous, explicit, threats of violence are ignored shows the depth of the West’s diffidence and decadence. To date, the Islamist threat has been mostly external, but thanks to self-loathing, guilt-ridden or co-opted government officialdom, it is increasingly a fifth column expanding within and, seeing all resistance crumbling, becomes ever more assertive.
Each contrived domestic crisis, by comparison, (steeped in suicidal “empathy”, which is actually self-loathing) is relentlessly trumpeted by MSM devotees as a moral and revolutionary struggle in the name of “progress”. Because Western nations did not come into existence in a state of utopian perfection, but had to evolve to improve, “progressive” wisdom insists they must die for their “original sins” - mainly colonialism and racism. Never mind how historically exceptional has been willingness of Western nations to engage in continuous self-criticism and correction; however improved from birth, only abortion of civilization in its current developed state can atone for the sins of its birth. An odd coincidence, no?
Unfortunately for those who understand that no nation can ever be born innocent or free of sin, this unholy campaign has been a very successful; the campaign, that is, to roil and confuse the population, to leave them adrift and unmoored in any enduring principles. Every “crisis” is said to be fundamental and is portrayed as Manichean; good versus evil. Only “bad people” could possibly disagree or even question leftist pieties; open discussion on the merits of any of the novel rubrics is verboten. The common denominator of all these issues is actually a single-minded juggernaut to re-define all of reality, according to the obvious supremacist beliefs of a self-appointed, small but aggressively vocal segment of society. You might think they spoke with the voice of God.
Drilling down a bit here, we again strike ontology: Is the left like Muhammad Ali when he said, “I am the greatest”? Or is God supreme? This has been one of humanity’s most abiding questions. Thus, this was destined to be the first battle for the neo-Marxists. Since they assert God-like power, themselves, in order control of the entire populace (and put the entire material universe at their disposal - since man, not God, has infinite power), God simply could not exist. If God does not exist, the only form of idolatry or blasphemy which could exist is opposition to their own supremacy. Thus, the woke project requires a top down reordering of reality, beginning the the essentials of human nature. Once God is replaced by the state, the only additional necessity is re-definition of certain words - while others are banned or mandated. Control of words is, after all, proximate to control of thoughts and ideas. Among the disallowed words (the practice described by the word is NOT disallowed, as it is central to the project; only infidels may not use it) is “idolatry”, the subject of the First Commandment. Since God no longer reigns supreme, blasphemy can only exist as derogation of the state - as it is informed and administered by our woke betters.
All this manipulation and revision/reversal of perceptions of reality (reality, itself of course, is not amenable to woke commands - only perceptions of those unwilling or unable to think critically and consider their own ideology and motives) pursued through endless performative manipulation of culture, politics, institutions (state and private), as well as the pervasive, captured state apparatus. The resulting extreme divisiveness is quite intentional, as it represents the ancient and obvious tactic of divide and conquer. The very fact I must state many of the things I say here - things as objectively obvious as the fact that human sex is plainly binary - is testament to the success of the leftist/statist/fascist juggernaut - of late re-branded as “woke”. At the same time, denial (actually, simply failure to re-state the obvious) of the blatant psychological projection being employed is simply stunning! How is it that the very ones employing daily fascist tactics (new black hoodie livery instead of brownshirts) can get away with labeling those civilly resisting their aggression as the “fascists”, when they, themselves, are clearly the fascists?? Such is the remaining power of the legacy “media”.
The latter word, media, stands as a stellar example of why re-defining words is so central to the whole misbegotten project of woke governance. Once, a “medium” denoted a neutral entity in the diffusion of objective information. Now, though, “media” have taken a side and become pure propaganda, yet they retain the name “media”. It is worth bearing in mind that various of the performative strategies are intended to reduce bloodshed. This is not slightly motivated by humanitarian principles. Rather, a docile populace (whether by propaganda, lies, fear, social pressure, bribery, etc.) makes it far easier to maintain the fiction that the state is wise, caring benevolent, etc.. This is but one of many useful fictions.
The “new” left of the so-called progressive era have been dismantling the US (and the West), bit by bit, for over a century now and have been most successful; policy has moved ever leftward in ratchet fashion, in the “long march” through the institutions. Practicing their particular form of nepotism and inbreeding, they have captured the intellectuals elite in the universities (where much of this began in the first place among reflexive nihilists), tech/corporate leaders, and most NGO’s; this is the very definition of fascism, of course. It’s hardly the first time in history this has been the case - yet this glaring reality remains unstated. In fact, the excesses, failures, and toll of human lives resulting from such past efforts are still well known. Each had a common underlying belief system - socialism as statist religion and fascism. Their modern camouflage is so effective that the natural name is not applied. In fact, today’s civilization killers are merely an expansion of what was once national socialism to international (universal) socialism. By its very nature, this is but a reprise of failed and murderous, socialism and fascism. Astoundingly, today’s practitioners are so successful they are still get away with obvious subterfuge - psychological projection - and call those resisting them “fascists”! The so-called “media”again enables and repeats this grand lie..
All such totalitarian systems, as we shall see, have the same basic characteristics. Their ultimate aim is always focused on one result: a dependent, compliant populace over which a powerful “elect” purport, in all their omniscient “benevolence”, to provide complete material succor and “safety” to everyone; the new-and-improved brand of safety includes state protection from “hurt feelings”! Individual agency and responsibility no longer exist. The sophisticated propaganda apparatus in service of this movement - called the MSM - incessantly, relentlessly emits the party line as to every matter deemed pertinent. Alternatively, it blares the electronic version of bread and circuses, so as to distract attention from real issues which might otherwise foster resistance. All this is done in the name of things like “”equity” (which is not equality). “diversity” (of unimportant superficial characteristics, like skin color) and “inclusion”(which, in fact explicitly excludes disfavored groups; that’s why the term “equity” [the ‘elect’s’ version of “fairness”] instead of equality; “infinitely malleable” words, again).
The tricky part for our “new and improved” statists/socialists/neo-Marxists is that stubborn thing called human nature; that and another stubborn matter called epistemology: how we fallible human beings acquire knowledge of the world around us - and always have - so as to grasp reality in order to promote our survival. In short, we learn by experience - by recognizing patterns and mistakes - either informally by solving practical daily problems, or formally by controlled scientific experiment - whose results are repeatable and independent of bias of those conducting the experiment; objective, repeatable. Unfortunately, today’s “elect” have perverted epistemology and science by the twin subterfuges of word re-definition and torture of science into scientism. Scientism miraculously always confirms the latest ‘received wisdom’ of our leftist betters. Yet they deny that miracles happen!
The aphorism about labels and libels is old and, like most generalities, is significantly true. For instance, saying “America is a nation of immigrants” is, in fact about half true, as Samuel Huntington has shown. Half those around today are actually descendants of original settlers and these were clearly different from later immigrants. That’s because settlers were first users of land who organized a new nation. Immigrants who came later integrated into an existing society, albeit some of them when it was relatively new. Thus, making generalizations about groups of people may be fraught with some inaccuracy. They may also wind up being far more than half true. Take those people with the leftist worldview, for instance. Note the definite article preceding worldview. That’s intentional and because their societal constructs are all identical and enforcedly so - until, of course, some apostates eventually soften or fall short at the tail of the beast (so to speak) and are then consumed (Jacobin style) by the head of the snake, whose revolutionary fervor remains undiluted by intervening facts or reality.
The most honest analytic approach, then - as well as the most likely to be accurate - is Bayesian - employing probabilities that certain character components tend to occur within certain specified groups of people. This applies a fortiori to self-selected groups - like political party adherents, religion, and/or worldview. I’m moved to undertake this analysis, in part, for what seems at first to be a trivial reason. As with many families, for about the past two decades it has been impossible to engage in what was once traditional political discussions (among friends and family) on the occasion of holiday dinner gatherings. Worldviews are no longer a matter for debate and compromise. No, they are mutually exclusive.
It may be a spoiler to say now that discussing politics has become like discussing religion, and there’s an obvious reason for that: leftism has virtually every execrable attribute of the medieval (not the present one for many reasons) Roman Catholic Church. - particularly its zealous enforcement of rubric and dogma - on pain of excommunication and death. Rather than list these, I invite the reader to recall the many (daily) examples of zealously practiced - or at least demanded of others (and varying) list of strict tenets, pieties, rubrics, apostasies, ex-communications, silencing, and (virtual) burnings-at-the-stake-equivalents - so gleefully reported by the devotees the MSM. Were it not so dangerous and destructive of persons and civilization, this would all be high comedy. Why isn’t it subjected to ridicule by hosts of late night TV?
It is worth noting, as well, an inherent imbalance which operates sub rosa in today’s political division. It’s congruent with the Israelis and the so-called “Palestinians” (word re-definition again: until recently, beginning with the Roman Empire, the “Palestinians” were the Jews, but that’s incidental here). The Jews want nothing more than peace and security.. The “Palestinians” want only one thing: their Jewish neighbors dead - preferably by their own hands. This goal is explicit and aggressively (not only shrilly repetitively stated) practiced regularly. Here’s the congruity which make political differences in the US similarly insoluble - even in principle. People like me (formerly called Classical Liberals) who are said to be on the “right” (actually, the MSM calls us all “extreme right wing”, while an “extreme left wing does not exist), like the Israelis, simply wish to live and let live with our fellow citizens; to be moral agents who are fundamentally tolerant and free to act correctly, based upon articulable eternal principles, including natural individual rights and self-determination.
The left, like the Palestinians by contrast (and it has ever been so), can only ever find meaning in their own lives through zero-sum power games - by either destroying those who don’t agree or by obtaining and exercising total control over society and state. It is again, verboten to state this fact regarding Islamists, due to a carefully-hidden fear of beheading, a.k.a. cowardice. The silence of western elites as to mainstream Muslim oppression of their favorite victim groups - far exceeding those they ever scream are rampant in America - is definitely NOT violence (quietly abstaining from prescribed public celebration of some “victim” group - that “silence” is violence, say our betters), according to their received wisdom! Their own silence, they say (if they say anything at all about it) merely represents respect for the “excluded” “other” (who they believe is better than us, anyway). Mere mention of the thousands of victims of Islamist terrorism or merely asking rational questions, by contrast, those are either “violence” (“hate facts”) or “Islamophobia”.
In a Bayesian sense, then, the right tends to be socially tolerant, passive and does not try control others to force conversion to its worldview. Its default mode of interaction is discussion or persuasion. The left, by obvious contrast, makes an absolute fetish (“sainthood”?) of “forced conversion”- invariably in the form of telling others what to do, say, and think. If not converts, they may grudgingly tolerate dhimmies (like Islamists) in their midst, provided they remain quiet. When it comes to zero-sum power games, active beats passive every time - especially given the astounding number of social/legal pulleys and levers which these very same leftist cry-bullies have installed into this formerly Constitutional republic. We must be reminded that administrative mechanisms used to be circumscribed and formerly aimed at ensuring individual liberty. At the relentless hands of leftists, checks and balances, rule of law, Bill of (individual) Rights, consent of the governed, etc., have all been shrunken to meaninglessness. They remain only as historical and quaint slogans.
So, I’ve given away the punch line - in a Bayesian sense, the left is a tight-knight group of co-religionists, a band of self-reinforcing control freaks, who cannot be happy (in reality, they can never be happy regardless, since they can never have enough power to suit themselves as long as one person’s words or mind fails to conform or, unless they are worshiped by all as God) unless they are positively vibrating with self-righteous, indignant, wide-eyed, spittle-laced, frontline “activity”, purportedly to correct the injustice/cause du jour. A Venn diagram of control freaks might include a tiny slice of Classical Liberals (“extreme right wingers”, per the MSM), but it would be vanishingly thin.
By contrast, Venn circle of the live-and-let-live group might have a vanishingly small section of control freaks. In other words, these particular generalities are true and significantly correct. Control freaks never, never stop using all the previously - installed state and non-state leverage. They never cease to use (and relentlessly expand) state and institutional power to control the actions, words and even the thoughts of the majority of citizens, who do not agree but fear to speak out. Notably, this includes a large majority of those who would prefer to just be left alone and decide how to conduct their own lives according to their own considered moral values and not those dictated by some irrational, stunningly-arrogant claim of authority. That is especially so when such claim to authority is based upon nothing but raw power and aggression - asserting wisdom received exclusively by the self-elect on the left (nonetheless considering themselves on the “right side of history”). This is the very definition of a religious cult.
This analysis further suggests we try to understand the psychology of the individual adherents to the “control freak” worldview. Any worthy psychological analysis of the ontological nature of human beings must address the issue of human dependency. Every one of us is born, after all, wholly dependent upon adults (normally our parents - despite the arrogant and shrill efforts to “deconstruct” and negate the simple fact of family; to replace it with state as preeminent loco parentis). That dependency begins physically, with need for food, clothing, and shelter. It is also clear that becoming fully human - human flourishing - requires fulfillment of spiritual needs as well as physical. Setting aside belief in God for the moment, there are surely some intangible, non-material human needs as well. It suffices for purposes here, to suggest these, fulfill another dependency need: for human society, for fellowship, for belonging.
The spiritual component of the human psyche, I assert is central to human flourishing. The ability to accept, to care for, to love, others - is best understood to derive from having received such love from parents as an infant. It is likely a form of neural imprinting. The best summary I’ve ever seen refers to this phenomenon as “a loving, mirroring face” as may be observed when a mother places her face so as to fill the infant’s visual field with her own loving, smiling face - a mirror of sorts for her child to experience in order to inform him/her image of self. For adults capable of human connection and genuine care for others, this image may be construed as a touchstone of all human decency. Those who have not received this - God’s gift of love, if you will - transmitted through other human beings - turn out to be incapable of loving others. At the extreme, sadly, this likely includes some sociopaths and psychopaths
I am positing here the case that this missing ability to feel a real, loving connection to others, is a sort of a scar on the lives of such individuals. Some of them try to compensate by “acting out” (or “acting as if” (or pretending) to care about others through excessive, performative behaviors. This is expressed in various compensatory behaviors, including extreme religiosity or caretaking, which are indistinguishable from “activism” and “social justice warfare”. This represents an unconscious compensation for incapacity to love unselfishly - a contrived but ultimately fruitless effort to convince the world to affirm one’s self as not only adequate, but actually of superior worth. Alas, it is the nature of compensatory psychology to overshoot the desired goal. The desire for an adequate sense of self worth reflected back to one by the world at large, is entirely understandable, however attempted. But it is the demand that the entire world proclaim and celebrate one’s superiority and accept one’s self-serving dictates which is so blatantly pathological.
The clearest example of this is made obvious by the absolute moral certainty of the shrill “activists” demanding LGBTQ+ “rights”. In reality, adult individuals already possess the “right” to act as they please in every aspect of their lives. In today’s world, few if any, care how others choose to live, what they look like, whom they love, how they dress or how they behave. All that is required is to abstain from acts which inhibit others from doing the same. The real demand of “activists” is that not only must everyone else be merely tolerant, but that they must actively and enthusiastically “celebrate” on cue the life choices of anyone who “identifies” as any of the (variable day-to-day) list of “gender” letters. It is important to understand that in none of this do I refer to the individuals who identify as either confused or non-conforming as to their feelings about their own sexuality. I am personally quite sympathetic to individuals who are uncertain or confused about their own sexuality,. Given the weight of millennia of evolution of both biology and perceptions about sex, this is undoubtedly painful. My aim is not at those actually suffering. Rather it is at those who are demanding the religious - level conversion of the entire world to their arrogant, contrived and intolerant viewpoint. “Live and let live” is already the default attitude of the multitude. That, however, does not suffice as far as these zealous “advocates” are concerned. I must come out on cue and applaud - and do so sufficiently enthusiastically, each and every time called.
Otherwise put, mere tolerance of heretofore nonconforming sexual/gender behavior is insufficient socially or politically, say our woke betters. And that raises an obvious and most important question about dependency: does the maintenance of any healthy adult individual’s self image or self-esteem (sometimes called “comfort in one’s own skin”) depend upon explicit, enthusiastic, repeated demonstrations of approval-on-demand by the entire world at large? Of course not. Obviously, any such person suffers from an unhealthy dependency; in effect, this dependency says: “I cannot feel OK about myself unless every last one of you regularly shows me - enthusiastically - that you think I am OK”. The recognition of this obvious truth serves as a wellspring of understanding as well as empathy for the actual individuals affected, as opposed to those who purport to be their advocates (why do they need such ardent advocates in the first place?; are they incapable of speaking for themselves?). There is no shame in the fact that these persons suffer from mental illnesses (based in unmet dependency needs, if nothing else) and merit support and professional help. This is not so for their purported “advocates/activists”, to whom these suffering people are so obviously being used as mere pawns in a grand game of power politics.
This recognition of unhealthy dependency also puts the lie to those who make a life for themselves (and often a financial living from wealthy political donors) using the suffering of mentally ill individuals (especially children and those emotionally vulnerable adults who have been persuaded they were “born in the wrong body”). This precise manipulation of reality (and language, yet again) has been used to coerce psychologists and psychiatrists who (ought to) know better. Until the ‘trans’ issue, they recognized delusions and knew sud=fferers that delusions are never treated by forcing the entire world to participate in them. Such bizarre efforts to “help” (drug addicts, for example) by normalizing an illness which (like addiction by the same purported “advocates”) is what gave rise to the antidote slogan among addiction recovery - “It’s easier to put on slippers than to carpet the entire world.” In other words, “Look to yourself before setting out to fix the entire world”.
Thus, we can see those who become focused on raw power, do so to compensate for their own incapacity to truly care for others. In place, of love they covet power by employing a series of performative manipulations, arrogant in the extreme, touting their own received wisdom. So certain are they in their wisdom and power, they are, indeed, about the business carpeting the entire world. Astoundingly, professionals who should know better go along with them for their own ideological reasons (hint: as with all academics, these professionals regard themselves as the intellectual elite; they thus believe they are naturally superior and entitled to rule). H.L. Mencken poignantly observed - “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it”. If only this fact were widely understood and applied.
Which brings us full circle, back to human ontology. Serious students of human flourishing understand the eternal dilemma rooted in our very nature. We are both material and spiritual creatures. A brief look at human behavior over time reveals an undeniable fact: mere material plenty does not fulfill every human need or dependency. The condition of a human person with all material needs met remains one of ineffable longing - not unlike the longing for the next breath of air. Again, it is denial of the basic ontological fact which underlies the left’s momentary success in prescribing the zeitgeist in our materialism-only culture. Materialism has replaced reliance on God by establishment of the state as an exclusive and intolerant idol. Only the state may have power and agency. Only the state can provide for all human needs. The only human needs in existence are material. These widespread present beliefs deny humanity’s most comforting resource: our existence is filled with meaning because we are created in the image of a God. Our lives are indeed filled with have purpose and we fulfill that purpose when we collaborate with each other voluntarily and peacefully in order to create - both material things and spiritual understanding. (end part I)