Supporters of the Left come from many groups, and most of their “special interests” can easily be identified. The loudest of these groups, however, the one we hear and read and see represented in all the media, is harder to understand. Of course, its members inevitably claim to care deeply about “the poor” (which is, of course, not even thinly disguised code for “American Blacks”), but since their charitable behavior is inconsistent with their vulgar rhetoric, it’s hard to avoid thinking that their foaming at the mouth fulminations have some other roots. In fact, the statistics on charitable giving are astonishing when the contributions of self-identified liberals and conservatives are compared. The liberals, those passionate lovers of “the poor” give a fraction of what the conservatives give, even as their per capita incomes are significantly higher.
In understanding people’s motivations, one is always best served by following indirect clues rather than by their self-descriptions. Thus, the real challenge in the world of psychological understanding is that of selecting the proper clues to follow. Here is a suggestion for just one such clue.
I suggest that we take the noisy Left’s characteristic canard as a clue to what drives it. What is that canard? Well, what did they call Reagan, what did they call both of the Bushs, and what are they now calling Palin? It’s always been the same. With protruding eyes, blood vessels ridging their necks and brows, and foam flecks flying from their lips, they always scream that the conservative is stupid. Over and over, again and again, the contemptuous “journalists” and “comedians” and “social scientists” are all on the same page”: their target is stupid. And they hate stupid people more than any other kind. But what does this tell you about them?
Let’s try to answer this question by examining a representative of this type who is to be found in a context both temporally and geographically far removed from the political churnings of the present. I am speaking of that darling of intellectuals everywhere, Socrates of ancient
If we look at this character without the blinders of the modern canon, what do we see? We see an ugly unsuccessful little man who uses verbal cleverness to capitalize on the adolescent rebelliousness of the offspring of upper class Athenians. How does he do this? He does it by “demonstrating” to his groupies that their strongly held intuitive beliefs are, in fact, false or, at least, indefensible. Socrates is, in fact, an arch Sophist, of whom the Greeks said that for money they teach “how to make the worse argument seem the better.”
The beauty of his practice was that it yielded a triple benefit: at the same time as he demonstrated his own superiority (while cleverly disowning it modestly at the same time: “I only know that I know nothing.”), he also managed to make his groupies feel inadequate and subservient, and to undermine the authority of their parents. Hmmm. Does this sound suspiciously familiar? Socrates, the ugly unsuccessful little man is the psychological template for our contemporary academics and “intellectuals.”
At the heart of the technique lies the event of making the obvious appear not only false, but stupidly false. The so-called “art of dialectic” is really nothing other than a technique of psychological domination, one with which we are quite familiar from legal interrogations. The trick is to humiliate, to undermine, to confuse in order to dominate. The rule is: make the other feel stupid. And what better way to accomplish this than by making the other’s strongest intuitively held beliefs out to be stupidly false!
But who does this sort of thing, other than a trial lawyer?
I follow Nietzsche in the answer to this question: this sort of thing is done by people who experience themselves as weak and on the outside and who hate the establishment as the location of that population which is a living reproach to their own inadequacies. These people usually do not have wealth, they do not have long-established families, they do not have powerful positions; they have no obvious advantages from which to launch their campaigns against the indigenous and well-rooted population. But they do have their mouths and access to many platforms. These are the people who used to speak from the tops of orange crates at street corners; now they speak from university lecterns and from televisions across the land; now they pontificate from internet blogs (even as I do right here!). It is here that they prove, as much to themselves as to their captive students, that while they have absolutely no obvious virtues, they have a hidden virtue: they are smart. And they prove that they are smart by demonstrating to those students over and over again, that they are not smart, and neither are their parents. They do all this by demonstrating time and again that what they might believe as obvious, is actually false. In this respect, they operate very much like the priests whom they profess to despise, for what they teach is that they and only they have the complex truth on all matters moral and political, no matter how bizarre or absurd that truth might appear to the ordinary person.
Of course, there are frequently converging causes at play here; some may do it because they believe their own left-wing ideologies, others because it is a way of making money, but, I submit, it is only their visceral hatred of those in the society who live at home in it that explains the fulminating vulgar streams they spew out into the media space.
In effect, these are the arrivistes who have resisted “melting” into the American culture, a culture in which they have always felt out of place, a culture they have always despised. These are the soldiers of the Left’s fifth column, working from within to destroy the very world that has historically been the only one to give shelter to strangers. And these strangers, rather than responding with gratitude for what this great country has done for them, set about conquering it from the inside and transforming it into a land in which everyone will equally feel inadequate and lost; in Camus’s wonderful phrase, they will all feel like strangers “with neither the memory of a lost home, nor the hope of a promised land.”
While this phrase was not applied by Camus to the classless society dreamed of by the “intellectuals” of the Left, it describes perfectly the mental life of the comrades of the worker's Eden of the future, not yet fully realized, but looming darkly on the horizon.
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