#72: Maybe Nietzsche Was Right About Power, After All

And yet another episode in my ongoing fascination with the inner workings of the Leftist mind. As always, I caution that most phenomena in nature are multiply caused, so whatever I say here, it is just another small aspect of this complex and stinky feature of the modern world.

It’s tempting, and many succumb to the temptation, to locate Leftism is what has been called “white guilt.” I’m skeptical. If there are white people who actually say their politics are determined by their feelings of guilt, I haven’t come across them. And if the claim is that they’re secretly or unconsciously dealing with their feelings of guilt, well, that doesn’t seem to be a falsifiable claim. And the whole “feelings of white guilt” thing is such a self-serving piece of manure anyway. “We’re just so morally sensitive that the evil in the world makes us just crazy!”

Christ, maybe, was motivated by something like “global guilt,” since, we are told, he took the world’s sins upon his own shoulders. Why would he have done this, if he didn’t think that in some way, he was really responsible for mankind’s sins. But, other than Christ and perhaps the Apostles and the saints, I’m inclined to think that people generally are motivated by things that please them, not things that make them feel bad..

A better story is that Lefties are motivated by sanctimony, the feeling of being holier-than-thou. It’s true that most Libs do feel holier than conservatives and that they seem to take pleasure in stimulating that feeling in themselves. But, it is also true that a lot of conservatives also feel much holier than their Leftie counterparts. So, I don’t think we can easily use sanctimony, as attractive as it is initially, to identify the mental state peculiar to the Leftie. But sanctimony is still a good clue.

Sanctimony is species of a genus, a genus which doesn’t have a name, but which I’ll dub for the moment, the feeling being “better-than-thou.” Being religiously more observant and sincere is certainly one way of being better than the next person, but it isn’t the only way. It’s also a way that isn’t available to the atheistic Lefties, so, if they want to feel better than the next guy, they have to find something other than being “religiously better.” And so they do.

The Lefties have two dimensions of “being better” than conservatives that complement each other. The first is that they are smarter than conservatives (their favorite insult is “stupid”), and the second is that they are morally better precisely because they are smarter. They have bought, hook, line, and sinker, into the Socratic linkage of morality and reason that has polluted philosophy since the third century BC.

Now, while the English idiom of “know-it-all” is available, it doesn’t quite capture the Leftie’s haughty attitude. The Germans, perhaps because their culture has produced the type for longer, has an expression that’s right on target: besserwisser. Because German is an agglutinative language, it has very many words that are simply constructions out of simpler words, and besserwisser is one of those. It is just a compostion of besser, “better,” and wisser, “knower.”

A know-it-all is just a person who is always lecturing others in an effort to display the amount she knows or thinks she knows. A besserwisser, on the other hand, is a person who is always making an effort to trump the knowledge or beliefs of another. The besserwisser wants to feel intellectually superior to the other. Thus, the besserwisser wants to feel smarter-than-thou.

As I”ve argued many times before, the Leftie’s historical orgins in the Enlightenment and its commitment to Reason (with a capital “R”, as you’ll notice) have quite naturally provided him with this avenue for feeling better than the other. In particular, the fact that science quite often produces theories (and apparent facts) that run counter to our common intuitions has encouraged the adoption of the scientific cloak for Leftie pronouncements. More specifically, reflections on man and society were transformed from being mere personal effulgences into “objective social scientific” theories. And who can argue with a “science,” eh?

So, what we’ve got in the Leftie is an Enlightenment descendant, usually quite ignorant of his own origins and of the physical sciences the apes, who attempts to feel good by producing counter-intuitive pronouncements to demonstrate his superiority over the common man.

Why does the Leftie do this?

Answering this risks descending to his level, which I am loath to do.

Ah, what the hell, I’ll indulge myself just this once.

Back before social science, when people opined about man’s “nature” rather than playing pseudo science psychology, they offered “large” hypotheses about man’s single motivational mainspring. Famously, Freud said the mainspring was sex, “libidinal energy,” and Nietzsche said it was the “will to power” (der Wille zur Macht). Freud, however, thought he was actually doing science, being a true child of the Enlightenment and a trained neurologist. He wasn’t.

While scarcely scientific, and a bit of a poseur, I think Nietzsche may have been right: it’s all about power. Powerful people exercise power because they enjoy it; inadequate people seek power because they want it. The whole thing is captured quite nicely in Swift’s nice poem:

"The Vermin only teaze and pinch

Their Foes superior by an Inch.

So Nat'ralists observe, a Flea Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,

And these have smaller Fleas to bite 'em,

And so proceed ad infinitum."

He does it because he feels inadequate and inadequate people always attempt to feel better at someone else’s expense, the smaller fleas below him.

As I said at the beginning, things are really never this simple. Hume might have been right when he wrote:

"It is sufficient for our present purpose, if it be allowed, what surely, without the greatest absurdity cannot be disputed, that there is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom; some spark of friendship for human kind; some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent." (David Hume An Enquiry into the Principles of Morals)

Even given that, however, I suppose it is sufficient for our present purpose to allow that at least one powerful, dominant drive in human beings is to assuage their feelings of impotence and inadequacy by finding some basis for feeling contempt for some of their fellows, however frail that basis might be.

Lest I be accused of harboring such feelings of contempt for Lefties, let me say this. Would be so surprising if I did? If I am correct, then this is a feature of the human being, and am I not human as well? But, quite apart from this, it behooves us to distinguish despising a philosophy, a theory, or a manner of life, on the one hand, and despising individual people, on the other.

I confess that I have despised individual people, and am I not human? But I also confess that I do despise Leftism and everything associated with it, and do so, finally, without a trace of regret.