#80: Sometimes, the moral high ground makes the best target from the air

September 10, 2010

Western Liberals obsessively review and bemoan America’s sins. We had slaves, they cry, we interned the Japanese during WW II, we carpet bombed Dresden, we nuked Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and so on, and so on. There is something disturbed about the way in which they just keep going on and there are various possible diagnoses available.

First, they repeat their mantra the same way an obsessive compulsive washes his hands. Perhaps these are just cases of undiagnosed OCD.

On the other hand, there is also a touch of PTSD here, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Of course, they were not themselves present at these catastrophes, but they behave as if they were actual survivors in their endless preoccupation with the same terrible events.

But we must not forget that all-time favorite, the Stockholm Syndrome in which a hostage begins to identify with her captor and takes on “his point of view.” Arguably, our Liberals have felt hostages to the world’s hostility and have developed the Stockholm Syndrome as a psychological defense mechanism.

Another candidate is the familiar Religious Mania. Yes, I know that Liberals don’t believe in God, but that doesn’t mean they can’t suffer from Religious Mania. One part of such mania is a pre-occupation with one’s own sinfulness. Mea culpa, I am guilty, I am a sinful creature (as are all of my fellows!), blah, blah, blah.

There may be other candidates. Is simple stupidity a psychological disorder these days? I’m sure it is, for just about every state of human character has been identified in the disorder industry as some kind of defect. But while I have a healthy skepticism with regard to this industry, I do believe that there really are crazinesses, and that modern Liberalism is one of them. Therefore, we should add another diagnostic category: LGD, or Liberal Guilt Disorder.

To be sure, feeling guilty is not of itself necessarily a form of craziness. However, it does become crazy when what one is feeling guilty about is something far remote from oneself. Slavery was repealed on Jan 1, 1863, roughly 150 years ago. I’ll guess that none of our guilty liberals have actually owned slaves, though a lot of them are happy to pay slave wages to Mexican nannies and gardeners.  Even crazier is the fact that many of these Liberals are actually immigrants to the country and did not even have dirty-handed ancestors involved in the slave trade.

And it is true that WW II was closer to us in time, and that some of the Allied combatants are still alive, but that brings us closer to another reason for the craziness.  Retaliating against an enemy who respects no Western notions of decent behavior is hardly a prima facie instance of evil. The insistence on being “better” than they are is a bullshit insanity for which we can thank Socrates, who imposed on Western history the notion that “preserving the goodness of our soul” is more important than staying alive. Once an antagonist has gotten one to believe this mushy tripe, he is in a strong position to win. Sometimes, the moral high ground makes the best target from the air. “We mustn’t sink to their level,” we hear from the Left. This mealy-mouthed pap is either disingenuous or the symptom of a serious mental disorder.

We know that we are dealing with a nut when he keeps repeating “Nagasaki, Hiroshima” and never mentions Pearl Harbor, The Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, the butcheries in Manchuria, the strafing of Shanghai, and so on, and so on.; when he keeps repeating “Internment Camps,” but never mentions German Concentration Camps. Self defense, for these wackos, is always “disproportionate.” Right now, we were told in a Newsweek  magazine article that the America “overreacted” to the twin-towers attack. And, no matter what the provocation, whatever Israel does in its defense is, by Western Liberal eyes, inevitably “disproportionate.”

We must recognize that modern Liberalism is not actually a political philosophy; it is a symptom of a mental disturbance.  It is characterized by idees fixe, by lack of proportionality, by irrational rages, and, most damaging of all, by an inability to recognize and appropriately react to aggression. Do Liberals have a narrative? Yes. Is it internally consistent? Barely. But both of these facts are true of schizophrenics as well.

What America and the West needs these days is a way of dealing therapeutically with an epidemic illness, a kind of mass psychosis.

We must learn to deal with LGD!