The Left rose through a singular power: a simple idea that made people feel comfortable in their social group, binding them together into a band to conquer all so that it would serve this idea.
For that reason, it makes sense not to say that Leftists are individually totalitarian, but that the thinking of Leftism is inherently totalitarian and individual Leftists will not be satisfied until they achieve a state that is both totalitarian and reality-denying.
The nature of ideology, after all, is to replace reality. It is the anti-reality. It tells you not how things work, but how they should according to human social logic. Leftism is at war with reality.
As a variant of Crowdism, Leftism is based in individualism. Every individual in the group wants guaranteed acceptance by the group. For this reason, they form a gang to make this so, but while their method is collectivism, their motivation is individualism.
What gives Crowdism power is the transfer of society from cooperative — where all people work unequally toward a goal that all understand — to control-based structures, where a formal goal is set up and applied equally to all in order to maintain power structures despite the fragmentation of society into many special interest groups, with individualists being one of these.
This gives rise to dark organization or a counter-current within society, formed of the individualist gang, that operates against its goals. Special interest groups do not share the goal of society as a whole, and therefore become parasitic: they take from the whole to support their own agendas.
For these reasons, the gang/cult of the parasite is always in motion. Its agenda never rests because it has hacked the human brain with a simple pleasing concept that short-cuts everything else. “If everyone is accepted, no one is at risk, and there will be no conflict,” is its underlying appeal, and the very fact of this simplification makes the meme powerful. It appeals to fear.
Since its motive is always conquest from within, the Crowd uses a number of hooks to short-circuit the psychology of others, and these in turn shape its own thinking into a pathological (repetitive without regard for results) obsession. This mental state can be recognized by the following internal cycles:
The fallacy of circular argument, known as petitio principii (“begging the question”), occurs when the premises presume, openly or covertly, the very conclusion that is to be demonstrated (example: “Gregory always votes wisely.” “But how do you know?” “Because he always votes Libertarian.”).
A special form of this fallacy, called a vicious circle, or circulus in probando (“arguing in a circle”), occurs in a course of reasoning typified by the complex argument in which a premise p1 is used to prove p2; p2 is used to prove p3; and so on, until pn − 1 is used to prove pn; then pn is subsequently used in a proof of p1, and the whole series p1, p2, . . . , pn is taken as established (example: “McKinley College’s baseball team is the best in the association [ pn = p3]; they are the best because of their strong batting potential [ p2]; they have this potential because of the ability of Jones, Crawford, and Randolph at the bat [ p1].” “But how do you know that Jones, Crawford, and Randolph are such good batters?” “Well, after all, these men are the backbone of the best team in the association [ p3 again].”).
Strictly speaking, petitio principii is not a fallacy of reasoning but an ineptitude in argumentation: thus the argument from p as a premise to p as conclusion is not deductively invalid but lacks any power of conviction, since no one who questioned the conclusion could concede the premise.
The final line may be the most important: this argument type is a linguistic sleight-of-hand, and the only reason it works is that the premise is associated with universal moral good, a concept that itself is an assumption. But because of its appearance in a social setting, the argument seems convincing because universal acceptance is a necessary basic attribute of socializing in large and thus broad groups. This is how the Crowd forms.
For example, consider the Leftist argument for diversity: variety is good, therefore we need ethnic variety. The only way to oppose this seems to be to criticize the conclusion of the argument, when the real solution is to attack the assumption and the inexact language that allows it to seem relevant. Variety is good in certain contexts, and only certain types of variety, and these do not analogize to civilizations very well.
The Left moves into circulus in probando by stacking its assumptions: “Because (we assume that) morality is universal, (we assume that) diversity is good, and since (we assume that) diversity is working so well, we need to expand the program.” In fact, all of Leftism can be seen as a circulus in probando starting with the idea that personal intent is more important than reality — the core of individualism and The Enlightenment™ — and moving to universalism, democratization and finally, to the extension of those principles to other areas. Diversity might be viewed as ethnic democracy, welfare as subsidized universalism, and strong state control as democratization of power.
For those reasons, saying that reason will guide us to correct answers necessarily overloads our minds with the imposition of the idea that all people are the same, and that reason works like a calculator, when in fact it is more varied. That in turn creates the curse of rationalism which is that it enables people to have tunnel vision by identifying a plausible answer and then finding facts to support it, instead of assessing all facts and finding a model which fits all of the known data.
Rationalism in this sense is not essentially distinct from rationalization, or developing a way of visualizing an unfortunate event as a positive one. In this case, the unfortunate event is civilization collapse, and so instead of fighting it, the Left rationalizes it and directs its attention away from fixing the problem to finding a way to feel good about the problem. Both rationalism and rationalization start by accepting a perception and then altering facts by filtering out those that do not conform to the thesis so that the perception appears not just true but inevitable.
The modern method can be seen as Social Control, or use of the threat of ostracism and reward for making people feel good as dual pincers of the control mechanism. Guilt is the primary weapon there: those who are not ideologically conforming become aware that others will be “upset” or “offended” by their acts, and are made to feel bad not about the consequences of their actions in reality, but in the perceptions of others.
This process of regulating people through public appearance proves deadly effective because humans — like our Simian forebears — are social creatures. Alienation does not require government intervention, and because it causes others to fear for themselves if they are associated with the alienated person, spreads like a disease. It is more effective than any other means of punishment because the consequences are all-pervasive.
When noticed by humans, social control is referred to as peer pressure with all the implications of collective punishment that this indicates. A small group, like a local community, fears being associated with bad ideas, so it punishes those who have them. In addition, this group will punish a group within it for deviation from the norm. This means that the individual is totally dependent on the group for behavioral cues and must follow whatever is decided, in an inversion of democracy but an extension of democratization. When all people have a voice, conformity results, and then it is made mandatory.
This produces a type of weaponized passive aggression or indirect bullying. The Leftist needs to appear somewhere, insist on a Leftist method, and then act wounded while summoning the troops — the rest of the gang/cult — to attack. This enables Leftists to infiltrate any area of society and, by using their passive aggressive “victimhood” narrative, force others to conform to what the Leftist desires.
The psychology created by the above cannot be properly viewed as a philosophy, but an inversion of philosophy: instead of finding reasons to act in certain ways, it assumes basic human impulses — which like most undisciplined things, are usually wrong — are correct and then invents explanations for those that make them seem reasonable.
That however implicates a philosophy with two branches:
The root of this philosophy is a resistance to life itself: people would prefer to be gods in their own minds than to realize their place in an order — structure, hierarchy, flow of events — that makes life what it is. This is the essence of control within the human mind. It rejects all that is natural and replaces it with a world composed entirely of human thoughts, feelings and judgments. This is comforting to the under-confident and neurotic.
All high-level societies die through some form of Crowdism, which is usually Leftist. When a civilization is forming, its purpose is clear: create civilization, beat back nature and disease, and organize so that the pleasures of life are possible. After that point, civilization is taken for granted because most people cannot see the reason to choose a new purpose, since they have the effects of the work that created that civilization.
Dysgenics factor in here as well, especially in cities large enough to be anonymous. People need only to find a job, rent a place to live, and purchase food from street vendors. Everything else is optional. It is not surprising that modern Leftists are enamored of the job/rent/restaurant lifestyle. This, and the advances in institutionalized hygiene and safety that save people from their own bad choices, create people who are living but have no will to live other than the mechanical and material process of survival itself. With this, purpose and bravery die.
Anti-goals afflict successful civilizations only. One mode of thought, embraced by primitivists and Nietzscheans to varying degrees, is that civilization — if it wishes to survive — needs to back off of “perfecting” everyday life, and should preserve dangers. The idea of social Darwinism that is not in love with jobs and money holds that there should be no externalized costs to individual actions, such that each individual faces the consequences of his actions including potential death. This means strict punishment for any costs incurred to society by the individual, a lack of things like insurance and uniform methods of survival, and daily challenges so that the clueless weed themselves out.
Another possibility for civilization survival is to design it such that every action must have a purpose, and the results are compared to that purpose, with those who achieve parity between intention and reality being promoted in a hierarchy. This creates constant internal evolution and at the very least disenfranchises those who are inept at everything but collecting social approval. In other words, society must be less “social” and more purpose-driven.
Diversity presents a fundamental problem in any society because with the presence of a single person from the Other group, either social standards must be widened to include the standards of both self and Other, or those who are Other will be at a disadvantage and appear to be victims. That in turn jump-starts the begging-the-question fallacy by making it easily observed that the Other is failing, and assuming that this is bad, and therefore that “change” must occur.
Above all else, we must remember what Walt Kelley told us years ago: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Inside of each of us is a monkey. This monkey reacts to life out of fear and lives in a miasma of superstition, projection and denial through filtering out inconvenient and upsetting information. This monkey is driven by impulse, which leads to rationalization of that impulse, and reverts thought. The healthiest civilizations are disciplined more in terms of private thoughts than public behavior, but not through Control; instead, they aim for realism and other methods of refining the spirit to be rigid about its thinking and to push down the monkey impulses.
Our inner monkey resents life for not being equal to our intent as individuals. That choice forces us to either accept reality as it is (nihilism) or to accept only ourselves, then rationalize that denial as good, and in turn blot out reality without a consensual hallucination of human thoughts, feelings and judgments. Since this has its root in the monkey impulse toward self-importance in defiance of a reality structured otherwise, it is also a regression and the source of the dark organization that is Crowdism.
We have come to recognize Typical Leftist Behavior (TLB) with increasing frequency as the achievement of Leftist goals (diversity, equality, democratization, globalism) has made reality totally unknown to most people, resulting in terrible consequences when their ideas are put into practice, as usually happens with reality-denial. TLB takes many forms but all are based in the schema above.
The threats in front of us — Leftism, The Enlightenment,&trade civilization collapse — are themselves effects of this inner transformation of human beings. We no longer intend to achieve good results; we focus instead on making our feelings happy despite the darkness around us, but this deprives us of a sense that life can be a joy and a pleasure. That in turn pushes us toward more dark thoughts and behaviors.
Salvation for Western Civilization begins when we not just reverse this process, but commit ourselves instead toward a purpose which replaces the original purpose of survival that kept our civilization united in its early years. We also must protect ourselves genetically, so that we are not replaced with the Other, even in traces, as those alter what we were and through atavisms of that, what we must be again.
The Left won because it had a simple idea that dominated all other thinking. The solution is not to try to replicate that, but to understand that simple ideas which dominate are in themselves a terrible notion, and that instead, we need a more nuanced, purpose-driven and realistic view of life. As Leftist society crashes in chaos around us, more are turning toward this idea or something like it.
Tags: begging the question, begging-the-question fallacy, cause and effect, circular reasoning, circulus in probando, control, crowdism, crybulling, decline, egalitarianism, leftism, means over ends, passive aggression, petitio principii, rationalism, rationalization, social control