Amerika

Liberalism arises from human self-pity, and causes us to think backward, so that instead of working toward a goal and liking ourselves for the attempt, we consider ourselves superior for reasons unrelated to reality, and this makes us neurotic.

The basic idea behind liberalism is that life is bad. Nature is bad, and life is bad, because they are scary. We the individuals could die at any minute. Even worse, we could screw up.

If you are hanging with your homeys, and you suddenly say “watch this” and try the coolest stunt ever and screw up, you look like an idiot. One of your homeys is going to make fun of you and he’ll then look cooler than you. He will gain social power over you.

That’s a big loss. How did you screw it up? The vision in your head of how reality works did not match up to the, ah, reality of the situation. You thought you could vault three speeding cop cars with your crotch on fire, but instead of a graceful result, here you are in the body cast. Idiot. Joe told us you’d screw it up and he was right, so he gets your share of the beer.

Liberalism is a counterattack by human beings against the cruel, cold, evil world. Since we have these big brains, and in them we keep track of the world in our holographic mind-maps, we can choose to edit the map instead of acting on reality. Why strive, when we can just say we did and go home?

The oldest form of this attitude is a kind of social non-aggression pact. It says that we all accept each other and ignore our deficiencies so we can keep the peace. It may be essential in really bad situations to have this type of social order; if all of your friends are morons, and you are one too, it’s best not to compete for least moron status. You’ll all end up in body casts.

Liberalism takes this attitude to a new level. Instead of waiting for results, we assume that results prove we as individuals are good, and then whatever happens becomes officially Not Our Fault. You tried to vault a cop car on a motorbike and ended up in a coma? Probably a faulty bike wheel made by a large corporation with ties to Israel or worse, the Church.

Most of our human activity consists in establishing this Not Our Fault level. We do this by not talking about results, but how nice, moral and friendly we are. This leads us to idolize pacifism over all else, and culturally agree to like nerdy, insecure people who make us feel happy because they’re harmless.

This creates a large mob of people committed to denying reality and being useless because they pity themselves. They feel horrible about how evil life is, and how cute little bunnies get ripped apart by fast mean eagles. They start to idolize being useless and nice, instead of possibly mean — but also smart. Because their thinking is already inverted, they quickly turn this into hating the smart because they could be evil.

When this hits a culture, it invents for itself a further justification — it’s progress, liberal thinking, big-mindedness, open-mindedness, whatever. That’s all just advertising and is as sincere as the words of a prostitute or used-car salesperson. People of this mentality like to sabotage any order, authority or consensus as to what reality is, because that way they can hide behind the chaos. Anarchy, libertarianism, atheism, weird sex, postmodernism… these are all justifications, not positive and constructive reasons for living.

Check out the latest self-congratulatory stroking:

Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials — the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium — have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.

They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They’re less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history.

Nearly four-in-ten have a tattoo (and for most who do, one is not enough: about half of those with tattoos have two to five and 18% have six or more).

But at the moment, fully 37% of 18- to 29-year-olds are unemployed or out of the workforce, the highest share among this age group in more than three decades. Research shows that young people who graduate from college in a bad economy typically suffer long-term consequences — with effects on their careers and earnings that linger as long as 15 years. – Pew Social Trends

What a positive article! “Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.”

But when read beneath the skin, you see that all of these traits are social traits. These have zero relevance to whether these people are, say, effective or intelligent. They like to think they’re intelligent, but they use symbols of intelligence — liberalism, open to change,diversity — instead of actual intelligence. Does anyone else think this sounds like a marketing scam?

Buy the new Zipradical 3000 lawn mower! It’s open to change, well-educated, under-employed and positive. Who knows if it cuts your grass? Your neighbors will think you’re cool. Buy today!

If you were wondering how this backward logic — using the symbol of being intelligent instead of being intelligent — comes to play, check out this amusing anecdote from more trend-watchers. First, there’s the positive spin:

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. – CNN

These people are forward moving, man. They pitched out God, are good pious liberals and are more intelligent — so says the sample group anyway — and even more, they’re unique precious snowflakes because, as the article windily elaborates, “sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans’ evolutionary past.” Whoah, dude, they’ve transcended evolution itself!

But later on you get the skinny:

Bailey also said that these preferences may stem from a desire to show superiority or elitism, which also has to do with IQ. In fact, aligning oneself with “unconventional” philosophies such as liberalism or atheism may be “ways to communicate to everyone that you’re pretty smart,” he said.

In other words, if you want to look smart act like smart people you see on television. The article doesn’t tell us where these IQ ranges fall, so it may be they’re looking at a bunch of 118s who graduated community college, got themselves Volkswagens and now are busy telling the rest of us how dumb we are. No word on what the 130+ folks who can read and understand Schopenhauer are thinking.

As part of this whacked-out backward logic, it’s important to always champion the underdog. The underdog after all has suffered, and so knows things those of us in comfy homes with stable lives cannot. We didn’t die on the cross — they did. But all of that is the tail end of the backward thinking, with the real goal being this: if we accept the most screwed up people on earth, and with pity make them equal to us, then no matter how screwed-up we are, we should accept and like ourselves.

There are plenty more ideas to be discovered in the squatter cities of the developing world, the conurbations made up of people who do not legally occupy the land they live on—more commonly known as slums. One billion people live in these cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. There are thousands of them and their mainly young populations test out new ideas unfettered by law or tradition. Alleyways in squatter cities, for example, are a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. One proposal is to use these as a model for shopping areas. “Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6pm,” suggests Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. “That will inject life into the city.” – Prospect Magazine

Chant it with me now: who’s going to save us? The slums are going to save us! The sharecroppers will save us! The dropouts, the addicts and the insane! Let’s accept everyone, so we can accept ourselves.

This is the psychology of liberalism, leftism, progressivism — whatever you call it, the origin is crowdism, or the will of the mob to have it be Not Our Fault. Instead of simply fixing themselves, they’re seeking external scapegoats and self-esteem builders. The scapegoats are the powerful (God, Kings, corporations, Nature) and the self-esteem builders consist of lifting up the underdogs, praising the neurotic, and of course liking themselves. Backward thinking means you start by liking yourself; you don’t like yourself because of anything you’ve done, learned, conquered or achieved. It’s the loser table at high school appointing themselves Fuehrer.

It takes a long time for the nerdy self-conscious low-self-esteem dropouts of the world to unite and overthrow their betters, but they’ve had many centuries to do so, and they finally started to really pick up steam around 1945 or so. Ever since then, being strong and doing what’s right has had that nasty sting of “well, you could be the new Hitlerstalin” to it, and so smart people have backed off from changing anything beyond their own matching paint tones at home. The result has been a chaotic society spiraling out of control, and the only real winners are the profiteers who pander to parasites and idiots with moronic products like hip-hop, Snuggies, Big Macs, glow-in-the-dark dildos and movies like Goonies or Save the Last Dance where a band of misfits comes together to take down the successful, attractive and intelligent ruling caste.

And what’s the end result of all this liberalism? Well, since people are irresponsible scapegoaters who are obsessed with finding “uplifting” reasons to like themselves, the ship of state has veered out of control and tried to promise everything to everybody, with a net result being that we’ve squandered our wealth and replaced it with a giant angry mob of incompetents.

The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 – or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: 10 grandparents have six kids have four grandkids – i.e., the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility – the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared with Spain and Italy, Greece has the least-worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.

So you can’t borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don’t have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when 10 grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

By the way, you don’t have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement: The Athenian “public service” of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation. Still, America as a whole is not yet Greece. – Orange Country Register

I don’t want to boil it all down to money, but money reflects the degree of organization in our society. A sensible society thinks forward: it looks at reality, tries to understand it, and then sets reasonable goals and charges forward to accomplish them. A sick society thinks backward: it congratulates itself on being brilliant, and finds a reason why it is owed money by government or some other large scapegoat. The healthy society thrives and gets more organized; the sick society lapses into greater degrees of disorganization until its population breeds itself back into gibbons and flings poo at the camera.

At this point, I wonder if what I’m expressing is actually an opinion. It’s a prediction and an analysis. I don’t even know if I like it. After all, I think I’d like being a liberal more — but it’s hard to turn my mind off to the consequences of my actions. Because, if you can get over the fact that life ain’t fair and we all suffer, you can see this world as a mostly blank canvas in which great things can be constructed. But the liberal psychology turns its back on that, and from fear of it, hopes to destroy it.

Tags: big brains, leftism, liberalism, non-aggression, pacifism