Genèvievism Gone Global
Genèvieve’s mania summed up for me precisely the behavior and thought process of the political left, especially in its immunity to reason. I might read an article on a left-wing website and then step outside and meet Genèvieve, and be unable to tell the difference in their structural attitudes to the world around them. The same destructiveness is at work, and when one brings up a countermanding point, the response is the same. They reply — to paraphrase Dennis Prager — not with arguments but with placebos and deflections while “labeling their opponents ‘selfish’ and worse.” Or in the words of Michael Savage from Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder, “If there is a dissenting opinion raised…the person offering that opinion is laughed at as being an eccentric throwback to a more primitive time.”
The “Occupy Wall Street” movement, or what I prefer to call the “American Spring,” is a perfect recent example of such irrational and anti-social behavior. The wrong “perpetrator” is singled out, the stink of anti-Semitism is in the air, false justifications are mobilized, disruptive behavior is countenanced, and an impenetrable self-righteousness characterizes the entire affair. The “intellectual bankruptcy and childish behavior [of] the logically challenged Wall Street protestors,” as C. Edmund Wright puts it in American Thinker, is a textbook illustration of a country reaching the “tipping point.” Wright continues: “The mob’s understanding of reality is so stunted,” that they do not realize “the iPhones and blankets and food and even the condoms they depend on are products of a free-market capitalist system they want to demolish. These are intellectual children — and a society must have intellectual adults, or it will fail.” In short, they are the Genèvieves of the sociopolitical world.
It should be clear by this time that, as with people like Genèvieve, there is no medium of intellectual exchange with the left, that facts do not matter, that the mentality in play is naïve and jejune, that logic and evidence are helpless to convince or even to prompt the slightest reconsideration, and that practically every counter-argument can be turned on its head and interpreted as confirmation of the original idée fixe. The left is plainly susceptible to what Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics has called “theoretical illiteracy,” which shows itself in the form of an “axiological dream world.” In other words, a proneness to delusion, the seductive reverie of antirealism, and the habit of rejigging the past seem hardwired into the collective mindset of our leftist intelligentsia. Such minds cannot be detoxified. What we are treating with here is an aberration of epidemic proportions.
And at the root of this species of madness, wherever it may happen to surface, an “Israeli” armed with his more lethal version of a weedwhacker and staple gun is always to be found intent on troubling his neighbors. The omnibus tendency in the world press and in such institutions as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice at The Hague, the European Union, the current American administration and, of course, “progressive” opinion in general to target Israel for any and every policy it adopts to secure its borders and defend itself against the threat to its very existence is an infallible sign of mental deracination.
The derangement of the left is nothing less than Genèvievism gone global.
The Many Faces of Domestic Terrorism
The incidence of domestic terrorism in America, the commission or threat of violence against civilians by political, religious, or other ideological fanatics, actually pre-dates the establishment of the United States.
Domestic terrorism has many faces, all of them ugly, all of it carried out by U.S. citizens.
Defined by the FBI in 1994 as,”the unlawful use of force or violence, committed by a group(s) of two or more individuals, against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives,” that definition of domestic terrorism was expanded by the Patriot Act to incorporate actions of “mass destruction, assassination, and kidnapping occurring within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.”
The British may have construed the Boston Tea Party as domestic terrorism even before the term existed. However, most of us are more familiar with contemporary incidents, those perpetrated by the KKK, the Black Liberation Army, the Jewish Defense League, the Weather Underground, the Unabomber, the Fort Hood Muslim, and the deadliest of all, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombers.
Depending on one’s sociopolitical perspectives, almost any domestic crime can be considered an example of domestic terrorism.
Thus, the 2009 senseless murder of the abortionist Dr. George Tiller by Scott Roeder, a man crazed by the inhumanity of late term abortions, has been termed by some as domestic terrorism. Conversely and perversely, gays who proudly attack a gathering of normal people with bricks are accorded an MSM pass. (http://tiny.cc/ifhnt)
Go figure.
On the other hand, transparent efforts at coercion by the Wall Street Occupiers, efforts clearly aimed at intimidating our government and civilian population “in furtherance of political or social objectives” aren’t being classified as terroristic by our governments or by the mainstream media.
If violence and murder constitute the requisite distinctions in determining what is and what is not domestic terrorism, what of the threat of violence and murder posed “in furtherance of political or social objectives”?
No murders by the OWS protestors have been reported so far but widespread violence has been committed against the public weal and against public sensibilities, overt threats have been directed toward individuals, institutions, and Jews in general, and rapes, thefts, and clashes with police. . . (Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5758.)
Genèvieve’s paranoia was not induced by a system. The paranoia displayed by a minority of OWS types seems to be the result of conflicting plans to draw people together in belief systems with designated enemies (e.g., the rich, or Conservatives, or bankers, or Jews). Luckily, the paranoid memes doesn’t seem to be working for most OWS participants. Many appear to be there just to party or to be part of something.
In war, it is a common tactic to depict the enemy as vicious inhuman beasts in order to unify each side. Also, Marx, Lenin, and others believed that Socialism could be furthered by inducing terror in the general population. Terror can be a unifying force multiplier for tyrants. Paranoid memes can be a unifying force multiplier for groups (when the memes are effective).
Paranoid labeling can be found throughout populism, whether it shows itself on the left or right. I tried to describe it here: http://clarespark.com/2009/12/16/perceptions-of-the-enemy-the-left-looks-at-the-right-and-vice-versa/. Gordon S. Wood’s Creation of the American Republic views the American Revolution as paranoid, so it is, according to this liberal historian (Wood), built into our national character. I dispute that.
I also dispute that our Revolution was based on paranoia. In fact, many Americans came here to escape paranoid societies where people lived in fear of their own governments and their neighbors (perhaps a justified paranoia in some cases). There have always been paranoid sects in America, but the sentiment has never predominated.
Unlike any other revolution, where a people rebel because they feel they’ve never had it so bad, Americans rebelled because they never had it so good and wanted to keep it that way. Americans were convinced that Crown and Parliament wanted to sabotage their good thing. We have been the fortunate recipients of our forebears unapologetic passion for self-interest and individual liberty.
I can do no better than to quote this;
“Certainly, the most intriguing fruit yielded by a consideration of the clinical profile of paranoia is the discovery that paranoid beliefs are not static faces of personality. They evolve. In fact, paranoia follows a well-defined progression that is remarkable in the ‘almost monotonous regularity’ of its development. It advances through a series of stages that begins with shame and ends in delusions of grandeur. the full schematic runs as follows;
1. A precipitation factor- a social setback or a slight or humiliation
2. A sensitivity to external contacts
3. An asocial withdrawal of some kind
4. subjective preoccupations
5. Hypochondriasis- the search for medical verification of illness and failure to find it
6. Increased concern, even obsession, with bodily functions
7. Increasing worry- Why? What? When?
8. Irrational revelation- the formulation of a manufactured insight into how the illness happened
9. Somatic delusions and retrospective falsification of the origins of the physical complaint
10. Projection- the belief that the illness is caused by an external factor
11. Systemization of the delusion, clarification, shift of anxiety and consequent reintegration of personality
12. Conspiracy logic (interpretation of events as links in a conspiracy) with a widening circle of persecutors worldwide
13. puzzlement about why persecution has focused on self
14. Delusions of grandeur
15. Recognition of an important mission such as saving the world or being a messenger of God
16. Cosmic identity- belief that “I am the Universe” or “I am God”.
This is from Martin S. Kottmeyer, a scientist who specializes in studying belief-based movements, notably Ufology and the UFO “contactee” movement.
He also points out that all such groups eventually come to believe that they possess superior knowledge and insights that the rest of the world will one day be forced to acknowledge. And thus be forced to obey them if it wishes to survive the “apocalypse” which they envision destroying all if a “societal change” according to their beliefs is not enacted, preferably Right Now.
Your neighbor was at about Stage 12 in the basic progression, having already identified the “source” of her woes (the “Israeli”) and concluded that he was part of a widespread conspiracy against her.
By comparison, most of the political,left, here and abroad, have gotten all the way to Stage 16- believing that they are gods and if everyone else does not acknowledge this, we are all doomed. If necessary, by being struck down by the thunderbolts our self-anointed “gods” wield. (This alone I consider a good reason to never let a confirmed “progressive” anywhere near the “football”.)
The Zuccotti Cong are, from all indications, at about Stage 15 on average. Which means they are just ripe for vaulting all the way off the edge of reality.
Considering the behavior of modern day progressive “thought leaders”, they will find that their new neighborhood is already pretty crowded.
cheers
eon
I love this phrase an “axiological dream world.” Both ethics and aesthetics have become increasingly important to me and a society that demands something for nothing has lost it’s way to both. Axiology is that branch of philosophy which deals with value. Ethics-what is good or what is moral? Aesthetics-what is beautiful? The western world has indeed constructed an “axiological dream world” in which each individual can have their own view and be right. Yes I understand that each person views the world at a slightly different angle, but this does not excuse us to justify what we know is of no value. Or worse what we know destroys value. That is what the OWS are doing; perhaps some are unaware of the consequences of their actions and perhaps some are fully aware and desire evil ends vis a vis Viva la Revolution. I cannot judge their hearts, I don’t know if they are evil or just foolish. I can judge their actions as both evil and foolish. Yet I do not fear the coming storm. When the world needs rebuilding many will return to axiological positions of substance. I plan on being ready with some answers.
In “Vision of the Annointed”, Dr. Sowell quotes Hannah Arendt that the intellectual achievement of totalitarians in the 20th Century was to convert questions of fact into questions of intention. If you ask Jeremiah Wright to support his claim that the U.S. government invented AIDS in a plot to kill black people, he simply calls you a racist for doubting it. Present contrary evidence to a believer in anthropogenic global warming and he dismisses it as oil company propaganda. To him, facts don’t matter, only intention.
Yeh. OK. But just plain undereducated useful idiots will do.
And David…..I really worry about your knowing so many fruitcakes in your life.
It seems a bit much. Were you at an institution?
Much appreciated, Pelaut. But no, just in the world.
David
Oh……Same thing.
Cheers.
Mr. Solway. I once heard a very amusing definition of a paranoiac: one who is in possession of all the facts. Sounds about right.
I believe it was Wild Bill Donovan or someone like him at the OSS who, when pressed on the matter, flatly stated that:
If you’re not paranoid, you are not in command of the facts.
… in today’s Washington Post, about half (I exaggerate on purpose) the articles were devoted to racial themes and racial considerations being the overriding determinant in social/legal/international decision-making and outcome… an excellent and timely example of David Solway’s thesis here.
I’m just a barber, no psychologist, however I concluded long ago that delusions of grandeur must be contagious, With DC at its core and spreading outward…
“He also points out that all such groups eventually come to believe that they possess superior knowledge and insights that the rest of the world will one day be forced to acknowledge. And thus be forced to obey them if it wishes to survive the “apocalypse” which they envision destroying all if a “societal change” according to their beliefs is not enacted, preferably Right Now.”
This describes a good proportion of the folks inside the Beltway, from what I’ve seen during my 10-year sentence in NoVA.
I think I understand what you’re saying, although I think I may detect a whiff of persecution complex (I mean, why make the neighbor an Israeli? Are we really supposed to believe that?). But yes, there is some madness afoot, and no doubt there is a fair amount on the left, I mean how could they not be mad, considering that the entire country has shifted so hard to the right that even right wing politicians in Europe would be considered commies over here? On the other hand (and I think the tea party would acknowledge this) the wealth distribution in America is starting to look like what you might see in some third word country in Africa or Latin America, and it’s pretty clear this is not happening because of affirmative action or evil plots by ineffectual academics who briefly hold sway over impressionable undergrads. NO, quite simply, as Warren Buffet sad, there is a class war going on this country and the rich are winning. Not to difficult to figure out. Not a question of being on the left or right. Just take a look around at your middle class friends- it’s hard out there. Huge numbers of jobs have been off-shored in the name of free trade which benefits no one but corporations and their stockholders. I work in the trades, and that’s why I got laid off. Anyway, just my two cents – I think that the rot is in Wall Street and that they own the politicians. Those Occupy Wall Street people are onto something. If I were in New York I’d go there and buy them some beers.
When I was much younger (13 years old) my family and I went to India for about 6 months (this was in the middle 60′s). We were out in the bush, I suppose you could call it, in small villages (400 people) reached by bullock cart tracks. We also spent time in Bombay and met some of the middle class people there (not the truly wealthy; we weren’t of that level of importance.) The contrast between people who lived with no running water, no electricity and no cars (they walked without shoes for the most part) and the urban middle class was enormous; it was like going from the twentieth century in the city back to the seventeenth in the villages.
If you think that the US is approaching the wealth distribution of a third world country that tells me you have never, ever been in one. The disparity between the wealthy and the poor here is orders of magnitude less than what you will see in a third world country. Our wealthy are not any wealthier than their wealthy, but our poor would be considered wealthy in their own right were they in a third world country.
Milton Friedman: “Today’s poverty was yesterday’s plenty.”
For almost the whole of human history, most people lived in poverty and oppression. We have it better than all of the billions of people who came before us.
These lunatics at the OWS protests are spoiled brats. If the radicals among them would get their way and install socialism or communism in the U.S., they’d all be longing for the good old days.
All Americans should be overwhelmingly grateful that they live in this country. Sadly, gratitude is not one of their virtues.
You will notice in my post that I said that the income distribution is “starting to look like” that of a third world country. Meaning that the trend is going in that direction, not that the US is actually a third world country. Important distinction, no? Obviously the poor in America are doing a lot better than the poor in Bombay and Sao Paulo, but they are doing a lot worse than the poor in Europe. There are tent cities in Sacramento, New Jersey, LA, many other cities, filled with middle- middle lower class families, many of whom have been thrown out of their houses because of the crisis. Not because tehy’re lazy, but because there was a monstrous housing bubble driven by big banks’ greed that popped and they all went underwater. Just type “tent city USA” into google and see what you find. The finance industry is taking a bigger and bigger piece of the pie, while productive parts of the economy are getting the squeeze. Unless you’re a corrupt politician in Washington, I don’t see how anyone could say this is a good thing. Incidentally I have lived all over Latin America, and the rich there are among the most shameless, ostentatious and ruthless people I have met. Paris Hilton, anyone? Regarding income distribution:
From wikipedia:
In 2004, the wealthiest 25% of US households owned 87% ($43.6 trillion) of the country’s wealth, while the bottom quartile held no net wealth at all.[3] The middle 50% of the country held 13% or $6.5 trillion of the total household net wealth.[3] The previous data are taken from analysis of the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) which over samples wealthy households. This over sampling more accurately represents the true wealth distribution [since most of the wealth is concentrated at the top]. This data shows that the top 25% of American society holds on average a net wealth of $1,556,801 which is 33 times more than those of the lower middle class, or the 25th-50th percentile.[3]
In addition to unequal wealth distribution, it can be difficult for individuals in the lower income distributions to gain economic mobility which inhibits their ability to accumulate wealth.[6] In 2006, children in the lowest 20% of the income distribution only had a 17% chance of making it to the upper 40% of the income distribution.[6] In 2004, children in the lowest 20% of the wealth distribution had only a 7% chance to make it to the top wealth distribution.[6]
In other words, wealthy parents tend to produce wealthy children, and poor parents tend to produce poor children. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics shows how stratification is becoming worse and worse since 1984. The lowest percentile has become worse, and the highest percentile has become wealthier. The fifth percentile has dropped further into negative net worth, while the 90th percentile has gained over four hundred points within the last twenty one years.[7]
Cheers.
Fine! You’ve diagnosed the disease. Now what is the cure? For me, I’m sick of these whining jackboots. I no longer care that most of them are young and stupid. They are being whipped up into a mob by the old and evil. Their wish for a revolution is just newsspeak for wanting to go out and kill people.
I truly wish there was a way for an amicable divorce. We’ll give them a couple of states (since they only make up about 20% of the population), seal them off and let them have a go at their utopia. Prove us wrong and don’t ask us for help.
Finally someone other than myself asking the same question: What are we going to do going forward? I am tired of the on-going diagnoses of the left by our writers, but nobody has the courage to write about the endgame for us. Obviously we cannot live together.
Is it a divided nation? Is it a civil war? Will we end up like the former Yugoslavia and become a balkanized nation of hispanics in one region, white progressives and their black friends in another and finally Americans in another?
The left has revealed themselves to us so further diagnosis is not necessary. What we need is a decision on what to do because we should all know that this next election, despite taking over the WH and Senate by the GOP, will not temper the left; they will never relent on trying to destroy America; violence will erupt and the OWS and NBP have been trial runs. We know the MSM, unions, Soros and most of the wealthy, and university professors will never stop trying to make America into a larger Cuba.
So enough with the psycho babble.
There aren’t enough of them to win; the Bolsheviks were never even a large minority, they just called themselves the majority. I’ve never dealt with Trotsky/Alinsky tactics that went all the way to violence, but I know the playbook well enough to know that they’ll follow it right off the cliff. I do believe that there is a conflict as irrepressible as that of the 1850s, maybe moreso; the North and the South still pretty much shared the same culture, they just had a serious disagreement over the ownership of some property. This is a LOT deeper culturally than that; Billy Yank and Johnny Reb could socialize between trying to kill each other. It has been a long time since I could stand the presence of a Lefty.
I guess if I decided to provoke a modern Ft. Sumpter, I’d do something to get the Left or one of their client groups to decide they had to go steal cars and plasma TVs in white suburbs because they didn’t get their welfare checks. Helter-Skelter.
Not white suburbs, Art; there’s too much of a chance that the anointed victims would have guns and the will to use them. Have the rats hit the uptown Eloi nests, the high-rises where the Leftist elite live.
#OWS has provided us with a marvelous elapsed-time experiment in how the left evolves. Over time the encampments will get worse and worse in their pathologies; there will be violence among themselves (already starting to happen), moer disturbances, more obnoxious and disgusting behavior, etc., ad nauseam.
Monitoring this behavior and broadcasting it to the world will make more and more people very unenthusiastic with #OWS. On top of that, it’s necessary to keep pointing out, and proving, that they are closely tied to this administration, the Democrats, the unions, and academia. The blame for #OWS must fall on those “adults” who orchestrated the whole thing. The idea is to have the vast majority of Americans lothing and despising the whole lot of them.
Watching my mother progress through these stages of paranoia was very sad. To her the world was a terrifying place and she shut herself off from it. But when I finally put myself in her shoes and realized that she really believed people were watching her, I had more sympathy for her illness. Yes, she was a Democrat. I think Liberalism is not so much a mental disorder, but that mentally ill people seek out Liberalism as a form of therapy. As other Liberals often do, my mother could never argue the logic or reason of her political beliefs. Pity them.
The sad thing about mental illness is that the person who suffers from it is not aware of it. Blessed are the few who come out of it. I agree with this blog post and the comments that follow it. You guys are more thoughtful than me, though, because when I see the OWS crowd I just think “g*dammed immature idiots”. Whenever I hear that this is a “divided nation” I picture a division between people who have grown up and people who haven’t, because, after all, the unrealistic outlook we have of the world as children is very similar to the distorted worldviews of the OWS-type of liberal. When I first heard Michael Savage on the radio 10 years ago, the thing he said that hooked me was “liberalism is a mental disorder”. At first I thought it was a rhetorical device he used as part of his schtick, but I think he’s right.
Blame Wall Street?
A diversion from the reality:
The Green Depression.
What is the real cause of the continuing economic recession?
The existing economy is being sacrificed for the sake of a hoped for future Green Economy created by force rather than by natural organic economic evolution.
New oil drilling STOPPED. New nuclear power STOPPED. New Natural Gas drilling SLOWED or STOPPED.
Enviornmental regulations imposed throughout the business world to the point of making existing business grind almost to a halt.
Hundreda and hundreds of thousands of jobs STOPPED, sacrificed on the altar of Green. Millions of jobs if you figure in ALL jobs affected by this intentional slow-down.
All to force a shift to higher energy prices which will make currently too-costly green energy more cost effective, in the hope that eventually this will allow Green Energy to finally become economically profittable sometime in the future 10, 20 or perhaps not for 30 or more years. By Governmental FORCE rather than by live economic progress.
So until the Green Economy becomes a functional reality, IF the country can stay afloat until then, you will just have to “do your part” and suffer.
I hope that makes you feel better. Now go and open up another can of cat food for dinner and stop complaining!
“Dang them weed-whacking Jews. They’ll get you every time. You’ll see.”
Man, you can’t invent this stuff.
I’m not sure these days how to distinguish genuine paranoid ravings from paranoid-sounding political rhetoric. No accusation against the other party seems too vile or outlandish anymore. Our representatives in congress, our intelligentsia, our news people all routinely say things that, 40 years ago, would have marked them as members of the lunatic fringe. The question is, how much of it do they believe and how much of it is just rhetoric? And can they tell the difference?
No. They can’t tell the difference and and they’re still the lunatic fringe. That’s what they don’t understand.
When we call such people “liberals”, we concede something that ought not to be conceded. (Who cares what they call themselves?) There is such a thing as real liberalism, and it is a very good thing. Real liberalism can arguably be defined by two non-negotiable commitments: the freedom of thought and procedural equality. Why should the left, which is often against both those things, be permitted to hijack the term?
People whose hearing starts to go bad often, before they get hearing aids, become more paranoid about what’s being said about them. Give them hearing aids and the condition tends to clear up. This is a simple example of how paranoia is a default condition of human thought when its confronted by ambiguous and poorly understood phenomena (for example, blurred and hard to understand speech). It’s easy to see where this comes from. Those of our ancestors who, for example, tended to assume that rustling leaves denoted the presence of an unseen predator were more likely to survive than those who assumed that it was just the wind. Even if it usually is just the wind, the penalty for overlooking the predator is so much worse than the penalty for mistaking the wind for a predator, that humanity evolved to assume the worst in ambiguous situations.
The current “great recession” is definitely an ambiguous situation, and young graduates attempting to get a job and failing for reasons that their teachers did not teach them about — and who have spent their entire life so far in school, a massively different social environment from the one they are now trying to live in — do not understand what is going on and have defaulted to their inherited tendency to paranoia, looking for someone to blame.
Someone like Genevieve, on the other hand, has probably let her predictable paranoid worries about something she did not understand keep her awake night after night, losing sleep to the extent that her mind started to go bad. Loss of sleep for whatever reason can disturb and destroy a person’s personality; there are many controlled psychological experiments showing what a potent destructive force it can be. So that’s what we now have with OWS: people with paranoid tendencies because they do not understand the malfunctioning of their civilization and its economy trying to get some sleep out in the open, often to the sound of drumming (and with plenty of recreational drugs available). What could go wrong?
Yes. The K-12 education system can also increase paranoia for the same reason as poor hearing or poor vision can. Many US public school kids are given no good foundation in history, local culture, practical economics, civics, ethics, morals, and other things that can provide a background or framework for people to assess the world they will likely experience in their lives. As with poor hearing/vision, a poor education is correctable.
Moral relativity removes any anchors that people might otherwise rely upon. This lack of grounding can lead to a personality that is much more susceptible to paranoid persuasions. This is exactly the way the Progressives want it. Moral relativity makes people much more receptive to the kind of outrageous propaganda you would need to buy into to willingly throw away your freedom.
Another thing our kids are not taught anymore is logic. People don’t know how to think things through anymore and come to reasonable conclusions.
This is why the Casey Anthony jury came to the verdict they did. They all lacked logical thinking skills.
By the way, I’m reading Ann Coulter’s book, “Demonic,” and it is stunning how she perfectly describes the mentality of the mob and the liberal left. It is a very timely book, considering the OWS mess.
I agree with you that for all the talk of critical thinking, the schools not only don’t teach logic, they teach the anti-logic of feelings and the critical part of thinking is reserved for criticizing any and all that might be in authority.
That said, I think the Casey Anthony jury was more logical than the prosecutor. Like so many prosecutors in death penalty states, he swung for the fence, the capital, premeditated murder; it’s the way death penalty state prosecutors keep score. Sorry, but you’d have trouble proving that ditzy life support system for her reproductive parts had ever premeditated anything. If they’d charged her with any form of murder as the result of indifference or negligence, it would have been an easy conviction.
Okay, now you’ve done it. Now we are going to have to appoint a new Government agency to investigate this new illness and research a cure for it. This shouldn’t take more than 20 years or so if we throw a few billion dollars at it.(Well, maybe a trillion, but not much more than that!)
Some conspiracies have good intentions, however costly and insidious they seem to an outsider.
Leftism is a mental trap, but some manage to extricate themselves out of it. David Horowitz is a shining example, even a proof of existence of a total cure, so let’s not despair.
Arguing with lefties usually gets nowhere, so it makes sense to try something else: My approach is to meet one-on-one, and volunteer to do most of the listening, and occasionally use the socratic approach to help them notice one particular token of inconsistency in their often circular logic. Not the whole enchilada, just one tidbit. If your rather innocent question (sufficiently innocent not to raise their dander) causes them to go quiet for a while, recognize that you have been helpful, and don’t get greedy and push too hard. One does not “pop” out of delusion in general and leftism in particular. If you have been holding their hand to go one-tenth of one percent of the distance, I congratulate you, because arguing with them generally pushes them deeper into the hole instead of helping them see a ray of light.
The process of coming to reason is long and arduous, because at the minimum one has to mourn the loss of a cheap and bogus intellectual comfort that has been “therapeutic” (not therapeutic, really, more self-serving) for many years. I propose to help the lefties in the same way you can help the poor: Offer something without offending what is left of their dignity. Patience!
In 19th century Russian novels, the middling elites of the society are shown with similar types of disorders. The Russian author Ivan Turgenev described one such character in his short story, “The Superfluous Man.” The cause of Genevieve’s and the OWS participants’ disorders and the Superfluous Man’s disorder is the unconscious knowledge that the person him/herself is useless. The OWS participants are discovering that they have no function, no use, no significant role to play in society. They are well-educated, but don’t know how to DO anything. A plumber, an electrician, a welder, a hair stylist, a cook, a secretary, a teacher, an accountant, a florist, a tow truck driver–all these have specific skills and are needed by society. The OWS participants are superfluous people.
When a person knows he is superfluous, he can only hate himself and deals with that self-hate by projecting it on to others–hence the paranoia. It is dangerous for a society to have large numbers of people who have no skills and are educated enough to understand they are useless to society.
That goes a long way to explain why college educations were once the exclusive province of the rich and the “libre” arts were restricted by the Romans to citizens wealthy enough to hire the tutors.
At the core of this topic in academia is the ascent of postmodernism and the rejection of western civilization and sequentially the rejection of objective reality. Another and older metaphysical template for this phenomenon is the idea of ‘ring pass not’. That reason or objectivity form a ring around meaningful human activity, if we attempt to push beyond reason or the ‘ring’ we are lost in a subjective nightmare of madness. OWS supporters display a Nietzschean ‘will to power’ that would have us all working to support them and their discontents. A traditional role of academia has been to disabuse the young of these ideas using reason. The radicals that now control academia understood very well that they had to abandon reason to accomplish their goals, you see the results now. Those academics need to be discredited and forced to return academia to the adults. It is really just a matter of what must be done to return to reason. The longer we wait, the more it will resemble Zombie Apocalypse.
Bingo – sir or madam you are completely correct. This is the face of post-modernism.
Reason? We don’t need no stinking reason! Just as the thugs in the great Bogart movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre didn’t need badges.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsdZKCh6RsU&feature=related
If you really want to understand postmodernism, I would recommend the book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault by Stephen R. C. Hicks. He explains post-modernism from the rational and pro-reason perspective. The students of postmodernism are mental fluff balls, but most of the humanities have been hijacked by these ideas. We have subsidized our own misery by allowing these ideas to go unchallenged and paying for college educations that are much worse than worthless.
The book is a brilliant dissection of why you come across such loons as found in universities and protests such as we are seeing. Our enemy is not people, but ideas – the enemy of humanity is post-modernism. I would highly recommend this book to know your enemy.
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abcd–efg hij — klm nop–
qrs –
tuv