For decades, it’s evident to anyone paying attention that the entire political program of the far left is one that’s riddled with contradictions, inanities, and falsehoods. Leftists do not base their arguments on logic, science, virtue, or common sense. Rather, they rely on the vulgar manipulation of feelings and emotions to drive their base to both the voting booth and the streets.
But who is falling for this manipulation? Who is letting their feelings and emotions override the reasoning skills which we all possess? Primarily, the left preys on the emotionally immature, the insufferably narcissistic, and the mentally ill.
I don’t throw around the term “mentally ill” lightly, nor do I employ it to mock or demean. There are millions of Americans suffering from mental illness for whom this categorization does not apply. The problem becomes when these mental illnesses are not properly treated, but rather are enabled and weaponized.
Gender Dysphoria
Gender dysphoria is a mental illness. There is nothing good or evil, forgiving or judgmental, bigoted or compassionate about that statement. It’s a simple fact. Those who suffer from it aren’t “freaks”; they’re God’s children who need medical and psychological help. And more often than not, gender dysphoria is a symptom masking a deeper disorder that, when discovered and treated, removes the gender dysphoria as well. But when others enable this illness, when its sufferers hear that the problem is not their mental illness but rather the world around them, the result is anger, bitterness, and hate. The result is violence and school shootings. And this is exactly the result that was sought.
Histrionic Personality Disorder
In plain English, this disorder describes people who validate their existence based on the amount of attention they get from others. If you’re fifty and you’re still dying your hair blue and piercing your extremities, you need psychological help. Again, I don’t say that mockingly. You are suffering, and you seriously need help. Guys who ride penny-farthing bikes? You need help. Women who pretend to be witches? You need help. People who announce their pronouns upon first meeting? You need help. This disorder gets weaponized when channeled into political outlets, in which its sufferers garner the most attention by staking the most outlandish, radical political positions. The disorder becomes performative art. Treat the disorder, and you remove the political symptoms.
There are other mental conditions that, while professionals do not classify them as mental illnesses, nonetheless describe patterns of emotional and psychological behavior that inhibit an otherwise healthy life. These include:
Overpathologizing
There are people among us suffering from severe trauma. Think war veterans. Rape victims. An inner-city child who witnessed an older sibling. And then there are people who experience minor inconveniences yet treat them as traumatic events. Think having to work a steady job. Or seeing an Israeli flag. Or hearing someone disagree with you. College campuses make “safe spaces” for you, complete with crayons and coloring books and comfort animals. Your entire life you’ve never been taught how to handle adversity, and it’s being weaponized and sold to you as a political ideology.
Victim Mentality
Anything bad that happens to you is filtered through a lens of cosmic injustice. Some jerk cut you off in traffic? It must be because I’m (insert victim group here). I didn’t get the promotion I wanted? It must be because I’m (insert victim group here). The injustice couldn’t possibly have been incidental, and it couldn’t possibly be due to any fault or shortcoming of its receiver. Victim mentality allows people to avoid accountability. And as long as bad things keep happening to the person (and they will), there will never be any shortage of Others to blame.
Inappropriate Guilt
You accept the responsibility for the sins of others that you had nothing to do with due to some sort of perceived connection or link (racial, gender, religious, etc.) to the sinner. Had the guilt been genuine, it could stem from depression or an anxiety disorder, but too often the guilt is not genuine. Its purpose is to be worn as a badge of virtue. It’s meant to showcase moral superiority. And the underlying goal is to elicit praise. That’s not the behavior of someone feeling actual guilt. How can we tell? Because you yourself are not sacrificing anything to atone for your alleged sin, you are demanding others within your “oppressor” group do so instead.
Doomscrolling
A healthy personality requires real-life relationships with other people. It requires hobbies. Proper exercise and diet. Fresh air. Human interaction. Adult responsibilities. Meaning and purpose. But for some people, especially, and unfortunately, young people, putting down their phones to explore the world around them is an option that never occurs to them. They get trapped in information bubbles, logarithmically calculated to reinforce their stereotypes. Before you know it, their belongings, their freedoms, their planet, and their lives are about to be taken from them by an Enemy so omnipresent that nothing can be done to stop it. Because their phone told them so. Indulgent parents and a worthless public school system never taught them how to think critically. The result, again? Depression. Loneliness. Isolation. And a desperate willingness to follow any false prophet who offers instant, painless solutions.
Messiah Complex
If you help people for the sake of helping people, good for you. If you help people out of a psychological fixation on being needed, or because you think you know what’s best for others, or because you have no boundaries, well then, you might want to start your own religion. Call it Karenism or Braydenism.
The problem lies in that most of these “conditions,” for lack of a better term, are rooted in pride, arrogance, and pomposity. The very nature of these conditions holds an instinctual disdain for self-reflection and insight. And the left is nothing if not full of its own sense of importance.
How do we counter this, if reason and logic prove insufficient? Wait for these people to mature out of these ways of thinking? But as I’ve mentioned above, the specter of witnessing this behavior being conducted not by teenagers but by middle-aged adults raises the question of how much more time these “adults” need to grow up, and if we can even expect that to happen at all.
The old adage that people gradually grow more conservative with age no longer applies. Middle-aged adults who should long ago have matured out of the conceited and ignorant presuppositions of inexperienced youth insist on stubbornly clinging to them.
I don’t know what the solution to this is. The people with legitimate mental illnesses need legitimate professional help. For the others, the only cure seems to be when the left goes so far off the deep end that some of these people find themselves the digested end of the axiom that all revolutions eventually eat their own. Think some liberal women after mediocre men began destroying their sports, some liberal Jews who realized on 10/7 that their supposed allies want them dead, or some liberal minorities when they realized the left considers them interchangeable pawns to be discarded once their usefulness is exhausted.
But it’s not enough. No advanced society, modern or ancient, has suffered so many of its citizens to delude themselves so efficiently over such a wide swathe of their own mental faculties which should have been, but has not been, checked by a chimpanzee’s ability to think critically. The left exploits this mental weakness, because that’s what the left does.
And its adherents will walk willingly to the gallows of their own revolution so long as the final words they hear are ones of assurance and confirmation that they were right.