The liberal pathology
“…war, ,slavery, imperialism, racism and the use of power to hoard the gains of enterprise: all have been part of the liberal project.” The Economist.[1]
What is it about liberals, or progressives, as they now like to call themselves? Since the sixties they have been striving to realise a utopian dream that assumes western societies must be defined by socialist government programmes funded by ‘redistributing wealth’; a euphemism for income tax. It is simply Marxism repackaged along lines first seeded by Enlightenment philosophers like Hume, Hegel and Kant. Everything our ‘progressives’ have done has turned to dust and death. Their war on poverty has left ever larger numbers of people sucked into the welfare abyss. Their revolt against western moral values has produced crime, child abuse and injustice and their social engineering, in combination with other factors, like multiculturalism and feminism, have put western societies under huge unnecessary pressure. They assumed, for purely Marxist and self-serving reasons, that the western cultural wheel was broken, or evil, despite its obvious factual superiority, over other cultures. All their economic, individual and social harm, detailed later, has been ignored as collateral damage, or justified by escalating commitment to the very policies that caused the harm in the first place. Their purpose is both mad and wicked. The current focus on transgenderism highlights both epithets.
No one can challenge the liberal world view without risking an enforced career change, prosecution for hate speech, or the good old liberal default tactic – cowardly ad hominem character assassination. Fascism reigns in liberalism’s weird be-politically-correct-or-else pathology. Worst of all liberals have monkeyed with the human mind by infusing popularist thinking with relativism and pluralism, leaving the younger generations unwilling to even acknowledge reality or morality, if it conflicts with politically correct non-judgementalism. If you want to see how this plays out go to www.nationalreview.com/corner/434158/watch-college-kids-cant-explain-why-short-white-man-isnt-a-tall-asian-women.
Psychologists should be giving the liberal condition a clinical name. How about libermania, or tradaphobia – liberals hate things traditional and have been busy dismantling Western Civilisation’s values. Douglas Murray characterises this pathology as cultural masochism. Their destructive antipathy thought of in cultural and social terms is marked by forms of ‘self-harm’, coupled to suicidal tendencies, narcissistic concentrations on self and logical denial that merge into anti-cultural nihilism. This manifests in basic failures to grasp the fundamentals of human nature, or experience. Murray quotes one German victim of a gang rape who happened to also be a liberal activist. She blamed the rape on western racism and sexism and apologised to her assailants. This twisted logic, based on fundamental errors of fact is typical of the liberal pathology. Did this silly woman ever consider that her manic apology might encourage further rapists and fuel the very immigrant misogyny she insists can only be ascribes to only her own culture? Murray cites other similar examples.
Libermanic ‘progressives’ live in a world of contradictions they cannot even recognise (see Part 3/30). At the liberal political-cum-corporate elite level this all translates into ongoing escalations of commitment to failed policies, like the debt explosion, demographic meltdown, immigrant based social tensions, state control and on-going social dysfunctions at the individual and family level. Put it all together and we have to be looking at a form of negative psychic conditioning.
In fact psychologists have given the liberal pathology a clinical name – malignant narcissism. Tammy Bruce calls it the “god of the left elite”. Its symptoms include sociopathy, self-serving aggression, gratification and self-promotion, coupled to intolerance and the will to power. This clinical description meshes well with my own libermanic diagnosis. Otto Kernberg describes it thus: “The pathological idealisation of the self [is] very much connected with evil and with a number of clinical forms that evil takes.” People are exploited in the interests of the malignant narcissist’s quest for power over others because the liberal narcissistic pathology feeds off victimhood and demands that society accept it is the perpetrator of whatever condition the libermanic perceives to be wrong. Add that to the causes promoted by the cultural Marxism we will explore later and all the ingredients necessary to feed this malignancy prevail. It was the cultural Marxists who fed ideas into academia about western injustices that then seeped into the minds of people already being told their individuality should have no bounds. Psychiatrist Jordan Peterson would add the feminist hatred of patriarchy and their glorification of a mythical original matriarchal order to the mix. Everything traditional about morality had to be trashed and everything noble about western societies had to be belittled. Socialism also has to be included because it promotes the narcissism of entitlement. Malignant narcissism, or what I will continue to call libermania, is the blending of the will to power with cultural guilt, exaggerated individuality and socialist entitlement.[2]
It is not hard to see why the liberal political and corporate class is bent on mass immigration. It is a cynical, even desperate, attempt to shore up its failed dogmas. The libermanic cannot bear to think their ideas might be flawed. Because feminist policies have led to declining indigenous populations, as women have forgone child-bearing and indulged in abortion, hiding the demographic disaster caused by feminism demands mass immigration. Economic policies of central bank quantitative easing, consequential indebtedness, and stagnant wage growth cause people to forgo child-bearing. Thus, liberal and corporatist dogma deliver a double whammy.[3] Welfare-ism has created a dependent class unwilling to commit to low income, entry level, employment and multiculturalism is based on unfounded cultural guilt that placates itself with diversity. As Mark Steyn rightly observes: “Multiculturalism was conceived by the western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is thus the real suicide bomb.”[4] These elements leave liberalism with no choice but to champion mass immigration. Workers are needed in the low paid jobs and falling populations leave gaps in both markets and the labour force.
They cannot go back on the policies promoting population decline. To do so would undermine liberalism’s blind faith in multiculturalism and feminism and call out their whole creed. Because they are moral and intellectual cowards liberals cannot bear to confront social policy failures, knowing it would have fatal elite privilege consequences at the ballot box and expose their bankrupt liberal dogmas. They would rather sacrifice the West to their hubris instead. We must all put up with immigrant caused housing shortages, crime and pressure on education and health rather than face the truth. In the U.K. it has been determined that immigrant policies have cost the taxpayers 114 billion between 1995 and 2011 because migrants suck more out of the welfare system than they return in taxes.[5] The depths of this libermanic darkness have yet to be fathomed, but its support for on-going Islamic immigration has to come close. The libermanic is hopelessly lost in Plato’s cave.
Adding perversity to perfidy, liberal elites have embraced corporatism which has, under the neo-liberal global commercial system, created huge social inequalities and mounted up impossible debt. It’s like watching a Punch and Judy show. Punch, the unrepentant liberal cum corporate lackey, is determined to make the un-workable happen anyway by beating us all over the head with a policy and ideological cosh until we grudgingly submit. Brute force, as Punch knows, is resoundingly successful if you don’t care about the effect on others. It is most obvious with Obama’s executive orders and the Eurocrats obsession with political unity, despite the Euro Crisis and various national referendums opposed to E.U. centralisation. They abandoned the Euro-constitution’s prohibitions on bailouts just to keep their euro-obsession in play. The damage to people, the abandonment of laws and the disregard for democracy are hallmarks of liberal-corporatism’s libermanic character.[6] A character that manifests as fascism.
The once Marxist liberal, turned conservative, David Horowitz, has exposed the symptoms behind liberalism’s tradaphobia – cultural loathing.[7] The lessons of history are to be ignored. The wisdom they provide is nothing compared to the blind utopian faith liberals prefer to put in their dreams of a socialist world. Karl Marx never manged to describe what his communist society would look like. In like manner liberals imagine a socially just world but never define how it would work and never concede their own culture is already more just than other cultures. Because life is often filled with difficulties and uncertainty, the libermanic finds solace in socialist policies, blindly assuming they will work, even if the evidence says otherwise. Liberalism is, at its core, a perceived antidote, or medication, for the angst people experience when life does not go smoothly. Analysing problems and finding self-reliant solutions, based on sound decisions that eventually overcome the problems, if combined with hard work, utilising all the levers for advancement available in western societies, is completely foreign to the liberal mind.
For liberals the universal failure of socialism in both Marxist and democratic states is simply an inconvenient truth. Malignant narcissism cannot accept it is wrong. The now livid failures of multiculturalism in Europe, starkly defined by recent jihad atrocities in the Levant, France, Belgium, the UK, Spain and the U.S.A. highlight the libermanic addiction to its doctrines. They cling to some ill-defined and logically bereft notion that it can all be made to work right the next time. They dream of a centralised apparatus that provides for everyone, living in a state of grey fascist equality. Utopia is just around the corner if we just hold the tradaphobic line. They rail against the inescapable fact that liberty and equality are unrelenting enemies. Human liberties have to be sacrificed on the altar of fraternal equality. Free speech must be stomped on (literally) if it denies libermanic values; it has to be hate speech. The inhuman history of this thinking is irrelevant to liberals. The French Revolution with its catch-cry liberty, equality and fraternity and its later Marxist manifestation all over the globe only led to war, misery and tyranny. Liberals refuse to look through the lens of history and common sense. It is this pathology that must be overcome, or the West’s death by many cuts will continue until the civilisation has bled out.
Horowitz correctly observes that liberals approach their ideological objectives as fervently as missionaries seek to save souls. The difference is liberals do not subscribe to the Christian doctrine of free will, even as they hide behind it. They have no interest in real democracy. All of us must accept their agenda. To refuse their ideas and PC dogmas is to rank yourself alongside Adolf Hitler. This is why liberals hate conservative perspectives and claim the death cult called Islam is a peaceful religion.[8] By definition conservatives are anti-feminist, racist, opposed to minorities and dismissive of the poor. In fact a typical conservative is focused on human freedom, limited government and properly functioning free markets, because these are more likely to lift people out of poverty and build equitable societies. These ideals run counter to the progressive agenda, hence the palpable intolerance liberals display whenever they meet with conservative opposition. Never mind that it is the conservative agenda that has made nations prosper and offered the best opportunities for the poor to better their condition. Centralised socialist control has paupered nations who have tried it, while suppressing human freedoms as a necessary adjunct to the process.
The conservative simply accepts humanity is imperfect and flawed. As Horowitz says: “They [conservatives] want to repair policies and procedures that are broken. They are not missionaries and they are not selling a land of dreams.” All anyone can do is maximise human freedoms to pursue individual interest balanced against a properly constituted system of citizen responsibilities and controllable government. Liberals, rejecting this simple design, blindly construct ever more complex systems of central control to artificially uphold Rousseau’s miss-shaped caricature of reality. Liberal Hilary Clinton is on record as saying: [the task of politics is nothing less than] “to remould society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the twenty-first century…” (Horowitz).[9] No it isn’t! The task of politics is to fulfil the will of the people through the process of democracy, not to mould people in the liberal’s Orwellian image. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao have all given that one a go. Liberals mirror the desperate efforts made by medieval astronomers to shore up their Ptolemaic belief that the universe revolved around the earth. Liberals, in like manner and against all the evidence, cling hyperbolically to their state-centric doctrines.
The sharp divide between conservatives and liberals has moved well beyond social debate to become a deep ideological rift that threatens western civilisations very survival. There is now a battle for the supremacy of ideas over issues more serious than the tensions that triggered the American Revolution and the English Civil War. Will this ideological battle turn into something like those two watershed events, given the climactic threat today’s ideological divide represents? I hope not, but it is hard to predict how things will eventually go. It may be things have already gone too far. If we are no longer talking about a battle for ideals, but a suffocation of culture, it could be too late to stage a recovery. Conservatives are only likely to mount a concerted comeback when they see Libermania as a direct attack on civilisation itself - an existential threat many times greater than any jihadist group. One can only hope an effective response is both imminent and peaceful.
[1] The Economist, January 28th, 2017, The Enlightenment and its Discontents, p.71.
[2] This paragraph draws on material in Tammy Bruce’s () book, The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on our Culture and Values.
[3] Discussed in Douglas Murray’s 2017 best seller The Strange Death of Europe.
[4] From his 2006 book America Alone: The End of the World as we know it.
[5] Ibid. Murray, 2017.
[6] Discussed in Daniel Hannan’s 2013 book, Inventing Freedom: How the English Speaking People’s Made the Modern World.
[7] Read David Horowitz’s book, Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan for Defeating the Left. I’m grateful to David for making this section so much easier to write.
[8] To acknowledge Islam’s violent doctrines would compromise liberalism’s multicultural-diversity dogma and by definition raise Christianity up as a morally superior code.
[9] New York Times Sunday Magazine, May 23, 1993.