A Series Of Essays, Which While Stating The Blatantly Obvious, Are Brilliantly Stated

These three (at a minimum) essays by John C. Wright should be taught to all literate children, over and over.

Leftists and truth (an excerpt):

"It is crucial to the worldview and self esteem of the Left that they regard themselves, despite all evidence to the contrary, as being morally and intellectually superior to their honorable opposition on the Right. A century long nightmare of the mass deaths, wars, broken lives, mass thefts, mass addiction to lying propaganda, and spiritual chaos spread by this political neurosis makes the act of total mental dishonesty needed to maintain this stance of presumptive intellectual superiority both difficult and comical to maintain, yet by heroic effort the Left manages to do so.

It is because they sacrifice everything else on this altar. Their self esteem, or, to call it by its right name, the Sin of Pride, absorbs all their attention and overthrows all other scruples, hesitations and sentiments. They are desperate to maintain their illusory and inflated self-image. Because they are desperate, they are shameless.

The prime evidence of their shamelessness is in the attitude, present in all writings of the Left that venture into philosophical areas, of disdain and dismissal toward the truth. I do not mean that they are untruthful. They are, but that is a side effect. I mean that on a fundamental and philosophical level, there is no place in their worldview for the concept that truth is objective.

In the bleary and psychedelic and flaccid mental world of the Left, truth is a matter of consensus, like the rules of grammar, or a matter of personal preference, like your taste in ice cream.

For them, truth is not true."

And this irresistable ccomparison:

"In the quest for intellectual superiority, there are two basic strategies: first, do something concrete to display your superior intellect to the world unambiguously, such as by reconciling Quantum Mechanics with General Relativity, or such as by proving that, for projective algebraic varieties, Hodge cycles are rational linear combinations of algebraic cycles.

The second is to claim superiority of the intellect, and to display to the world some form of incomprehensible paradox, or gibberish, or make noises like a hoopoe, so that when a skeptic questions your alleged superior thought process, you can grandly decree him to be too mentally retarded to comprehend your culminant transcendent ultra-superbrilliance, and too morally corrupt to deserve to do so."

And,
"For obvious reasons, the first strategy is unavailable to the Left. The second strategy has the obvious drawback that it makes objectivity the enemy. Truth is the enemy. So the second strategy fails unless confidence that truth exists is undermined.
[emphasis joyfully added]

Leftists and Virtue; (an excerpt):

"Because of their rejection of the idea of truth, even Leftists who might otherwise admire virtue must oppose it and promote vice. Allow me to explain.

A conservative will assume men are imperfect, or, to use the correct term, Fallen. He says that the guilt we feel when we sin is because we fall short of the standard virtue sets, and therefore we must try ever harder, with the help of good laws and good customs, to achieve virtue. Some conservatives say this is the point of civilization.

A progressive will assume men are always growing more perfect. He says the guilt we feel is a hindrance to happiness, if not a psychological disease. Therefore we must try ever harder to abolish taboos and guilt complexes and hang up, that is, to eliminate modesty, decency, shame, and lower the standards of virtue. The progressive dismisses traditional standards of virtues as being meaningless (hence the word “taboo”) or unhealthy (“guilt complexes”) or irrational (“hang up”). The elimination of virtue is to be done with the help of social engineering by ever more intrusive experts granted ever more intrusive powers over our lives, eliminating law and custom and replacing it with experts armed with arbitrary powers. Some progressives say this is the point of progress.

In sum, the conservative think we should avoid guilt by adhering to a standard of acting virtuously; the progressive thinks we should eliminate the guilt by eliminating the standards, and then acting in any way we damned well please, and the consequences are someone else’s worry.

Now, I have made an outrageous assertion: not that Leftists are indifferent to virtue, but are openly hostile to virtue."

The Left and the degradation of beauty (an excerpt):

"The strongest argument against the atheism so beloved of the Left is not an argument that can be put in words, for it is the argument of beauty. If you see a sunset clothed in scarlet like a king descending to his empurpled pyre, or wonder at the gleaming thunder of a waterfall, if you find yourself fascinated by the soft intricacy of a crimson rose or behold the cold virgin majesty of the morning star, much less see and enter a cathedral or a walled garden, or you hear Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” by Beethoven or see the David of Michelangelo, or become immersed into the song and splendor and Northern sorrow of Wagner’s “Ring” or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, if indeed you see real beauty and for a moment you forget yourself, then you are drawn out of yourself into something larger.

In that timeless moment of sublime rapture, the heart knows even if the head cannot put it into words that the dull and quotidian world of betrayal, pain, disappointment and sorrow is not the only world there is. Beauty points to a world beyond this world, a higher realm, a country of joy where there is no death. Beauty points to the divine.

The Left hates this argument, because – since it is not put into words – it cannot be refuted in words. It can only be refuted in images: a urinal, a several cow head, a can of shit, a messy bed. These images are ugly, aggressively ugly, meant to be demeaning, meant to be absurd, harsh, jarring, repugnant and gross. If the vision of a the morning star points to a world beyond this world, fair and filled with the music of the spheres, then visions of shit and blinking lights and severed heads and unmade beds point to a world of roaring despair, a desecrated graveyard, a dungheap.

The Left hates this argument, because if beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder, then beauty tells us what is a truth, a real truth, a truth from a world beyond the world of petty propaganda, a beauty beyond the world of pornography. The Left hates this argument, because if beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder, then beauty is meant to be served, not used for your selfish pleasures. Beauty humbles the proud, for it shows them something beyond themselves and their appetites. And the left hates that."

While he refers mostly to "Leftists", it is obvious that they cannot hold their principles or lack of principles and yet be theist. Leftism might contain a few theists, but their cognitive dissonance would be so great that it would indicate issues with their sanity. Leftism is a religion in its own right, a religion of destruction and hatred for all but the elite, the messiahs, the Ubermench. And even with with all that it is a mix of excessive self love and excessive self hatred resulting in a neediness only elitism can cure; that is a sanity issue, too.

Read these essays at their source.

ADDENDUM:
I just cannot resist these views on AtheoLeftist paradoxes:

"In this case, the idea of relativism is a mystery of the faith, and one never meant to be employed consistently. It is only used by hypocrites. No one ever applied the idea to his own ideas. No Leftist ever says, “I believe global warming is primarily man-caused and is certain to have disastrous rather than beneficial effects on human civilization — and my beliefs are a byproduct of the fact that I am Caucasian. My beliefs only apply to me and do not apply to you.”

It is only the beliefs of their opponents which are denounced: we are chided and lectured and dismissed as lunatics who suffer the strange delusion that matters of opinion are matters of fact.

The idea is rarely stated explicitly. It is the unstated assumption behind phrases like “that is true for you but not for me” or behind claims like “no one has the right to impose his views on another.” (It is never explained why it is that this view, the view that no one has the right to impose his views on another, can be imposed rightfully on all and sundry.)

If truth is true, then we are all accountable to it. We all have to answer to it.

If truth is true, there is one right answer and no one has an argument in favor of the wrong answers. If truth is true, the right answer has the right to speak and all the wrong answers shut up.

But if truth is not true, everyone has a right to an irresponsible opinion, and no one ever need answer for wrong answers. Only the right answer is commanded to shut up, whereas all the wrong answers need never stop their megalomaniacal chattering and caterwauling.

And now you know why the Left holds the dogma that no truth is true."
[From his essay on truth]

Go! read them at his place!