Politics and Power Through Tantrum
But coming back to what causes that trip lever -- it may come down to what Marxists call "false consciousness," though in this case it's the reverse of what Marx intended. These people are using the pretense of socialism to cover up their love of the most rapacious capitalism. They hate Trump because he exposes them. His unabashed and unashamed capitalism and obvious riches are what they seek, but don't want to admit to themselves or others. Otherwise they would have to face what they are and stop pretending to "goodness." It's about the virtue signaling or what I have elsewhere called moral narcissism (really the psychological motivation for virtue signaling). But it has become considerably more extreme since I wrote the book and has reached the level of pathology. It's also extraordinarily infantile. If Marx has been upended, so has Arthur C. Clarke. No more Childhood's End. In 2017 America, it's Adulthood's End.
Don't believe me? Here's just one name as an example -- Madonna (not the original one, the one that "thinks about" burning down the White House).
After Monday night we can add another: Stephen Colbert.
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Roger Simon: Moral Narcissism and the Roots of Leftist Rage
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2 comments:
I once heard Jordan Peterson, in a discussion of transgendered rights, use the phrase "exploding the categories", which, I think, succinctly captures the fundamental anti-rationality of leftists, who are incapable of distinguishing between exclusion and oppression.
The problem for leftists isn't that we have the wrong categories. It's that the very act of categorization is inherently exclusionary ("These are female, those are not"), which, to the leftist mind, is to say inherently oppressive.
On leftist terms, then, as long as we categorize, we oppress. So the only way to eliminate oppression is to explode all categories; not in order to replace them with new ones (which would simply result in different forms of oppression, and new victim classes), but to do away with categorization altogether. But since abstraction and categorization are the sine qua non of human reason, the leftist goal is nothing less than the destruction of reason itself.
Because categories are definitional, definitions are, to the leftist, inherently oppressive. The SSM debate was never about REdefining marriage, it was about UNdefining it. The traditional definition was oppressive merely because *any* definition is inherently exclusionary.
The transgender discussion thrives on the slurring of sex and gender. Leftists love terms like "fluid", "non-binary" and "spectrum" because they justify leftist undefinition. Facebook's 71 genders is the direct result. Examples: "Adamasgender" ("a gender which refuses to be categorized"), Alexigender ("fluid between more than one gender which the individual cannot identify") and Blurgender ("the feeling of having more than one gender ... blurred together ... not being able to distinguish"). Leftist undefinitions just rolled unrestrained off the page.
Leftist rebellion against categories strikes at the root of human reason. It is inherently anti-rational.
Absent categories -- that is absent even the basics of reasoning -- the left is left with feelings, because feelings are primal brute facts, just about the only things in human experience which are true simply by virtue of our experiencing them. And thus the only progressitards can do is to shout their feelings. The videos of the Evergreen State College takeover are the perfect examples: a roomful of students shouting their feelings at staff who largely stand silent because no any attempt at rational discussion is doomed.
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