What happens when your core self is not recognized, honored, reflected and encouraged in your home, in your nuclear (or extended) family, and when there is no intact culture into which you can emerge to find at least a suitable ersatz self?
You get the political Left, as it exists today. You get some sort of fascistic sympathies, because we all need to feel we exist, and if you cannot figure out how to exist as an individual, you will be driven inexorably to exist as a member of a collective, which is the point of Collectivism.
Look in your mind at an average American home: the TV is the altar. If food is served together, half of us are watching TV. Meaningful emotional connections become more and more rare. Our wealth allows us to each pursue our own lonely and largely narcissistic path. Children younger than ten have TV’s in their rooms. They have computers they spent endless hours on. I have seen babies in strollers with iPhones they were playing with while their parents took them for walks.
Self evidently, a digital screen is not a mirror, although no doubt millions try to use social media to make mirrors, which cannot but be defective, since all are trying to see themselves simultaneously, and since most are comparing themselves to some current God of social media, some current template, which they try and copy. Fashions and fads sweep in, and flow away. Everywhere conformity is idealized, and nowhere are people engaging in emotionally honest introspection, much less dialogue.
Such a world is purpose built for aspiring rulers, for anyone willing and even eager to tell people how to live their lives, and–indeed–who they are.
And I was contemplating this term “Identity Politics” yesterday on a walk. It has become a commonplace that we are beset by “tribalism”. Now, tribes provide two benefits: inclusion, and protection from what is “out there”. Your people, and you, band together to fend off whoever might be out there.
In a traditional, true, tribe, everyone knows everyone, and everyone is acculturated along traditional lines. You are taught, say, about how the Great Spirit created the sky, and the coyote did this and that, and that men are this way and women that way, and you are taught practical skills like hunting and fishing, and perhaps warfare. Or, as a woman, all the domestic crafts.
Such a tribe can, in theory, live in peace. They have everything they need. Practically most American Indians engaged in periodic and in some cases nearly continual warfare. And there is a thrill in this, too. There is a thrill, particularly for men, in the risk and rewards of fighting other men. It is perhaps nearly if not literally an instinct to seek out violence. This is a feeling you can only get through aggression. It is what animates, I suspect, most team athletics, all of whom, in America, have totems of some sort (Dolphins, Steelers, Braves), and who, in Europe, have place names, which is more settled countries amount to the same thing.
Now, what Collectivist politics–perhaps this is a phrase I should start using in preference to Leftism–grants is twofold. First, you get a place. You are now a Them, which is to say an Us. You belong. However, the terms are not particularly congenial. You get a place, but not a fixed culture. The cost you pay is continual alteration of your core self. You have to renounced the right to form your own opinions. You have to discard your personal, individual conscience. You have to believe one thing one day, and something different–perhaps radically different–the next.
For example, you have to believe that Bill Clintons long term–across his career–sexual depradations, which have been nearly entirely based on unequal power relations, mean nothing, and that Hillary’s abuse of his victims also mean nothing, BUT that Trump’s boasts about his sexual exploits is the only thing that should matter with respect to him, never mind the extreme implausibility that a billionaire could survive without hundreds of lawsuits if he was truly doing something the women involved found awful and degrading. The simple truth is that a lot of women wanted to fuck Donald Trump, and many did. He did not rape Stormy Daniels. He fucked her because he paid her, or perhaps because she wanted to, but either way it was consensual.
You have to believe that Trump lying about Daniels was unPresidential, but that Clinton lying under oath was just one of those things. The math does not add up.
So, basically, to become a hard core Leftist, you have to consent to have your mind raped repeatedly. You have to surrender your soul and your dignity. Given this, who would make this deal?
PEOPLE WHO HAVE NO OTHER CHOICE, or in any event, who possess no awareness of an alternative. And what they DO get is the pleasure of participating in group violence. All of them together are shouting the same things at the same people at the same time. They get to feel virtuous by association. They get to indulge all their basest instincts and be rewarded for it, praised for it, promoted for it.
And with respect to this identity notion, do you doubt that some people become “trans” because it allows them to join another group? Rather than be a bland nobody, now you are a political hero, now you are in a protected group, whose rights everyone is eager to shout about.
And with intersectionality, you get to join not just multiple groups, but an increasingly “elite” group. The more grievances you are told you can claim, the better you become as a person WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING, without maturing emotionally or socially. Indeed, I think on balance emotional retrogression is prized.
Given how embedded these emotional and social dynamics are within the Western world, it is hard to be optimistic about the future. I continue to wonder if I shouldn’t find some backwater somewhere to live out my life. If I didn’t have kids, I might do that. But I do, and my place is on the front line, fighting. Many battles have been won without hope. I have won many in my own life.
Persistence is everything in life. Life IS persistence.