As animals, we are meant to live in relatively stable worlds where something new sometimes intrudes. Healthy people both welcome novelty and appreciate sameness and continuity.
But it is hard to overstate both the shock of going from a state of believing in God, and God’s messengers and representatives, to that of hating or disbelieving in God, and being therefore cast from the previous order. It is a form of trauma.
And if we take as exemplars the nihilists of the French Revolution, or the actual Nihilists, who give us that name, whose progeny facilitated the Bolshevik Coup, what we see is that their eyes were dulled by “not-belonging” and that destruction became their obsession.
The goal of the Soviets, and the French before them, and frankly since, has been to first attack belief in God and church, then family, then community, then nation, then culture. It has been to deny humans–who are connection-seeking creatures by nature, from finding anything available to attach to, at least once they have been indoctrinated.
Necessarily, on a biological level, this leads to obsession as an ersatz-order, and specifically a Leftist obsession. By design, it is all that is left, and because it is not a natural order,because the people inhabiting it are not emotionally or socially present–trauma is in the very DNA of the disease–there is nothing real to cling to. And so compulsion enters, and specifically the compulsion to repeat.
And it is not a compulsion to repeat the same things. When a Catholic says the Hail Mary, he or she typically finds comfort in it. It is a long tradition. They are thereby connected to the past and presumably the future, and a very wide present which extends over much of the world.
But Leftist compulsion is oriented, daily, around the expression of tribal solidarity through hatred. As I say, it is a simple order lacking in complexity.
To be clear, a modern factory has as its goal zero defects, no mistakes. But all factories are still formally complex systems, into which the new and strange can and does still intrude. So too with human life, but to the very great extent that the factory is the model for modern social life, with perfect safety, perfect replication, perfect reliability in all systems the goal, then we have to understand that the obsession of the Left is with banishing all inconsistency, all intrusions of the truly complex, into their maniacal world.
From this basic process, one can derive Soviet Russia, and Jacobin France, Pol Pot, and the artificial famine of Mao. One can derive the Daily Cause, and the corruption of people like Arianna Huffington who once likely with justice considered themselves Liberals.