I would like to assert that the ideal of Socialism works psychologically to meet the deep mythic need for belonging, but this is a false God. It works to alienate people from one another, from their true emotional and instinctual needs, and makes life uglier, baser, less worthwhile, and ultimately the people in such societies more self destructive, lethargic, disempowered, and detached.
Witness what is happening among the beautiful people of northern Europe. They are importing savages in large numbers who are raping them, robbing them, and shitting–sometimes literally–on everything they touch with impunity. And in places like Germany and Sweden they are blaming THEMSELVES. I was reading an interview with, I believe, a Norwegian man who was anally raped, and he said he felt sympathy for the poor beast who did that to him. This was his version of virtue, of compassion.
And what is obvious to me is that THIS IS ALL HE HAS. This is what constitutes virtue for these people. The ability to set boundaries, to ask other people to exist within them, has been collapsed in his society. The possibility of individual assertion is disappearing radically. All they have is “everything is equal to everything, and if you disagree you are no longer a member of our social order”. Such an “order” is not an order at all. It is a system in the throes of internal collapse.
One must suspect that on some level these people, who have achieved an astonishing comfort in their lives, an astonishing security and following complacency, WANT to be conquered and dominated. Their egalitarianism has failed them. It is not a moral creed at all. It is the ABSENCE of a moral creed. It is the ABSENCE of a tribe, of a community, of genuine peers, of belonging. When you have nothing, it is tempting to want something, and the Muslims are only too happy to offer that. Submit or die is a simple enough proposition.
When you take an impulse like the need for hierarchy, and divorce it from its local contexts. the same instincts come to the fore in unannounced, invisible ways. They come to the fore in dreams of a global dominion, of a global order of power. Many of the best minds of the 20th Century spent their lives in the service of impulses eminently familiar to chimpanzees in the jungle.
The Soviet Union was a chimpanzee project. So was Maoist China. So is Cuba. So is Venezuela. They are papered over with lies, of course, but the underlying psychopathology screams for recognition and explanation.
So if I am right, what do we do? This was the most important point I wanted to make. The issue is simple: everything must be local. We see this recognition, too, across our culture. People are not stupid. They adapt to forces they don’t understand in ways which are natural to them, if they are allowed to, if more powerful primates do not stop them.
“Keep Austin Weird”–and its many off-shoots–stems from this. In a world of mass media, of virtually instantaneous travel, and literally instantaneous communication, one must feel different somehow. One must feel I am this and not that, one of us and not them.
One cannot be a member of an abstract order and get ones emotional needs met. There have to be concrete people, that you can name, that you recognize on the street, with whom you have some sort of relationship.
And the whole benefit of truly Liberal society is that there can be COUNTLESS simultaneous orders. There can be countless power relationships which work to meet this need. Somebody is in charge at the local Kiwanis Club, and the Rotary. Somebody runs the Chess club, and the beer drinking society. Or if nobody feels a need to have a boss, then that is fine too. That expresses a reduced need for power.
It seems to me that the more powerfully individuated a person is–and I would say that this is a function of a person’s relationship to that Spirit which pervades everything–the less control their instincts have, the less animal-like they are, the less need they have to belong to a hierarchy.
The goal of human equality is an enlightened goal. But it can only be met by people who are capable of assuming the mantle of personal power, of truly and deeply being who they are–not someone’s robot, not a hypnotized drone, but a real human being.
The task of the spiritual is both that of eliminating the need for other people, to be who you are, and the elimination of the impulse to shape other people to be more like you. We are all CREATED different. And what creates savor in life–true savor–is in seeing and appreciating these differences.
Everything in our public domain is corrupted, or nearly all of it. We see “diversity” called out as a virtue everywhere, but how different are these people really? I can predict the beliefs of most people on most topics given a small smattering of information. Not invariably, of course, but I think we all must admit that very few people do their own thinking. They repeat what they have been told as their own ideas, in the same way the recipient of a post-hypnotic suggestion repeats the behavior they had implanted.
We have relationships with Big Brother in the media. Large figures on the glowing shrines in our homes act as if they care. Tens of millions of Americans thought Obama cared about them.
But this is not a relationship. For many, it is all they have, but it is not enough. That is why so many of us are depressed, why so many are turning to heroin, why I read yesterday Raves are making a come-back.
Our culture does not meet our needs, but people feel powerless to create something new.
And this is the root attraction of the Left, of Socialism, of Bernie “I pissed off the people in my Commune because I always talked and never worked” Sanders. It feels like an alternative. The rhetoric is hopeful. It seems to promise a brighter future (as of course did Bolshevism, which drew a lot of energy from the “Futurists”).
But this tribe is an abstraction. It requires a firm commitment to believe whatever you are told to believe, to be emotional about the things you are supposed to be emotional about, and to ignore the many sins of the Party Elders.
The worst punishment is excommunication. For the millions of True Believers to be cast out of the tribe would be a death, and this they seek to avoid at all costs. To stay in the tribe they reject the use of individuated reason. They reject debate. They repeat what they are told to repeat and call it their own.
But people need difference to survive, and their tribe consists wholly in conformity. Yes, they mark themselves outwardly with tattoos, or oddities, or sexual peculiarities (as if such a thing still existed), but at root they think they same. Their views on dozens of topics can reliably be predicted. They are not diverse in the slightest. The men who founded our nation were vastly more diverse, despite being all white, all men, and all (at least relatively) rich.
Diversity is on the inside, not the outside. That is why I personally have never marked myself outwardly in any way, and continue to look like a dumb construction worker.
Here is the thing though: I have long argued that the hate directed at conservatives is the result of agitprop oriented around group solidarity. It is that, clearly.
But I also now realize that they have an emotional need to believe that there is an outside to their inside, that their “compassion” is different from the hate which other people must feel.
They need to believe that hate is an active force in the world, for their mission–and thus sense of self–to make any sense at all.
Thus, much of their hate is not the result of what they have been told, but what they must psychologically ASSUME of those who oppose them. They feel, for conservatives, what most of us would feel with respect to the KKK. They think they understand us, because they have a NEED to think this. A true mutual understanding would expose them to the needed knowledge that they have renounced their identities for nothing, that everything they stand for is marching towards tyranny, evil, and the eradication of freedom.
OK. That was what I needed to say.
On a personal psychodynamic note, I will add that part of my passion for all this stems from a recurring sense that the world is moving in the direction of the pathology of my family of origin, where nothing was ever what it seemed, where everyone was angry all the time but wouldn’t admit it, where ego boundaries were confused and under constant attack, and where true lasting happiness was absolutely impossible.
I do not want that for me, for my children, or for any human being. It is impossible to know where the point of no return is, but one can and should fight for what one believes as long as one can. That is my personal creed, and I think it is a good one. You never know when one last effort, one unexpected miracle, some unexpected intercession of Grace, might make all the difference.