Early on, I hit this point between anger and sadness. That is where the focus needs to be. Anger pushes out, and sadness pulls in, but both originate in the primal disruption, the trauma, that after which nothing was the same. This is the best description I can offer, but what I saw was that both are unhealthy: sadness is more or less a decision you need help; and anger is directed at punishment of others. Neither is actually oriented around healing, or forward progress. Only by sensing and entering that middle field can you address on the emotional plain those things which continue to disrupt you, by diverting you down both of those paths, perhaps in alternating ways, perhaps in a “monopolar” way. Can we speak of monopolar rage? I think so.
Likewise, it occurred to me the other day that Leftism is really about EITHER punishing people, or “helping” them, whether they want it or not. You punish the rich (or the Jews, or the Tutsis/Hutus, or Chinese, or whoever else, depending on where you are), while more or less coercing the poor, the working people, the class you claim to care about, in directions they would not have chosen, and which in almost all cases cause massive increases of misery.
Procrustes bed presumably never precisely fit anyone. In this analogy, the rich have their legs cut off–and/or their heads–which is punishment; but the poor are likewise put on the rack, and stretched in directions the Leftists feel they should go. Who fits? Solely the ruling elite themselves, and then only if everyone conforms well to everyone else.
Is there not a structural homology here? You have a direct expression of rage, directed in almost all cases at people guilty of nothing but superior intelligence and motivation to work; and on the other you “nurture” the sad, the lonely, the displaced, the outcast, the Other.
Can we not see this as a dual projection, in a psychological sense, of people who are unable to digest their own emotions? Take Frances Fox Piven: she is an amoral bitch. She wants to ruin everything, destroy everything, and for what? To salve deep seated emotions SHE has, that SHE can’t get through, using a reality in which the actual human beings involved suffer horribly, predictably, and uselessly.
When you see people who can only live in abstraction, you can assume as a rule that they have enormous blind spots in them, forced upon them by turmoil–unreason, feeling, myth, “primality”–they fear deeply. This is why the external order of totalitarianism appeals so mightily to them, why our academic caste has been so badly wrong–so monstrous, so demonic–for so long.