Well, if I’m honest, yes I do like to do my best to kick left wingers in the nuts sometimes. In my considered view, they deserve it, and as pathetic an excuse as it is, most of the time they start it. However, also in my considered view, this approach does not improve the world in any way, or change any minds. I am able to use abstraction to back off and ask myself if what I say am doing matches any perceptible, connectable outcome in the real world. I am able to use abstraction to develop a reasonable approximation of how far unprocessed emotions caused me to deviate from effective action.
But, and I’ve said this many ways, there can be rage in abstraction. Marxism consists in nothing else. As an individual, if I look at a person sitting in front of me and see only my picture of them, this is violent. It is a sort of violence. And it is no different if I look at a “society” the same way, or any part of it, say a “class”.
100 years ago wounded intellectuals expressed their violence through extensive rationalizations that resulted in millions of actual deaths.
Now, though, it seems the husk has fallen away. The rationalizations have fallen away, and the violence amounts to “you’re not like us, therefore you must die.”, which, of course, is the most primitive tribalism imaginable. Abstraction and principle have nothing to do with it.
It is an odd fact of modern Leftist intellectual thought that much of it has been devoted to its own destruction. It is almost as if, at an only mildly preconscious level, they said “we are tired of hiding our anger and rage; let us evolve a means of getting at it more quickly. If we evolve new ideas, we will need to defend those ideas, but if we attack the notion of truth, the need to defend any idea disappears. This short circuits this particular loop, which only ever existed to enable us to lie to ourselves and the world about who we are. As long as we maintain group unity, we no longer have to go through that exercise any more. Our hate can shine forth pure and true, and all we have to do is call it justice and tolerance, which is easy because words now only mean what we intend them to mean. This is a beautiful solution. It sparkles on the outside, and we can hide as many dead bodies on the inside as we want.”
At some point, of course, all the Communist regimes evolved into de facto postmodernists. The gap between their stated aims and the reality of what was actually happening was too much. They lied to the outside world, of course, who were kept in the dark about many things, but among the core elites, they simply revalued words such that all potential contradictions disappeared.