And speaking broadly, all long term perceptual errors relate to cognitive rigidity of some sort. The corrections which would come naturally and easily in a connected perceptual system, in an emotionally healthy person, simply do not happen. What you get is repetition.
Which brings me to the point I wanted to make: Leftism, in its core, is a dysfunction of abstraction. Abstraction, per se, can be both useful and harmful. It is needed to build cars, and even to count when the numbers are not present.
But it occurs to me to comment that there is a reason I came up with the idea of Perceptual Breathing so early on. The fact is that, while abstraction is essential in dealing with complex systems like a human society and culture, it can easily acquire a life of its own, and veer very, very far from any actual thing, any actual process, any actual person, any actual reality outright.
Marx, to take an obvious example, was an economic failure. Only 3 of his seven children survived to adulthood, and all seem to have been malnourished–again, because he was a self absorbed, combative fuckup. His ideas have to be seen as an imaginative alternative to his sordid personal reality, most of which he brought on himself. He was not preaching from a position of possibility, but rather of bitterness, anger, and temper.
As I have said many times, human culture is in my view most usefully broken down into four basic tasks: 1) the production and distribution of meaning; 2) of Truth; 3) of Power; and 4) of wealth.
The first and second are obviously related, as are 3 and 4, but all of them are logically distinct, in my view.
Leftism is an attempt to find, through politics (the creation and distribution of power), answers to both the meaning of life, and the nature of truth. Made simple, it aims to force everyone to conform to the same system, same ideas, and to stamp out all alternatives. This, for the pious obsessive, is supposed to allow personal peace.
But the whole project is insane. It uses words like justice, and truth, and compassion, but all of them are made to mean everything but what they mean in common sense usage. All are coopted into this lunatic cult because they have to be. It is the only way the thirst for blood and death can be even superficially rationalized.
In recent days I am really FEELING the insanity of this whole thing. It is like trying to talk sense into Moonies or the Manson cult. The fellow feelings, the sense of propriety and restraint, the understanding of boundaries, the tolerance of difference: all completely eradicated, destroyed, killed and buried.
That such a thing should happen in a free land, where information, even now, is available on nearly all topics, is really quite astonishing.
One thing I was thinking the other day is that social alienation has the effect of increasing vulnerability to cultish sentiments. People whose social connections are weak fear greatly being cast out still further. They are quite prepared to believe the most outlandish things merely to fit in a little bit, merely to get to participate now and then in GroupHate against some out-group. This was the psychosocial framework that enabled the Nazis, and which animates Antifa–the modern Brown/Black Shirts–even now.