When the head is gone, what is left? The gut. You have a being which is pure instinct, which feels rage and hate and violence and all the other nasty emotions with no governing control, no conscience, no restraints.
If those energies had been stagnant, this is liberating. It feels like freedom. You can finally express a rage which was bottled up in hesitancy, which you could not justify rationally.
One of the major problems with soft rich white people–who are the main demographic contributing to leftist politics–is that they do not allow themselves to believe anything. You can’t be truly Christian–not if it means judging gays. You can’t be proudly American. You can’t be proudly male. You can’t value success in a conventional way. Virtually every pathway for expressing creative energy which is sometimes tinged with anger and violence–these are normal human emotions, felt by all–is blocked.
So the solution is to stop thinking, and start reacting. If you like, you can paper it over with a stance of ironic detachment: detachment from the actual constructive use of reason.
You become an anger machine, one absolutely resistant to the persuasive efforts of anyone who may disagree with your politics based upon the blatant and ineluctable fact that the chosen methods never lead to the purported ends. Never.
One of the paradoxes of Identity politics is that they reduce identities; they do not increase them. If you are fortunate enough to be one of the “protected” groups, you still are only defining yourself as a non-white male. I would argue that the principle problem in black communities is precisely a lack of identity, of a sense of self.
You create an authentic self through making decisions based on principles you have chosen to value, particularly when these decisions are sometimes difficult. That is how you define who you are, what sort of person you are. That is how you build authentic self respect. There is no other way. There is no other way.
The essence of Identity politics is division: it is trying to strengthen one group POLITICALLY by attacking another group, typically rich white males. IF ONLY Republicans did not exist, IF ONLY the Man didn’t have it in for them, IF ONLY manna was not prevented from falling from the sky by those evil corporations, all would be right with the world.
But of course this is bullshit, or at least largely bullshit. Anyone who is given a free education and fails to make use of it is stupid. Anyone who does not have a plan to improve their own life, or at least that of their children, is irresponsible and stupid, at least if they don’t like the quality of their life.
You do not build people up by making excuses for them, by giving them reasons not to do work only they can do. This is obvious wisdom, and will never change, no matter how technologically sophisticated we become, or how wealthy.
When I say Identity politics work only politically, I mean that. They work to get cynics elected, and to make them rich. The lot of actual, individual people is impoverished: morally, culturally, socially, and economically.
I have been to Baltimore. Driving downtown, you pass block after block of ghetto, to finally arrive in a nice, gentrified, white, downtown. It would appear the whites live in the suburbs, come downtown for ball games or concerts, then go back home. This leaves thousands of unemployed blacks sitting on their porches every day watching the world go by. You do nothing long enough, it kills your soul. It is depressing.
But I will return to the fact that two parent black families fare just as well as two parent white families, at least when it comes to raising children.
All of the efforts of Democrats to help them have made their lives horrible. Only headless people would continue to believe the lies.