Posted on 02/27/2006 6:01:18 AM PST by mal
Many conservatives are absolutely perplexed by the question of what motivates liberals to take the patently wrong political positions they do. It’s difficult to explain it without believing such obviously wrong ideas like “liberals are just stupid”, or “they want to destroy our country”, but sometimes we resort to those explanations out of pure frustration.
But what is the explanation? Why do seemingly good, intelligent people take positions that cause so much harm in the face of all the facts? I’ve finally stumbled upon the answer, and it’s so stunningly simple, yet profound in its implications, that it’s absolutely mind-boggling. Liberalism isn’t a political ideology; it’s a psychology - the psychology of self-satisfaction to be precise.
A liberal (or a leftist; I use the terms interchangeably), is a person who only cares about politics to the extent that doing so makes him or her feel good, or avoid feeling bad, due both to external and internal factors. Their motivations can include things like a desire to feel intelligent, moral, noble, or unique, as well as a desire for peer acceptance or reverence, and aversion to being ostracized, among many other things.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinioneditorials.com ...
Some what they do is deliberately to subvert the society of "their parents". "Overthrow the establishment".
The customs and morals that came before the Baby Boomers are to be "rejected".
It's actually a psychopathology.
People with experience base their decisions on "What has worked for me in the past."
People with little or no experience, like the young, base their decisions on "What I imagine will work."
Some people never make the transition from fantasy-based decisions to decisions based on real experience.
Liberalism makes sense only if you believe the worst about America. That we are evil imperialists. That capitalism is unfair and cruel, and that any inequality among social and ethnic groups is a product of racism and oppression.
Per Michael Savage?
Liberals are indeed a cult of the maladapted. They cannot understand the dichotomy between a certain prophetic manipulative intelligence of "getting away with it" with the disastrous and immoral consequences that result. They want the money but not the blood or hard work required to make that money valuable. Not because of money itself, but because of liberals' lust for money and niceties, they will always find it criminal to not have access to it even if they do nothing for it.
The misfit liberal was also well adapted in the book Sloth by Wasserstein. It relates a dream universe of giving up on competing and enjoying doing nothing because no common liberal can ever dream to become rich & beautiful like, say, Pamela Anderson.
ping for later read
Nailed it.
Good Post!
You're right, it seems liberals all want to go to Heaven, yet they are not willing to die.
Liberals have replaced God with government and are busily trying to mold their God into their own image.
Good read.
Liberalism is a PSYCHOSIS, not psychology, IMO.
Many of those are in academia, and believe they can "model" that which they do not know, or have not experienced. They then construct their model to suit their needs or desired outcomes, but they never factor in unintended consequences.
Democrat voters/liberals= sociopaths.
Liberals haven't matured to a place where they can, and prefer to, take care of themselves. They believe the whole world owes them favors.
Yes. Abnormal Psychology.
"A liberal (or a leftist; I use the terms interchangeably)"
Well you shouldn't. There is nothing liberal about these people. It's an Orwellian paradox of their own creation, like "love is hate", "war is peace", or "freedom is slavery".
Do not relinquish this good and decent word to these illiberal Leftists. A better term for them would be sinister, which, of course, has several meanings including left.
I like the word sinister for them, implying, as it does, that they are malevolent, as of course they are, and that they are a bunch of bastards, which, of course, they are, as in bar sinister,
But I also like the word Leftist, implying, as it does, that, if we let them have their way, we will all be left behind in the dust of their self-serving objectives and, furthermore, that we will all have nothing left.
There are many good words for these people, but liberal does not apply to them. And don't let them have it!
Well Michael says its a mental disorder. I guess it is a psychopathology.
Certainly there is projection and self-loathing. We've all heard of "liberal guilt".
That is why Political Correctness must be removed from our schools and media "style guides". PC is not about free thought. It is about indoctrination into an agenda that cannot be "questioned". And it is an unhealthy agenda. It's goal is to subvert the establishment. Demonize dead white European males.
The barking moonbat left (the ones who say "question authority) is comprised of anarchists and socialists who seek to overthrow our constitutional form of governmnet. I say question those who say "question authority". Better to question everything, rather than just doing the bidding of the enemies of the USA.
I think Psychopathology is more fitting
Some of the best known liberals have impressive intellects, but cannot overcome their emotional reaction to issues. Their emotions dictate that they take a position that makes them feel good about themselves. They spend little time thinking, preferring to react emotional and then, figure a way to support their emotional reactions intellectually. This may be one reason that the Left controls the MSM. Viewing the news through various media produces an emotional reaction, just what the Left desires.
There is an admirable passion to liberalism, regardless of how misguided.
Conservatives tend to take a no-nonsense, common sense approach and stick with it. Occasionally, one wishes Conservatives had the passion exhibited by Liberals and would take the time and effort to show up at protests, join advocacy groups and donate money en masse like Liberals. We need the "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore attitude" of the Left in order to combat them on every front.
I saved in favorites to read later, as it is pretty long. But the headline nails it. Actually, this is an idea I've had for some time now. Who are the liberals?. There are two groups: one the moral relativists, the other those who can take direct advantage of liberalism.
The latter is pretty obvious. The more I get from other people's taxes the better.
About the moral relativists, they are hedonists. Of course everybody likes to have an easy, pleasurable way of life. In a society where that's is not only allowed but seen as "chic", you can do whatever you want. There only want basic rules to get away with it. Like, you live your life, I live mine. We don't judge each other. I don't kill you, you don't kill me. Just leave me alone. That's why defend abortion so fiercely. If a baby is an inconvenience for me, me, me, bwaaaaah, I eliminate him, because there are no consequences.
Why then do they defend things like higher taxes and redistribution of health?. Two reasons, one is that they are so deeply selfish that the need a way way to feel moral superiority. The second, is that it's a way of ... OK...now I give you money, and you leave me alone to do whatever I want.
That all, as I understand it, is not an idelogy. Those people only believe in themselves, money, pleasure, power....Anything that sounds like altruism, is out of their lives, doesn't matter how they want to put it.
The explanation is far simpler than one might imagine.
The answer manifests itself in the structure of the human genome. Liberalism can be explained by my theory that liberals are people who lack the gene required to process reality.
I have to draw a distinction between liberals and the people who agree with them.
My theory does not extent to those agendas that derive power by the constant shearing of the liberal sheep who cannot process reality.
Examples supporting my theory that some people lack the gene required to process reality are abundant. I’ll list some examples for your evaluation.
Would a person who can process reality support subsidizing, taxing, regulating, and then suing a product manufacturer?
Would a person who can process reality believe that throwing more money at education will improve its quality but adding educational choice will not?
Would a person who can process reality agree that black citizens are equal and then support affirmative action and quotas indicating the person believes blacks are not equal?
Would a person who can process reality believe that people cannot be trusted and at the same time believe that we can write laws people will abide by because they can be trusted?
Would a person who can process reality support diverting tax-payer funds from welfare recipients to lawyers hired to sue gun manufacturers?
Would a person who can process reality find merit in either of the two following observations?
A Republic can only exist as a permanent form of government until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that the Republic always collapses over loose fiscal policy, and is always followed by tyranny.
"The Roman Republic fell, not because of the ambition of Caesar or Augustus, but because it had already long ceased to be in any real sense a republic at all. When the sturdy Roman plebeian, who lived by his own labor, who voted without reward according to his own convictions, and who with his fellows formed in war the terrible Roman legion, had been changed into an idle creature who craved nothing in life save the gratification of a thirst for vapid excitement, who was fed by the state, and who directly or indirectly sold his vote to the highest bidder, then the end of the Republic was at hand, and nothing could save it. The laws were the same as they had been, but the people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted for nothing."
It is human nature to want something for nothing but it is the liberal who expects something for nothing.
Socialism is the problem. Agendas exist which seek to change the United States from a Republic to a democracy. The reality challenged liberal is the eager tool of these agendas.
People who cannot process reality are not different from the The Wild and (once) Free Pigs of the Okefenokee Swamp. As such, their good intentions and belief in the free corn remain a useful tool for democracy and tyranny to prevail.
"It's actually a psychopathology."
How about a form of paranoid schizophrenia?
Not to blow my own horn, but I outlined the history of this transformation in my book The Road to Malpsychia (Encounter Books). Progressives who could no longer subscribe to Marxism transferred their faith to the humanistic psychology outlined by Abe Maslow. According to Maslow, agenda-driven "revolutionary science" must replace organized religion, and traditional values give way to an ethic of "inclusiveness."
Maslow's list of self-actualized role models was limited almost entirely to leftists. Moreover, his ideas imply rule by an elite cadre of social scientists whose "recent research" sets the agenda for us all.
As a former lefty, I can attest to the power of leftism's psychological rewards, and it is for this reason it is so difficult to leave the tribe. As I read this, I was also struck by the similarity between liberal psychology and that of a seven year old. Liberalism is ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, and in an adult this is a psychosis, not a psychology. I suppose the author was being kind in an attempt to actually get some liberals to see themselves in what he was describing, I could assure him it will be futile.
My mother, brother, and sister are all Bush-hating libs. It truly IS about personal psychological needs, the brother and sister have both adopted victimhood status, so Bush-bashing for them is a survival mechanism.
Very interesting observation which rings so true to me. Quite possibly they instinctively KNOW at a very young age that they aren't willing to work hard enough to ever have any money, so they begin compensating with all of the psychotic mechanisms the author in the above article describes.
Liberalism is a flesh-eating disease.
"The Vision of the Annointed," by Thomas Sowell
Actually, Liberalism is an infantile mental disorder.
See "Vision of the Annointed: Self-congratulation as a basis for Social Policy" by Thomas Sowell.
"though for the record, and to their great dismay, I don’t think liberals are admirable people..."
I could have told him that 30 years ago ...
It now appears that I was fortunate to be trained during a very brief period when social science tried to emulate objectivity and the scientific method. But it my desire to measure results and assess costs and benefits that puts me at odds with this liberal mentality that wants to feel good about imaginary groups with hypothetical problems that need never be solved. They also don't bother to look for models or research in their unending and repeating social experimentation. If they did, San Francisco would not have recently voted for gun control because research shows it doesn't work. Schools would not keep innovating and experimenting their way back to universal illiteracy but would do what works to educate children. Alternate, science -based policy comes from the Heritage foundation, so I guess research & analysis is now a conservative value.
Many of the humanistic psychologists who looked forward to the demise of organized religion in the sixties ended up being drawn into New Age practices, from Taoism and the I-Ching to spiritualist seances, ESP, wiccan cults etc. This has always amazed me. They were too rational to be believing Christians or Jews, but tarot card readings and channeling the dead were fine.
San Francisco gave us Jim Jones, The Church of Satan, the Manson Family (before they moved to Southern California) and I think Scientology.
They certainly are dead set about finding some "new" truth to replace existing faiths they rejected.
I did very much include peak experiences in my book. Maslow originally thought of peak experiences as a substitute for organized religion, envisioning them as quasi-mystical moments with little content. After so many colleagues began turning to mystical practices (tarot cards, etc.) he was dismayed. He condemned this development in a speech late in his life at a conference of humanistic psychologists and was shouted down. (Another development was LSD-induced "peaks," touted by Timothy Leary, who knew Maslow and borrowed some of his rhetoric.)
In general, Maslow was quite bitter in his later years about the direction his followers were taking. He recognized some of the flaws in his own theories, errors his disciples magnified rather than corrected. In one posthumously published essay, Maslow admits that there is no objective way to distinguish between his self-actualized ideal and the manic phase of a manic-depressive psychosis. (Indeed, his student Abbie Hoffman, who tried to follow Maslow's model, turned out to be a raging bi-polar.)
I'm not against research in psychology and the social sciences. However, the questions researchers choose to investigate, the underlying assumptions behind their research, and the interpretation of the data can all be highly subjective.
How about "liberalism is a psychosis"?
Ooops, MortMan. I hadn't read your post! You know what they say about "great minds". LOL
The cults of the seventies owed a lot to Maslow's idea of peak experiences -- spirituality arising out of a personal mystical revelation as opposed to religious discipline, prayer, and the revealed word of God. Some of the cults -- Jim Jones's church, etc. -- were based on charismatic leaders. Others were psychology cults, like Synanon, primal therapy and est (which borrowed from both Maslow and Scientology). One feature of the latter is that they held out the hope that life would no longer be a struggle. They tended to see the self as an empty vessel that our patriarchal society gradually fills up with painful experiences. Rid yourself of the pain and you'll get back to a state of primal innocence.
The unifying characteristic of both types of cults is that followers are freed from obeying those pesky commandments which call on us to rein in our own desires.
You note how subjective the research can be. I think the application is often disasterous when it is social engineering. Since Freud practicioners have sure rushed down a lot of blind alleys. Normally, I prefer to stick to history.
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