The Liberal Mind: The psychological causes of political madness

Townhall ^ | Dec 4, 2006 | Lyle H. Rossiter Jr., MD

[13Sisters76]

The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness By Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr, MD Monday, December 4, 2006

Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.,a forensic psychiatrist, explains the madness of liberalism in his new book The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness. You can read an excerpt below, and read more at his website libertymind.com.

Like all other human beings, the modern liberal reveals his true character, including his madness, in what he values and devalues, in what he articulates with passion. Of special interest, however, are the many values about which the modern liberal mind is not passionate: his agenda does not insist that the individual is the ultimate economic, social and political unit; it does not idealize individual liberty and the structure of law and order essential to it; it does not defend the basic rights of property and contract; it does not aspire to ideals of authentic autonomy and mutuality; it does not preach an ethic of self-reliance and self-determination; it does not praise courage, forbearance or resilience; it does not celebrate the ethics of consent or the blessings of voluntary cooperation. It does not advocate moral rectitude or understand the critical role of morality in human relating. The liberal agenda does not comprehend an identity of competence, appreciate its importance, or analyze the developmental conditions and social institutions that promote its achievement. The liberal agenda does not understand or recognize personal sovereignty or impose strict limits on coercion by the state. It does not celebrate the genuine altruism of private charity. It does not learn history’s lessons on the evils of collectivism.

What the liberal mind is passionate about is a world filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust, anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation and injustice. Those who occupy this world are “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,” “women,” and the “unemployed.” They are poor, weak, sick, wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited and victimized. They bear no responsibility for their problems. None of their agonies are attributable to faults or failings of their own: not to poor choices, bad habits, faulty judgment, wishful thinking, lack of ambition, low frustration tolerance, mental illness or defects in character. None of the victims’ plight is caused by failure to plan for the future or learn from experience. Instead, the “root causes” of all this pain lie in faulty social conditions: poverty, disease, war, ignorance, unemployment, racial prejudice, ethnic and gender discrimination, modern technology, capitalism, globalization and imperialism. In the radical liberal mind, this suffering is inflicted on the innocent by various predators and persecutors: “Big Business,” “Big Corporations,” “greedy capitalists,” U.S. Imperialists,” “the oppressors,” “the rich,” “the wealthy,” “the powerful” and “the selfish.”

The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to grave agenda of redistributive caretaking. It is a government everywhere doing everything for everyone. The liberal motto is “In Government We Trust.” To rescue the people from their troubled lives, the agenda recommends denial of personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other-pity, fosters government dependency, promotes sexual indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial obligation, justifies theft, ignores rudeness, prescribes complaining and blaming, denigrates marriage and the family, legalizes all abortion, defies religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against the duties of citizenship. Through multiple entitlements to unearned goods, services and social status, the liberal politician promises to ensure everyone’s material welfare, provide for everyone’s healthcare, protect everyone’s self-esteem, correct everyone’s social and political disadvantage, educate every citizen, and eliminate all class distinctions. With liberal intellectuals sharing the glory, the liberal politician is the hero in this melodrama. He takes credit for providing his constituents with whatever they want or need even though he has not produced by his own effort any of the goods, services or status transferred to them but has instead taken them from others by force.

It should be apparent by now that these social policies and the passions that drive them contradict all that is rational in human relating, and they are therefore irrational in themselves. But the faulty conceptions that lie behind these passions cannot be viewed as mere cognitive slippage. The degree of modern liberalism’s irrationality far exceeds any misunderstanding that can be attributed to faulty fact gathering or logical error. Indeed, under careful scrutiny, liberalism’s distortions of the normal ability to reason can only be understood as the product of psychopathology. So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche. The modern liberal mind, its distorted perceptions and its destructive agenda are the product of disturbed personalities.

As is the case in all personality disturbance, defects of this type represent serious failures in development processes. The nature of these failures is detailed below. Among their consequences are the liberal mind’s relentless efforts to misrepresent human nature and to deny certain indispensable requirements for human relating. In his efforts to construct a grand collectivist utopia—to live what Jacques Barzun has called “the unconditioned life” in which “everybody should be safe and at ease in a hundred ways”—the radical liberal attempts to actualize in the real world an idealized fiction that will mitigate all hardship and heal all wounds. (Barzun 2000). He acts out this fiction, essentially a Marxist morality play, in various theaters of human relatedness, most often on the world’s economic, social and political stages. But the play repeatedly folds. Over the course of the Twentieth Century, the radical liberal’s attempts to create a brave new socialist world have invariably failed. At the dawn of the Twenty-first Century his attempts continue to fail in the stagnant economies, moral decay and social turmoil now widespread in Europe. An increasingly bankrupt welfare society is putting the U.S. on track for the same fate if liberalism is not cured there. Because the liberal agenda’s principles violate the rules of ordered liberty, his most determined efforts to realize its visionary fantasies must inevitably fall short. Yet, despite all the evidence against it, the modern liberal mind believes his agenda is good social science. It is, in fact, bad science fiction. He persists in this agenda despite its madness.

Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr, MD is the author of The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness. He received his medical and psychiatric training at the University of Chicago and served for two years as a psychiatrist in the United States Army. He is currently in private practice in the Chicago area.

Copyright © 2006 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

[Scarchin]

Thanks for the post. I just bought a copy of the book - 19.95 with shipping included.

[little jeremiah]

Later read.

[daniel1212]

You are on to something. I would say however is that a true Christian does work for the good of the whole when he submits in faith to Christ.

Liberalism is actually a manifestation of rebellion against God, as it is the work of the original rebel, and the author of the original “victim mentality,” who, being cast down from his unmerited position due to his self - exaltation, insinuated that God had a malevolent purpose in requiring obedience (Gn. 3:1-5). He thus fosters rebellion to the laws of God, because He hates God and the laws which represent His wisdom and character, which is contrary to that of the devil (Jn. 8:44; 10:10).

Under the rebellion which the devil promotes, personal culpability for sin is replaced with blaming the One who made the laws, or whatever Moral Authority represents Him (like rulers who say the believe in traditional moral values). And thus such must be denigrated because they stand in the way of the Liberals desire to “climb up some other way” rather than by submission to the moral absolutes of the Bible. And because such threaten the rebel with the reality of the consequences of sin, and the measures needed because of man’s proclivity to it (unless laws serve the liberals purpose). It is in sympathy with demonic Marxist Communism, which likewise promises a utopia built upon rebellion against God. “I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above.” (Karl Marx)

In the liberal mind, man is not a fallen creature, and like the devil, it believes he should be on the throne, rather than in submission to his Maker (any god they believe in assents to this ethos). And as man is not a fallen being, no measures need to be taken to counteract his sinful proclivities. The Liberal Mind basically rebels against the need for moral laws of a Biblical type, and especially those regarding sexual activity, finally even promoting to join together what God has (sexually) placed asunder.

The need to work by the sweat of one’s brow to earn bread is rebelled against, as instead a victim and entitlement mentality is fostered. In reality they would rather we not even need to wear clothes. Such was much the utopia of hippies, who still essentially promote such (modified) today within the “establishment.”

It sees child discipline an unnecessary and cruel, and works to deliver the child from the necessity of submitting to parents.

Related to this (actually), war is protested by default, not because it usually is driven by lust (at least by one side) and is horrendous, but because in their mind man cannot possibly be as bad (unless it is Pres. Bush) as to necessitate a Just War. And as it is based upon a false premise, such protests have no answers (lay down all weapons, and all will do likewise, as it is ALL your fault these basically good people attack us). Likewise felons are characteristically seen as all victims of the all evil Moral Authority.

They make merchandise of the effects of the fall as they promise to remedy poverty, etc. with pie in the sky ideas at others expense, not their own, and with programs that are demonically designed to produce worse or the same results. Yet like a typical religious cult, they must sometimes have or support some valid ideas by which to justify themselves, patching some holes on a leaking ship while they steer it toward an iceberg.

(Ezek 18:30) “Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel [read USA], every one according to his ways, saith the Lord GOD. Repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so iniquity shall not be your ruin.”

(Prov 14:34) “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.”

(Acts 20:21) “Testifying both to the Jews, and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.”