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Morgoth and Misery (Dr. Bastiat’s Question Answered)
Introduction
After reading Dr. Bastiat’s latest piece and a few other essays on Ricochet, I have developed a Morgoth theory of hard leftism. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien writes about how Morgoth became jealous of the creator god because he could not create things as beautiful as he could. Feeling resentful, he decided to pervert what he could not create.
Let’s go down the list of leftist contempt for humanity and humanity’s pursuit of beauty and goodness:
- Resenting the glories of capitalism and their own wealth and comfort, they pine for socialist control.
- Disdainful of a flourishing human civilization, they worship nature.
- Disgusted by how tasty and varied the American diet is, they ask that people eat bugs.
- Dismissive of beauty, they make art that’s intentionally ugly.*
- Disregarding the euphony, they make cacophony.
- Disbelieving in heroism, they have to make Luke Skywalker into a loser and make all men weak.
- Dissatisfied with their lives, they lash out against their family and the concept of family itself.
- Despising how nature created man and woman, they reject the idea of gender.
- Unable to describe goodness, they make stories where everyone is corrupt.
- Ashamed of their country and its history, they yearn for a global government to start the world anew.
- Contemptuous of life itself, abortion becomes a dark sacrament.
The hard lefties I knew in a few colleges weren’t really concerned about the little guy. They didn’t know a lot of poor people who were mistreated by the system and they didn’t hang out with oppressed minorities. They were resentful of their societies and themselves so they pretended to champion the weak in order to become a stronger Morgoth.
As we all have observed, the academic and artistic elite are obsessed with deconstructing everything. The literal meaning of that word means to take apart what was already built. In practice, deconstructionism says that everything from the past was bigoted in such a manner that renders it illegitimate and worthy of destruction.
Look at how they focus on tearing down statues. I cannot think of a better example of their yearning for destruction.
The Podcast
Recently, a vulgar and entertaining podcast I listen to had two podcasters pretty much summing up the hard leftist mindset: Boyscast (NSFW)
Danny: This subsection of people, these communist kinda-like anarchists. They are interesting people. The way their brains work or don’t work, I guess. But it is an interesting subsection of people. They are angry at everything and they don’t like anything. Like, nothing.
Ryan: “If you not angry at your parents you’re [redacted]”…
Danny: They get joy from like nothing. Like, even if you post a photo of like a dog and people say, well, that dog isn’t choosing to be in this photo right now. That dog is a slave. Someone bought that dog.
Ryan: “Some people don’t have dogs.”
Danny: Yeah, some people don’t have dogs. Yeah, they are miserable. And these people live in California. Do they have that much to be miserable about?
My theory is that miserable people often can’t accept that they are miserable for internal reasons, so they externalize. I have heard that some deeply unhappy people change their careers or they move to different cities in order to escape their depression or they go through many different intimate relationships very quickly. It’s an understandable impulse. It’s not easy to understand oneself and looking inward is often quite painful. One of the best stories about looking inward is in The Brothers Karamazov. When Ivan realized that his nihilistic materialist atheism inspired a murder, he undergoes a brain fever and hallucinates/meets the Devil. This isn’t uncommon in old literature. When characters undergo an intense realization or epiphany, it’s often accompanied by a sudden sickness and weeks in bed. Why wouldn’t people avoid that and just blame capitalism or patriarchy or whatever the word of the day is?
Victims of Comfort
The podcaster Adam Carolla (yes, I listen to a lot of podcasts) also talks about how success can destroy people who are depressed in Hollywood. When people are starving actors or singers, they are constantly trying to make it and they have limited funds and time to invest in drugs or Scientology. The constant struggle keeps you from imploding. But eventually, some people make it and they have so many residual checks that they don’t need to work anymore. They now have a large mansion that lets them isolate themselves and things can get really bad really quickly.
There is a similar pattern to generational wealth. As Whittaker Chambers noted in the past, “In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.” In present times, more working class are Republicans and some of the maleducated middle class are Democrats. The upper class are still communists. With the luxury to sit and think all day, they become miserable and nihilistic and wish to destroy the society that made them comfortable and secure.
Beauty and the Human Form
*I was discussing beauty with Mark Camp. We discussed how beautiful Japanese and Indian paintings are in their own odd and unique way. As different as those art forms are, they always strived to be beautiful. If a painter or an architect tried to turn against beauty or against his thousand-year tradition of pursuing that beauty, he would have become a pariah. It is only in Western Civilization that artists began to love ugliness and raise individual innovation above all other values.
Don’t you notice how bizarre and ugly leftist protesters look? I am aware of all the crass but amusing right-wing jokes, but I wish to make a serious point here. In the Antifa or BLM protests, there are girls who are kind of cute but they try to make themselves look ugly with a boy’s haircut and unfeminine clothing. Many of them are covered in tattoos and ear piercings to represent their individuality, though it makes them all look the same.
Another assault on beauty and reality is the body-positive movement. As I understand this movement, it is entirely a left-wing thing. The idea is that if you are fat and not particularly attractive, you shouldn’t feel bad because it’s society’s fault for not finding you attractive. In a similar fashion, some radical trans people are offended that many straight people don’t want to date them. Both ideologies are ready to ignore the significant medical complications concerning both obesity and transgender surgeries.
Poverty and Wealth
If the left was motivated by a compassion that based itself on reality, they would support some version of capitalism in order to enrich the poor and support the nuclear family because it is essential to all human flourishing. I assume that most of the Ricochetti are well-researched enough to know the overwhelming evidence in support of both some version of free markets and a strong family. Logically, people who are devoted to the poor and the downtrodden would want to focus on what has been proven to help the poor and the downtrodden.
In the last few generations, many Asian countries have gone from African levels of poverty to near universal literacy and enough rice and vegetables to feed even beggars. Africa itself is becoming wealthier as the Asian countries have done. Literally, billions of human beings have left absolute poverty and it has almost everything to do with free markets.
The left doesn’t care because capitalism is an icky word. Their compassion doesn’t relate to poor people in reality.
Conclusion
I could go on but I think I’ve made my point. Among the hard leftists is a hatred of what is good and beautiful is more of a motivation than compassion. We aren’t confronting nice but misguided people who just need to listen to some Thomas Sowell lectures. In our age, we are more comfortable with data points and meta-analysis and graphs. Those are all great if we are having a reasonable argument. But this isn’t about a disagreement of policy. We are confronting a spiritual nihilism and it’s time we act like it.
P.S. Russian literature is very helpful in addressing this spiritual nihilism.
Published in General
I nominate this post for Rant of the Week . . .
Holy crap. What an outstanding essay.
Let me go lie down and think about all that a bit.
I’ll have more of a response later.
Spot. On.
Or as Rush used to say, the Democrat party is the party of death. I would add that while most Democrats do not understand this, some appear to be getting the message. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/07/15/capital-city-ruy-teixeira-american-enterprise-institute-00045819
I think you touch on something very true here, in that miserable people cannot appreciate beauty or joy.
I see this more on an individual level in my practice. People do not want to focus on the things they can control and instead spend their energy and attention on things they cannot control. As an example, being a victim absolves one of responsibility, but also agency.
It is a miserable way to live.
Well done, Henry. I think your unique perspectives on people help you cut through some nonsense here and get to the point.
I found a response that connected to Doc’s post: https://ricochet.com/1289330/i-hope-democrats-are-surprised-by-the-destruction-theyve-caused/
But it deserves mentioning again here:
Henry and I have frequently not seen eye-to-eye on several posts…sometimes both of us responding with unneeded snark in a speedy quip. Not great for enlightening the other’s mind.
Dr. B and Bryan G are correct here – outstanding post and necessary reading. Point-by-point, lucid and well-articulated Henry. Well done!
Yes, but! I would like you to consider Roger Kimball’s essay Big Government Benevolence (and save me finishing a post about it).
And
I think the element you’re missing in your otherwise excellent essay is the intoxicating effects of abstract benevolence. Underlying leftism is arrogance, pride, conceit, vanity. . . “I’m such a good person because I hold all the right (left) positions, you shouldn’t question me on the outcomes of my policy preferences. I mean well.” The road to hell and all that. Unfortunately, other people have to suffer the hell the Left creates. It’s psycho-spiritual heroin that affects even those who don’t indulge in it.
Great point.
Even more brilliant point.
Yeah. I’ve sat in many courtrooms during patent litigation. Sometimes as a plaintiff, sometimes as a fact witness, sometimes as an expert witness. Lawyers who are losing their case often spend all their time trying to read the judge and jury’s minds instead of focusing on their own lack of effective lawyering.
A preference for focusing on those things outside one’s control is indeed a thing.
The Devils Pleasure Palace, Michael Walsh
More from Michael Walsh’s book.
I need to review all of this again, but I think this is really good. —->
I’m having trouble coming up with the words to summarize this. Since we mostly don’t live hand to mouth anymore, we set up these institutions like government and then we complain about the injustice of how they are run. The fact is, we have a bunch of institutions that we didn’t have before that give you more agency, basically. You are better off doing what you can to improve your life in spite of bad institutions or the ones that interfere with your agency, which is a real problem if you ask me. You have to get all of this straight in your head and then act and plan in the moment to move forward.
https://progressforum.org/posts/JjiewkPhAYmFzY3KL/death-is-the-default-why-building-is-our-safest-way-forward
Having said that, I think the system genuinely gets in the way of this.
I’m sure somebody else can say all of this better, so have at it.
I totally see this with my own relatives.
Be advised, that Human Progress thing I posted is a CATO project. lol
OK, I’ll buy this as a motivation to pervert/destroy, but what fundamental flaw makes some people jealous while other people are just appreciative?
Great question.
That flaw is the simple decision to take one’s mind to be true. What lies behind that decision is not simple, but comfort and safety set the necessary conditions.
In a word: Arrogance.
The word pride can mean many things, such as joy in accomplishment “I’m proud of you, son.” or a carpenter looking over his works with satisfaction. Pride in the sense of arrogance is what leads to Morgoth’s damnation.
This is best exemplified by another character from Tolkien’s mythos – Aule the Smith. Aule created dwarves independently of the Divine vision, but his creation was meant to supplement the Divine vision, not displace it.
I’ll offer a more serious answer than the gif I posted earlier. It’s been known for thousands of years:
Conservatives sometimes make the mistake of thinking that the crevasse between left and right is informational – that the left just needs to “listen to some Thomas Sowell lectures”, to quote @henrycastaigne
But the crevasse is affectional. The gulf between left and right is a difference in what each side loves.
We are not involved in some kind of upper crust debating society. As the meme says,
Great essay!
Let me fill in some blanks for readers not familiar with the Silmarillion, but know something about Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings:
Many people are tempted into perversion/evil when evil is disguised in handsome forms. Socialism appeals to many because, on the surface, it looks like Christian charity. When that surface is broken by reality for some, it still appeals to many in spite of its horrors because it offers power and privilege to an elite. And some, as Henry notes, come to see those horrors as features.
I freaking love that.
This is a wild video.
There is too much damn debt on this planet generated by government policy for these idiots to talk like this. It’s impossible. You need to procreate slaves to generate the GDP to pay it off. —>
Gotta let the bourbo
It kinda ties into how most conservatives are happy compared to those on the left . . .
This post should have 50 likes by now. Maybe 75.
FYI, Morgoth is Tolkien’s version of Satan.
{ eye roll }
See comment #22.
Someone must provide the sanctioning. Or they must believe the source of the sanctioning.
This is another variable to consider that I think aligns with the whole COVID lockdown/mandate/policy debacle. Our society’s attraction…nay, worshipping of ‘the expert’ or maybe better the expert class. Don’t get me wrong we need experts – unless they covertly attempt to silence other experts’ opinions, a la Fauci and Collins (a la Twitter/YouTube/Facebook censorship).
But it begins with the formation and endorsement of said experts. The force that the legacy media and academic institutions are playing- it is such an oversized role in committing so many of the left into believing this drivel in the face of overwhelming negative results. Dr. B. pointed it out – we have ‘friends’ on the left that we don’t think of as evil or necessarily stupid. Yet currently, they seem on a Highway to Hell believing in a long-ago disproven ideology: nearly 100 million dead through communism in the 20th century alone. What was Reagan’s quote?:
Even more troubling, the left seems oblivious to Milton Friedman’s wise advise (that Thomas Sowell has expounded on so eloquently):
To add one detail to W. C.’s comment, when conservative policies undeniably show good results, it doesn’t matter because their intentions were bad. After all, they are conservatives and bad people so their intentions must be bad, right?