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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
You don’t have to tell me about Tolkien’s mythology. I’m pretty sure that I could name the sons of Feanor off the top of my head.
But I do think that Tolkien’s works are an obvious Christian allegory, with Morgoth in the role of Satan. Do you disagree?
I don’t know for certain that Tolkien had that in mind, but it can certainly be interpreted that way. I’ve wondered why he made a distinction between elves and men, with elves lives being tied to earth and men being granted the “gift” of physical death and the ability leave earth for a fate unknown to both the elves and men.
My bad. Went straight from your post to the comments. Fixed it.
Conservative policies are hated because they are successful. Conservative policies are based on the frailties of human nature. People are lazier and more corrupt than we would like them to be. So when conservative policies work it disproves the utopian desire for perfection and it disappoints nihilists.
When conservatives point to red states and say, “See. We have lots of jobs and low crime rates and people are leaving blue states and we are doing some school choice stuff that really seems to help poor and minority folks.” We conservatives miss the point. It’s not about improving our flawed societies, it’s about perfectionism or a desire to destroy our imperfect world.
That is why they focus on conservatives having bad intent. They also deeply feel that conservatives are actually malicious because the current American lifestyle and the many frailties of human nature are unacceptable. To heck with all those poor folks getting jobs and being safe and choosing a school for their kids.
Bullseye!
I once asked a progressive I had the misfortune to work with why he was so ticked off all the time and his answer was, “Because we have the power to create a utopia and we waste our efforts on . . .” I don’t remember what he thought we were wasting our efforts on because I had heard enough to stop listening.
The other aspect of people such as that twit is that they don’t believe in any absolute values, so any criticism they make of someone they dislike must be based on emotion. What else do they have? They can’t claim a conservative is evil for willingly violating an objective moral standard, because they don’t believe such standards exist. The best they can do is conflate “evil” with things they don’t like.
Oh come on, this isn’t Henry! Sex robots aren’t mentioned even once!
The latest powerline three whiskey happy hour talks about this stuff.
It’s a bit of the chicken or the egg problem, though, isn’t it? Do people adhere to leftism first because they’re affirmed for it, or because they feel so darned good about themselves for wanting to protect the climate, and promote equal pay for women, and stop wars, blah, blah, blah. . .?
Once you’re in that loop, though, I can see that it’s VERY hard to break free of it.
EDIT: Because you will lose friends and family and your standing in the community and maybe even your livelihood once you reject the ideology. It’s a cult with all the punishments in place for heretics.
Eric Hoffer
I literally described Morgoth’s being an “archangel” cast out of “heaven”. With a following of lesser “angels”. Oy!
Of course I agree!
I guess that “playing along” with Tolkien’s own demurral on there being any Judeo-Christian allegories in his work was a bit too subtle.
Yup.
It is at 51:10 when they discuss this.
https://ricochet.com/podcast/powerline/the-three-whisky-happy-hour-with-guest-bartender-john-yoo-2/
John Yoo makes a joke about how odd it is that conservatives seem to be happier even though they can’t do all the fun stuff. Lucretia in a touching moment of compassion for the left noticed how horrible it is to have a leftist mindset. You don’t believe in Truth so you have to argue for your truth and when someone argues against it, it destroys your world.
So true. /heh
Ian Rowe addresses the nihilism of the left with regard to race in an excellent interview with Peter Robinson.
The comment about being frustrated about not being able to create beautiful things caught my attention because some years ago someone pointed out to me that leftists rarely create new things. Leftists almost entirely just destroy or reappropriate things created by others. This is seen in its simplest form in movies and other visual entertainment. Leftists can’t create new characters to be their homosexuality or transgender or female or black or whatever identity box hero. All they can do is reconfigure an existing James Bond or Ghostbusters or Captain America.