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My 750th post: The GUTOL (Grand Unified Theory Of Leftism)
There has been an interesting exchange of ideas recently on Ricochet, in this order:
- I recently wrote a post in which I wondered how my leftist friends, who are intelligent and nice people, could vote for leftism, given its horrifying record of humanitarian catastrophes around the globe.
- Henry responded with a brilliant post in which he suggested that leftism resonates with unhappy people: “My theory is that miserable people often can’t accept that they are miserable for internal reasons, so they externalize.” He suggested that if the left was motivated by compassion for the poor, they would promote capitalism, so the poor could become rich. But instead, they lash out at those they think are making them miserable – the wealthy, the producers, and even society itself. Thus, he says, “Among the hard leftists is a hatred of what is good and beautiful is more of a motivation than compassion.”
- In the comments of Henry’s post, Bryan tossed in this nugget of wisdom: “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.”
- Then iWe suggested in a post (which I don’t think was intended to be part of this discussion) that he didn’t believe that people wanted to really live. He wrote that most people simply want to get through life with a minimum of difficulty, and are reluctant to live life with vigor and passion.
All of this got my propeller spinning a bit. Let’s see if I can make sense of all this.
First, in defense of my simplistic question, I think this is a very important point. In national elections, Democrats consistently win around half the popular vote. That’s incredible. The party of slavery, the party that promotes the same leftism that led to the deaths of 100 million people in the 1900s, the party that is led by inspiring, youthful, charismatic figures like Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer – that party wins about half the popular vote. Regardless of who their candidate is at the time.
And most of the people that vote for Democrats are nice, caring, intelligent, pleasant people. I find that astounding.
Henry’s response was brilliant, I thought. Leftists claim to want a Utopia. And maybe they do, on a certain level. But their primary motivation is punishing whoever they blame for their problems.
Now, we all have problems. But not all of us blame others for our problems. P.J. O’Rourke wrote something like, “One problem with becoming a conservative was that I had more difficulty finding someone to blame for my problems.”
Taking responsibility for our problems is unpleasant. The painful soul-searching needed to find and correct our own flaws is even more unpleasant. It’s easier to just blame rich people. Or Jews. Or Christians. Or heterosexual white males. Or whoever. Anybody but you. You’re a helpless victim of forces beyond your control. That makes you virtuous and that makes government your only hope. Which gives you, and your government, more power than you deserve. And more power than is safe.
Then, to Bryan’s point, I’ve also noticed over the course of my career that people much prefer to have problems that they can’t do anything about.
If someone develops diabetes, I’ll say, “You know, it might help if you don’t live on donuts, sweet tea, Little Debbies, and Fritos.”
The patient will immediately become defensive: “It’s genetic! My brother has diabetes too!”
Me: “He’s my patient, too. And you’re right, he also has diabetes. Because he lives on donuts, sweet tea, Little Debbies, and Fritos.”
I’ve had patients transfer to another doctor after conversations like that. But if I tell them that they have pancreatic cancer and they’re going to be dead in three months, they’re strangely reassured by the fact that it was just bad luck. Not their fault. Which makes it more tolerable, somehow.
Which brings up iWe’s (possibly unintentional) contribution to this discussion. If people wanted to live their best life, they would want to take control of their lives. But taking control would mean also taking responsibility for their lives. Which is difficult. So they voluntarily give up control over their lives, to be absolved of responsibility over their lives.
Either way, things will go wrong. There will be disappointments in your life, no matter who’s responsible.
But if they are responsible for their own disappointments, that leads to unpleasant periods of self-doubt and agonizing efforts at self-improvement. Very difficult stuff. No fun whatsoever.
But if government is responsible for their disappointments, then it’s not their fault. Less pressure on them, I suppose.
What they don’t understand is that lack of control over one’s life also leads to bitter resentments. For example, I prescribe a medicine to a patient. It’s expensive. He asks if there are cheaper options. I say yes, but they’re not quite as effective. He says fine, give me the cheaper one, I’ll call you if it doesn’t work, and he’s pleased to have saved some money. But if he were on a government health care plan that refused to pay for the good stuff and instead gave him the second-rate drug, he’d be furious.
Either way, he gets the second-rate drug. But in one case he’s happy, and in the other case he’s furious.
Allowing others to control your life leads to anger and resentment. But still, to iWe’s point, many still prefer to avoid taking responsibility for themselves. So they become the miserable recruits for the Democrat party that Henry described in his post.
We tell children, from the age of 3 to their early 20s: Ok, you’re a good person. You don’t have to change – you’re as good as it gets, right now. What a horrifying concept. You’ve just extinguished any hope they have for the future.
By telling them that they are winners – and they can’t fail – you’re also telling them that they can’t succeed. It’s hopeless. No wonder they’re miserable. No wonder they look for someone to blame for their misery.
Ok, so let me try to tie all this together:
Society is fairly prosperous and stable, so many people lead happy, wealthy lives.
But some do not. And those people don’t wonder why they have failed while others have succeeded. Instead, those people look for others to blame. They blame family, religion, societal norms, and other restrictive systems which limit their behavior.
The successful people feel bad for the less successful, so they also criticize and attack the family, religion, and societal norms that led to their own success, out of sympathy for the less fortunate.
Once enough people turn against family, religion, and societal norms, then those things start to lose influence. We start to raise children without those things. After all, we don’t want to oppress them.
Those children, lacking the wisdom of the ages and lacking structure, understandably become miserable adults.
If you’re raised on nihilism, and you believe that your life has no greater purpose than the pursuit of immediate pleasures, and you believe it’s up to someone else to provide them for you, then nothing is ever good enough. And you’re bound to be miserable. Happiness becomes impossible.
Those miserable adults are naturally hesitant to believe that their misery is their own fault (and you could argue that it’s not). So they blame those who are more fortunate. Miserable people hate happy people.
The miserable people feel vindicated and virtuous. They literally can do no wrong – crimes are not criminal if they’re done for the greater good. So their attacks on family, religion, and societal norms become progressively more vicious.
The successful become evil, the less successful become good. Kids start smoking pot and playing video games. Why would they work their tails off simply to become successful, and thus, evil? So we get progressively more unsuccessful, miserable people who want government control, and progressively less successful, happy people who want personal independence.
And eventually we reach a critical mass of miserable people. So government power becomes overwhelming. For everyone.
Now family, religion, and societal norms go from supporting a stable society to having no supporters whatsoever. They shrivel and die, and nobody cares. Government will take care of us. That’s more fair.
The culture that supported that previously stable & prosperous society collapses completely, and everyone wonders why. It must be the Republicans’ fault…
Hmmm…
I don’t know. This made more sense in my head than it does now, after I tried to write it out. I still find it astounding that Democrats win half the national vote every time. And I’m amazed that my nice, intelligent, compassionate friends vote for them.
I just don’t get it. I guess because my brain just doesn’t work like that.
But maybe this is at least a partial explanation. Fear of failure leads to willing forfeiture of one’s autonomy, which leads to resentment and misery, which leads to the hatred of happiness and beauty and opportunity, which leads to attacks on the independence of others, which leads to more government power, which leads to misery, and around and around we go.
I guess.
I don’t know.
What do you think?
NOTE: I very much appreciate the contributions of @henrycastaigne, @bryangstephens, and @iwe to this essay. If I misrepresented your views in any way, please let me know and I’ll make corrections. Thanks.
Published in General
What’s your beef against silicon persons?
You are totally begging the question, Henry. They are property, not persons. Intrinsically inferior.
They also should not be allowed to marry.
Progressives started calling themselves liberals because eugenics had been firmly established as a “progressive” goal by Margaret Sanger and others. Eugenics fell into disfavor when the activities of those who put the concept most thoroughly into practice had the misfortune of losing World War II.
Just one of those things.
What if they have souls?
Which makes the Nazis liberals or progressives or both. Double plus good. Home run.
So I am a big fan of eugenics but not Nazism. Because of the racism and the socialism. Eugenics is by its definition good. On an unrelated post, if Dr. Bastiat wants to redirect this thread to something like his original intention. Totally cool.
No. They shared a common evil cause. The American eugenicists didn’t want blacks. They weren’t big fans of Southern Europeans or Asians either, but they had priorities. Their mechanisms aimed at preventing them from reproducing. The National Socialists (Nazis) didn’t want “non-Aryans.” So no Jews, or Slavs, or Romani. While they were at it, they figured out that they might as well do away with the homosexuals, the Seventh Day Adventists, and the handicapped. Their methods were a little more abrupt.
That is absurd.
Uhmmnnn… why? Eugenics literally translates as good genes. Eu is greek for goodness and wellness and genics is self-obvious. I would be happier and healthier if I had more good genes rather than less bad genes. So would you. So… why is it absurd.
Would you prefer a make another word that means exactly the same thing as eugenics but without the racist connotation?
Who judges? You? Maybe your genes aren’t up to snuff. What makes you think that you make the cut?
I apologise for my abrupt initial response, I should have been more measured.
My point is: it just doesn’t seem that progressives or liberals today are about genocide as a good way to keep the gene pool (or the culture) a certain way (ie to conserve it). I’d call myself a progressive and that isn’t my goal at all. I’d be surprised if any self-described progressive believed that.
Edited to add:
I’d be truly surprised if the pleasant people Dr B knows who still vote Democrat believe this either.
And here, I think, is a pitfall for GUTOL as articulated by Conservatives. And if Leftists (Liberals or Progressives) articulated GUTOR I believe they’d run into the same issue.
No, you’re fine. The Progressives let go of eugenics when the stink of the concentration camps became intolerable. Once its viability as a path to power was clearly lost, they dropped it like a leaky tin of Zyklon-B. You’d have to be a pea-wit to believe that government – any government – has the brainpower to pick which genes are good or should even be allowed to try. Much better to let the government make all the decisions necessary to run the entire economy. Surely they are smart enough to handle that, right?
They let go of the TERM eugenics but they still practice it, they just call it “right to choose” now, and aim it mostly at minorities.
Eugenicists murder people in their hearts. They believe that some others do not fit their view of which people who should be allowed to exist. If time travel were available, they would go back in time and see that those they don’t approve would never have been born. But all they have is the future, and they certainly have made the determination that all of whom they don’t approve will never be born. It’s not just race, it’s IQ, physical appearance, and personal convictions (call it religion or creed) that they would eradicate.
Eugenics is a euphemism. It actually means Genocide.
Yes
What do you call it when Down Syndrome is “eradicated” from Iceland, Zafar?
What will happen when a prenatal test is available for a condition that inflicts considerable social disadvantage, requires lifelong medical care, and carries an apparently irremediable 40% rate of attempted suicide (with all the misery that implies?) Wouldn’t a tender-hearted parent have an abortion?
The intention may not be the extermination of trans people, but the result would be.
By the way, I strongly suspect that if a predisposition toward homosexuality could be diagnosed before birth, women would abort their potentially-gay babies. Not, of course, because they “hate” gays and lesbians: Ask a very nice, progressive woman who aborted her Down Syndrome kid whether she “hates” the handicapped, and she will indignantly deny it—same for the one who aborted the kid with congenital deafness, clubfoot, cleft lip or cleft hand. Indeed, such a woman will couch her decision in “good mother” language around sparing the child a lifetime of suffering. Or she’ll admit—“bravely”of course—that while other, better people have what it takes to rear a child with a disability, she’s got other priorities.
Having had this conversation with a number of women, I am convinced that most would do the same when it comes to that little gay, lesbian, trans or potentially-obese fetus, and no, the world will never be quite “accepting” enough to make her change her mind.
As Down Syndrome babies are eliminated, programs and systems for supporting Down Syndrome people are, natually, eliminated also. The same is true of other variations from the sought-after human perfection, and this alters the “choice architecture” for women who might otherwise choose life.
And the result— reasonable, progressive, government-funded “free” choice by free “choice” —is eugenics.
Meanwhile, nearly 40% of the women who have abortions in America are black, meaning that abortion—“choice” by “choice”—is disproportionately eradicating black Americans, thanks to progressive policies.
The number one cause of perinatal mortality among black women is homicide. And the number one cause of death for young black men is homicide. Enact progressive policies—defund and demoralize the police, decriminalize anti-social behavior and de-incarcerate criminals and the one observable concrete result is more dead black people.
The net result of progressive policies —the welfare system, go soft-on-crime, abortion-on-demand—turns out to be the gradual elimination of precisely those people that the old-school eugenicists believed ought to be culled from the herd.
I can’t remember where I heard this. Supposedly in polling, 20% of people say they would abort a downs syndrome child. In practice it’s 80%.
I think I heard it on a CATO libertarian podcast interview with Brian Caplan about something related to public choice theory.
I am 100% sure this is where I got this, now. He has supposedly come up with a new way to prove that politicians lie all of the time. Something like that. I couldn’t get into it, but I will give it another try. He’s a pretty smart professor for conservatives and libertarians.
I either did not make the cut or I perhaps something went very epigenetically when my mother was pregnant with me. We really don’t have the science down when it comes neurochemistry, genetics or what happens when to the fetus when a mother is pregnant.
I see no reason that other people should be born like me or born with propensities towards stupidity, the zero-sum economic fallacy, sociopathy or schizophrenia.
It’s not like G-d makes people in mercy or goodness. We are made in the image of rapists, politicians and chimps.
Don’t black-Americans breed at higher rates than whites despite a minority black ladies using abortion as contraception?
By the way, I can expand my eugenics theory: One of the results of welfare programs as implemented (designed?) is fatherless households. The fatherless (especially male, but also female) are disproportionately likely to end up in prison, and during what would ordinarily be the years of peak fertility.
Incarcerated women are far less likely to successfully reproduce (even given the innovation of imprisoning men who say they are trans women with women). Women whose potential mates are statistically very likely to be “involved with the criminal justice system” have a further hurdle. For too many, these prove insurmountable: Contrary to the outdated (and frankly bigoted) image of the black “Welfare Queen” with five kids, black Americans are not reproducing themselves at replacement rates, even if you do not disaggregate fecund African immigrants.
Nowhere in progressive-land do I find support for black (or any) reproduction as a source of happiness or even of future political power. “Julia” of Obama’s famous ad, has one child, thus not replacing, in the next generation the two persons (one invisible, of course) who commingled in this one. The sons of former slaves aren’t going to be around to sup with the sons of former slaveowners: the progressives (choice by choice) will have wiped them out at last.
Actually, they know some things about this. If the mother is anxious or angry about being pregnant it can cause psychological problems.
If things go by the book from the third trimester to age 3, that prevents a lot of problems.
People definitely aren’t born good. Parenting is required.
I think they should. I find it just. Why inflict life on such an entity?
With regard to homosexuality. More evidence suggests that homosexuals receive higher rates of either estrogen or testosterone while in utero. It is doubtful that homosexuality doesn’t have a genetic component because everything has a genetic component but it might primarily be uterine chemical imbalances that create homosexuality.
And yet, if a cure were to be found, you’d be accused of wanting to murder all existing homosexuals.
Central planning never works. How many problems can you trace back to LBJ? I would say a [REDACTED] ton.
Central planning never works and nobody in this country is serious about growing and developing human capital.
According to Scott Yenor homosexuals consistently have twice the rates of suicide compared to the regular population. I seem to notice how homosexuals are consistently overrepresented in artistic endeavors. I would prefer that gays have genes that make them kill themselves less while still maximizing their creativity.
You just want them for their art? How selfish.
There is more to Progressivism than abortion on demand and there is more to Conservatism than Irish laundries. Don’t you think?
That said – I don’t believe I have the right to force a woman to give birth to a gay baby if she doesn’t want to. I may not like the result of a critical mass of women making this choice, but it is still their choice to make. Not mine, and not yours either.
It is only among conservative religious groups that there is a majority belief that God sends the children he sends, and he sends them in the condition they arrive, and that’s that – to try and change this is to argue with God so don’t do that. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the furture you imagine Progressives would pump out (below replacement rate) all straight kids while the gays would (still) emerge from Conservative communities?
That’s right, blame the mother.
It doesn’t matter if progressives “pump out” all straight kids if it’s below replacement rate; ultimately they “go out of business” (to quote Mark Steyn).
And I think conservatives would be looking for ways to correct or prevent such things before conception or in utero, rather than resorting to abortion.