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No-Fault Narcissism
My first car was a used Simca, a tiny car that was great for parking and mileage. Not a babe magnet nor a speedster, neither was it particularly crash-resistant. A young woman in a Mustang blew through a stop sign in Georgetown and totaled my car. A slightly different point of impact might have totaled me as well.
The policeman writing up the accident report (there were additional witnesses nearby) informed her that she would be charged. She became distraught and repeatedly said it was unfair because she did not mean to do it.
Claiming innocence for the direct, foreseeable consequences of one’s actions because of an intention (wish?) that there be no such adverse effects is the real core of leftism. It is less about Marx as it is an exercise in no-fault narcissism. Glorify oneself with noble programmatic or policy fantasies and never accept any blame when their implementation proves disastrous. Recent examples of no-fault narcissism at work:
COVID. Lefties were uniformly wrong about COVID—lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, school closings, etc. Together those policies caused great economic, social, and personal harm. Still, there has not been an outpouring of mea culpas from the legions of lefty lemmings who loudly told us that we must want Granny to die for questioning any of those policies. Even in retrospect, with obvious failure now in clear view, I think that most libs believe that because they meant well, because they chose to believe this was the moral, scientific thing to do, then how could they be wrong? And by corollary, those who disagreed must have had baser motives, so the factual reality and the actual outcome are morally irrelevant. They were still right and noble.
RACE. By the 1980s, it should have dawned on all Americans that President Johnson may have done more harm to African Americans than did CSA President Geoff Davis. Unlike LBJ, at least Davis did not make things worse for them. We are currently embarked on a new, hideously divisive ideological project designed to make black people completely dependent on a white leftist regime. Crime soars, public education implodes, skills, good habits, and useful knowledge are increasingly denied to black kids as the urban body count rises. And all of that is the direct result of the “good intentions” of white liberals.
Climate. Sane professionals, often at significant risk to their persons and careers, have shown that apocalyptic climate change scare stories (a.k.a., “climate porn”) are unfounded. Bjorn Lomborg and others have shown that (a) even using its own working assumptions, and even if the western world were to actually comply, the Paris Climate Accords would produce an ultimate reduction in temperature too small to be measured—and do so at a horrific cost. Even assuming the predicted warming will occur, it would be vastly cheaper simply to adapt than to try to abruptly eliminate fossil fuels. Bad “green” policy is already imposing cost burdens on the poor, leaving people to freeze and disrupting normal economic life. But the sheer nobility of wanting to Save the Planet makes it all OK, no matter how scientifically or economically unsound or much much innocent people must suffer.
[Oddly enough, jet fuel is still just $2.50 a gallon, so maybe Bill Gates should stick to using one of his two Bombadier Challenger 350s (330 gallons/$825 per hour and mothball his two Gulfstream 650s (452 gallons / $1,130 per hour). Do it for the planet, Bill.]
Tens of millions of Americans are still happily voting for policies they likely know are harmful. I am not responsible for what I did not mean to happen nor for anything that I wish did not happen, even if the likelihood of a bad result was pretty obvious. Judge me only by the wonderfulness of my intentions. The wreckage all around us is the result of no-fault narcissism. We need to find ways to start imposing some liability.
Published in General
Those who slavishly carried out the policies might have done it out of narcissm, but I believe that those who made the policies, like LBJ, had much more sinister motives. The Woke are really asleep.
If liberal policies yield bad results, it doesn’t matter because the liberals had good intentions.
If conservative policies yield good results, it doesn’t matter because conservatives had bad intentions.
I sometimes think we should use the term “liberationism” to describe the woolier factions of the left, especially since they use the word “liberation” so much. They want to be “liberated” from any and all discomfort, obligation, or personal responsibility (but not from the authority to coerce others, of which they crave plenty).
This is what makes them different from “libertarianism” which seeks freedom from overt coercion (and rejects any authority to coerce others) rather than liberation from personal responsibility.
I generally like the post, OB.
I don’t like the way that you blame white people for the problems of black people in our country. I don’t entirely disagree with your point, as I do think that the welfare policies started in the 1960s undermined families, and disproportionately hurt marriage and family among American blacks. However, that was giving blacks what they wanted. As I recall, MLK and others wanted the sort of welfare policies that Congress passed and LBJ approved.
And yet, LBJ didn’t run for re-election, even though the intent of those policies was to make re-election a cake walk.
What?
Please explain this. It makes absolutely no sense to me.
My recollection — from studying it as history, as I was an infant at the time — is that LBJ chose not to run for reelection because the Vietnam War was going badly. I don’t think that it had much, if anything, to do with his domestic platform. Further, I don’t think that his welfare policies alienated black voters. To the contrary, my recollection is that black voters have continued to support the same policies, by an overwhelming majority, ever since LBJ.
I thought he was only blaming white liberals, not all whites.
Affirmative action was supposed to be a generational one-off such as promoting by race in a factory that had discriminated by race but the premise was that the qualifications and experience were being ignored because of race. It was not supposed to be the case that race supplanted objective job qualifications.
There was also novel simultaneous interest in the plight of Appalachian poor whites at that time and something analogous to Depression Era relief was what people envisioned, not a career on the dole.
Congress got obsessed that able-bodied men might sponge off of aid to women and kids and wound up actually discouraging family formation. (that was a fetish of some southern Democrats)
Blacks were not in a position to lead or shape policy. Not even MLK at his peak with “40 acres and mule” references to money thought to be owed could get the levels and forms of spending he might have liked. This was the white Democratic majority and its liberal cheer squads all the way.
The corollary, from OB’s post: I am not responsible for what I did not mean to happen nor for anything that I wish did not happen, even if the likelihood of a bad result was pretty obvious. Judge me only by the wonderfulness of my intentions.
I think they’re just feeding a self-esteem hit. I used to think that they didn’t care about the results because all that mattered by that time was to focus on the next Really Important Thing for the next hit. I gave them the benefit of being distracted. I don’t anymore. They know about their aftermath but a) they need the next hit, and b) though they know they can’t admit and defensively won’t give it consideration.
I read this initially as “…are really all sheep…”. Hmmm. Also true.
Jordan Peterson describes their fanatical disconnection from reality as ideological possession.
No, they weren’t. They didn’t agree among themselves and still don’t. Not even lefties in government all agreed among themselves, all the time, though there was a dangerous pressure for conformity among that crowd.
For that matter, not even the people on Ricochet who managed to be loudly wrong were uniformly wrong or always wrong.
If you’re going to search for some group that was uniformly and always right, you’re going to have a long search.
Some people and some groups were far worse than others, but none are always wrong on everything.
No-fault Narcissism- Love the concept!
Since you youngens don’t temember in 1968 there protests in the streets nearly on a daily basis and every friggin day the radio would tell us of the scores of American soldiers killed that day. Almost the entirety of Democratic Party had turned against LBJ.
LBJ didn’t start affirmative action – Nixon and John Mitchell did.
That said LBJ’s Great Society helped mightily to destroy the black family, although that process began in the 1920’s with a series of laws like Taft Hartley and the Minimum Wage which were designed to discourage employing blacks.
Before those laws the percentage of black children born out of wedlock was only slightly above that of whites at 4%. By 1965 it had reached 24% for blacks and today it is at an incredible 74%!
I don’t recall any elected Democrat, any MSM outlet or the commissars of social media for the two years staring in March 2020 (a) bringing attention to Fauci’s many absurd flip flops; (b) admitting that the reality of “breakthrough infections” invalidated the claim that vaccination would end spread; (c) observing the fact that masked and unmasked populations in the same seasonality regions had identical outcomes.
Even if privately held doubts were widespread among lefties, their duty to obey the narrative and protect the narcissistic sensibility that they were Moral, Civic-Minded, Pro-Science kept them in check. Closing schools made zero epidemiological sense. Masking toddlers is assinine. Six-foot floor stickers in stores are absurd. Condemning the unmasked or unvaccinated as societal dangers was fascist nonsense. But at no point was there the slightest burp of dissent from the “elites”.
The crapola persisted precisely because of consent and endorsement by the near-entirety of the educated of the core of the Democratic Party. There is zero evidence of any great divisions in that demographic, including the fact that the worst, most lockdown-happy blue state governors were all re-elected instead of tarred and feathered.
So I have no regret about using “uniformly”.
These are generalities…please provide evidence, by date of quote or policy, of 1 Democrat not conforming. I struggle to find it.
How do I provide an example of what did not happen?
Yes, these are generalities but everything that transpired is consonant with that presumption. Is such an inference based on widespread observable behavior grounding and affirming bad policy with a surprising lack of open dissent barred unless we have polling data indicating that it is based on a preponderance higher than what, 81.75%?
Hell, there was anecdotal reporting of liberals claiming to wear masks because they did want to be mistaken for Republicans. There was a pervasive ethos at work. A year into the pandemic (trigger warning: generality ahead) liberals clearly cared more about appearances and the ascendancy of their side than they were about being scientifically correct, a trend which intensified even after they got their preferred outcome in the 2020 election.
The empirical reality twelve months in was that the outcome the science had always predicted (failure of general suppression strategies instead of targeted protection) had accrued. The economic harm, the unfolding educational disaster was known. Nevertheless , liberals did not fight Walz, Whitmer or Hocul. And I believe (again, shamelessly without quantitative data!!) that a policy change did not accrue because that would be a tacit admission that they were wrong and the critics (probably pictured all wearing MAGA hats) were right. Supporting that (which support had to be widespread for it to persist) might cause one to infer that those on the left would overwhelmingly prefer to be perceived as being on the right side, right and ascendant rather than actually getting it right, no matter the cost.
If I am wrong to characterize it in this way, please identify signicant instances of dissent originating from the left such that there may be significant divisions on that side that I missed. Please include any scathing criticism in a speech on the floor of House or Senate by any elected Democrat about the futility of existing policy, the wrongful suppression of legit scientific dissent, the unfounded policy of school closings, the embarrassingly cherry-picked bad studies posted by the CDC and the need to change policy. Or any such criticism emanating from the WaPo, NYT, or and major network other than Fox and any time through 2022.
My query was for TR to provide evidence for his generalities…his claim that Lefties weren’t uniformly wrong. OB, your summary is spot on, especially your closing paragraph:
I did, too. Thanks for the heads up.
Narcissism and arrogance are a major contributor to environmentalism, in my opinion. It is arrogant hubris for a movement to say that the way things are now is the way things should stay. Why should the temperature remain the same? Climate changes. Why should we save endangered species A? If species A can’t cut it anymore, then nature has a solution. Species A goes extinct and Species B get a shot to grow and advance and thrive. Why is it the business of humanity to tell Species B to F off because we have to help Species A limp along when it’s not suited to in a changing environment?
The left’s argument would be that it is our fault, our responsibility, and so we must help, if the changing environment is because of US. (Of course they’re wrong about that, but it is what they believe.)
The doctrine of “Disparate Impact” reveals that Affirmative Action (AA) was not as you describe. There was a contempt for the very idea of Qualifications as having any legitimate application to job requirements. There was and is now in the law, the will to insist on using fictions such as “invidious intent” , “white privilege” and on and on. The aim was to have “unqualified” women and blacks to be thrust into situations where they did not belong and discard all tests etc. so that you would have puny women fire fighters or AA engineers, physicians and transportation secretaries, vice presidents, suprem court justices and white house spokeswomen.
As another poster said today the left at essence is “No Fault Narcissism” where there really are no consequences because I did not intend them or want to see them! Thus there are no legitimate requirements and when I make you make the society go to hell, it is ok because I had a well founded hatred of the Father and all Authorirt and Structure.
True. But that still involves making a value judgement that what it was is automatically better than what it will be after the change. It makes a value judgement that any human-caused change is unnatural and bad and constitutes “damage” that we must rectify.
Well, yeah. I’m sorry, have you not met the Left?
You said lefties, not elected Democrats.
You should regret it, because it’s not factual, and you’re missing out on public discussion and information. I’m in favor of improving on the people who got so much wrong, not doubling down on being wrong.
But I am not the one doubling down on wrongness concerning the mandate mania. The complete absence of serious rethinking or dissent from that side is kinda diagnostic. I GENERALIZED (horrors!) that there was an astonishing degree of unanimity on the left. All you had to do to demonstrate that I was wrong was to produce evidence of the dissent I missed. Instead you presumed there must have been such significant divergence and I was somehow obliged to disprove it’s existence. You can generalize but I can’t?
The public discussion you say I am missing is not taking place. Second thoughts at Davos? Calls for mass resignations at CDC? One op-Ed at NYT is all I have seen that fits that category and that was pretty timid. People were vilified, fired and harassed by those who claim to love science. The science-lover mantle has to be surrendered by those who misused it before we can adequately shape planning for the next time.
That’s interesting. My husband has always said, “Whales eat a lot of fish. Maybe they were supposed to go extinct.” :) :)
Vinnie Prasad is one example. Vincent Racaniello is another. Paul Offit is another. I’ve mentioned these three people repeatedly. (Not that they agree with each other on everything, nor that I agree with them on everything.)
I was referring to this sentence specifically: ” Lefties were uniformly wrong about COVID—lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, school closings, etc”
Lefties were not uniformly wrong about that, and some of them have paid a price.