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Root Causes
Doug Watt again provides insightful observations, this time about anti-Catholic bias in his post about the infamous and imbecilic Richmond Memo.
We can get some insight into the mindset of the memo’s author by reflecting on who is and who is not a perceived enemy. Why, for example, would one feel visceral hostility to orthodox Catholics (and almost certainly also against pro-Israel Jews) but not Hamas or Antifa?
Picture a narcissistic teenager resentful of restrictions on mobility or sexual access, or, perhaps worse, a wealthy teen with full license to pursue such things yet afflicted with a persistent unconscious resentment for perceived adverse judgment on such behavior and desires. In Haven in a Heartless World, Christopher Lasch opined that the widespread absence of fathers in American families means that instead of a proportionally human authority figure who punishes but also forgives on a human scale, the development of the Superego is imagined as a fearsome, detached, omniscient judge.
Adolescent rebellion is normal unless it is malformed into a hatred of one’s entire cultural and religious heritage, and a fear and loathing of traditional morality.
I don’t offer the opinion that all leftism originates in adolescent distortions (although the daddy issues of keffiyeh-clad angry rich girls cries out for some serious clinical research), but it is clear that the perverse, modern variant of leftism does not arise from compassion and a thirst for justice so much as raw oikophobia, hatred of one’s own culture, country, family and religious heritage, much like disproportionate teen angst.
The leftist wants to claim a mantle of authority as the purveyor of true morality (DEI, sexual license, and climate change) and real democracy (rule by the enlightened for the benefit of victim classes and without the participation of the unenlightened). It is narcissism trying to be an ideology. It is a will to power but without the courage and consistency to admit its Nietzschean ramifications.
Orthodox Catholics, unwoke Protestants, non-secularised Jews, and competent conservative scholars can see through the falsehood of the attempted hijacking of Western culture and call out the fakers or, more troubling for the poseur, assert the existence of moral obligations and duties the newly enlightened believe (wish) they have left behind. Hamas, BLM, and Antifa not only do not pose a similar danger but could be said to share a common enemy.
The sophomoric hatred of America and its cultural roots, the need to invent new words for hidden, secret forms of racism and sexism even as actual prejudices and barriers have been evaporating for decades, and the sad need to call the people they fear, resent, and hate “haters” cry out for firm but compassionate adult intervention on a wide scale.
Published in General
Thank you for your efforts to draft and post this essay. Your arrangement effectively verbalized some of the unwritten groaning in my soul about these matters. I don’t have anything to add save that your closing about a compassionate approach even when that’s not well received is key. There’s plenty of fire out there. Taking the time to discuss such topics with someone in our orbit—if that arises—is worth pursuing. Godspeed.
Mixing compassion, directness and candor is a rare skill, if not an art form. I commented in another thread that once when I was a teenager approaching my father about some injustice/grievance whose specifics I do not recall, he lowered his newspaper, looked at me and said “Your parents are not perfect. Neither were mine. Get over it.” And returned to reading his paper.
The perpetual grievance mindset and self-created forms of anomie and anger are a sure-fire recipe for mental illness and a recruiting opportunity for brain-dead activism.
Millions of young men have been trained to believe that the traditional mission of husband and father is oppressive and wrongful and millions of young women trained to believe that the remarkably natural impulse to love and care for others is a vile trap and a betrayal of self. It is also not helpful that the boomers divorce rate undercut faith and confidence in their kids’ attitudes about the viability of marriage.
The entire American political, cultural and legal experience was originally designed to help remove obstacles to the pursuit of life as a mission or an adventure. It is a unique gift, an invaluable heritage and not some racist, sexist shell to be discarded in service to despair and dark moods claiming to be real freedom.
The following is in no way meant as a rebuttal but rather an exploration.
I had occasion to live in a smallish town in Oklahoma where I learned that there are people who think the Catholics aren’t Christians. I suspect their thoughts on Jews weren’t particularly complimentary either.
The Da Vinci Code gives us a sensationalized version of Opus Dei, a real organization within the Church. The Catholics also have the Knights of Columbus, a group that seems designed to satisfy those who would like to join the Masons but are forbidden to do so (the rift is old and also sensationalized). Add to this the de facto organization of molesting priests and their protectors, the rumors of nunneries with the dead babies of nuns bricked into the walls ~eyeroll~ the rumors of a secret porn section in the Vatican, and that the Church has Dominicans, Benedictines, Franciscans, and Jesuits — who don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye — and it isn’t hard to see how the average (or below average) outsider could come to the idea that there might be a secret paramilitary group as well.
I submit that the above nonsense could survive Quantico training, or even leech into Quantico training.
That said, there is doubtless a group of preppers who all go to the same Catholic church, and have guns that make FBI agents squeamish.
It would be strange if a large religion that believes in ‘end times’ didn’t have such a group.
But such a group does not reflect on the organization.
This post used profound insights as ammo and it was set to automatic fire. Thanks once again.
In order to have a reasonable concern, it is kinda traditional to have evidence that warrants such concern. Even in that silly memo there is no indication of a weapons stash, paramilitary or insurgent training, no sermons calling for Catholic jihad. It was the mere existence of a deeply conservative ideology that warranted a close eye. It was not overreaction to an actual threat but the stirrings of Big Brother.