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What Motivates Progressive Self-loathing?
So much of the liberal progressive mentality seems ultimately to be grounded in self-loathing. There’s the environmental condemnation of Western civilization (or even humanity itself) because it’s destroying the planet; there’s the multicultural impulse that admires all other cultures but despises our own; there’s the Hollywood instinct to make Americans (especially those in the corporate or military worlds) the villain in every story. Self-loathing is a common thread.
What I don’t understand is where this comes from, psychologically speaking. A normal, healthy psyche does not seek out reasons to hate oneself or one’s own culture. Is it guilt over our affluence and success? Is it an adolescent attitude of rebellion? Elitism?
Is it, as I’ve heard suggested, the product of decades of subversive Soviet influence designed to undermine American culture? (Apparently there is some evidence that this was not just Red Scare paranoia but a deliberate strategy.)
I just don’t get it. Ronald Reagan reminded us that confidence and optimism are inherently more attractive than self-flagellation. Why do so many people today willingly, enthusiastically, embrace a philosophy that is fundamentally based on the assumption that their own culture is something to be ashamed of?
And more importantly, how do we fix it? How do we convince these people that it’s OK to feel good about themselves and our country?
Published in General
Nope. It’s a cheap, undemanding way of asserting your own moral superiority, to say, “I’m a person of such supercharged conscience that I’m here to apologize for others. And since they are members of my group, citizens of my country, or are somehow on my ‘side,’ that gives me an air of self-sacrifice for which I expect admiration.”
The Left is driven by an innate desire to break down institutions it deems oppressive and stultifying, but in reality they are oppressive and stultifying themselves. They refuse to “let go” and move away from “power structures” that were in fact evil and oppressive, but aren’t any longer. Racism, classism, sexism, et. al. aren’t going away anytime soon. They know this, but for the Narrative’s sake, they continue to manufacture these sorts of things. It’s Sisyphean, and I don’t see an end in sight. As Kevin Williamson put it, the Left is intellectually dead.
“…But there are other profitable ways of fixing his attention on the virtue of Humility. By this virtue, as by all the others, our Enemy wants to turn the man’s attention away from self to Him, and to the man’s neighbours. All the abjection and self-hatred are designed, in the long run, solely for this end; unless they attain this end they do us little harm; and they may even do us good if they keep the man concerned with himself, and, above all, if self-contempt can be made the starting-point for contempt of other selves, and thus for gloom, cynicism, and cruelty.
You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character…The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools.” Screwtape Letters
Not at that time. It went one way. Later, after I started understanding and revering American principles, I developed a contempt for small-minded European statism.
I agree.
True, dat. And tiresome.
I agree, though, that for the most part the attraction of publicly declaring a distaste for one’s own culture, sex, skin color or species is that by doing so, you excuse yourself from the sins of any or all of these. You don’t have to actually give up the perks of being American, male, white or alive, so it’s cost-free moral preening. The exceptions are those occasions in which a male liberal hastily apologizes for himself and his gender as a means of forestalling hurtful criticism from one or more female liberals.
I’d say that it’s more accurate to say that Conservatives are alert to the danger of pride, and that pride, more than any other vice, marks this age and demands that we make a show of how unashamed we are. So we have Hillary brazenly lying, Miley Cyrus twerking, Bernie boasting his socialism (the ideology that killed millions), Obama impugning his country, and all turning up the volume to show that they’re proud. They believe their pride shields them from second thoughts.
Shame and guilt.
I may have been a little overly general. My characterization applies specifically to academics, who as we know are usually left-wing. I would say that knowledge and intelligence are strong traits of academics, but wisdom and discernment are not. A college professor will be better at knowing ideas, and better at creating new ideas, than the average person. However, they are not particularly good at discerning true ideas from false ideas. If someone lacks discernment, intellect is almost a bad thing. It gives a fool more creative ways to be foolish. For example, the idea that you can liberate people by transferring as much wealth as possible to the government is so foolish that it takes a great deal of intelligence to rationalize it.
Honestly, after being close to several liberals and several conservatives, I think it’s more accurate to say that conservatives see shame as good in a way liberals do not.
Conservatives are hardly immune to pride – indeed we often believe individuals who do succeed should take a special pride in their achievements. But we also see shame as a healthy moral tool – people should be shamed more for their sexual deviancy, underachievement, poor financial management, broken marriages, obesity, etc, etc – in short, people should be shamed as individuals for their individual failures: that’s how you get less failure, many conservatives believe.
I think it is misplaced disappointment in Progressivism’s failures. It is due to their inability to accept both mankind’s imperfectibility and their own schemes’ implausibility.
Yes! Scratch the “self-loathing” surface of any lefty and you’ll find an ocean of stolen valor — false “moral” superiority, self-regard, moral vanity, conceit… It has a lot of names, none of them flattering.
Prager often talks about the Left fighting the ones who fight real evils, while making up fake evils to “fight.” It’s why AGW is so perfect a cause for the Left: It’s not real (and therefore, not really scary), all their solutions lead to central planning whole economies, and the timeline is such that they’ll be dead before they can be blamed for failure of their policies.
As my beloved husband (Mr. KB?) pointed out, after spending many years teaching high school, individuality becomes a uniform too—an unattractive, absurdly expensive uniform that exposes far too much in the way of a. flesh or b. underpants.
Young ‘un’s who have taken up dressing like Punks are nonplussed when I—grey haired, granny-vibed— explain that this was the radical, different, outrageous thing I did when I was in high school, and frankly it was passé and silly then.
“Well-behaved women seldom make history,” is another meaningless slogan; I saw this on a colleague’s desk and pointed out that women seldom make history period, but insofar as this is changing, I guess you could call Hillary Clinton badly behaved?