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The Arrogant Misery of Leftists
“Jim” (not his real name) is one of my closest friends. We practiced medicine together for a while, and then I helped him through retirement. I still see him frequently, including, for example, at holiday parties. He is very intelligent, and a nice, well-meaning person. He is also progressive, which I find fascinating. He hates Trump nearly as much as Gary. He voted for Hillary but wanted Bernie. I read about social democracy in places like Venezuela, and wonder why Jim would want that for anybody. For an intelligent, well-meaning person, that really is fascinating.
At a recent Christmas party, Jim said something that caught my ear. Being a polite, nice person, he does not discuss religion or politics directly (…although he makes a lot of oblique references and snide comments; in a polite, nice way…). But he went on at some length that night, making snide comments about the wealth of a mutual friend. We live in Hilton Head. There are a lot of wealthy people here. Jim himself lives in a $3 million oceanfront house which he owns free and clear, and he travels the world. His wife recently took her BMW into the dealership to get it cleaned, and then drove home in a brand-new BMW. She liked it. Why not?
So it struck me as odd that Jim would criticize anyone for being wealthy. But the other guy is wealthier than Jim. Jim wasn’t being vicious, just snide. And they’re close friends – in fact, Jim just got back from spending last week on this guy’s yacht in the Caribbean. Jim may not approve of Caribbean yachts, but he’s not turning down that invitation. He’s not stupid. But he does this a lot – I realized that we had had this conversation, about various other wealthy people, many times. And I started to notice a pattern in his other topics of conversation over time:
Jim lives his life by Judeo-Christian principles but rolls his eyes at Christians. He considers Islam to be a beautiful culture, but Judaism and Christianity to be primitive superstitions which lead to bigotry and violence. Don’t get me wrong – he loves living in a Judeo-Christian society, and he lives his life in a Judeo-Christian way – he just scoffs at actual believers of Judaism and Christianity. Those people are, well, you know…
Again, his criticisms are rarely direct. He won’t say exactly what it is that he disapproves of. It’s just a snide comment and a roll of the eyes.
Jim’s life has been a long, steady, dedicated, and focused effort to gain wealth. He was born into an upper-middle-class family and has gone up from there. He is a good physician but has made several shrewd business moves over the years. He’s taken calculated risks at the right time, was clever with taxes and investments, and has done very well for himself and his family. So, good for him. But as I mentioned, he habitually denigrates those with more wealth than himself. Why? I used to think it was simply an effort to establish his credibility as a proponent of the less fortunate. But now, I’m not so sure. I haven’t quite figured this out yet, but I think his arrogance requires him to continually express his displeasure with those people. You know – those people. He’s above all that. Are you?
His life was saved last year by an extremely high-tech medical gizmo. When he told me about this remarkable, life-saving procedure, he shook his head at how much money the company that developed it was probably scamming from Medicare. Probably. Because, you know, those people…
He admires socialism in other countries, but he very much enjoys the benefits of living in a capitalist society.
He rolls his eyes at redneck gun nuts, but if anything bad ever happened, I suspect that I would find Jim and his wife on my front porch because they know that this is one of the best-armed houses in Hilton Head. He scoffs at those who think they need guns to protect themselves, while he lives in a gated community. With armed guards at the gate.
He shakes his head at the Puritans who think that marriage is the bedrock of society, but he is very upset that his beautiful daughter has been living out of wedlock with her boyfriend (and their child) for the past 10 years. Maybe her daughter listens to him more than he thought.
And so on and so on. And so on.
All those things have something in common, I think. Maybe a few things in common. I used to think it was simple hypocrisy. But now I think there’s more to it than that.
First, arrogance. Those people over there are misguided. Jim is wise and sensible. On the other hand, I am constantly learning from other people. Even from people that Jim would not approve of. I may not really approve of them either, but I think you can learn something from nearly anybody. By looking down his nose at Christians, Jim scoffs even at the wisdom of the ages, seemingly without wondering whether there’s something in those ancient books that could challenge his wisdom. That’s high-level, effortless, unconscious arrogance. Even a lack of interest in the world we live in. What an awful way to live your life.
Next, jealousy. Rather than enjoying his own good fortune, he resents those who have done better. Thus, nothing is ever good enough. There’s always someone better off. What an awful way to live your life.
And then, misery. Everything is a negative. Even a technological marvel that saves his life – he finds something to criticize. Rather than seeking joy, he seeks misery. And he finds it. What an awful way to live your life.
I’m not sure that Jim is a hypocrite, because I think he is too self-centered for hypocrisy. His concerns matter and the concerns of others don’t. At least, not in the same way. He’s not being hypocritical, just self-centered. It’s ok for big government to cause Venezuelans to survive by eating rats, but Jim complained about “greedy politicians” when some new local regulation raised the prices at the Whole Foods he shops at last year.
Jim cares about his well-being, and his security, and his image. He also cares about other people, I think. But in a very different way. A way that I just can’t wrap my mind around.
Again, Jim really is a good person. I like him a lot. That’s what makes all this so hard for me to understand.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Jim is just a stereotypical liberal, with the casual arrogance of the well-off, the hypocrisy required of those with nonsensical personal philosophies, and whose financial success leads him to constant, reflexive virtue signaling. And maybe my friendship with Jim is leading me to try to see things that just aren’t there. The simplest solution is usually right.
Maybe I’m confused not by Jim, but by leftism. I just don’t understand. How such nice, intelligent people like Jim could share even parts of the politics of Hugo Chavez, Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao – heck, even Nancy Pelosi – I search and search for understanding. I listen to Jim. I read liberal columnists. I watch CNN (well, in airports…).
I just can’t figure it out.
The history of the Democrat party in the United States is horrifying (Jim is a 70ish-year-old white man whose family has been in South Carolina for generations – surely he knows the history of the Democrat party. The party that he continues to vote for.) The history of progressivism/leftism around the world for the past 150 years is even more horrifying. And even if you ignore the history, what do you get out of leftism right now, at this moment? Arrogance, jealousy, and misery. Even in otherwise successful, happy people, like Jim.
How on earth does any thinking, feeling human decide, “You know, I want to be a progressive Democrat.” How on earth?
The more I listen to Jim, the more confused I get.
Can anyone out there help me understand?
Published in General
Oh? This Jim guy has it great! How much does his life suck? Sounds like not at all.
No. The Aholes rule the world. They get to be nasty, They get to do what they want. A lifetime of being a good guy has resulted in nada. Heck, when I express how I feel, I get attacked. look at the fights I get into here. Even trying to be decent people hate me.
Now that’s a funny statement right there. My mother is nearing eighty. She still needs to work for a living to keep up her house. Her employer stopped paying her the cash amount of her contract about two years ago while they were trying to do an IPO. She also has an in-kind salary of machines that she has to sell, but that amounts to less than half what she was being paid. It also requires her to get out and sell them. The only problem is that the job she is doing for the employer is 24×7. She trains all the other distributors and answers their questions about how to use the machines. She gets hundreds of e-mails a day and dozens of phone calls, every single day. She has managed to keep it together for two years while the employer keeps saying, “It will pay off in the end.” I know the so-and-so is happy to scam this old lady out of her time and will never pay it back, but she wants to help people.
My wife works about eighty hours per week to do her job. She’s officially off today, but is spending the day editing articles and publications, a small part of her job where the organization should hire someone else.
My best friend is happy that he has gotten his post-retirement work week down to about sixty hours per week. He turned seventy-eight this year, and can’t find decent employees, which means he and his wife have to work the hours to keep his factory and retail establishment going and providing themselves enough to live on. He retired from a large company that was nationalized by Obama, killing his stock investment in the company.
Are you going to say life doesn’t suck for them?
If I really wanted to depress people, I’d mention my own life. But let’s not go there.
Just because you can’t see what others are going through and because others try to put a good face on life does not mean that anyone has fewer troubles than you.
Amen, brother.
Some people are impervious to facts.
Have seen this too (in both the Old World and ours)—Old Money’s disdain for New Money. They have done nothing to earn the well-being their consumption provides yet are obsessively critical of the tastes of those who have earned their own. Your friend’s dysfunctional presumptions—though it seems he did work—are similar. Narcissistic, covetous people are nothing new. They are common. Better to understand what inspires those who are not.
He probably would have felt better about himself if he’d shaved this morning.
When my mom was going through a very dark time, a friend of her mother–that is, someone forty years older than my mom–told her, “I know it’s scary, but try to look past it and focus on what’s okay around you right now.”
That single bit of advice has gotten me through more tough times than any other advice. :-)
So I am passing it along to you guys too. :-)
And I will say a prayer for my Ricochet friends.
Life doesn’t suck. My wife and I aren’t wealthy (I could never buy a BMW on a whim), but we’re comfortable. I’m not hungry, or cold, and even though it’s supposed to storm tonight, I won’t get wet. For most of history, most people couldn’t say that.
Okay. I have to pipe up here. Life does suck. It wasn’t supposed to but it does. My view is: We are fallen creatures living in a cursed world; Life is hard, and then we die, and after that the Judgment: I thank God that He loves me. (And has sacrificed Himself in punishment for the weaknesses and spiritual criminality of those whom He has created. Weird and wonderful to contemplate. If it’s true — which it is.)
God never promised us to be happy. (In this world) He promised us not even peace. He promised us tribulation and suffering, and He told us to have a kind of contentment and promised us a kind of Joy (otherworldly, supernatural joy, based on His promise). And He promised the poor of this world, poor in spirit and poor in wealth, prestige, circumstances and acceptance, that we were and would be blessed with joy forever and that the increase of His kingdom would never end — the increase. (And we’ll all have an active, creative, not-boring, part in it.)
And He told us what to do, how to act and how to think, expecting us to do what He says because He says so, because we otherwise have no idea of the ramifications and depth of our own bad choices (as fish swimming in a mud puddle can’t understand clear water or the air and sky above).
We do what is right not so much for the reward in this world, but for the next, with Him forever, in this kind of Joy of seeing the Creator in all His grandness and goodness, and love and acceptance, and spectacular, loving affection forever.
(I reread this and this is too much, supernatural, the opiate of the masses, and upon consideration, just too good to pass up. The possibilities of just believing what He has said, are endless.)
This was a picture of an Afghan girl taken in 1984. Think about what her life had been like, and was likely to be like, and then tell me how much yours sucks. We have first world problems. She has misery.
I’m all for self-reflection, but I think my isoptrophobia is acting up again.
As Dr. Sowell has said, they refuse to preach what they practise . As you say why they do so is a mystery. If it’s good enough for them why isn’t it good enough for others? Many reasons I suspect, including a certain disdain for those deemed beneath them, strong miseducation, misplaced acceptance of alternative lifestyle choices and so on. All put together it makes for a misunderstanding of how to help others understand what works and why, plus a big reluctance to offer clear advice leading to ineffective or even counter productive methods and measures to help improve the lives of others . Then resentment at the failures that produces.
The denigration of those more successful monetarily may be tied to his view of self worth being too much a matter of his monetary success plus a ‘god’ complex causing him to resent anyone he sees as ‘better’ than him. He needs to learn that his worth is not determined by the size of his portfolio before he can accept with Grace the financial success of others, secure in what he has accomplished and not needing to compare his achievements to what others have done. So at the end of the day this attitude stems from a basic insecurity . Until he can accept himself for who and what he is he can’t be comfortable with the positions of others.
Yeah, the game is rigged, but you can’t win if you don’t play. And, it’s the only game in town. ( Apologies to R. A. Heinlein for mangling his words. )
I think this is another manifestation of liberals Feeling, and conservatives Thinking. They ignore Facts because they operate mostly from Feelings. They don’t care about the consequences of their actions or views, since their only operating principle is whatever makes them Feel good, or important.
Plus one of their hallmarks is no sense of humor.
Definitely no sense of humor, especially in the Old World sense of being “of good humor”. The other things I’ve seen are an odd combination of envy, self-righteousness, and a lack of self-awareness.
Exactly. Their every action is designed, not to actually address a problem, but to make them feel good about themselves. I’d be surprised, for instance, if “Hands Across America” fed one hungry person. They think floating candles down a river or sharing an anti-racism meme on Facebook means they “did something.” Then when the Republicans come along and try to be the grownups and make the hard choices that actually do address the problem, the liberals are in their faces with signs or blocking traffic and yelling “Meanies” and just getting in the damn way.
Those rich are probably close relatives of the rich, those twenty-four karat golden strawmen who have money that the little guy(s) don’t. Your friend may recognize that he isn’t a little guy, but that doesn’t mean he can’t resent the terrible hardship being suffered by someone or other on those little guys’ behalf.
The 1% are ruining the world and no one feels this more passionately than the bottom half of the 2%.
Edit: minor tweak.
I can’t remember who is the first person to have said that the problem with wealthy liberals is that they don’t preach what they practice.
EDIT: I now see OkieSailor beat me to it. It was Thomas Sowell.
This is the philosophical problem isn’t it? It is the point of view of Callicles against Socrates in Plato’s Republic. Justice is for suckers since it simply results in one being taken advantage of by the powerful and unscrupulous. So you might as well become powerful and unscrupulous yourself and be one of the victimizers instead of one of the victims.
Western civilization since Plato can be viewed as a meditation on that question regarding justice – that shows how deep, serious and challenging it is. So there is no way to briefly answer it here. The only answer is to engage the answers given by the great representatives of Western culture: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, among many others (these just happen to be some of my favorites).
Even though I just said the answer can’t be briefly given, I’ll give a nutshell response anyway without a defense of it: The human things most worth having cannot be found without a fundamental commitment to justice, and the things found without it are ultimately hollow and vain.
Psalm 73 tells me something different. I read it whenever I feel like that. It’s probably my most read chapter in the Bible.
In a way, I find the existence of people like your friend reassuring. They provide evidence for the existence of what is traditionally called the natural law. The natural law is that which men, rightly educated, simply know as self-evident. Your friend Jim knows it is better to live by the principles of self-restraint, hard work, deferred gratification, respect for others, and simple good manners than otherwise, and that having these virtues is more important than having money. He knows it even if it goes against his consciously held philosophy (e.g. the lives of people in our underclass suck because they simply lack money rather than that they live in a culture that destroys virtue.)
I wrote “rightly educated” just now because the traditional understanding of education, going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle, is that education must be primarily an education in virtue rather than objective knowledge. There is no point in trying to teach a kid who lacks self-restraint, the ability to defer gratification, and respect for others the finer points of geometry or history, let alone the value of such virtues as self-restraint, because he won’t have the patience or ability to absorb it. On the other hand, once he has absorbed virtues like self-restraint and respect for others, there is no point in “proving” their value because he will immediately and naturally recognize that value. The value of virtue either can’t be taught or doesn’t need to be taught. Once someone has acquired those virtues, he’s ready to go on to geometry and philosophy.
Thinkers like Tocqueville have pointed out that a weakness of democratic Republics like ours is that they tend to undermine the recognition of the natural superiority of the virtuous over the vicious. The notion that the virtuous are better people than the vicious offends our egalitarian sensibilities. By “vicious” I don’t necessarily mean criminal, I mean lacking in virtue. But it’s a simple fact of the natural law that the virtuous are better than the vicious, and the virtuous know it even if it makes them feel guilty because of the pride they feel in themselves.
Back in the days of serious Christianity, that pride/guilt was dealt with by the recognition that we are all sinners and in need of the saving grace of Christ, without which we are doomed, our personal virtue notwithstanding – indeed, to the extent that such virtue is a source of pride that leads us to think we have no need of Christ, it could be our downfall.
The modern left hates Christianity because it shines a light on their secret sin – the pride they have in themselves.
The message near the end of that psalm is especially inspiring and rejuvenating:
“As for me, closeness to G-d is good.”
This is the message we need to tell the world, over and over again.
I don’t feel He is close right now. I pray and hear nothing.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of getting out of the way, of letting go.
“Let go, let G-d.”
Another way to get close: give and give, and then give some more. That’s what G-d does and that’s what G-d wants. We get close to Him by following His wishes. Clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the sick, smile at someone who is sad, talk to someone who is lonely.
Assuming you have loving parents, you get close to them when you abide by their wishes. The same thing is true of G-d.
I have a lifetime of service to others. 25 Years in public mental health, met with “get lost” due to political plays.
I do my best to always put energy into the care of others. I seek to do the right thing all the time. Where is God to say “Good job”. No where.
I have the same like of friend. We used to be best friends. Closer than brothers. I tolerated his progressive talk, because his actions were conservative. I always felt he was a conservative, who didn’t want to admit it. Then Trump got elected. Then I found out I was xenophobic, racists, fascists, (you know the list). He never said those things to me, or directly about me, but after you hear them said about people who think just like you, it becomes personal.
He still really tries to be a good friend, but I just can’t spend time with him anymore. Sad.
You have lived a G-dly life. It pains me that you have not been recognized for that. It is also true that G-d is sometimes silent, or virtually so, which I know is not much consolation but you may wish to consider that, too, and then your work has truly been a noble and altruistic undertaking, since no recognizable reward was forthcoming.
“And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.” (1 Kings 19:11-13)
The Sabbath is coming in here in Israel so I have to stop now but would be glad to continue this discussion at another time.
status anxiety is a hell of a thing.