Why the Hatred? (Oikophobia in Modern Times)

 

It is of course a standard conservative cliché to mention that Black Lives Matter isn’t about Black Lives but that it’s about Marxism. That it is an unoriginal cliché doesn’t make it any less true.

What the tearing down of statues is about is a hatred of one’s own society. BLM only focuses on blacks who die at the hands of either policemen or whites. Blacks killed by other blacks or blacks who die from heart disease or blacks who die from drug abuse don’t matter to them because their deaths can’t be used to condemn American society, conventional bourgeois values, and capitalism.

We all know this. But why? Why do so many hate American society and history so much? America, according to surveys, is among the least racist nations on Earth. Americans in poverty are considered middle class by the standards of China. (I lived in China.) American society is a bit more violent than I would like but the most violent parts of our society are inner cities filled with young black men and Wokists never talk about that. So why do BLM and Antifa and the college that I went to so deeply hate what is by empirical standards, among the best societies that have ever existed? (If you think I exaggerate the goodness of America because of the recent July 4th, please listen to what Ayan Hirsi Ali has to say about the matter.)

They don’t hate America and the West because America is a bad country. They hate America because they are oikophobic. Roger Scruton defined Oikophobia as the “the repudiation of inheritance and home” and that it is, “a stage though which the adolescent mind normally passes.”

I must admit that I myself went through such adolescence. Christians were all hypocrites who went around harassing homosexuals* I thought. Everyone and everything were corrupt and I hated the society I was in. I studied Buddhism and Sufi Islam because it seemed more spiritual than the odd dogmas and stultifying conformity that surrounded me. (I’m still a fan of Buddhism and Sufism but I have renewed appreciation for Christian civilization and the teaching of Christ in particular.)

However, I was never into white guilt. This was because I read books about Asian, Middle Eastern and Native-American cultures. Turns out that war and bigotry were a universal constant in human history. Far from being exceptional, America was all too like other civilizations in its failures to respect human dignity. The American triumph over the rule of Kings and its love of individual freedom were the exceptional parts. (link to Calvin Coolidge)

This leads me to five theories about the Wokist movement. These five theories are not mutually exclusive and they all probably contribute to our current unpleasant predicament.

  1. They are deeply unlearned in history and the bigotry and slavery that has existed in every society ever. They are also unaware that terrible treatment of minorities, women, and homosexuals is usually worse in Communist countries.
  2. Colleges have fostered this nihilism for decades and now we are reaping a poisoned harvest.
  3. They are going through what I would like to call the “Screw you Dad,” phase of their lives and can’t accept that the world is unfair and that people are flawed.
  4. Humanity is incurably religious and without G-d people are turning to politics and identity politics as a source of meaning in their lives. (The Douglass Murray theory) Additionally, because families are so fractured now and the relationship between the sexes are so fraught, people are turning to the government and identity as a source of group belonging.
  5. There is something just dumb and evil in humanity that wants to tear things down rather than make things better.

I must admit that I am not addressing the best arguments of the left. I think this is fair because the left is… not into good arguments at the moment.

Also, people tend to believe in things because of emotional and superstitious impulses rather than logical argument anyway.

I cannot view what is happening in America right now as anything less than a nihilistic religious movement that is based on hatred of what came before them. Why is this movement suddenly so powerful so quickly when it is obviously bad for everybody?

P.S. If you think that I am being unfair to the Woke left, feel free to disagree with me and explain why.

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  1. Joshua Bissey Inactive
    Joshua Bissey
    @TheSockMonkey

    Umbra Fractus (View Comment):
    They don’t know that most of the slaves brought to the US were captured and sold to American traders by other Africans.

    A minor niggle, but the U.S./13 colonies got most of their slaves from markets in the West Indies, instead of directly from Africa. The people bringing slaves from Africa were very often based in Europe, rather than the New World colonies.

    https://www.britannica.com/topic/transatlantic-slave-trade

    By the 1480s, Portuguese ships were already transporting Africans for use as slaves on the sugar plantations in the Cape Verde and Madeira islands in the eastern Atlantic. Spanish conquistadors took African slaves to the Caribbean after 1502, but Portuguese merchants continued to dominate the transatlantic slave trade for another century and a half, operating from their bases in the Congo-Angola area along the west coast of Africa. The Dutch became the foremost slave traders during parts of the 1600s, and in the following century English and French merchants controlled about half of the transatlantic slave trade, taking a large percentage of their human cargo from the region of West Africa between the Sénégal and Niger rivers.

    • #31
  2. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    Why the hatred? Setting the stage for the Left’s new messiah:

    What we see is bad enough, but it’s probably only a very small part of what’s going on beneath the surface.  Why would it be below the surface?  Why would it be hidden?  Because those running it know it would never be accepted by Americans if it were visible.  They’re keeping it under wraps until they can foist it upon us – and they don’t plan to do that until they have everything in place to sweep them, and their grand design, into power.  It’ll be nothing less than a populist coup attempt, ostensibly driven by the current unrest, but in reality driving that unrest itself, and organizing it for its own purposes.

    . . .I don’t think a single figure like George Soros, the bogeyman beloved of right-wing conspiracy theorists, is the mastermind (although he may well be among the cabal running things).  This is far too big and too well organized for that.  It’s certainly globalist in scope and intention, based on the comments we’ve seen come out of populist demonstrations worldwide.  It’s clearly antithetical to individual freedom, subordinating that to the interests of the group – society as a whole.  Finally, it’s anti-democratic.  Free will and “one man, one vote” are unimportant in its scheme of things.  It would rather organize a shrieking emotional mob to demand, coerce, cajole and insist on something, so that the authorities cave into the mob in the name of “maintaining social peace” – even if that’s not what the “silent majority” want.  Human rights are almost always portrayed by the mob as collective rights, not individual.  You want freedom of speech?  Only if it’s approved speech!  The individual doesn’t count.

    How can we get closer to identifying these people and influences?  A good start would be to look at those who’ve been the eminences grises of previous globalist, populist administrations and leaders, and see what they’re doing now.  Anyone wondered what Valerie Jarrett is up to lately?  Notice how she was a major part of Organizing for America, which has since become Organizing for Action?  It’s interesting that none of that is mentioned in her Wikipedia page.  One wonders why not.  And who is she reporting to?  She’s not the “big cheese”, the leader in her own right – she’s one facet of the visible part of the iceberg, but reporting to the massive part below the surface.  There are many like her.  Rahm Emanuel?  Eric Holder?  They, and many other former leading lights of the Obama administration, appear to be deliberately trying to stay out of the public eye at present.  That’s strange behavior from those who did all they could to get into the public eye, earlier in their careers.  Why, one wonders?  If not them, then who will be their successors? . . . What’s going on?

     

    • #32
  3. Richard Fulmer Inactive
    Richard Fulmer
    @RichardFulmer

    namlliT noD (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    I like your post, Henry. I also believe that this insanity is due to the unrelenting desire of the Left to achieve an ideal state. The only way to do that is to destroy everything, completely, and start all over again.

    Susan, really?

    I gotta ask… What about them suggests an unrelenting desire to achieve an ideal state? Do you really believe these lefties have the slightest notion of what an ideal state would even look like? Or that they could put together a set of political mechanisms that would tend toward that goal?

    These are the same folks whose number one concern is systemic racism in a country that just had a black president.

    These are the same folks that assembled Chazistan, with summer of love approval of the mayor of Seattle, and it immediately had the highest murder rate of any state ever.

    Wasn’t that Rousseau’s schtick?  Civilization was what corrupted the noble savage, so burn it all down and bingo!  Instant utopia!  Marx sneered at such utopian thought, but he wasn’t much better.  He refused to explain in detail how socialism would work because it would evolve.  At the same time, however, he believed that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be brought about by violent revolution.  But revolution precludes evolution.  

    • #33
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