The strange relationship of liberals to power: their psychology as the forever underdog
The strange relationship of liberals to power: their psychology as the forever underdog
A discussion from Kaczynski to Star Wars
Liberals have an interesting personality quirk: they insist on thinking of themselves as the forever-underdogs, no matter their more-or-less unbroken series of victories since the Protestant Reformation or, really, since Paul’s original transvaluation of values 2,000 years ago.
Their personality quirk seems to be rooted in two things: (1) their dutiful adherence to society’s never-ending push for egalitarianism, where tearing down the unequally successful “evil” is seen as “good”, and (2) the bizarre nature of the liberal mind, which lacks individualized self-esteem and gets it via self-identification with the group-think of liberalism.
Kaczynski covers these aspects of their mind in Industrial Society and its Future:
The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization”. Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential….
Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals) or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems. (We do not mean to suggest that women, Indians, etc. ARE inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology.)
Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful….
Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly.
Kaczynski’s explanations of leftist’s obsession with tearing down anything seen as “strong”, “successful” or “superior” synchs up easily with Paul’s original transvaluation of values, which was aimed at subverting and destroying Roman warrior values which valued greatness, strength, individuality, self-determination, immediacy of purpose, honor, acceptance of hierarchy and nobility:
“There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28 NKJV), "Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant" (Matthew 20:26-28), and “Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things — and the things that are not — to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before Him” (1st Corinthians 1:27).
Paraphrasing Thomas Sowell and with his own twist,
(who has a fantastic Substack) argues that the underlying belief structure of liberals, which he sarcastically calls the “vision of the anointed”, is roughly as follows:All humans are basically equal (if given equal circumstances)
All humans are basically good (if given good circumstances)
All social ills are due to unequal/bad circumstances (given the right circumstances, all people will flourish)
It is our job to make circumstances better and more equal
Then we will bring about the kingdom of God on earth
These are tabula rasa religious beliefs that they hold against all empirical, scientific evidence to the contrary, even as they self-identify as science-believe rationalists.
Andersen continues, “If only we can enact the right policies, they seem to think, then we will put an end to crime, poverty, and inequality once and for all. As Sowell repeatedly demonstrates, the anointed think that there are solutions to perennial problems. In reality, there are only trade-offs.”
Compare this to his understanding of the vision of the inegalitarian, which Andersen labels as the “tragic” view:
Humans are not equal (and any attempt to make them so will be an authoritarian nightmare)
Humans are not basically good (pretending otherwise is naive and will lead to bad policy)
Social ills may or may not be due to bad policy (some social ills are perennial and the misguided attempt to eradicate them will be worse than the illness)
There are no solutions to social problems, only trade-offs (messing with complex systems always has unintended consequences)
Utopia is not for this world
Honestly, liberals are being reasonable here. They have fully, if blindly, internalized western society’s core egalitarian values, while you (if you’re reading this) likely have cognitive dissonance toward it - but a cognitive dissonance that for most dissidents and right-leaning individuals is unformed, inarticulated, it lurks in the mind as an uneasiness and a blind instinctive reaction against the latest egalitarian ratchet.1 Until one embraces and accepts that an unacknowledged, unembraced belief in the inequality of all life lies at the heart of one’s unease, a person’s actions, thoughts and words will not properly synch.
It is never enough
One of the core descriptors of the left, though, is that they are never content with their victories against inegalitarianism: they must always push for more of the Great Leveling. Kaczynski reviews this aspect of their thought process which results in never-ending greater, faster egalitarianism:
The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles.
Zero HP Lovecraft covers the same ground:
Scott Alexander is a mincing leftist coward who will survey a thousand points of data that clearly indicate a heretical conclusion, and then shrug his shoulders and announce that no one can ever know what the data means, but he still has a way with words, and he called this the fifty Stalins argument,
One wishes to criticize Stalin, but the penalty for doing so is life imprisonment in a camp. The only allowable way then to express dissent is to say:
“Stalin, he is good, but he is not enough. What we need is fifty Stalins!” This is what the progressive does when she accuses woke corporate leaders of being cynical.
She doesn’t realize she is doing this. It’s all perfectly instinctive, to complain in a way that is safe and meaningless, in a way that, if it were taken seriously, would empower the powerful even more.
And the act of saying it causes her to believe what she is saying. This is how public declarations work, psychologically. When you make a statement publicly, it causes you to adjust your own belief of yourself, to think that the thing you have said is your real belief.
No one is immune to this kind of social pressure from within.
The response by the right feeds into leftist delusions
The right feed into leftist delusions in two ways:
The right allows the left to falsely argue that their beliefs are rooted in logic, rationality and science, instead of blind religious beliefs dating back 2,000 years. This is likely because many Americans on the right are religious Christians, and it would be nonsensical from their frame to attack their secular enemies by claiming they retain the ethics and metaphysics of their own religion. This gives the left the moral upper hand in arguments, because appeals to science and rationality beat appeals to God or religion in the modern era.
The right allows the left to believe that the left are the underdogs, and that there is an ongoing close and tight race between whether the left or right will win the latest cultural issue. This is fundamentally false: it allows the right to think their strategies are useful and their perspective is truthful, when it is really rooted in self-deception and confusion.2 This in turn allows the left to play their psychological mind-games where they self-identify as weak rebels against powerful authority. Robert Lewis Dabney complained about this disingenuous dynamic in 1897:
What is the truthful position, and the effective one, if you have the misfortune of dealing with a leftist? Well, the proper position is not to engage them at all, as they are either NPC or sociopaths and they won’t change their minds no matter what you say. But if you have to engage them, the truthful position is the correct one: leftists have all the power and have had all the power for at minimum hundreds of years, they are driven by a blind, radical faith in egalitarianism that they are most likely not consciously aware of, and their beliefs are objectively and scientifically false and only bring complete destruction and ruin in their wake. They are close-minded fanatics whose values derive directly from Pauline Christianity whether or not they self-identify as religious, secular or atheist, or whether they wear the cloak of “Trust the Science” politicized, corrupted Scientism.3
This type of response ties power to responsibility. By leftists pretending that they are constantly rebelling against the big bad white western society, they can claim not to be responsible for their horrendous destructive actions, not just to others but to themselves mentally. If the response is that they have all the power, their power is rooted in blind faith, conservatives are powerless and merely meekly protest as their designated punching bag, and they are ruining everything, then the mental games they play to avoid responsibility cannot be applied.
Applying this argument to Star Wars
With all of this in mind, let’s use a popular movie example to demonstrate these principles. I hate to do it because it is such a nerdy, dorky, lame example, but let’s do it anyway because of the outsized effect it has had on society. Can one see why and how the original Star Wars trilogy has become so powerful over the past 50 years? And no, it’s not just about the application of Jung’s archetypes or Campbell’s hero journey, you dork.
The trilogy reinforces everything discussed above: the scrappy rebellion, marshaling its forces to defeat the big bad hierarchical establishment “order” against all odds and defeat and destroy it, thereby saving the universe and ushering in a new egalitarian age for all time!
But note how the trilogy ends: we never see *how* the victorious rebellion uses its power. We are never told what they do with it, which factions win out in this egalitarian utopia and who loses, because the left is fundamentally uncomfortable being in a position of strength and dominance and the use of power. Don’t get me wrong, it loves to revel in the use of power and destroy its enemies, but it is not comfortable with the acknowledgment, either to themselves or to others, that they have such power. If they were powerful they would, under Pauline Christian ethics, be “evil”, and who wants to think of themselves as evil?
The trilogy ends right when the rebels win. Voila! Raise the curtains, bask in the applause!
The prequel trilogy was weak and easily ignored. It had nothing to say about anything, riding on the coattails of the original trilogy and I guess it was kind of a character study of Anakin. But then look what Disney did with the new trilogy:
Instead of addressing thorny issues regarding how the liberal, egalitarian rebels held and used their hard-won power, which would inevitably require trade-off, what do the producers do? They turn the protagonists back into rebels against a new hierarchical establishment order! How sad, weak, cowardly and pathetic is this? But also totally understandable given the nature of leftist thinking: they really, really do not want to think that they have power, because then they are responsible for their actions and they might have to see themselves as “evil”.
But given how much less competent our rulers are versus a generation or two ago, and given how Lucasfilm put the incompetent woke idiot Kathleen Kennedy in control, the entire new trilogy has been butchered and the franchise IP ruined. Funny how that works…
Conclusion
Kaczynski correctly identified the idea that leftists do not want to believe that they have power, that they are always “rebelling” against the establishment for greater egalitarianism, but he misses the core point that they are acting fully in accordance with society’s core values which trace their origins to Paul of Tarsus.
The takeaway is that leftist actions are based in blind belief, not reason or science or rationality, and that they have all of society’s power and have had it for centuries or longer. They should be responsible for their actions and not hide behind false belief that they are the eternal underdog or that there is some constant ongoing tooth-and-nail super close battle between left and right (i.e. The West Wing, or its cynical version where everyone is corrupt, House of Cards, or the mix between the two, Lincoln).
The Star Wars saga exemplifies these principles in clear ways, but it’s repeated in much of mass media. For example, the very successful Handmaid’s Tale follows the same liberal logic: we are weak but together we are strong, fight the hierarchical power in the name of egalitarianism!
On the other hand, while the final season of Game of Thrones was correctly criticized for being rushed and truncated, George R. R. Martin’s decision to turn Girl Power Superhero Daenerys into a villain ruined the series for liberals because it was an attack on their religious beliefs in egalitarianism:
To be fair, it wouldn’t be very cinematic to film the true state of affairs: an all-powerful shitliberalism, bullying its retarded brother “conservatism” via a combination of brutal power politics, devious mindfucks and juiced by 2,000-year-old underlying egalitarian beliefs along with Rothschild ownership of the media and money supply, styling on its retarded brother forever-and-ever while pretending it is merely rebelling against the “all-powerful eternal menace.” I don’t think that message would be so appealing to the sensibilities of a population steeped in such egalitarian values. It might even leave a bitter taste in their mouths that could lead to cognitive dissonance against the established order. That would be bad for the establishment, so it is forbidden.
Lastly, switching gears from media to history, the story we have been told about World War 2 also fits into this paradigm. The official narrative is that the big, bad, inegalitarian, hierarchical Nazis tried to take over the world, and the scrappy Allies banded together and fended off their brutal attack on the world. The official narrative isn’t wrong (all effective narratives have aspects of truth to them, and the Nazis were brutal toward the Eastern European populations that it conquered) so much as it is incomplete in a very important way: industrial output wins wars, and the Allies dramatically outperformed the Axis in every single industrial category, from arms productions to oil production to military personnel to total population to tank and aircraft production, from a 3:1-10:1 ratio across all categories, and they had this critical information before going to war.4 That isn’t so good for the official narrative…
Ultimately, the real story is that the Axis were an ultra-violent rebellion against the emerging managerial, central bank owner controlled globalist egalitarian state, where Hitler attempted a failed transvaluation of society’s core values back to Roman warrior values. This was touched on previously here, but we will delve into this in more detail in an upcoming post…
It’s too bad that Kaczynski seems mostly unaware of the ratchet effect and of the origins of egalitarianism; his manifesto does not mention Nietzsche and only mentions Christianity a single time where he downplays its origins: “Identification with victims by people not themselves victims can be seen to some extent in 19th century leftism and early Christianity, but as far as we can make out, symptoms of low self-esteem, etc., were not nearly so evident in these movements, or in any other movements, as they are in modern leftism.”
People naturally want to think they are winning and superior; thinking of your “team” as a forever-loser is disheartening and “demoralizing” regardless of its accuracy.
Scientism is science by committee, “scientific consensus”, or data modeling. It is false and politicized garbage. Real science equals experiments, controlling for variables as best one can, that are repeatable by independent third parties. No science that relies on data modeling (climate change/global warming or COVID as examples) is real science. The ongoing replication crisis shows that very little of official science is real science.
The President of the Reichbank, Hjalmar Schacht, had been deviously providing confidential information regarding all Germany's economic developments to Montagu Norman, a fellow mason and Governor of the Bank of England.
Why is the West still so obsessed with the Jewish, Christian and Islamic irrational religions? They are moral power systems created by humans to control. They have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with spirituality. They prevent enlightenment. They are opium.
And why is the Westerner so obsessed with science, technology, status and wealth? One should think, that rational scientifically thinking people should be naturally drawn to the rational and logic spiritual systems of the East like Buddism or Advaita Vendanta.
Instead, the Westener appear incredible arrogant, stupid and childish to me. Incredibly intelligent people still think they find any meaningful lasting truth in science. It is based on a dualistic system of thinking. It will always fluctuate between poles, will by definition never be settled. What a waste of time to use this method to find answers to any meaningful existencial topic.
Everyone looks outwards, no-one looks inwards. Pepole try to explain the world, the stars, the atoms but have no clue who they are or what gives them true peace. What a sad madhouse.
You call the sole dissident a loser. On a society level that might be true. And if the dissident has no true spiritual purpose and footing, he is a loser. But to define your status in relation to society always ends bad because death and desease is the great equalizer. Barack Obama and Elon Musk will die exactly the same lonely death as a homeless alcoholic on the park bench in LA. Trying to find your purpose in any form of success will alwyas end badly.
That doesn't mean one can't be succesful. But that would be an unimportant side effect. Ultimately, there is only this moment and how it is met. If it is met with total awareness all is good.
"The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems."
I closely follow distance running. The perfect encapsulation of the oblivious and obligatory condescension you/Kaczynski describe here coupled to the ruthless blank-slatism you/Kaczynski also highlight -- well, one of many such encapsulations that qualify as "perfect" -- was the insistence starting in the 1990s, when Kenyans and Ethiopians began winning almost everything in sight, that one, their success was rooted solely in hard work and "guts" (because they're poor and primitive), and not at all in genetic talent; and two, that East Africans would never dope because they're afraid of needles. All in the course of accusing their interlocutors of racism.
Now that countless Kenyans have been caught doping, the same crowd, two decades later, has ignored their own old blather and moved on to other absurdities.