This month I give a second outing to the very first essay I ever published
And that was twenty years ago in American Thinker magazine.
Re-reading it, I was pleased to be reminded that the ideas it expresses - about the faux ‘social justice’ mentality that has seduced large parts of the Western university-educated middle class - now have much greater traction in political journalism than when I was writing in 2006.
I have highlighted the text in places to give extra emphasis. But, apart from that, I offer it here essentially unaltered….despite it being (with the benefit of hindsight) a bit starry-eyed about the future of the internet! Had I chosen to do any amending to my original text it would have been to change “self-hating” to “self-hating-by-proxy” to reflect the tendency of ‘Progressives’ to exempt themselves personally from the sins of ‘white-privilege’, ‘patriarchy’ et al that they level at their more ‘deplorable’ peers.
The Psychology of the Self-hating Liberal
The good news is that, after a whole century of heading in the wrong direction, a moral and intellectual challenge to the competitive victimhood, bleeding-heart version of liberalism is finally welling up in the West. This is in no small part thanks to the liberating force of the Internet that has made freedom of expression possible again after decades of suffocating mass media orthodoxy.
There is however a tendency to focus only on the downstream consequences of leftist ‘Progressivism’ rather than the insidious psychological pathology from which they spring. The rampant spread of parasitic victim-culture and Western impotence in the face of Islamic terrorism - these are both particular symptoms of a deeper psychological malaise. The deeper malaise is a wierd mentality of sublimated cultural self-hate that has come to be the prevalent social psychology amongst the white, university-educated professiona middle class; and especially those in public administration, academia and media. The people, in other words, with a disproportionately powerful ‘opinion forming’ voice in society at large.
The roots of the malaise are deep in modern intellectual history….. they have, in various forms, afflicted the European intelligentsia since the time of Rousseau and his ‘noble savage’. I first became aware of these strange mind games at university in the 1970’s. It is a mindset that did then (and still does) dominate academic life. Students and their tutors alike - mostly the beneficiaries of upward striving family backgrounds - were consumed with a phony and entirely self- absorbed infatuation with something they called ‘the working class struggle’.
Through its disproportionate hold on academic and media culture this mindset has now become mainstream. As it has spread through our culture it has been diluted and sublimated, Paradoxically this has made it even more poisonous by making it more difficult to apprehend. It has become a gossamer web of vaguely held attitudes. Here are some of them:
Being middle class is something to be slightly ashamed of. Being working class on the other hand - or better still affecting to be working class - makes you seem more heroic......As long as you are ‘left wing’ you are not only a nicer person but you are also ‘radical’ and therefore not boring. If on the other hand you are ‘right wing’, well that means you are ‘reactionary’ and mean......Business enterprise is essentially disreputable whereas getting a living off the public purse or in the arts and media is highly civilised. Being an engineer or a scientist is OK too, up to a point - for boring people anyway.....And of course all the problems of people in the rest of the world are the fault, not of those people themselves but of the prosperous West. More specifically, the blame lies with ‘the capitalist system’; not you personally of course. You show how much you care by going to Live Aid concerts and that makes you feel much better about yourself.
In the obsessive struggle to subvert the perceived social hierarchy, a new politically correct hierarchy is rammed down your throat. At its apex would be someone like a Red Indian lesbian; at the bottom of the heap would be a middle class, Southern English male. In the latter half of the last century this mentality spread through all professions and institutions and so has become self-perpetuating. By the time the influence filters down to the population at large it is so diluted as to be just a vague lack of confidence in Western civilisation and a linguistic fog of moral relativism which disorientates people and makes them doubt their own common sense instincts about right and wrong.
Of all institutions the most powerful in this respect is the mass media, on account of its insidious ability to drip-drip its influence on every aspect of the way you perceive the world beyond your own direct experience. Everything you know - or think you know - about, Iraq or ‘global warming’ or ‘the latest social research’ on this or that subject, you probably got via the media. The great media conjuring trick is the illusion that it is merely a transparent window whereas in reality it is a window, richly decorated with mythology. It breathes into your ear things like this:-
All people in the Third World are shouldering with dignity a burden imposed upon them by the West in general and America in particular....All businesses are probably trying to screw you....You as a consumer have plenty to whinge about....Politicians should do something about each and every one of the problems you encounter in life....And if you are making a mess of your life it’s because someone else should have given you more information or more help.
The trouble with all this apparent social conscience is that what really drives it is not some profound humanism but the desire of a highly privileged elite to feel better about themselves and stave off the unconscious and sublimated self-loathing which was drip fed to them at university.
Virtually everyone in the Western world today will have had his or her perception distorted to some extent by this fake but highly seductive fashion-accessory kind of social conscience. By subverting a perfectly valid hierarchy of values in judging human behavior, this fake social conscience has had a hugely corrosive effect on what was best in our civilization. Take, for example, the near universal acceptance now of the notion that to discriminate is wrong. Wrong. It is bigotry that is wrong. The capacity to discriminate - far from being wrong - is actually vital to civilized society; the more of it the better.
The psychology of middle class self-hate of is complex and multi-layered. It is, in part a mindset of frozen adolescence whereby people never entirely move beyond the inchoate parent-anger of their youth. Even sophisticated professionals can still carry their adolescent baggage, now displaced into a vague resentment against their own middle class roots or against America as the parent figure of the Western world. In part it is Rousseau and D. H. Lawrence: the cerebral intellectual’s Romantic infatuation with the primitive. And in part it is perhaps a stray fragment of the shattered star of Christianity - the first shall be last etc. This fragment, detached now from its overall religious context, floats meaninglessly in the post-Christian philosophical ether.
The consequences of this confused and self-indulgent philosophy are full of paradox.
First: when do you ever hear any credit given to the wicked American enterprise culture for the microchip, the personal computer, the Internet, Google, and all the rest of the apparatus that every lefty-liberal anti-globalisation warrior or anti-Western terrorist now blithely uses in pursuit of her agenda? In a staggering act of biting the hand that feeds, the liberal intelligentsia sneers at the kind of souls without whom there would have been no Western civilisation in the first place. Meanwhile South East Asia is turning out science graduates in the millions.
Second: the spread of attention-seeking, wilful victimhood in our culture - the whingeing, blaming and litigating -has tragically been assisted by the very scruples of self reliant, non-drama-queen type people preferring to just keep their own counsel and say nothing.
Third: Whilst we may not exactly have 1984, we do have plenty of Orwellian Doublethink. Being a ‘radical’ means thinking just like everyone else in your peer group. Caring about the catastrophic failure of mankind in large parts of the planet means going to rock concerts.
In challenging this malaise, it is not enough to attack the crazy social policies and the political correctness it has spawned. It is also necessary to challenge the century long myth that a left-wing type of ‘social conscience’ is good-hearted even if it is naïve. This is one huge fallacy. The truth is that it is more usually self-centred, self-deceiving and ultimately self-serving.
A couple of further thoughts, twenty years on….
….the above diagnosis of our Western cultural malaise may have gained more currency in the twenty years since I wrote it but right-wing journalism still mostly tends to be in denial about the scale of the spread of it. The tendency is to point the finger at politicians and/or ‘the elite’ but to fight-shy of pointing the finger at the tens (hundreds?) of millions who have also bought into all this guilt-tripping, virtue-signalling nonsense.
……when the real backlash against it all comes hard and strong (as it eventually must) you can bet that a large proportion of those tens of millions will be the very same ones who mentally delete their no longer fashionable attitudes and buy straight into the new groupthink….whatever that may be.
If we survive this era, the 21st century will be remembered for a troubling trend: blaming victims while standing in support of perpetrators.
For decades I have said that the left is the "totalitarian id". I have known and worked with these people in academia. They never grew up; they hate being potty-trained; they want to destroy the civilized achievements of others with better self-control. Leftism is not *a* mental illness; leftism *is* mental illness.