Mr. Cunningham it is hard to believe how ahead of the game you were twenty years ago, when you wrote the initial essay. I started realizing the possible negative effects when affirmative action became the law. This morphed into DEI and the white privilege narrative. I am white and would qualify as coming from a privileged backgroud. I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt or anything to be apologetic about. Your essay only ascertained the psychological damage of self-hating liberals. I am still shell shocked by the ass backwards overwhelming support for BLM. I look forward to reading all your essays, and thank you for the same.
I think what has made these Lefty mind-games so especially seductive to the naturally personally ambitious and aspirational kids from middle class backgrounds is that they are seductive on twin tracks....they make them feel 'nice' and they make them feel fashionable. It's a powerful drug.
If (*who*) survives the 21st C will be remembered (*by whom*) for a troubling trend: blaming (*by whom*) victims (*who* are they? precision needed) while standing in support (these are the same people as the those unidentified people doing the blaming--that's clear enough) of perpetrators (and *who* are the perpetrators?).
I can see what you're trying to say (I think), and likely I see it the same way as you. But it's far from clear--and, you know, there's just a tiny bit of finger-pointing going on. It's disturbingly like the way the the self-hating liberals do, as Mr. Cunningham describes them.
Do you see where I'm coming from? Lack of clarity that would separate you from them.
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.
I went to school with them, and now live among them. I am an anomaly to them. I am a rational, informed, educated, Trump supporter. I could not possibly be a typical Trump supporter, because Trump supporters with the exception of me, are all uneducated, unintelligent, unsophisticated, racist white supremacists. They know that for a fact, because NYT, The New Yorker, WaPo and NPR said so.
I think it's important to see that leftism is not in itself a disease It is simply an unworkable solution for how to create large scale multi-ethnic, multi-racial societies that are mostly free and stable.
Diseased individuals find themselves attracted to its emphemeral promises, and are unable to accept them as illusions.
Large scale multi-ethnic/racial socialism relies on external enforcement, because voluntary socialism, as in familes/clans/tribes and as far as identifiable ethnic groups (maybe), requires bilateral trust. There is little of this in multi-societies, and hence collectivism must be forced.
Part of this liberal groupthink, I'm sorry to have to say, is the double standards of feminism. On the one hand they decry the "patriarchy" and on the other they ignore the fact that it is primarily men who do the dangerous jobs and the engineering, construction AND maintenance of the civilization upon which women and men both depend. I think since you were at university, the dynamic has also shifted away from popularizing the working class to demeaning them: if you merely have a trade, you're nobody; if you have a university degree, you're somebody.
Conventional Leftiness is also a form of narcissism, sharing this instinct with conventional Rightist grandiosity but simply turned upside down. The Rightwinger, whether Colonel Blimp in 1900 or Donald Trump in our own time, says: " I announce the greatest (country, society, civilization) in the history of the universe, so look at me!" The conventional Lefty of the last 50 years says: "I denounce the most evil (country, society, civilization) in the history of the universe, so look at me!"
This is completely brilliant. It gives voice to many half-formed thoughts I've been thinking. The strange aspect of Western pessimism (which you note here) is that it is PURELY class-based... but pretends to be a universal, moralistic worldview. It's actually a symptom of disconnection and status-seeking, and thus profoundly hypocritical.
WOW! This is an amazing essay, full of very insightful ideas and well phrased language. To have recognized this 20 years ago is a real credit to you, and a slap in the face of our society not correcting this a lot sooner. Perhaps we can also give de Tocqueville some credit for his similar remarks on the soft enervation and strangulation of liberty from rules and regulations, noted in the 1830's.
I won't try to cite all of the items that caught my attention as I read, but a couple where you chose to avoid additional boldface, I would have added it:
Further in line with de Tocqueville: "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."
"... 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." [Dr. David Brin provides this supporting adage: "Criticism Is the Only Known Antidote to Error" (aka CITOKATE)]
A couple more items not needing 2026 emphasis, per se, but worthy of comment:
"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." While I am not in close sympathy with the religious views of commenter "Late but in earnest" below", I agree and think it was a good observation for you to make in regard to an historical, cultural, and psychological impact; a good brick to add to the wall of logic you were building.
"Meanwhile South East Asia is turning out science graduates in the millions." I blow hot and cold on this point and it's implications. Especially given you made it 20 years ago. I hear on one hand this suggests the Chinese et al. are really going to eat our lunch technologically. But then I see suggestions (aside from a few top grade universities) most of these graduates are not that well trained, and whatever skills they possess are constrained by the cultural forces to remain civil or to adhere to the CCP aims. 20 years on, it does not seem to have been the major factor in CCP success, except in supporting an enhanced surveillance state, that such a cohort might imply. Possibly excessive corruption within the CCP has played a role in keeping that force under wraps?
They do feel better about themselves; except in the quiet of dark places. Which is why they never allow the lights to dim or the soundtrack to stop playing. The constant wall of sound ensures the warm fuzzy feeling remains. Pray the power never goes out.
Excellent insights, as fresh today as it was 20 years ago. I would go a step further. The root cause of this sick psychology is the spiritual emptiness of the postmodern era - traditional religions have been discredited but nothing filled the vacuum. What could a well (over?) educated liberal believe in? Social justice feels as good a substitute as any. Focusing on the victim takes some existential anxiety off the minds of those who have a deep hole in their soul. Is there a solution? Nothing magical. But there are certainly plenty of human experiences and wisdoms to at least ease the symptoms and even inspire potential cures. I wrote about this phenomenon recently in a related blog: https://yansong.substack.com/p/faith-and-meaning-in-the-age-of-artificial?r=o1gg5&utm_medium=ios
"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."
This image of the 'shattered star of Christianity' is very powerful. Thankfully, this seemingly shattered star is also a person, Jesus Christ, fully human, fully divine, whose shattered body hung on The Cross, (seemingly) meaninglessly to those present.
Maybe as a civilisation we are presently enduring the very early hours of Holy Saturday, waiting for weeping, faithful, Mary Magdalene to discover the rolled back stone of the tomb and come running with the only news worth waiting for. News that will shatter all our warped preconceptions of each other and our world in ways beyond our present comprehension.
To be fair, I quite agree with the overall thrust of this article. I believe that it is generally in line with Ricardo Duchesne's thesis in his book "Greatness and Ruin" (and elsewhere). But I find quite a few specific details to argue with, so I shall. It's what I do. 8-)
First up, a personal statement in the now-fashionable style. I confess that I am an old white married man living in southern England. If that is enough to prejudice you against me, feel free to hie off and save yourself some time. (I do mean "hie off" and not any other similar phrase that might come to mind). Actually I am Scots, but that makes little difference in my case.
"The deeper malaise is a wierd [sic] mentality of sublimated cultural self-hate that has come to be the prevalent social psychology amongst the white, university-educated professiona [sic] middle class..."
Again, I feel myself squarely in the sights. I am a white university-educated middle class man, and a retired professional of sorts. But even on peering as deep into my soul as I can (about 13 microns) I cannot see any "cultural self-hate", sublimated or otherwise. As one of the really talented crew who used to write for "The Daily Reckoning" put it long ago,
"Hating another human being because of their race, religion, or membership in some other broad demographic group is simply a sign of laziness. After all, with just a little time and effort you can really get to know someone and learn to hate them on a more personal level".
There are very many people out there whom I am disposed to hate both mentally and viscerally, but mostly on the more traditional basis that their words and deeds are so widely different from my own. ("Hate" is putting it a bit too strongly, although I sometimes feel guilty for not hating them quite enough). The liars, warmongers, money-grubbers, robbers, murderers, and - oddly enough - hypocrites. And hyper-hypocrites.
However, I don't think I have ever had "a disproportionately powerful ‘opinion forming’ voice in society at large". Au contraire, I have often had an odd feeling of being entirely ignored, rather as if I were the Invisible Man or the protagonist of "The Sixth Sense".
"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..."
There may be something to that feeling. After all, working class/blue collar people have usually had physically demanding jobs, shorter life expectancy, and much less social respect. While some - not all - middle-class people have had cushy billets, sitting in comfortable upholstered chairs at desks and doing mostly "brain work" - even if it was less demanding on the brain than some factory jobs. And middle-class people had, until quite recently, better pay and thus more of the good things of life.
"Business enterprise is essentially disreputable whereas getting a living off the public purse or in the arts and media is highly civilised". Well, as we have seen more and more often and unmistakably, quite a lot of "business enterprises" are somewhat disreputable. As Gustavus Myers - himself an impoverished factory worker before he took up journalism - wrote in his 1936 book "The Great American Fortunes", "Through all of these pages have we searched afar with infinitesimal scrutiny for a fortune acquired by honest means. Nor have the methods been measured by the test of a code of advanced ethics, but solely by the laws as they stood in the respective times. At no time has the discovery of an ‘honest fortune’ rewarded our determined quest. Often we thought that we had come across such a specimen, only to find distressing disappointment; through all fortunes, large and small, runs the same heavy streak of fraud and theft, the little trader, with his misrepresentation and swindling, differing from the great frauds in degree only".
"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". Well... you would have had to be blind not to understand how the "Global South" or the "underdeveloped nations" have been mercilessly exploited by the richer industrialised nations. In 1750, believe it or not, the two wealthiest countries in the world were China and India, which then underwent over a century of poverty and oppression solely because they were conquered and occupied by cruel, racist, extorting Western "businessmen", politicians and soldiers. Now China leads the world again, and India is rapidly recovering.
"...a linguistic fog of moral relativism which disorientates people and makes them doubt their own common sense instincts about right and wrong". I doubt whether notions of right and wrong - morals, in short - are "common sense". Unless you accept the apocryphal remark that "Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen". Surely we acquire our ideas about right and wrong from our parents, relatives, friends, and society.
"All people in the Third World are shouldering with dignity a burden imposed upon them by the West in general and America in particular...." Well, there was George Kennan's secret US State Department memo of 1948: "We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction".
"All businesses are probably trying to screw you...." The prime directive of almost all corporations is to maximise short-term profit. That is done by maximising income and minimising spending. If by "you" is understood the workers and the customers, the quoted proposition is surely trivially and obviously true. That is what corporations are for, and in many countries it is what they are bound by law to do.
"...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". Not one of the cited innovations would ever have been created without the help of millions or billions of taxpayer dollars provided by the US government. The four mentioned were actually invented by scientists and engineers working in labs largely paid for by the taxpayers. We do owe those scientists and engineers a debt of thanks - but hardly the overpaid business "executives" who did them the favour of employing them.
Lastly, I am concerned about the considerable amount of amateur psychoanalysis of complete strangers. It's one thing to observe and remark on a person's conduct and statements; quite another to diagnose his motives, especially if you believe them to be widely different from his claimed ones.
Thank you for this Tom. As a reply I think it helpful to quote from the addendum to my original 20-year-old essay:
"...... it being (with the benefit of hindsight) a bit starry-eyed about the future of the internet" and
".......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."
I too "am an old white married man living in southern England" so I am hardly likely to be 'prejudiced against you'.
The rest of the text that you have picked up on is (as I imagine you will already understand) my characterisation of a type....a type that has not only almost completely dominated academia and the mainstream media for many decades now.....but also, in my experience anyway, is - albeit in varying degrees - more the norm than the exception amongst the Western university-educated professional middle class.
To put it another way, I'm not sure what we're 'disagreeing' about here?
We are probably not disagreeing at all! I was just horsing around, the way I used to like wrestling with my (elder) brother in ways that deceived adults into worrying for our safety. I have always been disputatious and loved arguing just for the sake of it (and admittedly to keep my claws sharp, although I had them sheathed this time). That trait probably comes closer to making my wife and daughters hate me than anything else.
I usually comment only on work that I think is worth criticising, and with an essentially constructive attitude - even if it doesn't feel that way to the author!
Do please feel free to comment on anything you disagree with in my work, or to add anything you thing germane or interesting. As Alexander Pope wrote, "A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday".
"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".
Inevitably, as soon as the influence of the Internet became widely understood, the suffocating orthodoxy moved in to muffle and neutralise it. Largely by the growth of vast "social media" corporations, whose Web sites are unthinkingly frequented by ordinary people who mistake them for the Internet itself. Unfortunately, it must be admitted that ignorance, laziness, and inertia play a significant part in this. When Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues created the Web and made it freely available as a gift to humanity, they assumed that most people would create their own small Web pages and would write as much as read. That capability was built into their first (free) browser, but was dropped by almost all subsequent ones.
Microsoft's first reaction to the Internet was to try to suppress it; then to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" it; finally, to take over as much of it as possible. It succeeded in that last objective simply because so many users defaulted to Windows and whatever browser it offered. The other social media corporations merely followed in its footsteps, like King Wenceslas' page.
Substack, among others, gives us a much better chance of freedom at the cost of giving up - most of us - dreams of riches. You can't have it all.
The white, middle-class mind game goes back at least 175 years. Consider the case of one Karl Marx, whose bourgeois life style, and activities of study and political agitation, was subsidized by his wealthy friend and benefactor Friedrich Engels. Bertrand Russell observed a century ago that Marxism was animated less by love of the proletariat than by rancor against the bourgeoisie---perhaps a "self-hating" unconscious reflex in old Karl himself.
It's certainly a mess. The real dilemma is that their ideas (which are held sincerely but NEVER acted upon) are totally incompatible with their lifestyles and priorities. Egalitarians don't send their kids to private school (or at least they shouldn't). Climate alarmists shouldn't take commercial flights. Folks concerned about the poor should be fighting credentialism, not bolstering it, etc. This creates a sense of deep inauthenticity - an awareness of their privilege and the deployment of their opinions (which become increasingly radical and deranged) as mechanisms of deflection and compensation. And most of these people vote.
If we survive this era, the 21st century will be remembered for a troubling trend: blaming victims while standing in support of perpetrators.
Mr. Cunningham it is hard to believe how ahead of the game you were twenty years ago, when you wrote the initial essay. I started realizing the possible negative effects when affirmative action became the law. This morphed into DEI and the white privilege narrative. I am white and would qualify as coming from a privileged backgroud. I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt or anything to be apologetic about. Your essay only ascertained the psychological damage of self-hating liberals. I am still shell shocked by the ass backwards overwhelming support for BLM. I look forward to reading all your essays, and thank you for the same.
Thank you Mary... generous as ever.
I think what has made these Lefty mind-games so especially seductive to the naturally personally ambitious and aspirational kids from middle class backgrounds is that they are seductive on twin tracks....they make them feel 'nice' and they make them feel fashionable. It's a powerful drug.
That comment, itself, is an example of the self-hate Mr. Cunningham describes.
...or so it seems to me.
No, she is simply pointing it out, just as the article does. Describing something is not the same as subscribing to it.
That's one way to read it, yes.
Maybe try reading it again slowly.
If (*who*) survives the 21st C will be remembered (*by whom*) for a troubling trend: blaming (*by whom*) victims (*who* are they? precision needed) while standing in support (these are the same people as the those unidentified people doing the blaming--that's clear enough) of perpetrators (and *who* are the perpetrators?).
I can see what you're trying to say (I think), and likely I see it the same way as you. But it's far from clear--and, you know, there's just a tiny bit of finger-pointing going on. It's disturbingly like the way the the self-hating liberals do, as Mr. Cunningham describes them.
Do you see where I'm coming from? Lack of clarity that would separate you from them.
Ah, I went overboard...my apologies.
It's all good.
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.
I went to school with them, and now live among them. I am an anomaly to them. I am a rational, informed, educated, Trump supporter. I could not possibly be a typical Trump supporter, because Trump supporters with the exception of me, are all uneducated, unintelligent, unsophisticated, racist white supremacists. They know that for a fact, because NYT, The New Yorker, WaPo and NPR said so.
I think it's important to see that leftism is not in itself a disease It is simply an unworkable solution for how to create large scale multi-ethnic, multi-racial societies that are mostly free and stable.
Diseased individuals find themselves attracted to its emphemeral promises, and are unable to accept them as illusions.
Large scale multi-ethnic/racial socialism relies on external enforcement, because voluntary socialism, as in familes/clans/tribes and as far as identifiable ethnic groups (maybe), requires bilateral trust. There is little of this in multi-societies, and hence collectivism must be forced.
Part of this liberal groupthink, I'm sorry to have to say, is the double standards of feminism. On the one hand they decry the "patriarchy" and on the other they ignore the fact that it is primarily men who do the dangerous jobs and the engineering, construction AND maintenance of the civilization upon which women and men both depend. I think since you were at university, the dynamic has also shifted away from popularizing the working class to demeaning them: if you merely have a trade, you're nobody; if you have a university degree, you're somebody.
I am old enough to remember twenty years ago. This post is eerily prescient. Or as they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Conventional Leftiness is also a form of narcissism, sharing this instinct with conventional Rightist grandiosity but simply turned upside down. The Rightwinger, whether Colonel Blimp in 1900 or Donald Trump in our own time, says: " I announce the greatest (country, society, civilization) in the history of the universe, so look at me!" The conventional Lefty of the last 50 years says: "I denounce the most evil (country, society, civilization) in the history of the universe, so look at me!"
So far, God help us!
This is completely brilliant. It gives voice to many half-formed thoughts I've been thinking. The strange aspect of Western pessimism (which you note here) is that it is PURELY class-based... but pretends to be a universal, moralistic worldview. It's actually a symptom of disconnection and status-seeking, and thus profoundly hypocritical.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/our-ruling-class
Thank you James
Oxford - '69 to '72. All my peers went Far Left (IS - International Socialists, now the laughable SWP. IMG - International Marxist Group).
All turned up to picket at the non-stop strikes at Cowley & Didcot Power Station. All given short shrift by the actual workers.
All now highly paid professionals. KCs, senior civil servants. Hospital consultants.
Not for me. I took the road less trodden, psychedelics. Still use them 57 years on. Happy with my choice.
Absolutely. Essex 71-74. The fashionable thing to be in the Literature faculty was a Maoist.
And some "working class struggle" students got beaten up by some visiting striking miners if I remember right!
WOW! This is an amazing essay, full of very insightful ideas and well phrased language. To have recognized this 20 years ago is a real credit to you, and a slap in the face of our society not correcting this a lot sooner. Perhaps we can also give de Tocqueville some credit for his similar remarks on the soft enervation and strangulation of liberty from rules and regulations, noted in the 1830's.
I won't try to cite all of the items that caught my attention as I read, but a couple where you chose to avoid additional boldface, I would have added it:
Further in line with de Tocqueville: "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."
"... 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." [Dr. David Brin provides this supporting adage: "Criticism Is the Only Known Antidote to Error" (aka CITOKATE)]
A couple more items not needing 2026 emphasis, per se, but worthy of comment:
"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." While I am not in close sympathy with the religious views of commenter "Late but in earnest" below", I agree and think it was a good observation for you to make in regard to an historical, cultural, and psychological impact; a good brick to add to the wall of logic you were building.
"Meanwhile South East Asia is turning out science graduates in the millions." I blow hot and cold on this point and it's implications. Especially given you made it 20 years ago. I hear on one hand this suggests the Chinese et al. are really going to eat our lunch technologically. But then I see suggestions (aside from a few top grade universities) most of these graduates are not that well trained, and whatever skills they possess are constrained by the cultural forces to remain civil or to adhere to the CCP aims. 20 years on, it does not seem to have been the major factor in CCP success, except in supporting an enhanced surveillance state, that such a cohort might imply. Possibly excessive corruption within the CCP has played a role in keeping that force under wraps?
Thank you ssri
They do feel better about themselves; except in the quiet of dark places. Which is why they never allow the lights to dim or the soundtrack to stop playing. The constant wall of sound ensures the warm fuzzy feeling remains. Pray the power never goes out.
Excellent insights, as fresh today as it was 20 years ago. I would go a step further. The root cause of this sick psychology is the spiritual emptiness of the postmodern era - traditional religions have been discredited but nothing filled the vacuum. What could a well (over?) educated liberal believe in? Social justice feels as good a substitute as any. Focusing on the victim takes some existential anxiety off the minds of those who have a deep hole in their soul. Is there a solution? Nothing magical. But there are certainly plenty of human experiences and wisdoms to at least ease the symptoms and even inspire potential cures. I wrote about this phenomenon recently in a related blog: https://yansong.substack.com/p/faith-and-meaning-in-the-age-of-artificial?r=o1gg5&utm_medium=ios
"The Democrats' Social-Justice Hoax": https://daveziffer.substack.com/p/the-democrats-social-justice-hoax
"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."
This image of the 'shattered star of Christianity' is very powerful. Thankfully, this seemingly shattered star is also a person, Jesus Christ, fully human, fully divine, whose shattered body hung on The Cross, (seemingly) meaninglessly to those present.
Maybe as a civilisation we are presently enduring the very early hours of Holy Saturday, waiting for weeping, faithful, Mary Magdalene to discover the rolled back stone of the tomb and come running with the only news worth waiting for. News that will shatter all our warped preconceptions of each other and our world in ways beyond our present comprehension.
To be fair, I quite agree with the overall thrust of this article. I believe that it is generally in line with Ricardo Duchesne's thesis in his book "Greatness and Ruin" (and elsewhere). But I find quite a few specific details to argue with, so I shall. It's what I do. 8-)
First up, a personal statement in the now-fashionable style. I confess that I am an old white married man living in southern England. If that is enough to prejudice you against me, feel free to hie off and save yourself some time. (I do mean "hie off" and not any other similar phrase that might come to mind). Actually I am Scots, but that makes little difference in my case.
"The deeper malaise is a wierd [sic] mentality of sublimated cultural self-hate that has come to be the prevalent social psychology amongst the white, university-educated professiona [sic] middle class..."
Again, I feel myself squarely in the sights. I am a white university-educated middle class man, and a retired professional of sorts. But even on peering as deep into my soul as I can (about 13 microns) I cannot see any "cultural self-hate", sublimated or otherwise. As one of the really talented crew who used to write for "The Daily Reckoning" put it long ago,
"Hating another human being because of their race, religion, or membership in some other broad demographic group is simply a sign of laziness. After all, with just a little time and effort you can really get to know someone and learn to hate them on a more personal level".
There are very many people out there whom I am disposed to hate both mentally and viscerally, but mostly on the more traditional basis that their words and deeds are so widely different from my own. ("Hate" is putting it a bit too strongly, although I sometimes feel guilty for not hating them quite enough). The liars, warmongers, money-grubbers, robbers, murderers, and - oddly enough - hypocrites. And hyper-hypocrites.
However, I don't think I have ever had "a disproportionately powerful ‘opinion forming’ voice in society at large". Au contraire, I have often had an odd feeling of being entirely ignored, rather as if I were the Invisible Man or the protagonist of "The Sixth Sense".
"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..."
There may be something to that feeling. After all, working class/blue collar people have usually had physically demanding jobs, shorter life expectancy, and much less social respect. While some - not all - middle-class people have had cushy billets, sitting in comfortable upholstered chairs at desks and doing mostly "brain work" - even if it was less demanding on the brain than some factory jobs. And middle-class people had, until quite recently, better pay and thus more of the good things of life.
"Business enterprise is essentially disreputable whereas getting a living off the public purse or in the arts and media is highly civilised". Well, as we have seen more and more often and unmistakably, quite a lot of "business enterprises" are somewhat disreputable. As Gustavus Myers - himself an impoverished factory worker before he took up journalism - wrote in his 1936 book "The Great American Fortunes", "Through all of these pages have we searched afar with infinitesimal scrutiny for a fortune acquired by honest means. Nor have the methods been measured by the test of a code of advanced ethics, but solely by the laws as they stood in the respective times. At no time has the discovery of an ‘honest fortune’ rewarded our determined quest. Often we thought that we had come across such a specimen, only to find distressing disappointment; through all fortunes, large and small, runs the same heavy streak of fraud and theft, the little trader, with his misrepresentation and swindling, differing from the great frauds in degree only".
"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". Well... you would have had to be blind not to understand how the "Global South" or the "underdeveloped nations" have been mercilessly exploited by the richer industrialised nations. In 1750, believe it or not, the two wealthiest countries in the world were China and India, which then underwent over a century of poverty and oppression solely because they were conquered and occupied by cruel, racist, extorting Western "businessmen", politicians and soldiers. Now China leads the world again, and India is rapidly recovering.
"...a linguistic fog of moral relativism which disorientates people and makes them doubt their own common sense instincts about right and wrong". I doubt whether notions of right and wrong - morals, in short - are "common sense". Unless you accept the apocryphal remark that "Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach eighteen". Surely we acquire our ideas about right and wrong from our parents, relatives, friends, and society.
"All people in the Third World are shouldering with dignity a burden imposed upon them by the West in general and America in particular...." Well, there was George Kennan's secret US State Department memo of 1948: "We have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction".
"All businesses are probably trying to screw you...." The prime directive of almost all corporations is to maximise short-term profit. That is done by maximising income and minimising spending. If by "you" is understood the workers and the customers, the quoted proposition is surely trivially and obviously true. That is what corporations are for, and in many countries it is what they are bound by law to do.
"...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". Not one of the cited innovations would ever have been created without the help of millions or billions of taxpayer dollars provided by the US government. The four mentioned were actually invented by scientists and engineers working in labs largely paid for by the taxpayers. We do owe those scientists and engineers a debt of thanks - but hardly the overpaid business "executives" who did them the favour of employing them.
Lastly, I am concerned about the considerable amount of amateur psychoanalysis of complete strangers. It's one thing to observe and remark on a person's conduct and statements; quite another to diagnose his motives, especially if you believe them to be widely different from his claimed ones.
Thank you for this Tom. As a reply I think it helpful to quote from the addendum to my original 20-year-old essay:
"...... it being (with the benefit of hindsight) a bit starry-eyed about the future of the internet" and
".......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."
I too "am an old white married man living in southern England" so I am hardly likely to be 'prejudiced against you'.
The rest of the text that you have picked up on is (as I imagine you will already understand) my characterisation of a type....a type that has not only almost completely dominated academia and the mainstream media for many decades now.....but also, in my experience anyway, is - albeit in varying degrees - more the norm than the exception amongst the Western university-educated professional middle class.
To put it another way, I'm not sure what we're 'disagreeing' about here?
We are probably not disagreeing at all! I was just horsing around, the way I used to like wrestling with my (elder) brother in ways that deceived adults into worrying for our safety. I have always been disputatious and loved arguing just for the sake of it (and admittedly to keep my claws sharp, although I had them sheathed this time). That trait probably comes closer to making my wife and daughters hate me than anything else.
I usually comment only on work that I think is worth criticising, and with an essentially constructive attitude - even if it doesn't feel that way to the author!
Do please feel free to comment on anything you disagree with in my work, or to add anything you thing germane or interesting. As Alexander Pope wrote, "A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday".
"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".
Inevitably, as soon as the influence of the Internet became widely understood, the suffocating orthodoxy moved in to muffle and neutralise it. Largely by the growth of vast "social media" corporations, whose Web sites are unthinkingly frequented by ordinary people who mistake them for the Internet itself. Unfortunately, it must be admitted that ignorance, laziness, and inertia play a significant part in this. When Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues created the Web and made it freely available as a gift to humanity, they assumed that most people would create their own small Web pages and would write as much as read. That capability was built into their first (free) browser, but was dropped by almost all subsequent ones.
Microsoft's first reaction to the Internet was to try to suppress it; then to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" it; finally, to take over as much of it as possible. It succeeded in that last objective simply because so many users defaulted to Windows and whatever browser it offered. The other social media corporations merely followed in its footsteps, like King Wenceslas' page.
Substack, among others, gives us a much better chance of freedom at the cost of giving up - most of us - dreams of riches. You can't have it all.
The white, middle-class mind game goes back at least 175 years. Consider the case of one Karl Marx, whose bourgeois life style, and activities of study and political agitation, was subsidized by his wealthy friend and benefactor Friedrich Engels. Bertrand Russell observed a century ago that Marxism was animated less by love of the proletariat than by rancor against the bourgeoisie---perhaps a "self-hating" unconscious reflex in old Karl himself.
It's certainly a mess. The real dilemma is that their ideas (which are held sincerely but NEVER acted upon) are totally incompatible with their lifestyles and priorities. Egalitarians don't send their kids to private school (or at least they shouldn't). Climate alarmists shouldn't take commercial flights. Folks concerned about the poor should be fighting credentialism, not bolstering it, etc. This creates a sense of deep inauthenticity - an awareness of their privilege and the deployment of their opinions (which become increasingly radical and deranged) as mechanisms of deflection and compensation. And most of these people vote.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-progressive-agenda-as-pure-class