Dead Reckoning

Why the Left develops such absurd ideas.

I remember in my days as a Left-wing teenager, many years ago, I was cooking eggs for breakfast one morning. One of my fellow Leftists came in and saw me and sneered, “Oh, I see you’re having an unfertilised chicken embryo for breakfast”. That was a man, but the aggression style, the sneering remark, the moral grandstanding, strikes me as very feminine.

What he was doing, of course, was being competitive. He was playing a game of ‘holier-than-thou’ with me. It was a play for dominance through virtue-signalling. Status within a closed group can be gained by conspicuous moral display. He was a vegan, and I was not, and he was therefore morally superior to me, and deserving of higher social status. He would have denied that, of course, and indignantly claimed to be an egalitarian who cares only for animals, not for himself. Disingenuousness and lack of self-awareness are also important characteristics on the Left. It helps them to cope with the cognitive dissonance that they inevitably experience.

Leaving aside the question of whether it makes any biological sense to talk about an ‘unfertilised embryo’, this person was also passionately in favour of what he would have called “a woman’s right to choose”.

According to his political world-view, perfectly orthodox on many parts of the Left, it’s outrageous to kill an unborn chicken, but it’s perfectly acceptable to kill an unborn human.

The minor incident illustrates perfectly what I call the extremist drift. He had created an incentive for me to become more extreme in my opinions in order to compete with others and avoid future shaming. At least we were preaching pacifism, misguided though we were. Consider what results this process might produce in a group advocating violence.

He was blissfully unaware of the absurdity of his own positions, the knots he had tied himself in. How did he manage it?

There are plenty of other examples of this kind of Left-wing absurdity, perhaps the most bizarre recent example being Queers for Palestine.

Or the idea that everything is socially constructed, except that women are essentially good, and men are essentially bad.

Why does the Left produce such blatant pseudo-intellectual garbage?

The Extremist Drift

I have mentioned elsewhere the inherent tendency of ideological groups always to drift towards extremism. Demonstrations of piety win you status within the group, and so members compete with each other for status by playing holier-than-thou. As one person becomes more pious and extreme, another one will attempt to outdo them. This Red Queen arms race takes place most effectively behind closed doors; public scrutiny tends to act as an effective check on extremism. A lot of absurd-sounding statements are intended for consumption within the cult, and only appear insane when overheard by outsiders. ‘Queers for Palestine’ makes perfect sense within the context of Leftist political culture. It just wouldn’t attract much sympathy in Palestine.

Supporting any struggle

An important leftist principle is to ‘support any struggle’. I was told this years ago by a guy we used to call Communist Dave:

“Support any struggle, comrade. Support any struggle”, Dave told me.

“I disagree”, I replied. “I think you should choose your battles very carefully”.

He didn’t look very happy at this, but he didn’t know how to reply. He could see my point.

This tendency to ‘support any struggle’, (i.e. jump aboard any passing fad that happens to be painted red, in an effort to compete for status within the group) is one of the reasons why the Left comes up with such absurd self-contradictory ideas.

It explains my antagonist’s breakfast-time taunting. He has been “supporting any struggle” without cross-referencing how these different causes might interact. He ends up saying that it is an outrage to eat an egg, but perfectly fine to have an abortion.

We see a smorgasbord of different leftist political causes spread out before us. We have a moral obligation to support all of them at the same time. Some of them will make more progress than others, but let’s do our best to endorse all of them.

First there is “Animal rights”; let’s agitate and push the envelope a little bit over here. Don’t eat eggs, it is exploitative of chickens.

Next there is “Women’s rights”; let’s agitate and push the envelope a little bit over there. Support a woman’s right to choose.

Voila. Contradictory, anti-human nonsense.

He would probably argue that an unborn human is not a person but a clump of cells, and therefore undeserving of rights. Even if you agreed with this, the same argument would also apply to the chicken.

Apparently not though. It seems that the chicken has the right to life, but not the human.

Let’s at least be consistent. If we can have abortions, we can eat eggs. If we can’t eat eggs, we can’t have abortions. Mostly, though, it seems that we just want to have our cake and eat it.

Anti-intellectualism

Then again, maybe the idea that we should try to be logically consistent is part of a wider language-game created by the heteronormative Patriarcho-Capitalist hegemony specifically to silence the voices of women, Queers and people of colour.

There has always been a strand of anti-intellectualism on the Left. It was perhaps originally a reflection of the working-class’s desire not to be intellectually overwhelmed by more educated opponents. We workers will not be excluded from power on the grounds that we are not educated, when we are denied education.

The bourgeoisie were intellectuals; the proletariat lived in a world of physical labour. An antipathy towards the bourgeois would involve an antipathy toward the intellectual. Plain-speaking workers called a spade a spade, and to do so has a nobility in itself.

This anti-intellectualism has been taken up by later iterations of Leftism to explain away, for example, differences in IQ scores between demographic groups. It’s all a conspiracy by white supremacist men to produce rigged tests in order to keep themselves in power. There is no such thing as the truth, there is only opinion. Protected groups have their own special ways of knowing which are not captured in the white man’s tests.

It is notable that Left-wing anti-intellectualism has no problem with overblown academic-sounding jargon. The verbose pompousness of left-wing academic terminology is designed to confuse and intimidate the naïve, while lending Left-wing ideas an air of seriousness that they do not deserve.

However, the bottom line is that the Left does not always select the best ideas from among those it proposes. It doesn’t want to be elitist, or exclusionary. It is a broad church in which all ideas are heard. Bad ideas are celebrated instead of being allowed to die. This inevitably produces a sub-standard output, which does not help the Left-wing case.

Being the Change

Many ‘progressive’ activists are keen on the principle “be the change that you want to see in the world”. In other words, go around pretending that the world is how you would like it to be, rather than how it actually is.

Because everything is socially constructed, goes the theory, there is nothing to society other than human practice; we can just get together and agree that society is whatever we want it to be. We can show others the path to utopia by becoming a living example of it. Once people see the superior nature of the society we are creating, they will want to join us. If enough people join in with us, then together, we can actually change society. What seems like a radical practise today will become normal once it is widely adopted. In this way, we can re-engineer society by direct action.

In order to work, the approach relies on mass conversion, essentially like a religion. These mass conversions, of course, never materialise, as most people just want to be left alone. Most people are not psychologically in need of a cult to belong to, which is essentially what this is. Most people will not be convinced that your radical agenda is workable or justifies the effort and disruption involved.

Whenever the progressive activists come up against normal people, they are obliged to adopt a high-handed moral arrogance, a ‘not in front of the natives’ mindset.

It usually isn’t very long before they have to resort to coercion. The people will need to be ‘persuaded’ to join in with the highly questionable social reform program. There is a corresponding necessity to suppress alternative practices, and this involves force of some kind. For the common good, you’ve got to stop doing this and start doing that. You must take the vaccine to protect others. Free speech has consequences. Give up meat to save the planet.

Evidence suggesting the plan isn’t working is deemed to be either deliberate sabotage and propaganda, or it’s just the teething problems of the transition period, and all will come good in the end. We just need to keep forcing everyone harder. Evidence showing the success of the progressive vision must be found, and if necessary fabricated. Contrary evidence must be suppressed, as we saw with the Covid episode.

However, the facts about the state of the world remain unchanged, despite what you would like to believe. You are almost certainly trying to force a square peg into a round hole, and it almost certainly isn’t going to end well.

The Gulag Awaits

Taking all of these features together, the drift towards extremism, the anti-intellectualism, the mission creep, the conscious decision to live a lie, we can discern clearly the path to the gates of the concentration camp. The totalitarian nature of the Left is to be found in the narcissism and intra-group virtue-signalling of its members, in the absurdity of its ever-shifting policies, in the need to control other people’s lives and enforce compliance.

It is said that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. I’m not convinced that these people even have good intentions.

As a grain of comfort, such regimes are always unsustainable. It is true that you eventually run out of other people’s money, but you also run out of credibility. As Ayn Rand said, “You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality”. Over time, the belief system espoused by the cult becomes more and more divorced from reality and more and more coercive. The more divorced from reality it becomes, the more coercive it has to be in order to keep the delusion going.

Eventually, inevitably, it will collapse.