A Few Points on the Utter Naïveté of Progressives

If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts. —Camille Paglia (possibly her most famous quote)

     This one may be a matter of flogging a long-dead horse, or maybe choking a dead chicken, but I don’t care, because sometimes I feel like saying this stuff because I consider it to be not only important, but so freaking obvious that it astonishes me that so many people just won’t see it.

     So for starters I suppose I should clarify two things. First, what is a Progressive? “Progressive” is a rough convenient synonym for a western leftist who follows whatever style of leftism happens to be in fashion. It’s not just a person who favors progress, as Progressives nowadays are as much in favor of decadence, decline, and fall as they are for any positive reform. It’s not just a Marxist, but nowadays more of a neo-Marxist—one who has replaced the bourgeoisie with straight white men as the archenemy of the system, and the workers with the welfare class as the hero. A Progressive is not just a Social Justice Warrior, but may just as easily be a Social Justice Coward, one who endorses irrational yet more or less popular views out of fear of being ostracized or otherwise punished by the hysterical mob of her peers. A Progressive is a western person who thinks China has a more enlightened political system than America, and is much more inclined to bash capitalism than communism. A Progressive takes critical race theory seriously, so seriously that he or she is inclined to agree that ALL white people are racists by default whether they hold racist attitudes not. A Progressive is a person who thinks Fox News is totally biased in favor of Trump, and sees CNN and MSNBC and The New York Times as reliable objective journalism. A Progressive is a person who favors emancipatory politics even if he has only the vaguest notion of what emancipatory politics actually is. Hell, you all know what a Progressive is. A Progressive is a soft-headed and somewhat hysterical leftist.

     So a Progressive is not someone resembling Theodore Roosevelt or even Woodrow Wilson, though they also were called Progressives. The meaning has changed, as have the meanings of so many other words, like “racist” or “normal.”

     The next thing to clarify is that the following points refer not to simple irrational sloppy thinking or emotional wishful thinking, much less to deliberate lies of the corporate media uncritically believed by these aforementioned Progressives (like the years-long Russia collusion hoax and coup attempt, for example), but rather to signs of childish naivety, a soft-headed ability to believe damn near anything, especially if it is spoon fed to them by the corporate establishment and is obediently parroted by most of the people in their social circle. It requires a certain capacity to reject obvious reality and to cling to myths with such tenacity that the power of their intolerance of truth will change the truth into something closer to what they are told by propagandists. Progressivism has become a faith-based atheistic religion, or rather a cult.

     Unlike many “anti-SJWs,” I do not consider most lefties, even most radical lefties, to be particularly vile. There is an old saying that conservatives think liberals are foolish, whereas liberals think conservatives are pure evil; and so, maybe because I’ve become slightly conservative over the past few years, I consider “liberals,” or rather leftist sheeple, to be deluded and irrational. Even so, the neo-Marxist left in general has become more evil, or at least more ruthlessly amoral in enforcing the irrationality of their cult, than it has been in my memory. So with that as a preamble, I follow with eight peculiarities of the new left which show them to be not really evil, but just plain blind.

     1. First there is the assumption, the very idea, that people in general are capable, even potentially, of being perfect. In true Marxist fashion the new left denies the reality of human nature, favoring a blank slate philosophy that should have been obsolete a century ago, and prefers to believe that white people’s imperfections are deliberate perversity, whereas everyone else’s imperfections are the result of capitalism, or white cis-gendered patriarchy, or “systemic oppression,” or whatever. Most of these leftist ideologues have never come close to really trying to reprogram themselves sufficiently that they might be perfect, except by hysterically censoring themselves outwardly. They habitually blame others for their own dysfunction and failure and misery. People don’t realize how profoundly stuck they are until they try to go against the current of mainstream human behavior, and most lefties do not even make the attempt—except, again, very superficially, for example with regard to hair colorings and desire for the suicide of their own race and nation. Also, most westerners, including of course most lefties, lack even the capacity for the power of introspection to get anywhere near that level of insight. 

     2. Next is the idea that imperfect people, as even Progressives still obviously are, can produce anything remotely resembling a perfect society, that dysfunctional misfits who victimize at the drop of the proverbial hat are liable to usher in a better world. I call utter bullshit on this one too.

     3. Then there is the (again essentially Marxist) notion that everyone is basically the same, with the same inherent degree of intelligence, talent, strength, and potential, and with all apparent differences being a cultural construct. In fact this is a veritable foundation stone of new leftism, despite the fact that it is an obvious falsehood. (It is a very convenient dogma for communists who like the idea of a classless society with everyone being practically interchangeable, rather like a hive of social insects.) This strange notion of the left ignores genetic, inherent racial and sexual differences which nevertheless are plainly obvious to anyone who has not been indoctrinated into the current mass hysteria. The fact is that living beings differ psychologically about as much as they/we differ physically; and though we humans are more alike than different, being all members of the same species of ape, still to deny, say, that women are influenced in their thinking by female hormones and men are influenced likewise by male hormones, as a genetically conditioned aspect of human nature, requires such blindness to one’s own humanity or human-ness that it boggles my mind, and inspires me to write about the subject repeatedly. We are born with different strengths, weaknesses, and potentials, regardless of all the indoctrinated leftist wishful thinking in the world, and no amount of socialist or globalist social engineering is going to change that.

     4. Another big one is the very idea that the history of radical leftism in the 20th century (let alone the riots and arsons and murders, etc. of recent months) is totally irrelevant to an evaluation of radical leftism. The fact is that Marxism alone has killed approximately 100 million people over the past hundred years, more so than all the various forms of fascism combined. This is good evidence that the new left really is a cult: how many more centuries of failed and stagnant economies, totalitarianism, and genocide will it take for neo-Marxists to realize that Marxism is a failure of an idea? But the presumption seems to be that castrating it and depriving it of half its rationality will somehow make radical leftism all better.

     5. This one is more subtle and may require a modicum of intelligence to comprehend it, but here it is: It is the idea that selfishness and ruthlessness—that is, competition—have no place in a prosperous civilized society. However, on the contrary, history shows that a certain amount of ruthless serving of oneself, and of one’s immediate family and friends, are instrumental to said prosperity. Competition and survival of the fittest are the generators of evolution, which is much truer PROGRESS than soft-headed, ideologically motivated social engineering will ever produce, regardless of compassion and other good intentions. If Progressivism is so superior, then it should win out in a free-for-all struggle for survival with all comers, including conservatism and even fascism, but it can’t…unless it is through the selfishness and ruthlessness of its clueless followers, and the shameless dishonesty of its leaders.

     6. And then there is the extraordinarily naive, childlike belief that if we are “nice” to everyone, like Somalian Islamist immigrants for example, then everyone will be “nice” to us in return, and the fact that so many people aren’t “nice” now may be attributed to white men of the past and present not being “nice” to them, or maybe to their ancestors. Everybody, except maybe for white men, are naturally, despite the blank slate they were supposedly born with, inclined to be “nice.” In other words, western civilization has so much of the left’s rage directed toward it because brown people can’t compete very well.

     7. In harmony with its cult-like nature, there is the belief that, as with other forms of ideological totalitarianism, everyone will somehow See the Light and be converted to the gospel of Progressivism, when it has less of a leg to stand on than, say, early Christianity or Marxism 1.0. As with the Christianity of Constantine’s time, Progressivism does not rely on reasoned debate so much as on hysterical witch hunts and aggressive indoctrination, with eventually the plutocrats seeing its usefulness as a means of controlling the masses and adding whatever weight they can to further it. But western people especially, those of western European ancestry, have this bothersome appreciation for liberty of thought and action, and to them the attempted compulsions of the Progressive left are becoming increasingly noxious and intolerable. Mass hysteria might have worked in premodern times, and actually did on occasion, but now the hysteria of the new left is just irritating and exasperating to enough people to defeat the new cult before it becomes the spiritually bankrupt Faith of the people.

     8. Finally, we have another veritable foundation stone of the new left’s “philosophy,” or at least ideology, and that is that objective truth itself is “just a cultural construct.” To some degree this is legitimate, and even Buddhist philosophy agrees that what is merely called truth by worldly normies is not ultimate truth but just a narrative called true because most people agree with it. But to declare that ALL so-called objective truth is nothing more than whatever people want it to be, is not only hogwash but dangerous hogwash. Feelings and emotional wishful thinking simply cannot determine facts, regardless of how fashionable postmodernism is among Starbucks socialists and other adult children. Saying that things fall up instead of down, or that two and two make seven, or that men can menstruate, is just plain false, regardless of how lefties spin their narratives; and building a bridge or launching a rocket built on feelings instead of empirical principles of physics and engineering will result an easily predictable disaster. This fashionable belief that wishful thinking can determine truth helps to account for the academic and political and propagandist (I almost wrote “journalistic”) left politicizing, weaponizing, and corrupting science to the point that it is no longer truly scientific. There are some lefties, especially in the neo-Marxist indoctrination camps called academia, who go so far as to insist that rational, objective empiricism, upon which science is based, is a “tool of white patriarchal oppression”; but when science goes into decline, any relatively advanced technological civilization which relies upon it is also bound to go into decline. So to flog the dead horse one last time today, truth is emphatically NOT just a cultural construct, although the term “cultural construct” may itself be just a cultural construct.

     That’s enough I suppose. The horse is still dead.