The internet is infuriating because it is not reality. The internet is pure symbol. As a result, no one can tell you’re a dog on the internet, or if you’re pushing a dog of an argument.
In particular, it is popular for random people to follow you around and insist that you’re wrong. “It’s logical,” they tell you, but they are not speaking of reality. They have taken a few factors, cherry-picked data, and spun it to show you a dollhouse world of simple “truths” that do not exist in reality.
These people are infected with a mental virus called liberalism that has suspended their logical thought process. Like other cults, it provides them with a clear definition of who’s OK and who’s not, and offers handy explanations for just about any situation.
They frequently accuse others of hypocrisy for not accepting this tiny little world as a substitute for the large and broad world that we must actually survive in. Let’s take a look at some frequent liberal accusations of hypocrisy and how true they are.
- Inclusion
Typical liberal dogma is that conservatives exist in a binary world where we exclude anyone who does not agree with us and demonize them. Here’s an example from the comments:
Conveniently, you have branded anyone who exists outside the parameters of your dichotomous 1-dimensional left/right political spectrum as just another “one of them”. This is the fundamental defense system of all belief systems against hostile information/truth;
if not Jihadist = ‘infidel/heathen’.
if not Pro-PC = ‘fascist/bigot’.
if not conservative = ‘leftist/liberal’.What the liberal fails to mention is that there’s a more powerful binary going on in liberalism. “If not liberal, is bad.” The liberal thinks that because he does not explicitly call his foes “conservatives,” it does not appear that he is excluding them.
The liberal dichotomy is based on inclusion. They don’t need to call their enemies names. By implication, liberalism is open-minded, “intellectual” and correct, which makes anyone who opposes it close-minded, dim-witted and wrong.
- Poverty
In the liberal lexicon, if you think poverty has a cause, you are a bigot. It’s actually a tale of two causes. Liberal dogma states that poverty is caused by external factors, usually pre-existing poverty or large corporations, or the rich, or something.
Conservatives tend to look at trillions spent on public schooling, public assistance, equal opportunity programs, civil rights and other factors and take a more sanguine look: if you’re impoverished, it’s because you’re either clueless or cannot apply yourself.
We all acknowledge that there are some exceptions to any rule, but the liberals want us to believe the rule that all are exceptions.
Liberals say poverty has an external cause, and that anyone who disputes this is a nasty mean person. Conservatives suggest poverty has an internal cause, with a few exceptions. Liberals call conservatives bigots for suggesting that our choices in life lead to results.
- Race
Nowhere is liberal hypocrisy more evident than on the issue of race. The liberal parties after all thrive on dissent, which encourages a lack of national unity and thus a focus on the individual and what it wants to demand from society. And more tellingly, minorities and immigrants constitute the left’s new voting bloc, since those groups overwhelmingly vote leftist.
In the liberal view, demanding that every country on earth open its borders so that humanity becomes one single ethnic group worldwide is not bigotry. Even though this amounts to genocide of existing ethnic groups, liberals see it as enlightened.
If you oppose the great liberal quest to turn us into a homogenized single ethnic group, you’re a racist. Liberals who want to destroy your race are not. Is that clear, Comrade Citizen?
Why is liberalism this insane?
Liberalism is fundamentally a social trope, not a logical one. It is concerned with appearance, not consequences beyond the immediate and tangible. Its point of view is how you appear to other individuals in a social setting. Beyond that, it considers nothing, especially the consequences of its ideology.
The ultimate goal of liberalism is to paint itself as exceptional, and to construe any opposing viewpoint as “like everyone else,” or unexceptional and prone to normal human failings. The liberal cult thrives because it makes its members feel smarter and more enlightened than you.
This is why liberalism is effective at mobilizing large numbers of people from the discontented, failed, alienated, confused, or merely socially promiscuous among us. This is also why it is equally effective at destroying civilization by forcing it to distance itself from reality.
The conservative view is that liberalism is one of many mental pitfalls in life, like alcoholism, cults, self-pity or denial. The liberal view is that only liberalism is true and that everything else is error. Who actually is the hypocrite here?
I don’t subscribe to any particular ideology as a statement of my identity. I think ideologies are simply tools, and any ideologies principles can be relevant in any given circumstance; it just depends on the circumstance.
I imagine your problem is that you are attached to your ideology — conservatism — and wish to insist that it should be applied in every single circumstance; as opposed to simply considering it one of many useful ideological tools. Sort of like the man with the hammer who thinks everything is a nail.
Then you meet liberals who only have one ideology in their toolbox: a screwdriver, who wants to screw everything in sight; and the two of you meet; to fix the problem of some dust on the floor, which would require the tool known as a brush and dustpan.
Instead you are both beating the dust to smithereens with your hammer and screwdriver, and blaming each other for the fact that your problem persists.
There are sincere truthseekers who may at any given point of time in their life be exploring either liberal or conservative ideology to see if its principles are applicable to any issues they wish to test their application.
There are conservative and liberal individuals who have attached their ego to their ideology, instead of using their ideology as one of many problem solving tools. The latter in both camps believe that they are ‘right’ and everyone else is ‘wrong’ and unworthy of entering into a sincere enquiring conversation. Both appear to get a sense of self righteous superiority by denigrating the other as being unworthy a enquiry minded sincere listening conversation.
For an observer; its a bit like watching Tom and Jerry cartoons.
The underlying possible truth of the matter being, both sides get some kind of ego-socio-political status benefits from their respective fanclubs and are essentially participating in a faked staged kind of political wrestling game.
In Radical Honesty we have a kind of practice that if you find out you start getting a few followers, the first thing to do is, make an absolute fucking fool of yourself in front of them. If any of your followers are not capable of ego-existential death; and you accept such a person as a follower, because of your ego’s greed for quantity of followers, instead of quality of followers capable of ego-existential death;… then you thereby allow your ego’s addiction for ever greater number of followers to imprison your rational and enquiry minded processes, that are quite happy to admit when they have made a mistake, and to laugh at ourselves for taking ourselves so serious, into its ego prison of ‘always being right’.
“I don’t subscribe to any particular ideology as a statement of my identity. I think ideologies are simply tools, and any ideologies principles can be relevant in any given circumstance; it just depends on the circumstance. ”
i don’t mean to be “mean” but that is illogical and counter-productive, we all have stances, even you you must take a stance and defend it. i understand the nature of POWER, it forces people to switch ideologies constantly and they are a way of manipulating people. nobody wants to be pigeon holed as a liberal or a “racist”, but people really are these things. I find it somewhat distressing that people do not BELIEVE in their own ideas. if i missed your point please reiterate, because I am a bit confused.
“Not having an ideology” is an ideology.
It is an inescapable concept.
What?
To not have an ideology is an ideology?
How can the lack of something equal the existence of that something which is claimed to be lacking?
There doesn’t seem anything “inescapable” about such a weird concept. It just doesn’t make sense.
Resolving to believe in no ideology is an ideological commitment; it’s like offering “anarchist” as your view on type of government.
Someone recently used the term “notional” here to describe one side of this split, but there is a view that leftism is an “ideology” in that it is prescriptive, but rightism is a strategy in that it is consequentialist. In simpler terms, rightism is a study of cause and effect and the strategies that are rewarded, while leftism is a matter of feeling and moral judgment without regard to consequence. There are truths in both usages, but the argument could (reasonably) be made that strategy/consequentialism itself is an ideology. Further, the statement “My ideology is to refuse to have an ideology” itself constitutes an ideological statement. I tend to bypass the linguistic confusion by instead describing each.
thank you, you cleared it up for me good sir!
exactly, being Machiavellian and using ideology as a vehicle to power is contra the whole idea of “preserving tradition”
Me either. I don’t subscribe to any identity whatsoever.
I disagree. Some strategies are superior to others; any other notion is a moral (not logical, not historical) insistence on pluralism and the equal “validity” of all concepts. Some ideas are simply wrong.
You are mistaking instance for essence here.
Even if most people argue politics this way, it does not mean the ideas themselves are wrong because they are misused.
“two of you meet; to fix the problem of some dust on the floor”
What if they meet to build something usefull, a cupboard? Then both tools are relevant; the only problem is: where is the blueprint, assembling instruction, etc., or at least a good picture of this cupboard with its description?
Do you have a picture of the society we all are talking about?
Ideology is based around an overly rationalistic, analytical, partial, abstracted, Cartesian perspective on the world.
The conservative tradition (pre-WW1) is based on an older kind of Reason – not disembodied, but somatic; contextual; imaginative; incorporating knowledge about concrete aspects of the world – particular knowledge of time and place.
Ian McGilchrist explains very well the difference between ideology and tradition, tying it back to insights from both neuroscience and the history of literature and art.
This paragraph is designed to add to what you have said above. Most universals are based in the lowest common denominator because they are so generic they are forced into interpretation by the individual. Conservatives have one universal, which is the world itself. Within that, they seem to trust process and hierarchy more than a flat hierarchy composed of individuals.
well said mr. stevens
Cantillon,
Are you referring to: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World?
If so: are you implying that there is some relationship between the political terms of ‘right/conservative’ and ‘left/liberal’; and the terms of ‘right and left’ brain?
My understanding of the political terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ are that the further you move to the right, you move towards anarchy and libertarianism (smaller goverment) to no goverment; and the further you move to the left, you move to larger goverment (socialism, nazism, communism, corporatism, fascism).
My understanding of the neurological terms ‘right’ and ‘left’ brain, are simply that the one is on the right, and the other on the left.
Am I missing something?
My definition for any ideology, whether it be political, religious or cultural tradition is that it is in essence “a group-shared system of thought and action that offers the individual a frame of orientation and an object of devotion”.
I can’t speak toward Cantillon’s response, but to my mind this is the division:
Left: Individualism, egalitarianism, freedom = society geared toward the individual.
Right: Consequentialism, structure, naturalism = society geared toward process, order and design.
As part of that, rightists tend to support “Social Darwinism” based upon a theory of quasi-libertarian laissez faire and meritocracy. This does not exclude monarchy, caste systems and nationalism.
American rightists are roughly as you describe, but I would refer to all of them as “neo-liberals” at this point, although I think the founding fathers were probably farther right than most imagine, e.g. would have more in common with Machiavelli and Hitler than our current “wage patriotic war for world equality, gender rights, multiculturalism and McDonald’s” conservatives.
So it would appear that your political terms of ‘left’ and ‘right’ are rather different to my political terms for left and right. As I imagine others terms for ‘left’ and ‘right’ may also be different to both of ours.
So: could you elaborate a bit further on both concepts and each term you use being a bit more specific; and would you fit what you call ‘liberalism’ into ‘left’?
Would you also agree that not everyone who uses the political terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ mean them in the same way that you do?
It is my opinion that a majority of the misunderstandings, disagreements and general animosity between all individuals on planet earth are a result of people’s lack of communication skills, and lack of listening and enquiring to determine whether what we thought we heard someone say (our interpretation), actually was accurate in terms of what the speaker meant.
We project our interpretations of anothers spoken or written words, as being an accurate interpretation of what they mean, without enquiring to determine whether they are indeed accurately interpreted. To a greater or lesser extent, depending on the particular relationship; we are all in self-delusion about what we think others are saying!! Its quite funny, if it weren’t so tragic; considering our belief that we are ‘communicating’! ;-)
Please excuse my coarseness, but only coarseness will adequately serve to express my agreement here:
Fuckin’ “A”!
Well said, etc. You have nailed the problem on the head.
The non-existent art of communication.
Who remembers when it took place without a second thought? Until the advent of the drug culture, that saw everyone adding “Know what I mean?” to every statement.
“Yeah, yeah”, was the answer, in every case.
So much for communication.
Huh!
In an age before pluralism, in which any interpretation was valid.
As I’ve said, some people call cars apples.
This does not make a car an apple.
This is not a failing of language, but of the human ego, in demanding that its own definition supplant a reasonable depiction of what exists.
For example:
I can’t agree here.
Fascism and Nazism were not left-wing movements.
Anarchy is not a right-wing movement.
Yes, and some terms are correct.
The other option is that language is meaningless.
I tend to use historical definitions, not populist vernacular.
Some people also refer to cars as apples.
It’s very fortunate that Muhrrteyn was the first to comment. He (I tend to assume people online are usually males and Andrea is a masculine name even etymologically speaking) clearly illustrates the us against them mentality, perhaps unwittingly. First he starts disqualifying the “others” with a series of cliches of relativism and how ideologies are tools, which shows in fact a poor understanding of the historical forces that got us here and why. This he does only to be able to qualify “them” (and in his case it would seem it’s most people), and in the last paragraph he proceeds to validate his “us”, in his case a psychotherapy group called “Radical Honesty” and he describes how the members of that cult have to immediately disqualify themselves if they show any leadership traits; which is a nifty device for we all know how hard it can be sometimes for an alpha to deal with those contesting his dominance in a group. If you care to look it up you’ll find a video of the guru offering you reading materials on the main page, and their FAQ reduces all the problems in life to “lying”. So here we have a small group of people who are supposed to be absolutely honest to his leader and function within the superstitious framework of psychotherapy. Do we need a better example of “Us vs Them”?
The honest man is a natural leader. Not that he sets out to be, but his is the clearest, truest view. He simply is.
The idea of “Radical Honesty” grates somewhat, on me, however.
There seems nothing radical about honesty. It is like sunshine, after grey overcast: it is what it is. An elemental is-ness. Remove it and it becomes an not-ness. It is present or it is absent. How can it be radical?
The leader of “Radical Honesty” suggests that everybody lies. Does that include him? The statement itself is a lie. I do not lie. Perhaps I am the only one that does not. But even if that is so, still the statement is untrue.
A man lies until he realizes it is not (ever) in his own interests.
Then he does not lie.
The transition is nearly effortless.
Like a self-harmer who decides to not self-harm.
He does it until he doesn’t.
The idea of the group, itself, is flawed, too.
Far from enhancing communication, total honesty removes one from the process known as communication, which it actually is not, anyway. Becoming the only one who is able to communicate, renders him alone, and thus outside of the process of communication, which necessarily entails two or more communicators.
If everyone were “radically honest”, then – as they say – we would really be cooking. But that is not about to happen.
To my mind, this is the essential part of understanding conservatism. We are consequentialists, meaning we study the results of actions. In order to see that lies are never in our own interests, we must see the consequence of the lie, and the consequences of those consequences.
There’s honesty with self, and honesty in communication. It seems to me that degree of honesty with self determines the quality of a person, and that nature is designed so that some rise above many.
Good points. Mega-good points, in fact.
It seems to me that leftism is built entirely upon dishonesty.
Nothing is labeled by what it is, but by its opposite.
Everything and everyone is misrepresented.
This is – predictably – labeled ‘progressive’.
Progressively more and more dishonest.
You can’t become a conservative: either you are one, or you are not. Conservatism is a base identity, not a stance. This is probably why so few conservatives actually are what they claim to be: David Cameron is a good example.
Honesty may be adopted as a whole way of being, and conservatism may result. But even so, it can never be retroactive. I fall into this category. I would never have imagined, all those years ago, that I would ever become such an oddity.
And now I can not imagine ever being able to be anything else.
True. The fundamental difference is that leftism is self-based, i.e. “How do I want to think, judge or feel about this?” while rightism is world-based, i.e. “What will the consequences of this action be in reality?”
You can see the birth of leftism any time you babysit children. At some point, they get angry about something or another and storm off to do it their way. When that fails, they come to you for advice. Except that in a civilization, effects do not come quickly enough to be observed near-contemporaneously with their causes, and so the leftist both self-deludes and is tolerated by (too many) others.
Could it be that the essence of what conservatism is can be exemplified by the image of the Roman Pater Familias, the head of a household with authority and responsibility over it? The West is not lacking in mothers but fathers are scarce these days. And I’m not talking about those, perhaps well intentioned, male mothers. I’m talking about the father as “auctor” as founder or, one might say, “planter-cultivator” (which also gives us English “author”) The auctor is “is qui auget”, the one who augments the act or the juridical situation of another.
Someone from the left is someone who resents this “auctoritas patrum”, fathers’ authority, for whatever reason. A rebellious son, which our culture has somewhat recently transformed in an ideal to aspire to; or a resenting wife. These people will always have a narrative of discontent and victimization, because they either can’t become fathers themselves nor can they accept someone else’s authority.
We definitely lack these. We used to call them “aristocrats.”
Liberalism is anti-leadership. It prefers mob rule with a delegated channeler of crowd intentions. The result is removal of anyone with any superior knowledge or ability.
Legitimate view: idea A seems logical to me, and idea B does not, so I will endorse any group endorsing idea A.
Crazy view: idea C is the one true path and anyone who does not accept idea C is a heretic who must burn
It’s natural to oppose those who oppose what you find to be truthful. The dangerous cults are the ones that insist you obey a single idea and that all else is wrong.