Amerika

Very few people make it through the thought required to analyze Leftism to its roots. On the surface, we all know what it is: an outlook of supposed compassion which supports feminism, diversity, social welfare programs and gay rights.

Underneath the surface, Leftism reveals itself as fundamentally an ideology, or a notion that human preferences for how the world “should” be are more important than how the world functions. This was formalized in The Enlightenment™ as the idea of seeing the world through human reason as expressed in the individual.

Ideology does not compromise. It functions as a binary: the ideology is the new proposed idea, to which people either assent or dissent. Dissent means the idea will not come to pass, so in a passive-aggressive way, is seen as an attack and attempt to kill the idea. Thus the idea and its adherents feel comfortable in engaging in pre-emptive self defense by targeting those who disagree.

This gives the ideology virulence. It has an inherent “my way or the highway” approach to it, and those who dissent face outright hostility, which cows most into accepting it. This allows it to style itself as normal, and present dissenters as aberrant and to call them names like Nazi, fascist, racist, homophobe, sexist, classist and ableist which connote a failure to conform to social standards.

Historically, Leftism arose during the French Revolution and consisted of a single idea. Egalitarianism, or the notion that all people are equal in basic ability, converted utilitarian thinking into a political morality. This appealed to a fundamental weakness in humanity, the Dunning-Kruger (or r/K) derived tendency toward hubris, or assuming that oneself is more important than the way the world works.

Leftism is egalitarianism through ideology, not practical methods. For example, a king who wanted his people to be equal might try rewarding the good so that they bred out the rest, and established equality through extremely similar genetics and ability. He might separate them by ability into regions so that in each region, all people were roughly of the same abilities.

Ideology however provides a double benefit: public virtue signaling conceals private intent to exploit. Egalitarianism is the voice of the salesman, promising Utopia but laying claim to profit, with no concern for how well the consumer will fare. For this reason, ideology makes people feel intelligent and powerful for having manipulated the world to reflect their own intent and desires.

As such, Leftism replaces identity because it is an identity. To be Leftist is to identify with the strong-looking people who are taking over society, those who can be bold and controversial, and to benefit from social popularity and the career, sexual and in-group benefits it provides.

History tells us that Leftism took over and everyone who did not follow — both explicit dissenters and those who were simply not convinced and remained neutral — was thrust into the Right, which made it from the beginning both a compromise with Leftism, and a “big tent” mixed bag of non-Leftist ideas. This weakened it by creating indecision, infighting and other confusion.

The Right has finally discovered its core through the Alt Right: realism. We base our actions on what is, as seen through history, and not what we want to believe is true, starting with the illusion of equality. Recognizing that people are different and exist in a hierarchy of ability and moral goodness is massively taboo because it is anti-social in appearance.

Social thinking dominates when ideology appears because what people want to think is true becomes more important than what is real. The Right is anti-social because we recognize that the most common human tendency is self-delusion and that this is amplified in groups. The Christians call this “original sin,” but it is more Darwinian: without self-discipline, we are monkeys, and only some of us have that self-discipline.

We cannot have self-discipline without realism. We need something to discipline ourselves to that is not “of us,” like the various airy principles and navel-gazing emotional gestures that are so common in humanity. Instead, we must point ourselves toward the world, learn it and come to appreciate its wisdom, and use that to expand our minds.

This in turn leads us to a realization about Leftism. As a pathology, Leftism consists of the denial of the need for us to understand the world, and advances the counter-argument of “humanism,” or the idea that people are more important than reality. Even though that leads to disaster every time, it remains the most popular argument created by humans, and realism is the only bulwark against it.

Tags: dunning-kruger, hubris, leftism, r/K strategies, self-discipline