Selfishness and Nothingness
A reader remarks:
The left is not a set of ideals, it is a set of tactics for power and status. That makes the only ‘ideals’ pride and selfishness, and we all know where those come from.
I respectfully disagree. In my experience (which may be atypical) Leftists are proud, but they are not selfish.
They are self absorbed. What they seek is an inexpensive and unearned sense of moral superiority.
They are stung with the memory of many sins, but, in their crippled moral vocabulary, they have no words and no concepts to define such things. They feel the emotion of guilt but do not know what it is called or what it is. The language of Newspeak has left them with no terms for these ideas.
Perhaps, following the atheist Freud, they think guilt springs from undue repression of authentic emotions and passions, and that therefore the feeling is never valid. The solution to guilt would then be to indulge more deeply in whatever sin provoked it, affirming all the while one’s own self-esteem.
Perhaps, following the atheist Marx, they think religion is the opiate of the masses, and guilt merely one part of a system of control by whatever secret and hidden social forces oppress the masses to the benefit of the elite. The solution to guilt would then be to indulge in subversion or violent revolution or the social order, to be an agent of chaos, and to commit more sins and crimes in the name of the coming utopia.
Perhaps, following the atheist Nietzsche, they think religion the province of the unenlightened, and that the true man, the superman, is beyond good and evil, and by strength of will alone, breaks free of all such moral categories, and heroically creates his own morality, indeed, creates his own reality, where he is god, and he alone is responsible to himself. The solution of guilt would then be in indulge in all evils passion or perverted reason can imagine, piling horror atop holocaust, can call it good.
Please note that all these atheist solutions are unreasonable, because they deny the chain of cause-and-effect leading to guilt. Guilt is caused when one sees that one has violated moral law. Moral law is a reality. It is a central part of what makes man Man. Atheism denies reality and man.
And so, tormented by un-admitted, irrational guilt, they indulge in jealous hatred of men happier, better, more productive and more honest than they.
Happier men they call exploiters. Better men they call crooks. More productive men they call cheats. More honest men they call oppressors who impose a ‘narrative’ on the oppressed.
Unable to admit that their unhappiness is due to any flaw or fault of their own, they indulge in an easy and irrational defensive habit to protect themselves from shame and criticism: they claim — and all of them, each and every one, either tacitly or openly makes this claim — that no merit exists in the universe by which one man might be better than another.
Nothing exists but power. Truth does not exist, only a narrative erected to support the current power structure. Beauty does not exist. Virtue does not exist. Nothing exists but power.
Nothing exists but power. Instead of truth, only a narrative exists, erected to support the current power structure. The philosophers job is to reveal that there is no truth. Beauty does not exist, only bland decoration that supports the current power structure: the artist’s job is to produce ugliness to shock the complaisant, to reveal the shocking truth that everything is dismal and meaningless. Virtue does not exist. The moralists’ job is to promote tolerance of vice, because intolerance of vice is tyranny. Vice is one’s inner self identity. Nothing exists but power.
Now, if nothing exists but power, there is no scale by which anything can be measured. If a man is above you in happiness, fortune, wealth, esteem, productivity, virtue, talent, or anything else, it can never be nature, good luck, hard work, or God’s mysterious will which rewards him that higher status.
It must always, always, always be oppression. If nothing exists but power, the truthful man cannot get his reputation for honesty by being honest, on the grounds that honesty does not exist. A reputation for honestly must, by definition, be false, and must have been seized by power.
The problem with this logic is that it assigns to invisible, occult forces the outcomes of obvious common sense: some men are luckier than others. Some are more honest. Some are handsomer. Some men work harder. In order for everything to be unfair, the universe must be a meaningless vacuum where only the powerful oppress the weak, and the only evidence of this alleged oppression is the lack of perfect homogeneity in outcomes.
If truth, beauty, and virtue do not exist, if neither blind fortune nor omniscience providence have any influence on the fates of men, then there is only raw power. The raw power grants unfair privileges on the scapegoat group, whoever it is. (For Marx, the scapegoats are capitalists, for Hitler, the Jews, for feminists, the patriarchy, for race-baiters, the White Man. for pervertarian, the sexually non-abnormal.) It nothing other than raw power grants any privileges, then no privilege is a legitimate reward. No authority is legitimate authority.
But since these things come about for obvious reasons that any child can see, i.e. nice people attract nice people, and nasty people repel nice people, one must then attribute semi-supernatural and invisible powers over society to the scapegoats. Little things like language, the use of pronouns, take on the significance of the chanted spells of witches. It is magic. In order to steal back from men the privilege masculinity bestows, and therefore to break the curse on women, all you need to do is get everyone to say “he and she”! To stop racial hatred, all you need do is say “persons of color” (which is good magic) and never say “colored persons” (which is black magic).
The argument is circular and psychotic. Every good fortune that comes to a man by birth, happenstance, hard work, or applied talent is now automatically defined as an illegitimate theft of good luck from the magic luck pot of life. Since there is no such thing as differences of birth, happenstance, hard work, or talent (so the circular reasoning goes) therefore the good fortune must have been stolen. Any evidence which shows otherwise is “narrative” that is, a lie meant to uphold oppression, and the only reason for anyone to lie to uphold oppression is pure evil.
And so the Left, who include the single most aggressively dishonest, sexual perverted, uncivilized, crude, foul-mouthed, thieving, mass murdering atheist aggregation in all human history, bar none, and with no one even close to second place, spend their every waking hour, and also muttering in their sleep, about how evil, evil, evil, evil everyone else is.
They are the victims of the Father of Lies and his willing henchmen. He is their father.
But selfish? No. Self righteous. They do not want your material possessions. They are not healthy like normal thieves. They want your possessions destroyed, your honors destroyed, your family life destroyed, your laws and customs destroyed. They do not want it for themselves.
They want revenge against God. They want revenge against Being itself. But God is out of reach. So they take it out on anything that bears the stamp or image of God. They take it out on truth, on beauty, on virtue, on joy.
Suicide bombers are not selfish. They want to die.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
