Why Liberal Values Collapse on Contact With Reality
We on the Right spend too much analyzing liberalism-as-it-claims-to-be, and not enough time looking into the pathology behind it. This psychological state is both less malevolent and more unrealistic than most people could imagine.
If we view liberalism as a phenomenon emerging from socializing, instead of politics, the disparity between its promised results and actual results, and the lack of concern by its adherents for that widening gap, makes perfect sense.
In any human social group, those who find themselves insignificant have one goal: to make themselves seem relevant and important so that they have some power. The only way they can do this is by rejecting whatever the group does that is succeeding, since it does not value the insignificant.
Consequently they come up with an idea, individualism, which says that individuals are more important than reality, therefore any individual who is insignificant must be treated as if they are an actual contributor toward success.
Individualism claims to speak for the individual, but actually erases individuality because individualism cannot be socially validated without approval from the mob. Otherwise it is seen for what it is, a type of malignant selfishness.
To ward off those observations, individualists always cloak their activities behind altruism, peace, love, art, hope, and religion. Their goal is to seduce the crowd so that it listens to their tales of woe.
To introduce individualism to a population, you must first suspend reality. The insignificant must become significant, which requires abolishing significance itself so that everything is equally important. Like a religious cult, the individualism group must abolish the world as known.
This shows us the social roots of liberalism. They are contrarians, or those who stand against whatever is working for the sake of standing against it. They tell us that the world as observed, tested, and described is not real, but the world in which the insignificant are important is real.
In order to portray the real as unreal and the unreal as real, they must invent a social reason, appealing to your sense of mercy, justice, fairness, and pity. They style themselves as victims of whatever is succeeding in order to abolish the distinction between significance and insignificance.
This contrarian victimhood mentality leads to a dependence on negative feelings. They only feel good when they are feeling bad because if they are feeling bad they have a way to get power, so they must make suffering a value.
Almost all such movements begin in pacifism. These tap in to a fear of conflict and advocate denying the reality that to achieve goals one must fight, replacing it with the idea that goals are not important so long as we maintain a method of non-violence.
Individualism, in a philosophical sense, means “me first above all else.” That is what isms are, the selection of a top-level principle of ordering. An individualist would not risk his life or comfort for a nation, race, culture, religion, ethnicity, or even principle.
Although the Left has hijacked the term, these are bourgeois or urban values. People who work in cities tend to see their job as paying taxes to a system that takes care of all of these problems for them, and their goal is to advance their own interests as far as possible.
For centuries, city people have paid country people to fight their wars for them, later on adding in the urban poor as cannon fodder. The bourgeois view is that everything in society is a transaction, and so we pay taxes to pay people to make military problems go away.
Since this obviously does not work, the contrarians get to work with their pacifism. This means avoiding conflict, which means in turn avoiding all of the important decisions so that society can cultivate a false unity by pursuing trends and scapegoats.
They ignore a basic fact of life, which is that without civilization being functional, no one can live a good life. To be functional, a civilization must approach the hard questions and big issues, which in turn requires it stop wasting money on the frivolous stuff at the periphery.
Those who object to the failure of the system and its civilization are told that they can go home and set up their own little society in their living room. We call this “the hobbyist theory”: the idea that if people dislike how society is going, they can just drop out in place (but keep paying those taxes!).
No wonder modern people suffer an immense sense of isolation, loneliness, abandonment, depression, confusion, demoralization, and pointlessness. You put up with the system as it wrecks everything, and then run away to your home so you can hide from the horror it has become.
Liberal values start with the idea that nothing is as it seems, therefore we can pursue a Utopia of our own invention, and rapidly progress to a bureaucracy for administering that perfect and pure existence which makes life miserable and because of its reliance on pacifism, stifles dissent as “dangerous.”
Sometimes they say the quiet part out loud and reveal exactly what they intend, which is that individualism replaces organic culture, and creates a mob dedicated to a false unity based in pacifism, or tolerating the needs of others at the expense of your own need for a functional civilization:
The analysis revealed both individuals used bonds — relationships between people or groups based on shared experiences and feelings — to construct a “We/They” division, in which the “We” is used to legitimize violence and delegitimize the opposing actions and beliefs of the “They.”
In other words, the group that formed the original We/They division (egalitarianism) does not want you to consider joining any other group because then you might oppose individualism. They make it clear that they want atomized citizens adrift in confusion. Anything else might lead to violence, after all.
Pacifism is an uneasy bargain. It means that you avoid conflict so that each individual can do whatever he wants in exchange for mutual nonaggression. This also ensures that absolutely nothing can get done because any real problem will bring conflict, so it is like an agreement to avoid reality.
Individualism, in other words, both creates and is created by pacifism. Like egalitarianism generally, it is a method without a goal, or more appropriately a method and goal that creates a type of infinite loop in the minds of those infected with it.
Prioritizing pacifism shows us a classic case of people avoiding the problems where they can lose in a big way, and instead targeting areas which because they are unimportant, are unlikely to be contentious. People get fired over bungling big accounts, but rarely over choosing the wrong paint color.
This shows us the pathology of egalitarian societies that dodges big issues and goes after the optics instead:
It might be termed the Law of Triviality. Briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.
The committee — bureaucracies run by committee — will always choose to pursue lower risk. This means that it will give in to special interests and pursue non-problems, but avoid dealing with the very problems for which it was created.
Committees are accountable only to problems caused by their actions; they are not penalized for inaction. Consequently they choose inaction whenever they can, but gain headlines for symbolic activity which almost never addresses an actual issue.
This means that they seize in discontent wherever they can find it, style those people as victims, and throw money at the problem. It is cheaper for them than dealing with actual problems, and there is never a shortage of malcontents no matter what they do:
“In every country, there are always people who are patriotic, and others who don’t like the government, who are not happy with anything — even if you put a gold toilet in their room,” says Kirik.
This shows us how liberal values reverse themselves. They start out liberating people from social order so they can be individualistic, but that creates a new order based on enforced individualism, at which point that order must defend itself, and it rapidly becomes unrealistic.
All of this comes from the world-rejection at the heart of liberalism, a desire to believe that things are not as they are and therefore, we can do what we want and have someone else subsidize it and clean up after it. Egalitarianism is ultimately a selfish individualistic pathology.
