NON-LEFTIST ETHICAL NATURALISM:
A coherent alternative to moral relativism
By John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D. -- article originally written December, 2003 but subsequently expanded -- up to 2007)
In moral philosophy the view that "ought" or "is right" statements are ordinary statements about the world (empirical statements) rather than having some privileged and peculiar "moral" quality is termed "ethical naturalism". Like all positions in moral philosophy it has its difficulties but I believe that such difficulties arise from a misunderstanding of how moral statements arise.
In fact, I do not think that the nature of "ought" or "is right" statements is very problematical at all.
It seems to me that statements such as "X is right" (or "X is good" or "You ought to do X") can be unpacked in only four or perhaps five basic ways:
1. I like it when people do X
2. Doing X generally leads to widely desired results
3. It is the will of God that you do X
4. X has an eternal, inescapable, universal "moral" quality.
5. X is the prevailing rule around here (though if the person was asked why that rule exists he would almost certainly reply by referring to some version of one of the preceding three statements).
I think most people would agree that "You ought" statements can mean 1, 2, 3 or 5 above. I do. You might dispute the truth of any of them but you would understand what is being said and understand that it is a factual claim. I would for instance dispute an "ought" statement that is unpacked as 3 above because I am an atheist but I accept that the person making the claim is trying to make a statement of fact that can be proved or disproved in some way.
Interpretation 4 above however is untestable, undemonstrable and hence gibberish -- though it does seem to be widely believed. But lots of clever people believe in global warming so beliefs are neither any proof of anything nor any cause for surprise. Now isn't that simple?
Not everybody agrees that it is simple. A famous objection is the objection by David Hume. David Hume contends that there is an unbridgeable gap between "is" and "ought" statements -- so that you cannot justify "ought" statements by "is" statements. Yet that is precisely what people normally do. An "ought" statement always commends some course of action and when people ask WHY that course of action is commended the reply is often in terms of "is" (empirical) statements (e.g. the commendation of X can be explained as: "X leads to generally desired consequences" or "X leads to consequences that you would like" or "I like X" or "X is the prevailing rule in this culture"). So in my view the fact that an "ought" statement can be explained in that way shows that it is an empirical statement to begin with. Statements in general have all sorts of influences on people (for example, if someone said to me: "Your son has just died", it is clearly an empirical statement but it would also have an enormous influence on me if true. It would cause me to take many actions that I would not otherwise take) and an "ought" statement is an empirical statement with what is expected to be one particular sort of influence -- a commendatory influence. So an "ought" statement is often simply a shorthand (compressed) "is" statement that can be promptly expanded if desired.
A major way in which I differ with many philosophers, however, is that I accept that "ought" statements are used in a variety of ways rather than in one single way and I do not try to make sense out of ALL the ways that they are used. And I have SHOWN that usage of moral language differs from person to person by way of psychological research. As I see it, "ought" statements always commend but they are not always empirical statements. Sometimes they are in fact very incoherent statements (at best pseudo-empirical statements) and I think Hume's difficulty arose out of a determination to find meaning in incoherent uses of "ought" statements (i.e. when "ought" statements are elaborated as being or emanating from timeless and universal rules that are "known" only in some mysterious and untestable way -- typically expressed by saying "X just IS right", with no further explanation given) and I simply regard that quest as a fool's errand. The world is awash with incoherent gibberish and baseless assertions so there is no reason to be either disturbed by it or interested in it when such assertions occur in moral discourse. When I encounter it, my usual response is to point out its incoherence and untestability and then refuse to have any further truck with such things (as I did here).
Being primarily a psychologist, I am of course interested in WHY what I have called incoherent uses of moral terminology arise and I find the explanation given by philosophical psychologist John Maze persuasive: That they are a conscious or unconscious attempt at fraud -- an attempt to persuade by saying that immutable and peculiarly moral properties exist and that they have some claim on us because of that. Maze's work is not online but if you have access to a university library, you can find it in: Maze, J. (1973) "The concept of attitude". Inquiry, 16, 168-205. Maze also had a book published in 1983 called The Meaning of Behaviour which I have not read but which almost certainly would contain similar arguments. I have summarized Maze's arguments at somewhat greater length in my academic paper on the present topic.
Many people -- Roman Catholics in particular -- are nonetheless very attracted to the view that some moral statements just ARE right, regardless of time and place. They say that killing babies is ALWAYS wrong for instance. If one objects that killing babies was perfectly normal and perceived as "right" in the most brilliant civilization of ancient times -- Greece -- they are quite unmoved and just say that the Greeks were wrong. But how do they KNOW? What is their authority or source of information about the "wrongness" concerned? Basically, they cannot tell you. Their only authority is a "gut reaction" and different people in different times and in different places have many different "gut reactions", of course. Pro-abortionists, for instance, seem to have the gut reaction that killing babies is OK as long as the baby is young enough. So "gut reactions" simply reduce to "in my opinion". What starts out looking like a very authoritative statement turns out to have no authoritativeness at all.
Leftists make great hay out of that. They popularly refer to such views as "moral absolutism" (a philosopher would say "ethical non-naturalism") and assert a version of ethical naturalism which is popularly referred to as "moral relativism". They reject what I have called meaning 4 above and say that only meaning 5 is possible for "ought" statements. In other words, they say that right and wrong is only what is accepted behaviour in a given society at a given time. And I in part agree with them. I too believe that there is no timeless and forever fixed right and wrong and that what is right and wrong varies from society to society. That does NOT mean, however, that all ways to live are equally wise -- which is the extension of moral relativism that Leftists usually glide into without people noticing. Leftists normally seem to ignore totally what I have called above meaning 2 for "ought" statements: that some ways of living lead to generally desired outcomes and some do not. Such claims are simple empirical propositions for which there is much evidence. Most people, for instance, desire material prosperity but only some ways of living lead to that. Laziness, for instance generally does not lead to prosperity so laziness is generally unwise, or, in shorthand, "bad" or "wrong". So there is no need for anybody to be embarrassed into abandoning talk of "right" and "wrong". Such terms do have real and important meanings -- even if you are an ethical naturalist.
And at least from Edmund Burke onwards, conservatives have taken the matter one step further. That some value is merely the custom of a given society is taken by Leftists to imply that the value concerned is NOT worthy of respect or continuation. Conservatives draw precisely the opposite conclusion. That some custom has evolved through trial and error over a long period of time is seen by conservatives as indicating that it is probably a wise and valuable custom that should not be abandoned except for very strong reasons. The custom may not be "right" in any absolute, immutable or unimprovable sense but it may still be very wise and valuable in enabling a civil and healthy society to function and give its members what they desire -- such as peace, security and prosperity. In that sense, courage, honesty, democracy and the rule of law are "right". Countries where such values are widespread generally have more peace, security, freedom and prosperity than countries where such values are not widespread. Values and standards of behaviour are very important matters indeed.
Amusingly, however, Leftists are very prone to using the language of right and wrong (which they claim not to believe in) when it suits them. They will claim that things like Apartheid or "racism" are WRONG without batting an eyelid. The moral relativists suddenly become moralists. They will happily say things that they do not remotely believe in if it suits their ends of gaining power and influence. I did some research into the dishonest Leftist use of moral language which is reported here. And when Leftists do use moralistic language, it is rather fun to use the arguments of moral relativism to show how shallow their arguments are -- as here.
Addendum
It may be that some see a contradiction between my statement above that gut instincts are not authoritative and my statement elsewhere that most morality is instinctive.
There is however a large distinction to be made between the truth of a statement and a person's motivation for making it. What I said above was about truth claims, not about why that claim is made. One hopes that there is usually some connection between the truth of a statement and why people make the statement concerned but that there is no obvious or necessary connection is all too obvious.
2007 ADDENDUM
Some 2007 research by Haidt would seem to be of considerable interest in connection with the above. Haidt argues that the basis of morality is instinctive but that conservatives display greater cognitive complexity in dealing with moral questions. Given the frequent Leftist assertion that "there is no such thing as right and wrong", that is not inherently surprising. Although they often use moral talk in an attempt to influence others, Leftists would seem, on their own admission, to have no serious interest in or committment to morality of any kind. That does make the invariable brutalities of Communist regimes rather understandable.
Part of a summary of Haidt's research:
"Haidt argues that human morality is a cultural construction built on top of -- and constrained by -- a small set of evolved psychological systems. He presents evidence that political liberals rely primarily on two of these systems, involving emotional sensitivities to harm and fairness. Conservatives, however, construct their moral understandings on those two systems plus three others, which involve emotional sensitivities to in-group boundaries, authority and spiritual purity."
There is a longer account of Haidt's research here
Click here for a list of all John Ray's comments on moral philosophy
FINIS
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Monday, March 26, 2007
THE SKEPTICS HAVE SOLD OUT
By John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
It is sad to see a voice of reason fall silent but exactly that seems to have happened over at "The Skeptical Inquirer". They quite rightly say that limitless skepticism leads nowhere. To be precise it leads to solipsism -- doubting everything but your own existence -- but the means they propose to limit skepticism are astounding.
They seem to want to decide scientific truth not on the facts or on the balance of the probabilities but by majority vote! If you had taken a majority vote among the learned men of Galileo's day you would have "discovered" that the sun rotated around the earth. And you would be WRONG!
The example they give is instructive. They say that because 2500 "scientists" signed a document saying that mankind is causing global warming therefore it must be true. No weighting to the degree of expertise of the "scientists" involved is given nor is any account taken of how many of them stand to lose their research grants if the theory is disproven. But above all, no weighting is given to the many discordant FACTS -- such as evidence that global warming is occurring on Mars too. Did mankind cause THAT? Or did solar variability do it? Many people might therefore want at this stage to rename them "The Credulous Inquirer".
And if majorities win, what about the many scientists who reject the claim of man-made global warming? There is a 19,200 name long petition here -- signed by "17,100 basic and applied American scientists, two-thirds with advanced degrees... Signers of this petition so far include 2,660 physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, and environmental scientists..who are especially well qualified to evaluate the effects of carbon dioxide on the Earth's atmosphere and climate. ..(and) ..5,017 scientists whose fields of specialization in chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and other life sciences". The petitioners are a much more numerous group than the group favoured by the magazine and they REJECT the view espoused by the magazine.
There have of course been attempts by environmentalist true believers to sabotage the petition drive. However the organisers have, to their credit, made efforts to ensure its validity. "Of the 19,700 signatures that the project has received in total so far, 17,800 have been independently verified and the other 1,900 have not yet been independently verified. Of those signers holding the degree of PhD, 95% have now been independently verified. One name that was sent in by enviro pranksters, Geri Halliwell, PhD, has been eliminated. Several names, such as Perry Mason and Robert Byrd are still on the list even though enviro press reports have ridiculed their identity with the names of famous personalities. They are actual signers. Perry Mason, for example, is a PhD Chemist. "
So even by their own ridiculous "majority rule" criterion, "The Skeptical Inquirer" was showing no skepticism at all.
But it gets worse again: It really looks like they were not credulous but straight-out dishonest in their support for the global warming theory. They depicted their favoured report on global warming as the outcome of a standard scientific peer-review process. As this report from Stats.org notes, it was nothing of the sort. What was published was a totally distorted version of what the scientists had said:
And the second report that the Skeptics quoted also said nothing like what they claim:
Clearly, the Skeptics have been taken over by Greenie propagandists, with their characteristic disregard for the truth. Sad indeed. I think a lot of people might now want to rename them as "The Dishonest Inquirer".
Update:
The above words were written in 2003 and resulted in a short correspondence with the magazine. By 2007 the credulity had deepened -- as we see here. The Skeptics had become evangelists in fact! An average temperature rise of a fraction of one degree across the entire 20th century got them panicked! NO skepticism there whatsoever.
FINIS
By John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
It is sad to see a voice of reason fall silent but exactly that seems to have happened over at "The Skeptical Inquirer". They quite rightly say that limitless skepticism leads nowhere. To be precise it leads to solipsism -- doubting everything but your own existence -- but the means they propose to limit skepticism are astounding.
They seem to want to decide scientific truth not on the facts or on the balance of the probabilities but by majority vote! If you had taken a majority vote among the learned men of Galileo's day you would have "discovered" that the sun rotated around the earth. And you would be WRONG!
The example they give is instructive. They say that because 2500 "scientists" signed a document saying that mankind is causing global warming therefore it must be true. No weighting to the degree of expertise of the "scientists" involved is given nor is any account taken of how many of them stand to lose their research grants if the theory is disproven. But above all, no weighting is given to the many discordant FACTS -- such as evidence that global warming is occurring on Mars too. Did mankind cause THAT? Or did solar variability do it? Many people might therefore want at this stage to rename them "The Credulous Inquirer".
And if majorities win, what about the many scientists who reject the claim of man-made global warming? There is a 19,200 name long petition here -- signed by "17,100 basic and applied American scientists, two-thirds with advanced degrees... Signers of this petition so far include 2,660 physicists, geophysicists, climatologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, and environmental scientists..who are especially well qualified to evaluate the effects of carbon dioxide on the Earth's atmosphere and climate. ..(and) ..5,017 scientists whose fields of specialization in chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and other life sciences". The petitioners are a much more numerous group than the group favoured by the magazine and they REJECT the view espoused by the magazine.
There have of course been attempts by environmentalist true believers to sabotage the petition drive. However the organisers have, to their credit, made efforts to ensure its validity. "Of the 19,700 signatures that the project has received in total so far, 17,800 have been independently verified and the other 1,900 have not yet been independently verified. Of those signers holding the degree of PhD, 95% have now been independently verified. One name that was sent in by enviro pranksters, Geri Halliwell, PhD, has been eliminated. Several names, such as Perry Mason and Robert Byrd are still on the list even though enviro press reports have ridiculed their identity with the names of famous personalities. They are actual signers. Perry Mason, for example, is a PhD Chemist. "
So even by their own ridiculous "majority rule" criterion, "The Skeptical Inquirer" was showing no skepticism at all.
But it gets worse again: It really looks like they were not credulous but straight-out dishonest in their support for the global warming theory. They depicted their favoured report on global warming as the outcome of a standard scientific peer-review process. As this report from Stats.org notes, it was nothing of the sort. What was published was a totally distorted version of what the scientists had said:
Frederick Seitz, former president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, claimed that he had "never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process than the event that led to this IPCC report." Seitz went on to charge that nearly all of the editorial changes made by the report's lead author, Benjamin Santer, "worked to remove hints of the skepticism with which many scientists regard claims that human activities are having a major impact on climate in general or global warming in particular." Others, including the independent but industry-backed Global Climate Coalition (GCC) went so far as to claim that the report had been "scientifically cleansed" in a political effort to emphasize alarm about global warming while deleting references to uncertainty.
And the second report that the Skeptics quoted also said nothing like what they claim:
"Last week the National Academy of Sciences released a report on climate change, prepared in response to a request from the White House, that was depicted in the press as an implicit endorsement of the Kyoto Protocol... As one of 11 scientists who prepared the report, I can state that this is simply untrue. For starters, the NAS never asks that all participants agree to all elements of a report, but rather that the report represent the span of views. This the full report did, making clear that there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them."
Clearly, the Skeptics have been taken over by Greenie propagandists, with their characteristic disregard for the truth. Sad indeed. I think a lot of people might now want to rename them as "The Dishonest Inquirer".
Update:
The above words were written in 2003 and resulted in a short correspondence with the magazine. By 2007 the credulity had deepened -- as we see here. The Skeptics had become evangelists in fact! An average temperature rise of a fraction of one degree across the entire 20th century got them panicked! NO skepticism there whatsoever.
FINIS
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
POLITICS: ONE DIMENSION OR TWO?
By John J. Ray (M.A.;Ph.D.)
Describing the entire domain of political attitudes in terms of a single Right/Left dimension does have its problems. Libertarians in particular are always promoting a two dimensional description of political attitudes. The political compass and the "World's Smallest Political Quiz" are popular applications of such theories. Below are two examples of such a description:
Unfortunately, though I am a libertarian, I am also an academic who has specialized in surveys of political attitudes and I regret to report that we seem to be pretty stuck with the old Left/Right schema. So let me give you a quick tour of the academic literature:
Academics have been talking about this for a long time. Various authors (e.g. Eysenck, 1954; Rokeach, 1960; Kerlinger, 1967) have proposed that an adequate description of world politics really needs two dimensions. They propose, for example, that the Left-Right dimension be supplemented by an Authoritarian/Permissive dimension. So that democratic Leftists and Rightists are Permissive Leftists and Rightists whereas Communists and Fascists are Authoritarian Leftists and Rightists.
Although such proposals have considerable intuitive appeal, they do not, unfortunately, seem to coincide with how people's attitudes are in fact organized when we do surveys of public opinion. It is very easy to find people's attitudes polarizing on a Left/Right dimension but nobody has yet managed to show in a satisfactory way any polarization of attitudes on the postulated second dimension (Ray, 1980 & 1982 -- online here and here).
The summary from my 1982 paper published in The Journal of Social Psychology reads as follows:
The Eysenck/Rokeach/Kerlinger theory that social attitudes are two dimensional suffers from disagreement about what the second dimension should be called and how it should be measured. The present work tests the proposal that there is a dimension of libertarian/authoritarian attitudes orthogonal to radicalism/conservatism. A set of items designed to maximize the likelihood of such dimensions appearing was administered to a random postal sample of Californians. No real evidence of the proposed second dimension appeared. It was concluded that authoritarianism is a personality variable only.
"Orthogonal" is statistician-speak for "unrelated" or "at right-angles to". The correlations observed in the data showed that people who agreed with one conservatism statement, no matter how it was conceived, tended to agree with all other conservatism statements. Similarly for expresions of Leftist views. But "authoritarian" or "libertarian" statements did not cluster together at all. Your being a libertarian on one issue did not mean that you would tend to be libertarian on other issues. So it is solely the Left/Right dimension on which people in fact polarize.
The account of Left/Right attitudes given in my monograph suggests why this is so. For a start, the assumption that Fascists or Nazis are Right-wing is false. Hitler himself energetically claimed to be a socialist and Mussolini (the founder of Fascism) was a lifelong Marxist. The evidence for this has been summarized at great length elsewhere so will not be elaborated here.
Historically, the core of conservatism has always been a suspicion of government power and intervention and conservatives therefore accept only the minimum amount of government that seems needed for a civil society to function. So it is no wonder that there is no authoritarian version of conservative ideology. If it were authoritarian it could not be conservative.
Leftism, on the other hand, IS intrinsically authoritarian and power-loving and will always therefore tend in the direction of government domination. It is only non-authoritarian to the extent that is thwarted by external influences (such as democracy) from achieving its aims. Leftists in democratic societies do of course commonly deny authoritarian motivations but that is just part of their "cover". Deeds speak louder than words.
It may be worth noting that one researcher (Goertzel (1987) did manage to derive two personality measures that seem to correspond fairly closely with the usual proposals for what underlies political orientation. He called his two measures "tendermindedness-toughness" and "intuitiveness-consistency" and the latter was certainly very reminiscent of conservatism. So how did these two personality measures correlate with a range of political beliefs? Negligibly in all cases -- see his Table 4. Once again we see that a two-dimensional account of what underlies political orientation just does not work out empirically.
References:
Eysenck, H.J. (1954) The psychology of politics. London: Routledge
Goertzel, T. G. (1987) Authoritarianism of personality and political attitudes. J. Social Psychology, 127 (1), 7-18.
Kerlinger, F. N. (1967). Social attitudes and their criterial referents: A structural theory. Psychological Review, 74, 110-122.
Rokeach, M. (1960) The open and closed mind. N.Y.: Basic Books.
A TECHNICAL CAVEAT
As conservatives characteristically know and as Leftists characteristically deny, reality tends to be peskily complex -- and the present subject is no exception. I wish therefore to point out now some of the complexities not mentioned above.
The dimensionality of political attitudes was a topic of great interest to me throughout my research career and many of my published papers bear on it. I attempted an answer to the dimensionality question in the second paper I ever wrote, in fact -- written in 1968 and published in 1973. So I hope I can be forgiven if I lapse somewhat into technicalities in what follows:
The summary of what I want to say is this: While two robust orthogonal dimensions cannot be extracted from normal political discourse, two strong oblique dimensions can routinely be extracted.
To elaborate: There is a way to divide up normal political discourse into two dimensions but those two dimensions tend to be correlated. They are not independent. Knowing a person's position on one dimension will give you a weak prediction of his/her position on the second dimension. Ferguson in fact published such a solution in the 1940s, though he forced orthogonality (independence) on his solution.
And the dimensions identified by Ferguson can always be found and they are in fact rather familiar. They are the religious/moral dimension and the economic dimension. In other words, it is perfectly possible for people to be conservative on religious and moral matters but at the same time to be socialistically inclined on economic matters. For an extended discussion of just that combination, see here. There IS a religious Left who favour all sorts of government intervention in economic matters. As Waldman says: "Actually, in 2000, at least 10 million white "evangelical Christians" voted for Gore".
Some attitude combinations are more common than others, however, and it will be no news to anybody to hear that the PREPONDERANCE of religious conservatives also support conservative (non-interventionist) economic policies.
What is surprising, in fact, is how weakly the two attitude clusters are associated. In one of my 1973 papers, I found, for instance, a correlation of only .24 between economic conservatism and social conservatism. It was this weakness of association that enabled Ferguson to force an orthogonal solution (i.e. a picture of independence) on his data.
It would appear, however, that this weakness of association stems from areas of discourse that are less central to overall political orientation -- as, in a 1984 paper, I found that moral issues lay at the centre of all conservatism/Leftism issues. See the second Appendix in the paper. It is no wonder, then, that religious conservatives figure so prominently in America's Grand Old Party at the beginning of the 21st century. It shows, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the most personal issues are also the most important in politics.
In summary, then, religious/moral conservatism and economic conservatism are distinct but related -- and the more important the issue is the more highly they become related. It is perhaps encouraging that psychological research from many years previously in Australia predicted so well what was happening in American politics in the early 21st century.
Reference:
Ferguson, L. (1941) The stability of the primary social attitudes. J. Psychology, 12, 283-288.
FINIS
Saturday, January 20, 2007
ACADEMIC FAKERS
By John J. Ray
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 27, 2003
Like most college and university teachers in the social sciences and humanities, academic psychologists are overwhelmingly Leftist in their orientation. So it will be no surprise to hear that at least since the 1950's psychologists have been doing their best to find psychological maladjustment in conservatives. To anyone with a knowledge of history the results have been quite absurd (See here) but psychologists rarely seem to know much about history so that has not disturbed them.
I spent 20 years from 1970 to 1990 getting over 200 articles published in the academic journals of the social sciences which subjected the various politically relevant theories of psychologists to empirical test. The only test that psychologists normally give to their theories is to seek the opinions of their students on a variety of issues and present THAT as evidence about how the world works. My consistent strategy was to do the same sort of test among random samples of people in the community at large. I found that people in the community at large are not nearly as accommodating to the theories of psychologists as psychology students are!
My non-conformist behaviour in actually doing a serious test of these theories won me no kudos, however. I appear to have had far more articles on political psychology published in the academic journals than anyone else and so would therefore -- by conventional academic criteria -- normally be considered the No. 1 world expert on the subject but in fact my writings have always been comprehensively ignored. My findings did not produce the RIGHT CONCLUSIONS, you see. In fact my findings showed the theories concerned to be wrong in almost every respect.
So it was no surprise to me at all to read the latest effort in the long line of attempts by psychologists to discredit conservatives. The article "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition" was published recently by John Jost and his collaborators at Berkeley in The Psychological Bulletin -- one of the premier journals of academic psychology. The "powers that be" at Berkeley were so pleased with this article that they put out a press release that was designed to publicize the findings of the article as widely as possible.
The result was great derision from conservative political commentators. The study was so obviously one-eyed that it was very easy to deride. Their claim that Stalin was Right-wing, for instance must be some high-point of twisting the evidence. If the most prominent Communist of the 20th century was Right-wing, who on earth would be Left-wing? Black might as well be white. Here is what Jost and his crew actually said:
"There are also cases of left-wing ideologues who, once they are in power, steadfastly resist change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism, such as Stalin or Khrushchev or Castro (see J. Martin, Scully, & Levitt, 1990). It is reasonable to suggest that some of these historical figures may be considered politically conservative"
It is hard to know where to start in commenting on this breathtaking statement. To say that the instigator of huge (and disastrous) changes in almost everything in Russian life resisted change is incomprehensible. And to call Communists of that era conservatives is equally perverse. One has to say that "conservative" obviously has a pretty strange meaning in the ivory towers of Berkeley. In their world even Stalin can be blamed on conservatism.
Apparently as an attempted explanation of their perverse definitions, they go on to say that the worldwide legion of Communist tyrants that they allude to are not typical of Leftists. The fact that Communists at their height controlled nearly half the world is not apparently enough to get them counted as typical Leftists.
The reason they get themselves into this awful muddle is that they have no idea what conservatism actually is. To define what it is, they consulted dictionaries and social science encyclopaedias and their fellow Leftist writers but they do not appear to have consulted a single conservative! And they have certainly studied no political history. They have fallen into the simplistic trap of equating conservatism with rejection of change. It is of course true that conservatives DO reject some changes -- the foolish changes advocated by Leftists in particular -- but it is also true that conservatives WANT change -- change that will get the government off their backs in particular. If Jost and his colleagues had talked to almost any conservative they would have found out very rapidly that there are a HEAP of things about our present society that conservatives would like to change. It is only Leftists talking to one another who think that conservatives are motivated only by a rejection of change.
If anybody would like to look at what has historically defined conservatives, a summary of the history concerned can be found here. Briefly, however, conservatives have always resisted attempts to curtail their rights and liberties -- particularly from the incursions of tyrannical governments. THAT is what has often made them resist change -- as governments do have a habit of trying to curtail the rights and liberties of the individual. But to say that conservatives resist change for its own sake is something that only a Leftist would believe. Conservatives believe in liberty. Leftists believe in the State.
So the Jost group in effect fell at the first hurdle. If they could not get straight what conservatism is, the chances of their saying anything reasonable about it were pretty slim. But let us look a little further at what they did say anyway:
The first thing to note is that the article concerned is not in any sense new evidence about anything. It is just a summary of what other Leftist psychologists have said on the subject over the years. And as computer people have always warned: GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out). And it is a very strange summary at that. Although the authors express some pride that they "cast a wide net" in looking for articles to include in their summary, they in fact leave out practically everything that does not suit them. They look only at articles that they like. It is NOT in any way a comprehensive, objective survey of the literature on the subject. For instance, how many of my articles did they cite? Just two. So just in ignoring the great bulk of my articles on the subject they ignored half the relevant literature. But Leftists always have been good at ignoring evidence.
So they say that their Leftist approach to the study of politics "has withstood the relentless tests of time and empirical scrutiny" and go on to cite 13 articles that support their approach as evidence for that assertion. If they had been fair and objective, they could also have quoted 100 articles of mine that upset that assertion. But in good Leftist fashion it is only people who support their views that they cite. No tolerance of ambiguity there!
Their ignorance of what conservatism is also shows in the means they use to measure it. Psychologists measure traits by use of "scales" (sets of interrelated questions). The more "conservative" statements you agree with, for instance, the more conservative you are said to be. The big hitch, of course, is in deciding what is a "conservative" statement. And psychologists have arrived at some strange conclusions in deciding that. Two of the most popular scales that psychologists use in studying conservative politics are the 'F' scale -- put together in the late 1940s by the (Marxist) Adorno and his group -- and the RWA scale put together by Altemeyer. Yet in general population samples Leftist voters are just about as likely to get high scores on both scales as Rightist voters are! (See e.g. here) So once again we have psychologists seriously telling us that a lot of Rightists are Leftists. Apparently Stalin is not so atypical after all!
That their measures of "conservatism" do not correlate with anything of current political relevance was even acknowledged by one of the authors of the scales concerned -- the RWA (Right-wing Authoritarianism) scale. Altemeyer, on p. 239 of his 1988 book Enemies of Freedom makes the bald statement that "Right-wing authoritarians show little preference in general for any political party". So in what sense are the statements in the scale "right-wing" if right-wingers are no more likely to endorse them than Leftists are? Leftist psychologists are like something out of Alice in Wonderland where words can mean anything that they say they mean. I myself do think that the F and RWA scales measure some sort of conservatism (though what sort would be hard to say) but it is certainly not political conservatism. My best shot so far at guessing what they measure is an old-fashioned outlook -- but note that both Leftist and Rightist voters are equally likely to be old-fashioned in the sense concerned.
But you would never guess from what the Jost group say that their scales are so hopelessly invalid ("invalid" = "does not measure what it is supposed to measure"). Of the RWA scale, for instance, they say "Scores on the RWA Scale have been found to predict a broad range of attitudes and behaviors related to social, economic, and political conservatism as defined in the general culture at the time. For instance, the scale has correlated reliably with political party affiliation" Weasel words! They do not even seem to have read Altemeyer himself. The shred of justification they have for that statement is that among SOME people (e.g. politicians) those identified as conservative are slightly more likely to get higher scores on the RWA scale. But it still remains true that in the community at large Leftist and Rightist voters are roughly equally likely to get high scores on the thing.
The central weasel word above is of course "reliably". Psychologists have the strange habit of taking a correlation seriously as long as it is "statistically significant". But ANY correlation will be statistically significant if the sample size is large enough! So we have the weird phenomenon of correlations as low as .15 (meaning that there is only a 2% overlap between two groups of people) being taken as proof of something ( See e.g. here). What this means in practice is that if 51% of voters for the conservatives get a high score on the RWA scale and 49% of voters for the Leftists get a high score on it (which is roughly what happens), psychologists say: "Aha! We told you so! This scale measures conservatism!"). And if that happens often we get statements such as the one that the RWA scale "reliably" measures conservatism. That roughly half of their "conservatives" vote Leftist does not seem to bother anyone at all!
Leftist beliefs are obviously so rigidly held to among psychologists that any evidence at all will do to support them.
I could go on to point out many, many more holes in this caricature of serious research (e.g. by pointing out that Hitler was a socialist, that Mussolini was a Marxist, that scores on the Dogmatism scale are meaningless and that intolerance of ambiguity is a "unicorn" concept) but I think that it would be flogging a dead horse to do so. I have written a fair bit more about it on my blog for those who want to look a little further and if anyone wants to look at the academic issues involved in detail there are all my published academic journal articles on the subject to refer to. They are all now online.
One of my academic colleagues -- Prof. James Lindgren -- has also been looking closely at the Jost work. He has gone to the trouble of finding out what the public opinion polls reveal about conservative voters. A sample of his findings is here. He does however have in preparation a point-by-point refutation of the Jost claims. Practically everything the Jost group claims about conservatives on the basis of what students say turns out to be the reverse of the truth according to the public opinion poll data. When Prof. Lindgren has his work ready I will of course publicize the link on my blog.
Post publication addenda
I understand that Prof. Lindgren has decided to report his research in the form of a book but that it has not yet been published.
There have been lots of subsequent uncritical mentions of the Jost et al. pseudo-meta-analysis but a widely read one appeared in "Psychology Today". A brief comment on the article concerned is therefore offered below. Below that is offered a brief comment on another article much relied upon in the "Psychology Today" article -- a quite ludicrous article by that old warhorse of the field, Jack Block.
YESTERDAY'S PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
Psychology Today has put out a big article on the psychology of politics. It purports to explain why people hew to the Left or the Right.
It bases its conclusions, however, on research that has no scholarly worth whatsoever. The two main pieces of research it relies on to support the differentiations it proposes are by Jost et al and Block et al. Both pieces of research are within my area of academic specialization so the gaping flaws in both are more evident to me than they might be to others. I have some time ago pointed out how intellectually discreditable both studies are -- reproduced above and below. I was actually one of the authors whose research the Jost et al. article purported to summarize!
Jost et al. showed vividly the usual Leftist talent for ignoring large bodies of evidence that did not suit their preconceptions. Their article must in fact rate as one of the most dishonest meta-analyses ever reported. They were very clearly guilty of "motivated cognition" -- exactly what they accused conservatives of. Leftist projection and leftist denial do usually go hand in hand.
Michelle Malkin and Jim Lindgren note the absurd "sampling" in the Block study. It seems unlikely that there were any actual conservatives among the individuals studied! That is not the first time Leftist psychologists have perpetrated such an absurdity in their mendacious claims to "explain" conservatism, however. See, for instance, here.
Given the very dubious basis of the generalizations offered in the Psychology Today article, the generalizations offered by the article should detain no-one. Whether any of the statements made are true is simply unknown.
Sadly, many in the blogosphere have assumed that there is some respectable evidential basis for the article. Cinnamon Stillwell and Fausta sum up some of the blogospheric reactions. Iron Shrink also has a detailed debunking of the Jost et al. study.
For an account of the psychology of conservatism based on the actual history of conservatism, see here.
THE BLOCKHEADED BLOCK
Starting in 1950, psychologists have been trying to prove that conservatives are psychologically maladjusted --an effort that was summarized by Jost et al. and demolished above. They never give up trying, however, and the study of 95 children from Berkeley, California by Jack Block and his wife is the latest episode. It's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel to demolish the "research" concerned so I will just mention a few basics.
What the authors found was that Berkeley children who were rated as unhappy in their kindergarten years turned out as adults to be conservatives. So what do we conclude from that? Do we conclude that conservatives are intrinsically unhappy people? Hardly. The opinion polls repeatedly show conservatives to be the happiest (e.g. here). So what DO we conclude? How about saying that conservatives in ultra-Leftist Berkeley feel uncomfortable in that environment and pass on some of that discomfort to their children? But the children (as most children do) grow up to share their parents' politics so they turn out conservative in later life too. So conservative parents who were SITUATIONALLY unhappy have conservative children -- big deal!
But that is actually putting the best face on the study. It is not nearly as good as that:
1). The children concerned were not a representative sample of any known population. They may not even have been representative of Berkeley, let alone anywhere else. And if you don't sample, you can't generalize.
2). The correlation between personality and ideology was often very weak (e.g. .27 or 7% shared variance for the rating "Is self-reliant, confident") so there were nearly as many confident children who turned out Rightist as Leftist. The reported correlation could in fact have turned on the responses of just one child. That certainly weakens ALL causal inferences from the study. And many of the stronger correlations involve obvious value judgments. For instance "Is visibly deviant from peers" is said to characterize conservatives but why not turn the value judgment around and conclude that conservatives tend to be independent?
3). The measure of conservative ideology is suspect. Block does not list the actual attitude statements he used but, as I have shown above, Leftist psychologists in general don't have a blind clue what conservatism is -- and what they regard as a measure of conservatism is usually a caricature of the real thing -- generally a collection of ignorant and aggressive statements that very few real-world conservatives would assent to. That it was a caricature in this case is suggested by the fact that it showed conservatives as less intelligent. In the general population it is Leftists who are less intelligent.
I could go on to mention the Rosenthal effect etc. but what's the point?
AN INSTRUCTIVE CONTRAST TO ALL THE ABOVE
Conservative commentators sometimes return the sort of compliment offered above by writing swingeing analyses of Leftist psychology. You can find one example here by forensic psychiatrist Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr, MD.
What a contrast! The article above about Leftists is based on what actual Leftists actually do — a vast difference from the Leftist psychologists who failed to interview any actual conservatives — and who certainly did not base their observations on what conservatives actually do, as distinct from what they say. And no psychologist should need to be told that attitudes are a poor guide to behaviour and it is behaviour that counts.
FINIS
Sunday, December 24, 2006
LEFTISM AS PSYCHOPATHY
By John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
I have shown elsewhere that there can be many causes of Leftism. I have also shown in the same place, however, that although all sorts of different people can be Leftist in one way or another, there would seem to remain a core Leftist type -- seen at its clearest among Leftist academics and intellectuals. Although such people form only a small fraction of the total population, their influence and their grasp on the levers of power in the media, in the bureaucracy, in the universities and, at times, in politics, make what they think, say and do very important indeed. And it is my contention that this type is eerily reminiscent of a well-known psychiatric category: The psychopath. So the ULTIMATE explanation for all the core characteristics of Leftism that have been described so far lies in many Leftists being sub-clinical psychopaths.
The characteristics of the clinical psychopath can be summed up as follows: He is not obviously "mad"; he is often highly intelligent; he is unmoved by brutality (except to enjoy perpetrating it); he has no moral or ethical anchors or standards; he is deeply (but discreetly) in love with himself (narcissism) so secretly despises others and thinks they are fit only to be dominated and exploited by him and those like him; he is a great manipulator who loves getting others to do his bidding by deception or otherwise; he is the master of the lie and the false pretence but sees no reason to be consistent from occasion to occasion; he will say anything to gain momentary praise or admiration; his only really strongly felt emotions seem to be hate and contempt and he is particularly enraged by those who have what he wants and will be totally unscrupulous in trying to seize what others have for himself. But above all, the psychopath does not seem to be able to tell right from wrong and, as a result, does sometimes commit or connive at murders and other heinous crimes with what seems to be a clear conscience.
That seems to me to constitute, by and large, a fairly comprehensive description of your average Left-wing intellectual -- particularly of the many intellectuals who did (and often still do) support in various ways the old Soviet system in Russia. I think that I have already touched on each of the above characteristics as underlying much of what Leftists say and do but I will treat in detail some of the major features just mentioned, one by one, below.
I should however also note at this stage that Leftists are clearly not clinical psychopaths -- i.e. they generally keep out of trouble with the law and with mental health authorities. They do not, for instance, usually commit murders (though one still-revered Leftist intellectual -- Althusser -- certainly did). But they do definitely seem to show a milder form of all the psychopathic characteristics -- some of which can be even advantageous in certain ways -- as I have pointed out elsewhere. Psychologists do of course find that most human characteristics are normally distributed -- i.e. any extreme characteristic will tend to have much more frequent milder forms -- so the present proposal is in that sense perfectly orthodox within modern academic psychology.
Just to make sure we know what we are talking about, and to reassure readers that I am not biasing my account of the matter, here is a summary of what one of the classic authorities on psychopaths says about them:
Leftist amorality as sub-clinical psychopathy
As just mentioned, the most striking characteristic of the psychopath has always been his "moral imbecility" -- his often breathtaking lack of feeling for other people and his disregard for the rules they live by. So if it shows nothing else, the assertions of "moral equivalence" between brutal regimes and democratic regimes (which I have also referred to elsewhere) that Leftists are quite famous for show their utter amorality. Neither Joseph Stalin nor Pol Pot nor Saddam Hussein bothered Leftists one bit and all were excused by Leftists in various ways -- as just doing what they had to do or some such. So Stalin's heirs are among us. One of them recently said: The disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life". And that was George Galloway, a British Labour Party member of parliament in the year 2003. And going back further, Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the few journalists to report honestly what he saw in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, knew well the British Leftists of his day. He says that members of the Left intelligentsia, like Beatrice Webb, knew of Stalin's vast brutalities against his own people of that time but just didn't care. They were attracted by the Soviet "vision" of a people who were made to do what intellectuals thought was a good thing so that was all that mattered. Mass-murder and suffering were a matter of indifference to them -- as I will set out at greater length below.
Principles? What principles?
Stalin's mass murders certainly appear to this day to be regarded by many Leftists in the economically successful "Western" democracies as merely awkward from a PR point of view rather than wrong. This psychopathy means, of course, that the Leftist really has no standards at all. Like any psychopath, he/she will say anything and everything as a means to getting what he/she wants (i.e. personal pre-eminence of some kind). U.S. Democrat Presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 was a good example of that. He was renowned for his flip-flops -- saying different things to different audiences so that he came down on both sides of almost every issue. And that seemed not to bother his Leftist supporters one bit -- though the "Washington Post" was critical:
And as Jeff Jacoby wrote:
There was in fact a fascinating short article in the "Wall Street Journal" pointing out that Kerry and the Democrats at that time abandoned any pretence of idealism in foreign policy and advocated instead stability and the status quo! Given their constitutional aversion to stability and the status quo, that was surely another proof that Leftists will advocate ANYTHING that they think will get them power. Historians will also remember that J.S. Mill was a great spokesman for liberty but that he was in fact on the Left in British politics and voted in favour of government restrictions and regulation on lots of issues. Principles were very rubbery for him too.
And even after their defeat in the 2004 Presidential election, U.S. Leftists remained locked into the defence of the status quo. As Rich Lowry put it:
So we see how important the MOTIVATION for change is. When conservatives propose changes that will empower the individual and reduce the degree of power and control exercised by the State, they are clearly acting out historic pro-individual conservative values. Whether they like or dislike change as such does not come into it. The change concerned (private retirement savings accounts, health savings accounts etc.) meets their basic goals so is pursued. And because the selfsame changes go against the centralization of power and subjugation of the individual that Leftists want, they oppose the changes concerned. Leftists do in general like to engineer change as a way of making themselves look good but if any given change does not do that and in fact moves power further way from them, they with perfect ease go into reverse gear and do exactly what they otherwise have always accused conservatives of doing: They defend the status quo both at home and abroad.
It is amusing to note that many Leftists even used the national sovereignty doctrine in a (pathetic) attempt to defend the status quo in the Middle East. In particular they used it to protect Iraq's Saddam Hussein and attack President George W. Bush. They used the international law doctrine which says that boundaries must be respected without looking at what goes on inside them. But the origin of that doctrine may be a bit inconvenient:
It originated in 1648 after Europe became exhausted by Catholic vs. Protestant wars as the "Peace of Westphalia" and was a (partially successful) way of preventing more wars by accepting the status quo as final -- i.e. accepting as final those boundaries between kingdoms that existed at that time regardless of the religion of the ruler (which it was accepted his subjects were obliged to follow). Napoleon however eventually came along and thoroughly upset the status quo so the whole thing had to be done all over again by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. And the Congress of Vienna was chaired and run by the representative of the Austrian Kaiser, the highly-reactionary Prince Metternich (who was himself a Westphalian, curiously enough). So the Congress of Vienna must be one of history's best examples of a concerted and successful attempt to defend and preserve a major and long-lasting status quo.
And the doctrine underlying THOSE arrangements (that internal affairs are sacrosanct) is what Leftists periodically proclaim as sacred! They did it with respect to Hitler as well. Note, for instance, the response of John Curtin (leader of Australia's major Leftist political party) to Germany's invasion of Russia in June 1941. While the conservative Australian leader Robert Menzies quoted Winston Churchill's stirring words resolving "to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime", Curtin condemned the invasion but went on to say "the Labor Party has no objection whatever to the Germans practising Nazism in Germany". More details of that here or here .
It all shows (as ever) how non-existent their "principles" are. Leftists can DEFEND the status quo if it suits their power needs -- as indeed they also do when they defend their welfare empires from conservative attempts at cutbacks and welfare reform and as they did when they reversed gears over eugenics.
Keith Burgess-Jackson also has a post on the notion of national sovereignty that sums up the issues involved with admirable brevity:
Another amusing example of Leftist moral imbecility and lack of any real principles to go with the proclaimed ones is Will Hutton:
Keith Burgess-Jackson points to similar hypocrisy in the USA:
And the blindness of the American Left to the oppressive nature of Fidel Castro's Cuban regime is legendary. For instance, it really was pathetic to hear film-maker Oliver Stone's evasions and apologies for Castro. In Stone you can hear the moral blindness of American "liberalism" in full flight. One small excerpt: "I think it would be a mistake to see him as a Ceausescu. I would compare him more to Reagan and Clinton. … They were both tall and had great shoulders, and so does Fidel."
And as Nat Hentoff of The Village Voice notes:
Former Leftist, Ron Rosenbaum, also spells out the moral imbecility of Leftist activists at some length in his article "Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee". Worth reading in full.
And Liddy has a great list of events proving that Leftists have no standards, principles or consistency at all. The same things that were good under Clinton are suddenly bad under Bush. As the saying goes, if it weren't for double standards, the Left wouldn't have any"
Obama too exemplifies psychopathic "flexibility" about what he supports. He says whatever will please his audience of the moment, regardless of taking quite different stands on other occasions. 'At the 2014 National Prayer Breakfast he warned that "freedom of religion is under threat... around the world." He neglected to mention, however, that organizations like Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby are suing his administration because they object to contraceptives mandated under ObamaCare in violation of their religious views. Even more astoundingly, Obama claimed, "We... believe in the inherent dignity of every human being," and "the killing of the innocent is never fulfilling God's will; in fact, it's the ultimate betrayal of God's will." Remember, this is a man who supports abortion under any and all circumstances, even in its most appalling partial-birth form, and who once told Planned Parenthood "God bless you." The seemingly total lack of self-awareness is beyond shocking but is classical psychopathy
Everything said so far in this section on amorality, however, does in one way show that Leftists practice what they preach. Because Leftists do normally LOUDLY PROCLAIM their amorality. Whether in the guise of "post-modernism" or otherwise, it seems axiomatic to the Leftist that all moral and ethical standards are merely a matter of opinion and of no binding force whatsoever. "There is no such thing as right and wrong" is a mantra that we hear from them whenever they want to dismiss any argument that does not suit them. So they themselves tell us that they have no principles. We should believe them. It is another strange characteristic of psychopaths that they shamelessly make damaging admissions about themselves. I have discussed postmodernism and its related doctrines at some length elsewhere so will not expand further on the matter here. I also show elsewhere that one does not need to make metaphysical or unworldly assumptions to regard talk of right and wrong as both meaningful and important.
Psychopathic tolerance of brutality among "liberals"
A few more notes on the weird (psychopathic) tolerance of brutality by the Left generally and by America's so-called "liberals" particularly:
A review by R. Fulford of In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr: "Hard as it may be for outsiders to imagine, a lingering affection for communism remains part of American university life.... American leftists insisted for decades that Hiss was falsely condemned. When a mountain of evidence proved the case against him (and many others), the defenders began suggesting that maybe spying actually didn't matter.."
Another review by D. Garrow says: "In Denial pulls no punches either: "Far too much academic writing about communism, anticommunism and espionage is marked by dishonesty, evasion, special pleading and moral squalor. Like Holocaust deniers, some historians of American communism have evaded and avoided facing a preeminent evil"-namely, the Stalinist dictatorship that for decades ruled the Soviet Union, murdered millions of its own citizens, and treated foreign Communist parties as mere minions of Moscow. There's no denying Haynes and Klehr's contention that "a significant number of American academics still have soft spots in their hearts for the CPUSA," the American Communist Party"."
Teichmann on the 60s generation: "One of the most striking features in the anti-Vietnam-War movement and standpoint .. was the astonishing tolerance shown towards the Communist countries, and their deeds, that is, what they did or had done to their own people, and to others, and to their attitudes towards basic notions like freedom, human autonomy, and even the possibility of democracy... Elitism without Guilt.. the Sixties' young grabbed it, and have lived off the fantasy ever since. These Believers think that everything worth saying has been said - and is known - by them. Past knowledge and history are bunk. The forever young make the new history, and make sure that no-one with different values is listened to. The similarity of these political fairytales told to our impressionable, upwardly mobile radical young, and those told to young Germans, and Italians and Russians - rather earlier - is striking".
Che Guevara is still worshipped by the young Leftists of Western universities but as a Cuban writes of him: "He did not have any business in Cuba but he went there to kill Cubans. He did not have any business in Africa but he went there to kill Africans. He did not have any business in Bolivia, but he went there to kill Bolivians, where he eventually died on his own sword.... As far as I am concerned, Ernesto Guevara was the Bin Laden of his time.... It will be very insulting for millions of people if, 30 years from now, they were to see in the streets people wearing Bin Laden T-shirts, as it is now for us to see people using Che Guevara's T-shirts."
Paul Hollander's book "Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society" recounts what Leftist intellectuals did for many decades in the Soviet era. To quote one Amazon reviewer: "Political Pilgrims is the amazing story of how Western intellectuals embraced Marxist tyrants at the very moment their colleagues were rotting in prison cells, and the common people everyone claimed to be concerned for, were starving. The book relates how cultural and religious leaders from the West, including familiar names, visited the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other communist countries, and told the most appalling lies"
And the book Stalin's British Victims (reviewed here and here), shows that members of Britain's Communist Party knew very well of Stalin's Terror. Even the murder by Stalin of their closest family members and fellow Communist fanatics could not shake them. They still kept on defending the Soviet system and Stalin himself. It shows how their inhuman vision for the world was all that mattered to them and also shows of course their utter lack of normal human feeling.
And, rather unbelievably, the glossing over of Soviet brutality continues to this day. Popular young Leftist blogger and Soviet apologist, Matthew Yglesias, was in 2004 still doing it -- saying that that lots of Russians "got themselves killed" by Stalin -- as if it were the doing of the victims rather than the doing of Stalin:
As Yglesias came under a lot of fire over that comment, he has since deleted it, but a fuller version of it is saved on "Catallarchy".
At the very least, Yglesias shows characteristic Leftist indifference to mass-murder. His further claim about the backwardness of pre-revolutionary Russia is sheer propaganda too. As one of the commenters on "Catallarchy" said:
Russia was in fact the world's 4th largest industrial economy at the time and was steadily becoming more democratic -- and if the Tsar had not bothered his head with the Serbs, Russia would be a modern advanced nation today. There is even a photographic record of what Russia was like in the early 1900s -- in clear and brilliant colour too.
Nor is the Leftist admiration for brutal dictators with a good line of talk anything new. In Napoleon & Wellington by Andrew Roberts (excerpt here), we learn that the British Left of Napoleon's day (the Whigs) so admired Napoleon that they had a lifelong aversion to the man who finally defeated Napoleon at Waterloo -- The Duke of Wellington.
I normally explain the sort of behaviour described above as the outcome of a dishonest character rather than any mental defect but it is so obvious from the attitudes involved that Leftists just don't feel for others that I think psychopathy has to be the major cause of the dishonest character.
Another possibility comes from one of the readers of my blog who emailed me to tell of an interesting case he knows where someone developed a paranoid mental disorder -- which is a type of psychosis and would normally stem from a chemical imbalance in the brain, with too much dopamine being present. Before the disorder developed, the person concerned was conservative. As his paranoia developed, however, his politics drifted to the left. He now thinks that all members of his family should pool their wealth and then re-distribute it equally. Of course, he would contribute nothing and benefit greatly. He is now very opposed to Bush even though he formerly voted for Reagan. So is an excess of dopamine in the brain generally associated with leftist political leanings? It's a testable hypothesis. I must say that some of the emails I get from Leftists do have all the hallmarks of psychotic thought disorder. It is hard to make head or tail of some of them. And loss of reality contact would seem to be characteristic of both schizophrenics and Leftist ideologues so it does seem a lively possibility to me that SOME Leftists are suffering from a low-grade psychotic disorder, rather than psychopathy.
Examples such as the above are also a good reply to any claim that I overgeneralize. American "liberals" in particular often say that not all Leftists are as nasty as Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot, Mao, Kim Jong Il and all the other lovely "socialists" who have gained unrestricted power. Some American "liberals" even say (through gritted teeth?) that they hate such "totalitarians" or "authoritarians". So if "liberals" hate Communists, how come they were apologizing for the Soviets and praising them and trying to protect them almost up to the day that the Soviet Union imploded? Even to this day, to have been a Communist in the past is treated most indulgently in "liberal" intellectual circles -- as no more than excessive idealism or as having been "a liberal in a hurry". And what American "liberal" has ever said a bad word about Castro? I got an email from a Leftist quite recently saying what a good and wise man Castro is -- despite Castro's police State, his political prisons, his political executions and his suppression of free speech and any opposition. So it is "liberals" themselves who make it clear that the only real difference between Communists and themselves is how much power they have. U.S. "liberalism" is just an attempt to achieve the old Communist goal of enforced "equality" in a gradual, step-by-step way. They are just "slowed down" Communists and like the Communists, their real motive for seeking equality is not "compassion" but hatred of other people's success.
And there are still totally unreconstructed, unapologetic and overt Stalinists among America's Leftist intelligentsia. They have had to transfer their allegiance from the now-vanished U.S.S.R. to the DPRK but that is all. As Tremoglie notes here:
A brief summary of Leftist amorality and indifference to suffering
Ralph Peters puts it well (Excerpt):
Is Leftism juvenile rather than psychopathic?
Further to what has already been said about Leftism as a form of infantilism: The very short time perspective of Leftists is very noticeable. As was noted above in the case of John Kerry, they seem to live in an eternal present where what they say only has to sound good today to this audience. To another audience tomorrow they will happily say the opposite if it seems likely to win them applause. This leads to the chronic conservative complaint of "inconsistency" or "hypocrisy" on the Left and the lame Leftist "post modernist" retort that there is no such thing as truth anyway.
A very well-known example of Leftists cheerily going into reverse-gear over an alleged "principle" is the way they once claimed that government should be "colour-blind" in the way it treates it citizens. As soon as this was more or less accomplished, they went into reverse and said no, the government should be colour-conscious in the way it treats its citizens -- so-called "affirmative action". Other examples: Communists were pro-Nazi when Hitler and Stalin were allies but became anti-Nazi overnight when Hitler invaded Russia; Leftists were keen eugenicists in the 1930s but claim to loathe eugenics today; Leftists deny that genetics could have anything to do with black/white differences or ability differences generally but still cheerily assert that homosexuals cannot help being homosexual because "they were born that way" etc, etc, etc.
This willingness to say anything to anyone if it will gain some momentary applause, popularity or advantage is of course very characteristic of the psychopath but it could also be argued that it is juvenile. Children too have short time perspectives and not very systematized thought. As Evan Sayet says (see here or here):
(There is more from Sayet here. Also reproduced here. His comment on abortion is rather good: "Interestingly, while the leftist believes that twelve year old children are mature enough to make a decision on issues of life and death, they don't think seventeen year olds are mature enough to make decisions as to what soft drink to buy on high school campuses!")
Ben Stein, V.D. Hanson and Dennis Prager, too point out a variety of ways in which Leftists would appear to be fundamentally juvenile.
And the claim that Leftists are simply juvenile would certainly help account for the fact that Leftism appeals preponderantly to the young. See elsewhere for the large body of evidence I have amassed in support of that well-known generalization. Most prominent conservatives do seem to have started out on the Left and moved Rightwards as they got older -- Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan being probably the best known examples of that.
There are however other explanations for the appeal of Leftism to the young -- see above -- and I doubt that "juvenile" is any more than a description of the Left. It would not seem to be much of an explanation. The people concerned are after all physically and mentally mature so what makes them juvenile? There is no obvious explanation. To say that they are psychopathic, however, IS explanatory. Psychopathic behaviour IS normally exhibited in adults (though it mostly seems to die down after about age 40) and there is little doubt that some brain abnormality is the cause of it. It is also an abnormality that is not wholly disadvantageous -- as I note here -- in its subclinical (less severe) forms so it seems reasonable to see Leftism simply as psychopathy in politics -- or, putting it another way, what happens when subclinical psychopaths use politics for their purposes.
And, of course, tolerance of brutality is absolutely characteristic of psychopaths but not particularly characteristic of the young. In summary, then, one might say that adult Leftists behave in juvenile ways BECAUSE they are psychopathic. Psychopathy is itself immature by normal standards (in its failure to acquire moral or ethical anchors of any kind, particularly).
More examples of Leftist infantilism here
Psychopathic Leftist reliance on lies and dishonesty
Another absolutely characteristic feature of psychopaths is their readiness to lie and lie shamelessly. And to this day I have never quite managed to get used to the way many Leftists seem to be completely uninterested in the truth. And this is another way in which the Leftists of today differ not at all from the Leftists of the Cold War era.
Stalin's old Soviet production statistics are of course the classic example of Leftist lies but chronic misrepresentation was also confirmed by the revelations made possible in Russia by former President Gorbachev's policy of "Glasnost". From what has been revealed, there can surely now be no doubt that for most of last century the Soviet system literally floated on a sea of lies. This was so extreme that even the maps produced by official Soviet cartographers were fraudulent. Even an accurate Moscow street map was unavailable! And note that the great cartographical capacity that U.S. spy satellites have had for many years renders any explanation of this in terms of defence considerations quite laughable. And note that this attachment to lies is not confined to the Soviet bloc and China. I myself remember well the pre-Khrushchev times when most Western Leftists dismissed accounts of Stalin's mass murders as "inventions of the capitalist press". There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Another example of the attachment of Western Leftists to lies is the accusation that the early British settlers of Tasmania were guilty of genocide against the Aborigines there. This was finally debunked by historian Keith Windschuttle, a former Leftist himself. There is a short summary of his work here. Prominent Australian historian, Geoffrey Blainey has reviewed Windschuttle's book and accepts that Windschuttle has indeed demolished the Leftist myth about the "genocide" of Tasmanian Aborigines. Speaking of the Leftist historians, Blainey says: But many of their errors, made on crucial matters, beggared belief. Moreover their exaggeration, gullibility, and what this book calls "fabrication" went on and on.
And a very relevant comment on the modern British Left:
Quote from BrookesNews. So nothing has changed among the Left. They are dishonest as ever but what they support shows well enough what sort of people they are.
A more subtle form of dishonesty is the great absurdity of the policies that Leftists have often advocated. Policies such as rent-control and nationalization of industry have a superficial attraction that guaranteed that they would be widely tried but who could honestly advocate them once it is apparent how badly they work? Certainly not a person who had the welfare of the people at heart. Such policies have only ever delivered poverty and housing shortages. Why have Leftists advocated such nostrums for so long?
If their motives were benevolent, it would make no sense to advocate so much misery. If their real motives were, on the other hand, a need for power and a desire to concentrate in the hands of their clique extensive power over the lives of others it makes very great sense indeed.
And the famous Leftist call for abolition of wealth and income differentials would surely lead one to expect that Leftists would reject materalistic ambition in their own lives. But it is not so. Although Leftists seem to decry the scramble for private material possessions (conservatism is smeared as "the politics of greed"), they themselves on the personal level seem to be just as keen for the scramble as anyone else. There has been a lot of research reported in the literature of academic psychology on the subject of achievement motivation but the various measures of materialistic achievement motivation have been shown to have negligible correlation with Leftism -- where a high negative correlation might on theory have been expected (Ray, 1981b; Ray & Najman, 1988). In other words, in their own lives Leftists are just about as apt as Rightists to seek personal material gain. Once again the Leftist emerges as being hypocritical and as not honest about his/her real motives and values.
And we do not really need psychological research to see what the motivations of Leftists are actually like in their daily lives. Johnson (1988), himself a former prominent Leftist, explored at length the actual lives of various prominent Leftist intellectuals -- including Karl Marx himself. He found that while such intellectuals claimed to love humanity, their actual deeds in their own lives and their detailed exhortations to their followers suggested a loathing of and contempt for their fellow man. For them it was no joke that "I love humanity. It is just people I can't stand". Dishonesty of various kinds just seems to be inherent in Leftism.
Leftists as practitioners of the "big lie"
Nazi propaganda minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels is famous for his saying that if you tell a big enough lie often enough people will believe it. He has able successors in the Leftists of today.
The CounterRevolutionary has argued (with obvious truth) that what influence Leftists have stems from their being better at propaganda rather than from their capacity to deliver desirable results. He argues therefore that conservatives should do more to press their arguments rather than just respond to Leftist claims: "We must insist that people and ideologies are judged by the results of their actions, not on the lofty ideals they claim to uphold. Without the reliance on the facade of humanity socialism, and it's modern derivatives anti-Americanism and anti-globalism, are reduced to hate ideologies no different from fascism or Islamism."
He is undoubtedly right but I think that conservatives will never be as good at propaganda because they do not have that Leftist carelessness about the truth.
The greatest triumph of the Leftist "big lie" technique in recent times would have to be the way they have persuaded almost everyone that Hitler was a Rightist when he was in fact one of them -- an extreme socialist. He was to the Right of Stalin but that is about all. See here.
But there are many smaller examples of successful Leftist deception and the "stolen generation" story in Australia is one of them. It has in fact been one of the triumphs of the Australian Left to convict white Australians of the "crime" concerned -- the alleged forcible removal of 100,000 black children from their families so they could be brought up by white foster-parents instead. There has even been a film made about the subject -- Rabbit-proof fence -- which claims to be a documentary. The whole story is however just another Leftist lie -- as Andrew Bolt sets out at length here. The slender basis of fact that the story relies on is that some 1930s official do-gooders -- predecessors of the modern LEFT -- did place a few mixed-race children in white foster homes to give them a better chance in life -- but the placement was always made with written parental consent. There was NO forced removal. Nobody and nothing was "stolen". And that's not just Andrew Bolt's opinion. It is the finding of a year-long $10 million Australian court case about the claim. Officialdom acted only when the parents either did not want the children or felt that they could not care for them adequately.
So the truth is that it was white do-gooders and social workers just like the Leftists of today who ran the programme concerned. The children concerned were all half-castes (of partly white ancestry) and the wiseheads of the day felt that "for their own good" such children would have "a better chance" if they were brought up in white families rather than other black families. Like the Leftists of today, the "welfare" workers of that time felt that they knew what was best for other people. But to this day most Australians believe it was all just racism -- with no awareness of the do-gooder motivation behind it.
And in the USA, the most successful big lie would appear to be the constant claim from Democratic party propaganda that they are the anti-racists and Republicans are the racists. I guess Abraham Lincoln must have been a Democrat? And the "Jim Crow" laws of the old South must have been put in place by Republicans? No need to guess, is there?
And which party voted in higher percentages for the 1964 civil rights act? The actual percentages of "yes" votes were: Republicans 80% in the House and 82% in the Senate versus Democrats 63% in the House and 69% in the Senate. In fact, in the 26 major civil rights votes after 1933, a majority of Democrats opposed civil rights legislation in over 80 percent of the votes. By contrast, the Republican majority favored civil rights in over 96 percent of the votes. So how do the Leftist liars get away with it? I guess hardly anybody knows their history so that gives the liars free rein.
There is a great quiz about all those good old anti-racist Democrats here. It comes ultimately from a column by Thomas Oliver. Sample question: 3). When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil rights efforts in the South, the governing powers that opposed him were of which party?
a) Democrat
b) Republican
Also, this article gives a much more detailed history of whether Democrats or Republicans have been more racist.
Psychopathy, elitism and hate
Much that I have said in this monograph (e.g. here, here and here) points out the good fit to reality provided by the explanation that Leftists are strongly motivated by hatred and contempt for others -- with "compassion" being merely a necessary cloak for their real motivations. Leftists want power and acclaim for themselves and when they see any power and success in others they hate it and want to tear it down. But is that consistent with Leftists being psychopathic? Are not psychopaths supposed to be devoid of normal human emotions? They are not. They certainly have large emotional deficits and a great lack of empathy but one emotion that thrives in them is hate. This can be most graphically illustrated by the case of Eric Harris, the moving spirit behind the Columbine massacres. Read this excerpt from the psychiatric conclusions about Harris and marvel at how similar Harris was to the average Leftist intellectual:
It must again be stressed, however, that we are talking about committed Leftists here rather than voters for Left-leaning political parties. It is the Leftist leaders and ideologues who are clearly psychopathic. Some Leftist followers may be too but probably not predominantly. Julie Burchill has a column in The Guardian which makes that point most emphatically -- saying that the mass of supporters for Leftist causes are decent but naive folk led astray by a small group of bloodthirsty psychopaths. As an only partly reformed Leftist herself, she is in a position to have some insight.
Clinton as a psychopath
And there can surely be no more prominent leadership position than President of the United States. So who is unquestionably the ex-President that Leftists still swoon over? As noted already above, it is William Jefferson Clinton, of course. Leftists identify with him enormously. So what sort of person is he? There is little doubt that Clinton is/was a psychopath:
* Jesse Jackson once described him as "immune to shame," someone who at the core consisted of "absolutely nothing . . . nothing but an appetite."
* Or as former senator Bob Kerrey famously characterized him: "an unusually good liar -- unusually good". And Jackson and Kerrey were both on Clinton's side of the political fence.
* And as The Wall St. Journal points out, Clinton, despite his Leftist credentials, changed very little in America during his time in office. He mainly carried forward processes that were already underway. Why? Because he had to spend such a huge amount of his time just defending his repeated amoral behaviour in his personal life.
* And even Clinton's much-noted personal charm is characteristic of psychopaths.
* And the stupid lie about how his wife Hillary got her name (from Sir Edmund) is typically psychopathic in the way it gave him only a trivial gain in return for revealing himself as a compulsive liar.
* And his pardoning of utter rogues during the closing hours of his administration was also breathtakingly cynical and amoral.
But none of that bothered his admirers during his Presidency, of course. So if people reveal their own outlook by those they admire, the psychopathy of committed Leftists is well revealed by their admiration of Clinton. His psychopathic character is so marked and central to him that it has to be a large part of the reason WHY committed Leftists like him. Telling a good and impressive story regardless of its truth and without any belief in it WAS Clinton. And it largely IS Leftism too. Clinton is/was as shallow as a birdbath. Like all psychopaths, he was simply glib.
And, for anybody who knows psychopaths, what a classic psychopathic performance this was:
The psychopath will say whatever it takes to gain sympathy and approval -- and he is very good at detecting what it takes.
There is also an interview with Clinton here (plus some comments) which shows psychopathic features. Note the total lack of any sense of guilt or remorse for anything he did and the wild theories put forward to explain the attacks on him. It's his "enemies" who harmed him, not his own lack of any morality or responsibility. Psychopaths all think that they can do no wrong and very commonly explain their difficulties by saying that people are just out to "get" them.
John Kerry as a psychopath
Democrat Presidential candidate for the year 2004, John Kerry, is another rather clearly psychopathic figure. He made much in his campaign of his service in Vietnam so let us for starters look at just one excerpt from what his fellow servicemen at the time recollect of him:
The last sentence is of course the characteristic lay summary of psychopaths. So let us look a little further. Sometimes little things can tell you a lot and John Kerry's totally implausible story about his dog is an example of that. It is a classic psychopathic lie -- something said which earns momentary acclaim but which is uttered without any thought of its being found out as false.
Given the chronic lying of psychopaths, this story also begins to makes sense. It claims that the details of his war record posted on the net by John Kerry are fraudulent: "I looked at that Web site and the first thing I looked at was Kerry's Silver Star citation. Guess what? It is for an action that took place in 1969, but it is signed by Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. Strangely, Lehman was secretary of the Navy from 1981 to 1987,"
It is also now rather clear why Kerry made his outrageous claims about American war crimes as soon as he got back from Vietnam. As well as the incident mentioned above, the sampan incident and various others incidents indicate that Kerry himself was a war criminal and it seems to be a reflexive Leftist strategy to accuse others of what are in fact their own faults (Freudian "projection").
And read again the summary at the beginning of this section on psychopathy and note what is says about the typical psychopath: "a willingness to look out for number one that leaves the greatest egotists in the dust. He.. will lie, cheat, steal, and kill without the slightest remorse... " And then note this summary of Kerry's vast egotism by the infamously partisan Leftist columnist Maureen Dowd:
If that is what his friends say about him.....
Obama as a psychopath
It is probably pointless to add more and more examples of sub-clinical psychopathy among prominent Leftists so perhaps just a few notes about President Barack Obama will suffice:
Like Clinton and Kerry, Obama is just another glib rogue.
A significant waffle
Obama's now-famous remark: "Why can't I just eat my waffle?" has been much noted. Google has over 19,000 mentions of it. And the message taken from it has generally been that Obama is a haughty elitist who does not like to be questioned. I think that there is much more than that to it, however. Read the following contemporary report to put it in context:
The above quote and the waffle remark are both telling us the same thing: That Obama has difficulty keeping up his "nice guy" image. Keeping it up quite simply wears him out. It is not who he really is so keeping up that image tires him and he just HAS to rest from it. It is not who he really is.
And as someone who has studied psychopathy (I have a couple of academic journal articles on the subject) that is very familiar. Psychopaths also typically present a "nice guy" image -- something that sucks in the females wholesale. The psychopath says and does all the right things and people promptly put their trust in him. And then when they least expect it, he "goes bad" on them. "Why did he do that?" is the typical distressed response, "He was so nice and then he went and did ....".
The sucker in the story gets very thoroughly betrayed and has no clue as to why the psychopath suddenly changed. The answer, of course, is that the nice guy act was all a pretense in the first place and because it was not genuine the psychopath just could not keep it up for long. The "change" that distressed the sucker was the mask being dropped and the psychopath reverting to his true type.
And that is what we see in both reports of Obama's behaviour above. By the time he got to his waffle he just could not keep up his act, even under the full glare of media scrutiny. He HAD to have a rest from acting. So the Obama we see on the campaign trail is just a false front for the very dismal soul that lies beneath it.
The examples above are about Obama on the campaign trail but the typically psychopathic lack of moral anchors was readily observable during his Presidency too -- as Tibor Machan observes. An excerpt: "There is no black and white for the man–no one, not even a vicious terrorist and a leader of a country in which women are systematically and barbarically oppressed, justifies for him any sort of firm moral condemnation. Like those ever-permissive parents who always have an excuse for what their offspring are doing, no matter how mischievous or outright evil it manages to be, for Mr. Obama those who attack America, actually attack innocents everywhere, just could not be all bad, unworthy of understanding."
And here's a classic bit of psychopathy as described by Thomas Sowell:
And another example that is greatly amusing for its discrepancy with what he later did. The huge expansion of Federal debt under Obama could have no better critic than Obama himself. Here is what he said in March 2006:
Typically psychopathic feigned principles. It sounded good but was ignored when something else suited him.
In October 2014 Roger L. Simon was also struck by Obama's moral vacuum:
Prevalence of psychopathy in politics
As I have pointed out at length elsewhere, there are many reasons why people can have hate in their hearts for the society around them. But those who have that hate are the Left. And it is that hate which makes them want to change us all.
The anger and hate is sometimes so strong that it is visible -- Mrs Clinton with TWO clenched fists. Even the Communist salute requires only one. The fist is the emblem of the Left. It tells you what they want to do.
The fist certainly seems to be her trademark
And this is British Liberal leader, Nick Clegg
And how about this? A mass Communist salute in the best Soviet style:
It’s from the trailer for Disruption, a Warmist "documentary"
SOURCE
But a major reason for the hate is ego. The hater thinks highly of himself and resents that the world does not give him the praise and rewards that he thinks are his due.
It is hard to know for certain how much Leftism is driven in that way. It is very evident in Leftist leaders but is it widespread among the voters? When people are questioned immediately after voting in Presidential elections, the reasons that Democrat-voters give for their vote seem to be founded mainly on profound ignorance of the facts and issues. Democrat candidates are blamed for what Republicans do and vice versa.
For all that, however, many ordinary people who favour the Left often do express the same resentment of the world that we see in Leftist leaders. I can warrant that from the many social attitude surveys I did in my social science research career.
As I also set out at length above, however, many Leftist leaders are not only egotists but are in fact the ultimate egotists -- psychopaths, people who have no real concern for other people at all -- people to whom only their own self-interest is visible. Though their psychopathy is "sub-clinical", i.e. it is subdued enough to keep them out of trouble with law enforcement and the mental health system.
So when both the leadership of the Left and a substantial part of their supporters are psychopathic, we clearly have one half of the political spectrum that is substantially insane. Beneath their superficial charm lies a serious mental defect.
That such a pathology has engulfed half of politics is of course extremely disturbing. My comment (during my research career) that psychopathy is often successful in various ways appears to have been confirmed in spades. It even appears in fact to have been reproductively successful, which is very alarming. We now have a substantially psychopathic population around us.
That psychopathy has been reproductively successful for many years now is not hard to fathom. As I have pointed out psychopaths seem to have a magic way with women. The women eventually get disillusioned but pregnancies often occur in the interim. And these days the children of such pregnancies will normally survive to adulthood. So there has been a gradual but steady drip of psychopathy into the population. And the "soft" penal practices of the current era have greatly facilitated that. Criminals are now rarely executed but are released back into the population to continue their mayhem. And a substantial number of those criminals are psychopaths.
No wonder our Leftist political opponents often seem to be off the planet
Summary of the psychology of the Left
All explanations simply push the need for explanation one step further back. If you show that Y is caused by X then the next question is obviously, "what causes X?". I think that what has been said so far has taken us through several such steps. We initially saw that ideologically-committed Leftists (as distinct from the much larger number of people who vote for Left-leaning political parties at election time) are motivated by a love of change. As the second step we saw that they love change because it gives them opportunities to strut and feed their large but weak egos in various ways -- including giving them opportunites for gaining power.
Now however we have come to the point of suggesting that the emotional shallowness that a large but weak ego implies may in fact be just one symptom of a much broader and more serious emotional and intellectual deficit -- psychopathy. Psychopaths are after all renowned for their emotional shallowness -- to the point where they can at times seem entirely devoid of emotion. Additionally, we have seen that Leftists not only have the moral imbecility of the psychopath but in fact proudly proclaim it -- in their "postmodernist" doctrine (See here) that everything is relative and nothing is better or worthier than anything else (except when it suits Leftists, of course). We have also seen that the other major characteristics of the psychopath -- indifference to brutality and reliance on lies -- are present in spades among Leftists. And most of all, the sense of superiority to others and the masked contempt for others are at once very psychopathic and very Leftist.
In a basic sense, then, it has been proven that Leftists are psychopathic: They have all the symptoms. To show that they and clinical psychopaths have similar brain function would be the next step but the study of psychopathy itself is still only in its infancy so that step would seem a long way off as yet. Psychologists might consider it a useful step to examine whether or not Leftists score high on standard questionnaires that are used to detect psychopathy but I have shown elsewhere the large problems in that.
In summary, then, Leftism at its deepest level would seem to be a form of sub-clinical psychopathy -- not normally severe enough to get the person into much trouble but severe enough to cause lots of trouble for others.
Clickable index to the above article:
Leftist amorality as sub-clinical psychopathy
Principles? What principles?
Psychopathic tolerance of brutality among "liberals"
A brief summary of Leftist amorality and indifference to suffering
Is Leftism juvenile rather than psychopathic?
Psychopathic Leftist reliance on lies and dishonesty
Leftists as practitioners of "the big lie"
Psychopathy, elitism and hate
Clinton as a psychopath
John Kerry as a psychopath
Obama as a psychopath
Summary
FINIS
By John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)
I have shown elsewhere that there can be many causes of Leftism. I have also shown in the same place, however, that although all sorts of different people can be Leftist in one way or another, there would seem to remain a core Leftist type -- seen at its clearest among Leftist academics and intellectuals. Although such people form only a small fraction of the total population, their influence and their grasp on the levers of power in the media, in the bureaucracy, in the universities and, at times, in politics, make what they think, say and do very important indeed. And it is my contention that this type is eerily reminiscent of a well-known psychiatric category: The psychopath. So the ULTIMATE explanation for all the core characteristics of Leftism that have been described so far lies in many Leftists being sub-clinical psychopaths.
The characteristics of the clinical psychopath can be summed up as follows: He is not obviously "mad"; he is often highly intelligent; he is unmoved by brutality (except to enjoy perpetrating it); he has no moral or ethical anchors or standards; he is deeply (but discreetly) in love with himself (narcissism) so secretly despises others and thinks they are fit only to be dominated and exploited by him and those like him; he is a great manipulator who loves getting others to do his bidding by deception or otherwise; he is the master of the lie and the false pretence but sees no reason to be consistent from occasion to occasion; he will say anything to gain momentary praise or admiration; his only really strongly felt emotions seem to be hate and contempt and he is particularly enraged by those who have what he wants and will be totally unscrupulous in trying to seize what others have for himself. But above all, the psychopath does not seem to be able to tell right from wrong and, as a result, does sometimes commit or connive at murders and other heinous crimes with what seems to be a clear conscience.
That seems to me to constitute, by and large, a fairly comprehensive description of your average Left-wing intellectual -- particularly of the many intellectuals who did (and often still do) support in various ways the old Soviet system in Russia. I think that I have already touched on each of the above characteristics as underlying much of what Leftists say and do but I will treat in detail some of the major features just mentioned, one by one, below.
I should however also note at this stage that Leftists are clearly not clinical psychopaths -- i.e. they generally keep out of trouble with the law and with mental health authorities. They do not, for instance, usually commit murders (though one still-revered Leftist intellectual -- Althusser -- certainly did). But they do definitely seem to show a milder form of all the psychopathic characteristics -- some of which can be even advantageous in certain ways -- as I have pointed out elsewhere. Psychologists do of course find that most human characteristics are normally distributed -- i.e. any extreme characteristic will tend to have much more frequent milder forms -- so the present proposal is in that sense perfectly orthodox within modern academic psychology.
Just to make sure we know what we are talking about, and to reassure readers that I am not biasing my account of the matter, here is a summary of what one of the classic authorities on psychopaths says about them:
Robert Hare, in his book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, which I have just finished, estimates that there may be as many as two million psychopaths in the U.S. Sooner or later, you are bound to come across one, a truly frightening prospect, an encounter that could ruin your life. A psychopath is characterized, as the book's subtitle has it, by a lack of all scruple, a willingness to look out for number one that leaves the greatest egotists in the dust. He (and males in this category outnumber females 20 to 1) will lie, cheat, steal, and kill without the slightest remorse, blaming the victim, and bemoaning his own fate when caught. The real kicker is that the psychopath is often charming, a glib talker who is adept at seeing when and how someone may be taken advantage of, and most victims of psychopaths walk unaware right into their traps. The psychopath knows full well how to make use of people's natural propensity to trust others
Leftist amorality as sub-clinical psychopathy
As just mentioned, the most striking characteristic of the psychopath has always been his "moral imbecility" -- his often breathtaking lack of feeling for other people and his disregard for the rules they live by. So if it shows nothing else, the assertions of "moral equivalence" between brutal regimes and democratic regimes (which I have also referred to elsewhere) that Leftists are quite famous for show their utter amorality. Neither Joseph Stalin nor Pol Pot nor Saddam Hussein bothered Leftists one bit and all were excused by Leftists in various ways -- as just doing what they had to do or some such. So Stalin's heirs are among us. One of them recently said: The disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life". And that was George Galloway, a British Labour Party member of parliament in the year 2003. And going back further, Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the few journalists to report honestly what he saw in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, knew well the British Leftists of his day. He says that members of the Left intelligentsia, like Beatrice Webb, knew of Stalin's vast brutalities against his own people of that time but just didn't care. They were attracted by the Soviet "vision" of a people who were made to do what intellectuals thought was a good thing so that was all that mattered. Mass-murder and suffering were a matter of indifference to them -- as I will set out at greater length below.
Principles? What principles?
Stalin's mass murders certainly appear to this day to be regarded by many Leftists in the economically successful "Western" democracies as merely awkward from a PR point of view rather than wrong. This psychopathy means, of course, that the Leftist really has no standards at all. Like any psychopath, he/she will say anything and everything as a means to getting what he/she wants (i.e. personal pre-eminence of some kind). U.S. Democrat Presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 was a good example of that. He was renowned for his flip-flops -- saying different things to different audiences so that he came down on both sides of almost every issue. And that seemed not to bother his Leftist supporters one bit -- though the "Washington Post" was critical:
"John Kerry has become the favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination without a detailed or clarifying debate on many issues.... Now, with the nomination seemingly within his reach, the Massachusetts senator must begin to more fully explain where he stands on the major challenges facing the country. That task is particularly important for Mr. Kerry because of his fuzziness on issues ranging from Iraq to gay marriage".
And as Jeff Jacoby wrote:
"In the 2004 presidential field, there is a candidate for nearly every point of view. His name is John Kerry. Equivocating politicians are sometimes accused of trying to be "all things to all people," but few have taken the practice of expedience and shifty opportunism to Kerry's level."
There was in fact a fascinating short article in the "Wall Street Journal" pointing out that Kerry and the Democrats at that time abandoned any pretence of idealism in foreign policy and advocated instead stability and the status quo! Given their constitutional aversion to stability and the status quo, that was surely another proof that Leftists will advocate ANYTHING that they think will get them power. Historians will also remember that J.S. Mill was a great spokesman for liberty but that he was in fact on the Left in British politics and voted in favour of government restrictions and regulation on lots of issues. Principles were very rubbery for him too.
And even after their defeat in the 2004 Presidential election, U.S. Leftists remained locked into the defence of the status quo. As Rich Lowry put it:
"Please, don't change anything." That bids fair to become the liberal slogan for the early 21st century. Who knew government programs circa 2004 would have achieved an equipoise of perfection such that disturbing them in the slightest way would represent liberal heresy? And who would have guessed that "progressives" would become opponents of change so thoroughgoing that they would make Edmund Burke blush?
Reactionary liberalism will be the order of the day in President Bush's second term. Take Social Security. The program was started in the 1930s. Back then, there were 41 workers for every retiree. Now, there are three workers for every retiree. Back then, life expectancy was significantly shorter than its current 78 years. In other words, in 70 years the world has changed, but the structure of Social Security hasn't -- and liberals desperately want to keep it that way.....
The same basic argument will apply to tax reform, tort reform, health-care reform and further education reform. No issue quite highlighted the left's reactionary impulse than when, during the campaign, Bush proposed redeploying American troops from their Cold War outposts around the world. Liberals immediately reacted negatively, making the argument, basically, that the troops should stay where they are, because they've been there for 40 years, and everyone is comfortable with it.
It is in foreign policy that the new liberal orientation has been most stark. Liberals once believed in global change based on the advance of human rights. This was an admirable idea (if sometimes poorly implemented). Now it's been abandoned because Bush has picked it up, and liberals believe in little else in foreign policy except that whatever we attempt will fail...."
So we see how important the MOTIVATION for change is. When conservatives propose changes that will empower the individual and reduce the degree of power and control exercised by the State, they are clearly acting out historic pro-individual conservative values. Whether they like or dislike change as such does not come into it. The change concerned (private retirement savings accounts, health savings accounts etc.) meets their basic goals so is pursued. And because the selfsame changes go against the centralization of power and subjugation of the individual that Leftists want, they oppose the changes concerned. Leftists do in general like to engineer change as a way of making themselves look good but if any given change does not do that and in fact moves power further way from them, they with perfect ease go into reverse gear and do exactly what they otherwise have always accused conservatives of doing: They defend the status quo both at home and abroad.
It is amusing to note that many Leftists even used the national sovereignty doctrine in a (pathetic) attempt to defend the status quo in the Middle East. In particular they used it to protect Iraq's Saddam Hussein and attack President George W. Bush. They used the international law doctrine which says that boundaries must be respected without looking at what goes on inside them. But the origin of that doctrine may be a bit inconvenient:
It originated in 1648 after Europe became exhausted by Catholic vs. Protestant wars as the "Peace of Westphalia" and was a (partially successful) way of preventing more wars by accepting the status quo as final -- i.e. accepting as final those boundaries between kingdoms that existed at that time regardless of the religion of the ruler (which it was accepted his subjects were obliged to follow). Napoleon however eventually came along and thoroughly upset the status quo so the whole thing had to be done all over again by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. And the Congress of Vienna was chaired and run by the representative of the Austrian Kaiser, the highly-reactionary Prince Metternich (who was himself a Westphalian, curiously enough). So the Congress of Vienna must be one of history's best examples of a concerted and successful attempt to defend and preserve a major and long-lasting status quo.
And the doctrine underlying THOSE arrangements (that internal affairs are sacrosanct) is what Leftists periodically proclaim as sacred! They did it with respect to Hitler as well. Note, for instance, the response of John Curtin (leader of Australia's major Leftist political party) to Germany's invasion of Russia in June 1941. While the conservative Australian leader Robert Menzies quoted Winston Churchill's stirring words resolving "to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime", Curtin condemned the invasion but went on to say "the Labor Party has no objection whatever to the Germans practising Nazism in Germany". More details of that here or here .
It all shows (as ever) how non-existent their "principles" are. Leftists can DEFEND the status quo if it suits their power needs -- as indeed they also do when they defend their welfare empires from conservative attempts at cutbacks and welfare reform and as they did when they reversed gears over eugenics.
Keith Burgess-Jackson also has a post on the notion of national sovereignty that sums up the issues involved with admirable brevity:
Some posters on my Ethics of War blog appear to think that sovereignty is absolute, i.e., that nothing could possibly justify intervention in another nation's affairs. This is as indefensible as any other absolutist position, such as extreme pacifism and anarchism. Nor should it be thought that sovereignty is meaningless unless it is absolute. Sovereignty is the analogue of personal autonomy. But of course personal autonomy is not absolute. My right to govern myself has limits. I may not exercise my autonomy to harm or threaten harm to others, for example.
So the question is not whether Iraq was a sovereign nation at the time coalition forces intervened. It's what the scope and limits of sovereignty are and whether the limits were exceeded in this case. I submit that sovereignty does not include the right to harm one's citizens, as Saddam Hussein had a long record of doing and gave every reason to believe would continue to do unless prevented by force from doing so. It wasn't just Saddam, either. His sons, Uday and Qusay, had been groomed to carry on his tyrannical, genocidal ways. The coalition led by the United States did right in taking these moral monsters down.
Another amusing example of Leftist moral imbecility and lack of any real principles to go with the proclaimed ones is Will Hutton:
"Will Hutton, Britain's foremost critic of capitalism and an outspoken advocate for affordable social housing, is married to a property developer who has made a fortune out of selling and renting inner-city properties, often at rates which local council housing officers describe as exorbitant."
Keith Burgess-Jackson points to similar hypocrisy in the USA:
"Please keep in mind that I was a liberal for a long time. I know the liberal mentality and tactics. Liberals have no shame. They're unfulfilled totalitarians. Their only goal, despite their declared concern for the disadvantaged, is power. Think about it. If liberals truly cared about the disadvantaged, as they say they do, they'd dispose of their wealth. There are enough wealthy liberals in this country to feed, clothe, shelter, and medicate every poor person. Don't hold your breath waiting for this to happen. The Kennedys are still wealthy, aren't they? John Kerry is more than happy to take advantage of the Heinz fortune. Liberals insist on forcing others to pay for their hare-brained social-engineering schemes. This suggests that they're driven by envy and spite, not benevolence".
And the blindness of the American Left to the oppressive nature of Fidel Castro's Cuban regime is legendary. For instance, it really was pathetic to hear film-maker Oliver Stone's evasions and apologies for Castro. In Stone you can hear the moral blindness of American "liberalism" in full flight. One small excerpt: "I think it would be a mistake to see him as a Ceausescu. I would compare him more to Reagan and Clinton. … They were both tall and had great shoulders, and so does Fidel."
And as Nat Hentoff of The Village Voice notes:
"Ann Sparanese, a member of the governing Council of the American Library Association, has written a letter to the Voice criticizing my columns about Fidel Castro's prison sentences of 20 and more years for 75 Cuban dissenters, including 10 independent librarians. ... At an upcoming midwinter meeting in San Diego, from January 9 to 14, the ALA plans to decide whether it will indeed live up to its principles and finally support the locked-up independent librarians in Cuba. It has refused so far."
Former Leftist, Ron Rosenbaum, also spells out the moral imbecility of Leftist activists at some length in his article "Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee". Worth reading in full.
And Liddy has a great list of events proving that Leftists have no standards, principles or consistency at all. The same things that were good under Clinton are suddenly bad under Bush. As the saying goes, if it weren't for double standards, the Left wouldn't have any"
Obama too exemplifies psychopathic "flexibility" about what he supports. He says whatever will please his audience of the moment, regardless of taking quite different stands on other occasions. 'At the 2014 National Prayer Breakfast he warned that "freedom of religion is under threat... around the world." He neglected to mention, however, that organizations like Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby are suing his administration because they object to contraceptives mandated under ObamaCare in violation of their religious views. Even more astoundingly, Obama claimed, "We... believe in the inherent dignity of every human being," and "the killing of the innocent is never fulfilling God's will; in fact, it's the ultimate betrayal of God's will." Remember, this is a man who supports abortion under any and all circumstances, even in its most appalling partial-birth form, and who once told Planned Parenthood "God bless you." The seemingly total lack of self-awareness is beyond shocking but is classical psychopathy
Everything said so far in this section on amorality, however, does in one way show that Leftists practice what they preach. Because Leftists do normally LOUDLY PROCLAIM their amorality. Whether in the guise of "post-modernism" or otherwise, it seems axiomatic to the Leftist that all moral and ethical standards are merely a matter of opinion and of no binding force whatsoever. "There is no such thing as right and wrong" is a mantra that we hear from them whenever they want to dismiss any argument that does not suit them. So they themselves tell us that they have no principles. We should believe them. It is another strange characteristic of psychopaths that they shamelessly make damaging admissions about themselves. I have discussed postmodernism and its related doctrines at some length elsewhere so will not expand further on the matter here. I also show elsewhere that one does not need to make metaphysical or unworldly assumptions to regard talk of right and wrong as both meaningful and important.
Psychopathic tolerance of brutality among "liberals"
A few more notes on the weird (psychopathic) tolerance of brutality by the Left generally and by America's so-called "liberals" particularly:
A review by R. Fulford of In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr: "Hard as it may be for outsiders to imagine, a lingering affection for communism remains part of American university life.... American leftists insisted for decades that Hiss was falsely condemned. When a mountain of evidence proved the case against him (and many others), the defenders began suggesting that maybe spying actually didn't matter.."
Another review by D. Garrow says: "In Denial pulls no punches either: "Far too much academic writing about communism, anticommunism and espionage is marked by dishonesty, evasion, special pleading and moral squalor. Like Holocaust deniers, some historians of American communism have evaded and avoided facing a preeminent evil"-namely, the Stalinist dictatorship that for decades ruled the Soviet Union, murdered millions of its own citizens, and treated foreign Communist parties as mere minions of Moscow. There's no denying Haynes and Klehr's contention that "a significant number of American academics still have soft spots in their hearts for the CPUSA," the American Communist Party"."
Teichmann on the 60s generation: "One of the most striking features in the anti-Vietnam-War movement and standpoint .. was the astonishing tolerance shown towards the Communist countries, and their deeds, that is, what they did or had done to their own people, and to others, and to their attitudes towards basic notions like freedom, human autonomy, and even the possibility of democracy... Elitism without Guilt.. the Sixties' young grabbed it, and have lived off the fantasy ever since. These Believers think that everything worth saying has been said - and is known - by them. Past knowledge and history are bunk. The forever young make the new history, and make sure that no-one with different values is listened to. The similarity of these political fairytales told to our impressionable, upwardly mobile radical young, and those told to young Germans, and Italians and Russians - rather earlier - is striking".
Che Guevara is still worshipped by the young Leftists of Western universities but as a Cuban writes of him: "He did not have any business in Cuba but he went there to kill Cubans. He did not have any business in Africa but he went there to kill Africans. He did not have any business in Bolivia, but he went there to kill Bolivians, where he eventually died on his own sword.... As far as I am concerned, Ernesto Guevara was the Bin Laden of his time.... It will be very insulting for millions of people if, 30 years from now, they were to see in the streets people wearing Bin Laden T-shirts, as it is now for us to see people using Che Guevara's T-shirts."
Paul Hollander's book "Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society" recounts what Leftist intellectuals did for many decades in the Soviet era. To quote one Amazon reviewer: "Political Pilgrims is the amazing story of how Western intellectuals embraced Marxist tyrants at the very moment their colleagues were rotting in prison cells, and the common people everyone claimed to be concerned for, were starving. The book relates how cultural and religious leaders from the West, including familiar names, visited the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other communist countries, and told the most appalling lies"
And the book Stalin's British Victims (reviewed here and here), shows that members of Britain's Communist Party knew very well of Stalin's Terror. Even the murder by Stalin of their closest family members and fellow Communist fanatics could not shake them. They still kept on defending the Soviet system and Stalin himself. It shows how their inhuman vision for the world was all that mattered to them and also shows of course their utter lack of normal human feeling.
And, rather unbelievably, the glossing over of Soviet brutality continues to this day. Popular young Leftist blogger and Soviet apologist, Matthew Yglesias, was in 2004 still doing it -- saying that that lots of Russians "got themselves killed" by Stalin -- as if it were the doing of the victims rather than the doing of Stalin:
"The planned economy has also produced a public transportation system of astoundingly high quality compared to what we've got in, say, the United States. On the other hand, the extremely cramped housing in what is, objectively, a nearly empty country seemed totally absurd. And of course millions of people got themselves killed in Stalin's various schemes.
As Yglesias came under a lot of fire over that comment, he has since deleted it, but a fuller version of it is saved on "Catallarchy".
At the very least, Yglesias shows characteristic Leftist indifference to mass-murder. His further claim about the backwardness of pre-revolutionary Russia is sheer propaganda too. As one of the commenters on "Catallarchy" said:
"Russia was not "a totally undeveloped country" in 1917. It was an industrial nation spanned by railroads with an emerging capitalist class, labor unrest, factory strikes and all the other attributes of a developed nation of the time.... Still, it had freed its slaves (serfs) before the US did and even gave them land though they had to pay for it in future installments."
Russia was in fact the world's 4th largest industrial economy at the time and was steadily becoming more democratic -- and if the Tsar had not bothered his head with the Serbs, Russia would be a modern advanced nation today. There is even a photographic record of what Russia was like in the early 1900s -- in clear and brilliant colour too.
Nor is the Leftist admiration for brutal dictators with a good line of talk anything new. In Napoleon & Wellington by Andrew Roberts (excerpt here), we learn that the British Left of Napoleon's day (the Whigs) so admired Napoleon that they had a lifelong aversion to the man who finally defeated Napoleon at Waterloo -- The Duke of Wellington.
I normally explain the sort of behaviour described above as the outcome of a dishonest character rather than any mental defect but it is so obvious from the attitudes involved that Leftists just don't feel for others that I think psychopathy has to be the major cause of the dishonest character.
Another possibility comes from one of the readers of my blog who emailed me to tell of an interesting case he knows where someone developed a paranoid mental disorder -- which is a type of psychosis and would normally stem from a chemical imbalance in the brain, with too much dopamine being present. Before the disorder developed, the person concerned was conservative. As his paranoia developed, however, his politics drifted to the left. He now thinks that all members of his family should pool their wealth and then re-distribute it equally. Of course, he would contribute nothing and benefit greatly. He is now very opposed to Bush even though he formerly voted for Reagan. So is an excess of dopamine in the brain generally associated with leftist political leanings? It's a testable hypothesis. I must say that some of the emails I get from Leftists do have all the hallmarks of psychotic thought disorder. It is hard to make head or tail of some of them. And loss of reality contact would seem to be characteristic of both schizophrenics and Leftist ideologues so it does seem a lively possibility to me that SOME Leftists are suffering from a low-grade psychotic disorder, rather than psychopathy.
Examples such as the above are also a good reply to any claim that I overgeneralize. American "liberals" in particular often say that not all Leftists are as nasty as Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot, Mao, Kim Jong Il and all the other lovely "socialists" who have gained unrestricted power. Some American "liberals" even say (through gritted teeth?) that they hate such "totalitarians" or "authoritarians". So if "liberals" hate Communists, how come they were apologizing for the Soviets and praising them and trying to protect them almost up to the day that the Soviet Union imploded? Even to this day, to have been a Communist in the past is treated most indulgently in "liberal" intellectual circles -- as no more than excessive idealism or as having been "a liberal in a hurry". And what American "liberal" has ever said a bad word about Castro? I got an email from a Leftist quite recently saying what a good and wise man Castro is -- despite Castro's police State, his political prisons, his political executions and his suppression of free speech and any opposition. So it is "liberals" themselves who make it clear that the only real difference between Communists and themselves is how much power they have. U.S. "liberalism" is just an attempt to achieve the old Communist goal of enforced "equality" in a gradual, step-by-step way. They are just "slowed down" Communists and like the Communists, their real motive for seeking equality is not "compassion" but hatred of other people's success.
And there are still totally unreconstructed, unapologetic and overt Stalinists among America's Leftist intelligentsia. They have had to transfer their allegiance from the now-vanished U.S.S.R. to the DPRK but that is all. As Tremoglie notes here:
"If you believe the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) - an organization that extols the virtues of communism and detests capitalism - North Korea is nearly a paradise. A nation where a peace-loving president governs a land of contented people, living a happy existence, with sustenance not even a tertiary concern. On September 29th, 2003, a self-appointed group of representatives of the United States of America traveled to North Korea to build a bridge between the two nations. The group consisted of four NLG lawyers... The NLG repeatedly claims there is no starvation in the DPRK."
A brief summary of Leftist amorality and indifference to suffering
Ralph Peters puts it well (Excerpt):
"The silence of the Left in the face of uncomfortable truths is a hallowed tradition, of course, dating back to the earliest crimes of the Soviet Union. When the reality confronting the Left contradicts the theory, the theory must be preserved at any cost.
And there's no sign of improvement, not a glimmer of the least scrap of conscience or integrity on the Left. It's all about revenge against a democratic system that gives a blue-collar worker a vote equal to that of a university professor's ballot, about hatred for the free market for providing better lives for the great majority while Marxism drowned in the bile of its victims. There's no one the new American Left so despises as the working man or woman who continues to believe in the United States.
And it's about power. Had Bill Clinton invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam, the Left would have cheered their throats raw, praising him as one of history's greatest liberators. The rhetoric about Iraq isn't about justice, or the Iraqi people, or even about the horrors of war ..... The great, unforgivable insult to the Left is that conservatives took the idea of liberation seriously and acted, while the Liberal-Arts faculty merely chattered about it...
The global Left never cared about the Iraqi people until they became American "victims." As Saddam Hussein slaughtered more Muslims through campaigns of oppression and wars of aggression than any tyrant since Tamerlane, the Left remained silent. But now that Saddam himself might face the death penalty, Leftists everywhere are wringing their hands at the thought of such injustice.
Where were they when the screams of torture victims pierced the prison walls under Saddam? Where were the celebrity journalists when Iraq's mass graves were being opened over the past fifteen months? Where are the reports of the fierce joy of the Kurds, free at last, free at last?
Now, in late July of 2004, where is the Left as the Sudanese government conducts a campaign of genocide against the wretched of the earth in Darfur Province? Oh, yes, there have been a few crocodile tears - but where are the demands for intervention?
Where are the campus demonstrations against that great liberator, Robert Mugabe, who destroyed Zimbabwe, terrorized its people - and is using scarce reserves of food as a weapon while his citizens slowly starve?
Where is the American Left's sense of justice in the face of European anti-semitism? Of course, the spreading hate-crimes against Jews, synagogues and cemeteries are all Israel's fault.that's been explained to us.
Then where are the protests against the corruption and repression used as tools of control by the Palestinian Authority? The self-respecting Leftist whispers, "It's their culture." As are suicide bombers, no doubt. Why doesn't the Left complain about the hate speech spewed in mosques and madrassahs around the world? Are calls to exterminate Jews and butcher Christians just "part of their culture," too?
When will we see mass demonstrations demanding rights for women in the Islamic world? Are women's rights only for middle-class whites with college degrees? Where is the Left's passionate sense of humanity when Islamic extremists behead the innocent - and videotape the event, to the glee of the Muslim world? Of course, those decapitations are really America's fault ... we've driven them to it, you see.
The truth is that our Left is so intellectually decrepit, so infected by dishonesty, so morally feeble that it has only breath enough to condemn American actions. No matter how many brown or black human beings suffer around the world -s tarved, ethnically cleansed, raped, tortured, murdered - it doesn't count unless you can blame America.
This is a moral crime for which we all pay. By obsessing about Iraq - where the United States and its allies performed a great and noble deed, however imperfect the day-to-day details - the Left has tacitly agreed to let the rest of the world rot. And it is, indeed, rotting. Intervention to stymie tyrants couldn't be right in Bosnia or Kosovo when Democrats owned the White House, but automatically wrong with Republican sponsors.
This isn't just hypocrisy on the part of the Left. It's complicity. With tyrants and thugs everywhere. The blood of al Qaeda's victims is on the hands of terror's apologists, whether in Cairo or in Cambridge.
Is Leftism juvenile rather than psychopathic?
Further to what has already been said about Leftism as a form of infantilism: The very short time perspective of Leftists is very noticeable. As was noted above in the case of John Kerry, they seem to live in an eternal present where what they say only has to sound good today to this audience. To another audience tomorrow they will happily say the opposite if it seems likely to win them applause. This leads to the chronic conservative complaint of "inconsistency" or "hypocrisy" on the Left and the lame Leftist "post modernist" retort that there is no such thing as truth anyway.
A very well-known example of Leftists cheerily going into reverse-gear over an alleged "principle" is the way they once claimed that government should be "colour-blind" in the way it treates it citizens. As soon as this was more or less accomplished, they went into reverse and said no, the government should be colour-conscious in the way it treats its citizens -- so-called "affirmative action". Other examples: Communists were pro-Nazi when Hitler and Stalin were allies but became anti-Nazi overnight when Hitler invaded Russia; Leftists were keen eugenicists in the 1930s but claim to loathe eugenics today; Leftists deny that genetics could have anything to do with black/white differences or ability differences generally but still cheerily assert that homosexuals cannot help being homosexual because "they were born that way" etc, etc, etc.
This willingness to say anything to anyone if it will gain some momentary applause, popularity or advantage is of course very characteristic of the psychopath but it could also be argued that it is juvenile. Children too have short time perspectives and not very systematized thought. As Evan Sayet says (see here or here):
"Today immaturity reigns in the Democratic Party -- from the Clinton frat house to the left's top authors (while conservative titles include the thoughtful "Why We Fight" and "Inside American Education", the bestsellers of the left are "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot", New York Times writer Molly Ivin's "Shrub" -- a fifth grader's jealous play on the name of the popular new kid, Bush -- and her infantile sequel "Bushwhacked."). In fact, not only does immaturity reign, to today's Democrat it is considered a badge of honor....
This type of insane hyperbole has become the norm in the Democratic Party because, like the child, the leftist lives in a world of self-importance, where nothing is bigger than the servicing of their immediate wants. A child can believe his parent is "the worst in the history of the world" because the child knows little -- and cares even less -- about the world outside his tiny domain. The same is true of the Modern Liberal. To them little thought is given to long term consequences of their actions or the historical context of their words.
Today's Democrats, like small children, see only their own immediate gratification and the chance to advance their short-term personal wants.
(There is more from Sayet here. Also reproduced here. His comment on abortion is rather good: "Interestingly, while the leftist believes that twelve year old children are mature enough to make a decision on issues of life and death, they don't think seventeen year olds are mature enough to make decisions as to what soft drink to buy on high school campuses!")
Ben Stein, V.D. Hanson and Dennis Prager, too point out a variety of ways in which Leftists would appear to be fundamentally juvenile.
And the claim that Leftists are simply juvenile would certainly help account for the fact that Leftism appeals preponderantly to the young. See elsewhere for the large body of evidence I have amassed in support of that well-known generalization. Most prominent conservatives do seem to have started out on the Left and moved Rightwards as they got older -- Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan being probably the best known examples of that.
There are however other explanations for the appeal of Leftism to the young -- see above -- and I doubt that "juvenile" is any more than a description of the Left. It would not seem to be much of an explanation. The people concerned are after all physically and mentally mature so what makes them juvenile? There is no obvious explanation. To say that they are psychopathic, however, IS explanatory. Psychopathic behaviour IS normally exhibited in adults (though it mostly seems to die down after about age 40) and there is little doubt that some brain abnormality is the cause of it. It is also an abnormality that is not wholly disadvantageous -- as I note here -- in its subclinical (less severe) forms so it seems reasonable to see Leftism simply as psychopathy in politics -- or, putting it another way, what happens when subclinical psychopaths use politics for their purposes.
And, of course, tolerance of brutality is absolutely characteristic of psychopaths but not particularly characteristic of the young. In summary, then, one might say that adult Leftists behave in juvenile ways BECAUSE they are psychopathic. Psychopathy is itself immature by normal standards (in its failure to acquire moral or ethical anchors of any kind, particularly).
More examples of Leftist infantilism here
Psychopathic Leftist reliance on lies and dishonesty
Another absolutely characteristic feature of psychopaths is their readiness to lie and lie shamelessly. And to this day I have never quite managed to get used to the way many Leftists seem to be completely uninterested in the truth. And this is another way in which the Leftists of today differ not at all from the Leftists of the Cold War era.
Stalin's old Soviet production statistics are of course the classic example of Leftist lies but chronic misrepresentation was also confirmed by the revelations made possible in Russia by former President Gorbachev's policy of "Glasnost". From what has been revealed, there can surely now be no doubt that for most of last century the Soviet system literally floated on a sea of lies. This was so extreme that even the maps produced by official Soviet cartographers were fraudulent. Even an accurate Moscow street map was unavailable! And note that the great cartographical capacity that U.S. spy satellites have had for many years renders any explanation of this in terms of defence considerations quite laughable. And note that this attachment to lies is not confined to the Soviet bloc and China. I myself remember well the pre-Khrushchev times when most Western Leftists dismissed accounts of Stalin's mass murders as "inventions of the capitalist press". There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Another example of the attachment of Western Leftists to lies is the accusation that the early British settlers of Tasmania were guilty of genocide against the Aborigines there. This was finally debunked by historian Keith Windschuttle, a former Leftist himself. There is a short summary of his work here. Prominent Australian historian, Geoffrey Blainey has reviewed Windschuttle's book and accepts that Windschuttle has indeed demolished the Leftist myth about the "genocide" of Tasmanian Aborigines. Speaking of the Leftist historians, Blainey says: But many of their errors, made on crucial matters, beggared belief. Moreover their exaggeration, gullibility, and what this book calls "fabrication" went on and on.
And a very relevant comment on the modern British Left:
The silent endorsement of Saddam's war crimes by the fake peace movement is fortunately highlighted by the indiscreet George Monbiot. This Marxist academic not only accused the US of being a war criminal, meaning Bush, but also claimed that "The five soldiers dragged in front of the cameras this week should thank their lucky stars they are prisoners not of the American forces fighting for civilisation, but of the 'barbaric and inhuman' Iraqis"
A regime that beats and murders POWs, uses civilians as shields, fakes surrenders, beheads women, shreds opponents, shoots down protestors and shells refugee is not barbaric and inhuman according to Monbiot. I always tell people who are rightly outraged by the lying likes of Monbiot that we should nevertheless be grateful to them because they inadvertently tell us what the left is really thinking. And it ain't pretty.
Quote from BrookesNews. So nothing has changed among the Left. They are dishonest as ever but what they support shows well enough what sort of people they are.
A more subtle form of dishonesty is the great absurdity of the policies that Leftists have often advocated. Policies such as rent-control and nationalization of industry have a superficial attraction that guaranteed that they would be widely tried but who could honestly advocate them once it is apparent how badly they work? Certainly not a person who had the welfare of the people at heart. Such policies have only ever delivered poverty and housing shortages. Why have Leftists advocated such nostrums for so long?
If their motives were benevolent, it would make no sense to advocate so much misery. If their real motives were, on the other hand, a need for power and a desire to concentrate in the hands of their clique extensive power over the lives of others it makes very great sense indeed.
And the famous Leftist call for abolition of wealth and income differentials would surely lead one to expect that Leftists would reject materalistic ambition in their own lives. But it is not so. Although Leftists seem to decry the scramble for private material possessions (conservatism is smeared as "the politics of greed"), they themselves on the personal level seem to be just as keen for the scramble as anyone else. There has been a lot of research reported in the literature of academic psychology on the subject of achievement motivation but the various measures of materialistic achievement motivation have been shown to have negligible correlation with Leftism -- where a high negative correlation might on theory have been expected (Ray, 1981b; Ray & Najman, 1988). In other words, in their own lives Leftists are just about as apt as Rightists to seek personal material gain. Once again the Leftist emerges as being hypocritical and as not honest about his/her real motives and values.
And we do not really need psychological research to see what the motivations of Leftists are actually like in their daily lives. Johnson (1988), himself a former prominent Leftist, explored at length the actual lives of various prominent Leftist intellectuals -- including Karl Marx himself. He found that while such intellectuals claimed to love humanity, their actual deeds in their own lives and their detailed exhortations to their followers suggested a loathing of and contempt for their fellow man. For them it was no joke that "I love humanity. It is just people I can't stand". Dishonesty of various kinds just seems to be inherent in Leftism.
Leftists as practitioners of the "big lie"
Nazi propaganda minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels is famous for his saying that if you tell a big enough lie often enough people will believe it. He has able successors in the Leftists of today.
The CounterRevolutionary has argued (with obvious truth) that what influence Leftists have stems from their being better at propaganda rather than from their capacity to deliver desirable results. He argues therefore that conservatives should do more to press their arguments rather than just respond to Leftist claims: "We must insist that people and ideologies are judged by the results of their actions, not on the lofty ideals they claim to uphold. Without the reliance on the facade of humanity socialism, and it's modern derivatives anti-Americanism and anti-globalism, are reduced to hate ideologies no different from fascism or Islamism."
He is undoubtedly right but I think that conservatives will never be as good at propaganda because they do not have that Leftist carelessness about the truth.
The greatest triumph of the Leftist "big lie" technique in recent times would have to be the way they have persuaded almost everyone that Hitler was a Rightist when he was in fact one of them -- an extreme socialist. He was to the Right of Stalin but that is about all. See here.
But there are many smaller examples of successful Leftist deception and the "stolen generation" story in Australia is one of them. It has in fact been one of the triumphs of the Australian Left to convict white Australians of the "crime" concerned -- the alleged forcible removal of 100,000 black children from their families so they could be brought up by white foster-parents instead. There has even been a film made about the subject -- Rabbit-proof fence -- which claims to be a documentary. The whole story is however just another Leftist lie -- as Andrew Bolt sets out at length here. The slender basis of fact that the story relies on is that some 1930s official do-gooders -- predecessors of the modern LEFT -- did place a few mixed-race children in white foster homes to give them a better chance in life -- but the placement was always made with written parental consent. There was NO forced removal. Nobody and nothing was "stolen". And that's not just Andrew Bolt's opinion. It is the finding of a year-long $10 million Australian court case about the claim. Officialdom acted only when the parents either did not want the children or felt that they could not care for them adequately.
So the truth is that it was white do-gooders and social workers just like the Leftists of today who ran the programme concerned. The children concerned were all half-castes (of partly white ancestry) and the wiseheads of the day felt that "for their own good" such children would have "a better chance" if they were brought up in white families rather than other black families. Like the Leftists of today, the "welfare" workers of that time felt that they knew what was best for other people. But to this day most Australians believe it was all just racism -- with no awareness of the do-gooder motivation behind it.
And in the USA, the most successful big lie would appear to be the constant claim from Democratic party propaganda that they are the anti-racists and Republicans are the racists. I guess Abraham Lincoln must have been a Democrat? And the "Jim Crow" laws of the old South must have been put in place by Republicans? No need to guess, is there?
And which party voted in higher percentages for the 1964 civil rights act? The actual percentages of "yes" votes were: Republicans 80% in the House and 82% in the Senate versus Democrats 63% in the House and 69% in the Senate. In fact, in the 26 major civil rights votes after 1933, a majority of Democrats opposed civil rights legislation in over 80 percent of the votes. By contrast, the Republican majority favored civil rights in over 96 percent of the votes. So how do the Leftist liars get away with it? I guess hardly anybody knows their history so that gives the liars free rein.
There is a great quiz about all those good old anti-racist Democrats here. It comes ultimately from a column by Thomas Oliver. Sample question: 3). When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil rights efforts in the South, the governing powers that opposed him were of which party?
a) Democrat
b) Republican
Also, this article gives a much more detailed history of whether Democrats or Republicans have been more racist.
Psychopathy, elitism and hate
Much that I have said in this monograph (e.g. here, here and here) points out the good fit to reality provided by the explanation that Leftists are strongly motivated by hatred and contempt for others -- with "compassion" being merely a necessary cloak for their real motivations. Leftists want power and acclaim for themselves and when they see any power and success in others they hate it and want to tear it down. But is that consistent with Leftists being psychopathic? Are not psychopaths supposed to be devoid of normal human emotions? They are not. They certainly have large emotional deficits and a great lack of empathy but one emotion that thrives in them is hate. This can be most graphically illustrated by the case of Eric Harris, the moving spirit behind the Columbine massacres. Read this excerpt from the psychiatric conclusions about Harris and marvel at how similar Harris was to the average Leftist intellectual:
More of the psychiatric summary of Harris can be found here. And for a fuller discussion of how prevalent elitism is on the Left -- despite their claimed passion for "equality"-- see here. And for the destructive envy that is part and parcel of Leftist elitism see the discussion elsewhere under "Envy".
Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.... Klebold is easier to comprehend, a more familiar type. He was hotheaded, but depressive and suicidal. He blamed himself for his problems. Harris is the challenge. He was sweet-faced and well-spoken. Adults, and even some other kids, described him as "nice." But Harris was cold, calculating, and homicidal. "Klebold was hurting inside while Harris wanted to hurt people," Fuselier says. Harris was not merely a troubled kid, the psychiatrists say, he was a psychopath.
In popular usage, almost any crazy killer is a "psychopath." But in psychiatry, it's a very specific mental condition that rarely involves killing, or even psychosis. "Psychopaths are not disoriented or out of touch with reality, nor do they experience the delusions, hallucinations, or intense subjective distress that characterize most other mental disorders," writes Dr. Robert Hare, in Without Conscience, the seminal book on the condition. (Hare is also one of the psychologists consulted by the FBI about Columbine.. ) "Unlike psychotic individuals, psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised." Diagnosing Harris as a psychopath represents neither a legal defense, nor a moral excuse. But it illuminates a great deal about the thought process that drove him to mass murder. Diagnosing him as a psychopath was not a simple matter. Harris opened his private journal with the sentence, "I hate the f---ing world." ... It rages on for page after page and is repeated in his journal and in the videos he and Klebold made. But Fuselier recognized a far more revealing emotion bursting through, both fueling and overshadowing the hate. What the boy was really expressing was contempt.
He is disgusted with the morons around him. These are not the rantings of an angry young man, picked on by jocks until he's not going to take it anymore. These are the rantings of someone with a messianic-grade superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling inferiority. It may look like hate, but "It's more about demeaning other people," says Hare.
A second confirmation of the diagnosis was Harris' perpetual deceitfulness. "I lie a lot," Eric wrote to his journal. "Almost constantly, and to everybody, just to keep my own ass out of the water. Let's see, what are some of the big lies I told? Yeah I stopped smoking. For doing it, not for getting caught. No I haven't been making more bombs. No I wouldn't do that. And countless other ones."
Harris claimed to lie to protect himself, but that appears to be something of a lie as well. He lied for pleasure, Fuselier says. "Duping delight"-psychologist Paul Ekman's term-represents a key characteristic of the psychopathic profile.
Harris married his deceitfulness with a total lack of remorse or empathy-another distinctive quality of the psychopath. Fuselier was finally convinced of his diagnosis when he read Harris' response to being punished after being caught breaking into a van. Klebold and Harris had avoided prosecution for the robbery by participating in a "diversion program" that involved counseling and community service. Both killers feigned regret to obtain an early release, but Harris had relished the opportunity to perform. He wrote an ingratiating letter to his victim offering empathy, rather than just apologies. Fuselier remembers that it was packed with statements like Jeez, I understand now how you feel and I understand what this did to you.
"But he wrote that strictly for effect," Fuselier said. "That was complete manipulation. At almost the exact same time, he wrote down his real feelings in his journal: 'Isn't America supposed to be the land of the free? How come, if I'm free, I can't deprive a stupid f---ing dumbshit from his possessions if he leaves them sitting in the front seat of his f---ing van out in plain sight and in the middle of f---ing nowhere on a Frif---ingday night. NATURAL SELECTION. F---er should be shot.' "
Harris' pattern of grandiosity, glibness, contempt, lack of empathy, and superiority read like the bullet points on Hare's Psychopathy Checklist....
It must again be stressed, however, that we are talking about committed Leftists here rather than voters for Left-leaning political parties. It is the Leftist leaders and ideologues who are clearly psychopathic. Some Leftist followers may be too but probably not predominantly. Julie Burchill has a column in The Guardian which makes that point most emphatically -- saying that the mass of supporters for Leftist causes are decent but naive folk led astray by a small group of bloodthirsty psychopaths. As an only partly reformed Leftist herself, she is in a position to have some insight.
Clinton as a psychopath
And there can surely be no more prominent leadership position than President of the United States. So who is unquestionably the ex-President that Leftists still swoon over? As noted already above, it is William Jefferson Clinton, of course. Leftists identify with him enormously. So what sort of person is he? There is little doubt that Clinton is/was a psychopath:
* Jesse Jackson once described him as "immune to shame," someone who at the core consisted of "absolutely nothing . . . nothing but an appetite."
* Or as former senator Bob Kerrey famously characterized him: "an unusually good liar -- unusually good". And Jackson and Kerrey were both on Clinton's side of the political fence.
* And as The Wall St. Journal points out, Clinton, despite his Leftist credentials, changed very little in America during his time in office. He mainly carried forward processes that were already underway. Why? Because he had to spend such a huge amount of his time just defending his repeated amoral behaviour in his personal life.
* And even Clinton's much-noted personal charm is characteristic of psychopaths.
* And the stupid lie about how his wife Hillary got her name (from Sir Edmund) is typically psychopathic in the way it gave him only a trivial gain in return for revealing himself as a compulsive liar.
* And his pardoning of utter rogues during the closing hours of his administration was also breathtakingly cynical and amoral.
But none of that bothered his admirers during his Presidency, of course. So if people reveal their own outlook by those they admire, the psychopathy of committed Leftists is well revealed by their admiration of Clinton. His psychopathic character is so marked and central to him that it has to be a large part of the reason WHY committed Leftists like him. Telling a good and impressive story regardless of its truth and without any belief in it WAS Clinton. And it largely IS Leftism too. Clinton is/was as shallow as a birdbath. Like all psychopaths, he was simply glib.
And, for anybody who knows psychopaths, what a classic psychopathic performance this was:
"Sitting before a rapt audience of thirty-somethings, the former president recounted the childhood horrors of a negative body image and a drunken stepfather and the grown-up challenges of brutal Republicans and journalists who live to hurt politicians' feelings. Oprah was, at all times, duly sympathetic and handled the subject of adultery with considerable skill: Scolding her guest with affectionate concern, she drew from her audience laughter and applause simultaneously. This enabled Mr. Clinton to smile in his trademark boyish fashion and pledge that marathon counseling had made him a better man, better husband, better father, better president and better guest on 'The Oprah Winfrey Show.'"
The psychopath will say whatever it takes to gain sympathy and approval -- and he is very good at detecting what it takes.
There is also an interview with Clinton here (plus some comments) which shows psychopathic features. Note the total lack of any sense of guilt or remorse for anything he did and the wild theories put forward to explain the attacks on him. It's his "enemies" who harmed him, not his own lack of any morality or responsibility. Psychopaths all think that they can do no wrong and very commonly explain their difficulties by saying that people are just out to "get" them.
John Kerry as a psychopath
Democrat Presidential candidate for the year 2004, John Kerry, is another rather clearly psychopathic figure. He made much in his campaign of his service in Vietnam so let us for starters look at just one excerpt from what his fellow servicemen at the time recollect of him:
George Bates, another officer in Coastal Division 11, participated in numerous operations with Kerry from January 1969 to March 1969. In Bates' view, Kerry was a coward who overreacted with deadly force when he felt threatened. Bates, a retired Navy captain, believed that Kerry treated the South Vietnamese in an almost criminal manner.
Bates is haunted by a particular patrol with Kerry on the Song Bo De River in early 1969. With Kerry in the lead, their Swift Boats approached a small hamlet with three to four grass huts. Pigs and chickens were milling around. As the boats drew closer, the villagers fled. There were no political symbols or flags in evidence. It was obvious to Bates that existing policies, decency and good sense required the boats simply to move on.
Instead, Kerry beached his boat. Upon his command, numerous small animals were slaughtered by heavy-caliber machine guns. Acting more like a pirate than a naval officer, Kerry disembarked and ran around with a Zippo lighter, burning up the entire hamlet.
Bates was appalled by the hypocrisy of Kerry's quick shift to the role of a peace activist condemning war crimes upon his return home. Even today, Bates describes Kerry as a man without a conscience.
(Quote from p. 62-63 of "Unfit for command" by J.E. O'Neill and J.R. Corsi)
The last sentence is of course the characteristic lay summary of psychopaths. So let us look a little further. Sometimes little things can tell you a lot and John Kerry's totally implausible story about his dog is an example of that. It is a classic psychopathic lie -- something said which earns momentary acclaim but which is uttered without any thought of its being found out as false.
Given the chronic lying of psychopaths, this story also begins to makes sense. It claims that the details of his war record posted on the net by John Kerry are fraudulent: "I looked at that Web site and the first thing I looked at was Kerry's Silver Star citation. Guess what? It is for an action that took place in 1969, but it is signed by Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. Strangely, Lehman was secretary of the Navy from 1981 to 1987,"
It is also now rather clear why Kerry made his outrageous claims about American war crimes as soon as he got back from Vietnam. As well as the incident mentioned above, the sampan incident and various others incidents indicate that Kerry himself was a war criminal and it seems to be a reflexive Leftist strategy to accuse others of what are in fact their own faults (Freudian "projection").
And read again the summary at the beginning of this section on psychopathy and note what is says about the typical psychopath: "a willingness to look out for number one that leaves the greatest egotists in the dust. He.. will lie, cheat, steal, and kill without the slightest remorse... " And then note this summary of Kerry's vast egotism by the infamously partisan Leftist columnist Maureen Dowd:
For his entire life, he was seen as so ambitious to be president, as so eager to consort with heiresses, that it was off-putting; his St. Paul's classmates played "Hail to the Chief" on kazoos when he walked by, and in the Senate, Bob Dole mocked the Massachusetts senator's love of cameras by nicknaming him "Live Shot".
If that is what his friends say about him.....
Obama as a psychopath
It is probably pointless to add more and more examples of sub-clinical psychopathy among prominent Leftists so perhaps just a few notes about President Barack Obama will suffice:
"Speaking early this month at a church in Selma, Ala., Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said: "I'm in Washington. I see what's going on. I see those powers and principalities have snuck back in there, that they're writing the energy bills and the drug laws." . . .
But not only did Obama vote for the Senate's big energy bill in 2005, he also put out a press release bragging about its provisions, and his Senate Web site carries a news article about the vote headlined, "Senate energy bill contains goodies for Illinois." . . .
On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune reported that an extensive search found no basis for an episode Obama recounts [in his 1995 book, "Dreams From My Father"] about a picture he ran across in Life magazine of a "black man who had tried to peel off his skin" in a failed effort to use chemicals to lighten it. Obama writes that "seeing that article was violent for me, an ambush attack." The Tribune reported: "Yet no such Life issue exists, according to historians at the magazine. No such photos, no such article. When asked about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, 'It might have been an Ebony or it might have been . . . who knows what it was?' (At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.)" . . .
As another example, consider Obama's stirring tale for the Selma audience about how he had been conceived by his parents, Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham, because they had been inspired by the fervor following the "Bloody Sunday" voting rights demonstration that was commemorated March 4. "There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Ala.," he said, "because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Ala. Don't tell me I'm not coming home to Selma, Ala."
Obama was born in 1961, and the Selma march occurred four years later, in 1965. The New York Times reported that when the senator was asked about the discrepancy later that day, he clarified: "I meant the whole civil rights movement."
Source
Like Clinton and Kerry, Obama is just another glib rogue.
A significant waffle
Obama's now-famous remark: "Why can't I just eat my waffle?" has been much noted. Google has over 19,000 mentions of it. And the message taken from it has generally been that Obama is a haughty elitist who does not like to be questioned. I think that there is much more than that to it, however. Read the following contemporary report to put it in context:
Early morning trainers and exercisers at the Greenville, Miss., YMCA on Mississippi primary day last Tuesday got a taste of Sen. Barack Obama's reclusiveness, which the traveling press corps has learned to accept.
After speaking at Tougaloo College on Monday night, Obama went to the "Y" at 6:30 a.m. for a workout. He greeted nobody and did not respond when people there called out to him. That aloofness has been the pattern in the Democratic presidential candidate's behavior toward reporters who cover him.
After finishing his workout, Obama returned to his gregarious campaign mode with a visit to black-owned Buck's restaurant in Greenville before leaving the state. He won Mississippi comfortably against Sen. Hillary Clinton.
Source
The above quote and the waffle remark are both telling us the same thing: That Obama has difficulty keeping up his "nice guy" image. Keeping it up quite simply wears him out. It is not who he really is so keeping up that image tires him and he just HAS to rest from it. It is not who he really is.
And as someone who has studied psychopathy (I have a couple of academic journal articles on the subject) that is very familiar. Psychopaths also typically present a "nice guy" image -- something that sucks in the females wholesale. The psychopath says and does all the right things and people promptly put their trust in him. And then when they least expect it, he "goes bad" on them. "Why did he do that?" is the typical distressed response, "He was so nice and then he went and did ....".
The sucker in the story gets very thoroughly betrayed and has no clue as to why the psychopath suddenly changed. The answer, of course, is that the nice guy act was all a pretense in the first place and because it was not genuine the psychopath just could not keep it up for long. The "change" that distressed the sucker was the mask being dropped and the psychopath reverting to his true type.
And that is what we see in both reports of Obama's behaviour above. By the time he got to his waffle he just could not keep up his act, even under the full glare of media scrutiny. He HAD to have a rest from acting. So the Obama we see on the campaign trail is just a false front for the very dismal soul that lies beneath it.
The examples above are about Obama on the campaign trail but the typically psychopathic lack of moral anchors was readily observable during his Presidency too -- as Tibor Machan observes. An excerpt: "There is no black and white for the man–no one, not even a vicious terrorist and a leader of a country in which women are systematically and barbarically oppressed, justifies for him any sort of firm moral condemnation. Like those ever-permissive parents who always have an excuse for what their offspring are doing, no matter how mischievous or outright evil it manages to be, for Mr. Obama those who attack America, actually attack innocents everywhere, just could not be all bad, unworthy of understanding."
And here's a classic bit of psychopathy as described by Thomas Sowell:
Innumerable facts, however, show that it is our Commander in Chief who is Phony in Chief. A classic example was his speech to a predominantly black audience at Hampton University on June 5, 2007. That date is important, as we shall see.
In his speech -- delivered in a ghetto-style accent that Obama doesn't use anywhere except when he is addressing a black audience -- he charged the federal government with not showing the same concern for the people of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina hit as they had shown for the people of New York after the 9/11 attacks, or the people of Florida after hurricane Andrew hit.
Departing from his prepared remarks, he mentioned the Stafford Act, which requires communities receiving federal disaster relief to contribute 10 percent as much as the federal government does.
Senator Obama, as he was then, pointed out that this requirement was waived in the case of New York and Florida because the people there were considered to be "part of the American family." But the people in New Orleans -- predominantly black -- "they don't care about as much," according to Barack Obama.
If you want to know what community organizers do, this is it -- rub people's emotions raw to hype their resentments. And this was Barack Obama in his old community organizer role, a role that should have warned those who thought that he was someone who would bring us together, when he was all too well practiced in the arts of polarizing us apart.
Why is the date of this speech important? Because, less than two weeks earlier, on May 24, 2007, the United States Senate had in fact voted 80-14 to waive the Stafford Act requirement for New Orleans, as it had waived that requirement for New York and Florida. More federal money was spent rebuilding New Orleans than was spent in New York after 9/11 and in Florida after hurricane Andrew, combined.
Truth is not a job requirement for a community organizer. Nor can Barack Obama claim that he wasn't present the day of that Senate vote, as he claimed he wasn't there when Jeremiah Wright unleashed his obscene attacks on America from the pulpit of the church that Obama attended for 20 years.
Unlike Jeremiah Wright's church, the U.S. Senate keeps a record of who was there on a given day. The Congressional Record for May 24, 2007 shows Senator Barack Obama present that day and voting on the bill that waived the Stafford Act requirement. Moreover, he was one of just 14 Senators who voted against -- repeat, AGAINST -- the legislation which included the waiver.
When he gave that demagogic speech, in a feigned accent and style, it was world class chutzpah and a rhetorical triumph. He truly deserves the title Phony in Chief.
If you know any true believers in Obama, show them the transcript of his June 5, 2007 speech at Hampton University (available from the Federal News Service) and then show them page S6823 of the Congressional Record for May 24, 2007, which lists which Senators voted which way on the waiver of the Stafford Act requirement for New Orleans.
And another example that is greatly amusing for its discrepancy with what he later did. The huge expansion of Federal debt under Obama could have no better critic than Obama himself. Here is what he said in March 2006:
"The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government cannot pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that, 'the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better."
Typically psychopathic feigned principles. It sounded good but was ignored when something else suited him.
In October 2014 Roger L. Simon was also struck by Obama's moral vacuum:
Increasingly, I am thinking that Barack Obama does not know the difference between good and evil. Now I realize implying that someone can’t make that distinction, really the difference between right and wrong, is a harsh condemnation indeed, but I think it is something that should be examined in Obama’s case since it would explain many of the extraordinary missteps of his presidency. Those missteps are only escalating at the present moment as evil stalks the globe at an ever rising pace.
In fact, before looking very far backwards, consider this: Would the United States today be doing anything at all about the Islamic State -- had ISIS not bothered to behead publicly a few Westerners?
Let’s be honest — not a chance with this president, although 99.9 percent of the horrific activities of the Islamic State had nothing to do with the beheading of a handful of Americans and Brits. ISIS had already provided us with more than enough examples of mass murder and other Holocaust-like actions to last several lifetimes. In two videos I saw, dozens of Middle Eastern men were decapitated, their severed heads placed on poles while others were shot through the back of the neck and dumped unceremoniously into pits they had dug for themselves. It was unclear whether they were alive or dead, probably a little of each. Those videos, one of them almost an hour long, were like recruiting films for an Islamic version of the Khmer Rouge or the Wehrmacht. Straight from Hell.
But they were largely ignored by our president, who had proclaimed these people the JV or wanted to believe as much in order not to disrupt his post-modern, morality-free weltanschauung. It was not until the American public was aroused by the beheadings of the Westerners that Obama did much of anything – and even that was, and still is, as little as possible. Evil does not interest him, especially if it has nothing to do with votes. Evil does not even exist for him. Only fairness. If only those ISIS people could be “fair” — hence his dopey remarks about what people do or do not do in the 21st century, as opposed, I suppose, to the bloodthirsty 20th.
At the same time as IS is rampaging, Obama’s equally morality-challenged crew at the State Department is busy criticizing (what else?) Israel, yet again for Jewish construction and apartment purchase in Jerusalem Arab neighborhoods. (At least this time it wasn’t for murdering civilians, one of the more hypocritical accusations of recent years, considering who made it.) Netanyahu, a man with a moral center a tad larger than Obama’s, struck back on CBS’ Face the Nation but (surprise, surprise) the court eunuchs at CBS removed the Israeli PM’s criticism from the broadcast. Nevertheless, by then the State Department’s Jen Psaki had already taken umbrage at Netanyahu for daring to question His Majesty.
Commentary’s Seth Mandel continued: “It wasn’t clear that Jen Psaki even knew what she was being asked about. The degree to which this administration’s advisors and spokesmen are uninformed about issues on which they pronounce judgment is simply incredible.”
Well, it’s not incredible if you don’t know the difference between something as elemental as good and evil. Without that, there’s nothing to pronounce judgment on. Pick on Israel while allowing the entire Middle East to turn into a veritable Islamist sea of beheadings, rapes, sexual slavery and mass murder. It’s all a power game. You pick on someone who is sane and will therefore listen to you. Never mind that the only ones genuinely trying to help anybody in the region are the Israelis, who are actually treating Syrian ISIS victims and spending Israel’s money to do it. As the old saying goes, “No good deed goes unpunished,” particularly when you don’t know what a good deed is.
At its basis, the problem is cultural relativism, the tawdry mother philosophy of political correctness that suffused the academy when Obama was going to school and still does. Under CR, all cultures are equal, ours and the Islamic State. We are imperialist to think otherwise. Morality is a thing of the distant past, some artifact of St. Anselm or Maimonides. Not cool, even if it protects us from murdering each other.
Prevalence of psychopathy in politics
As I have pointed out at length elsewhere, there are many reasons why people can have hate in their hearts for the society around them. But those who have that hate are the Left. And it is that hate which makes them want to change us all.
The anger and hate is sometimes so strong that it is visible -- Mrs Clinton with TWO clenched fists. Even the Communist salute requires only one. The fist is the emblem of the Left. It tells you what they want to do.
The fist certainly seems to be her trademark
And this is British Liberal leader, Nick Clegg
And how about this? A mass Communist salute in the best Soviet style:
It’s from the trailer for Disruption, a Warmist "documentary"
SOURCE
But a major reason for the hate is ego. The hater thinks highly of himself and resents that the world does not give him the praise and rewards that he thinks are his due.
It is hard to know for certain how much Leftism is driven in that way. It is very evident in Leftist leaders but is it widespread among the voters? When people are questioned immediately after voting in Presidential elections, the reasons that Democrat-voters give for their vote seem to be founded mainly on profound ignorance of the facts and issues. Democrat candidates are blamed for what Republicans do and vice versa.
For all that, however, many ordinary people who favour the Left often do express the same resentment of the world that we see in Leftist leaders. I can warrant that from the many social attitude surveys I did in my social science research career.
As I also set out at length above, however, many Leftist leaders are not only egotists but are in fact the ultimate egotists -- psychopaths, people who have no real concern for other people at all -- people to whom only their own self-interest is visible. Though their psychopathy is "sub-clinical", i.e. it is subdued enough to keep them out of trouble with law enforcement and the mental health system.
So when both the leadership of the Left and a substantial part of their supporters are psychopathic, we clearly have one half of the political spectrum that is substantially insane. Beneath their superficial charm lies a serious mental defect.
That such a pathology has engulfed half of politics is of course extremely disturbing. My comment (during my research career) that psychopathy is often successful in various ways appears to have been confirmed in spades. It even appears in fact to have been reproductively successful, which is very alarming. We now have a substantially psychopathic population around us.
That psychopathy has been reproductively successful for many years now is not hard to fathom. As I have pointed out psychopaths seem to have a magic way with women. The women eventually get disillusioned but pregnancies often occur in the interim. And these days the children of such pregnancies will normally survive to adulthood. So there has been a gradual but steady drip of psychopathy into the population. And the "soft" penal practices of the current era have greatly facilitated that. Criminals are now rarely executed but are released back into the population to continue their mayhem. And a substantial number of those criminals are psychopaths.
No wonder our Leftist political opponents often seem to be off the planet
Summary of the psychology of the Left
All explanations simply push the need for explanation one step further back. If you show that Y is caused by X then the next question is obviously, "what causes X?". I think that what has been said so far has taken us through several such steps. We initially saw that ideologically-committed Leftists (as distinct from the much larger number of people who vote for Left-leaning political parties at election time) are motivated by a love of change. As the second step we saw that they love change because it gives them opportunities to strut and feed their large but weak egos in various ways -- including giving them opportunites for gaining power.
Now however we have come to the point of suggesting that the emotional shallowness that a large but weak ego implies may in fact be just one symptom of a much broader and more serious emotional and intellectual deficit -- psychopathy. Psychopaths are after all renowned for their emotional shallowness -- to the point where they can at times seem entirely devoid of emotion. Additionally, we have seen that Leftists not only have the moral imbecility of the psychopath but in fact proudly proclaim it -- in their "postmodernist" doctrine (See here) that everything is relative and nothing is better or worthier than anything else (except when it suits Leftists, of course). We have also seen that the other major characteristics of the psychopath -- indifference to brutality and reliance on lies -- are present in spades among Leftists. And most of all, the sense of superiority to others and the masked contempt for others are at once very psychopathic and very Leftist.
In a basic sense, then, it has been proven that Leftists are psychopathic: They have all the symptoms. To show that they and clinical psychopaths have similar brain function would be the next step but the study of psychopathy itself is still only in its infancy so that step would seem a long way off as yet. Psychologists might consider it a useful step to examine whether or not Leftists score high on standard questionnaires that are used to detect psychopathy but I have shown elsewhere the large problems in that.
In summary, then, Leftism at its deepest level would seem to be a form of sub-clinical psychopathy -- not normally severe enough to get the person into much trouble but severe enough to cause lots of trouble for others.
Clickable index to the above article:
Leftist amorality as sub-clinical psychopathy
Principles? What principles?
Psychopathic tolerance of brutality among "liberals"
A brief summary of Leftist amorality and indifference to suffering
Is Leftism juvenile rather than psychopathic?
Psychopathic Leftist reliance on lies and dishonesty
Leftists as practitioners of "the big lie"
Psychopathy, elitism and hate
Clinton as a psychopath
John Kerry as a psychopath
Obama as a psychopath
Summary
FINIS
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Eugenio Pacelli, a righteous Gentile, a true man of God and a brilliant Pope