Saturday, October 22, 2005

Politics and Pain

Front Page Magazine is doing a symposium with a number of leftist who have broken with the faith. Tammy Bruce has some very interesting things to say about the kind of people the left tends to draw from.

Narcissism, while frequently thought of as “self-love,” is in fact the opposite. It is self-obsession based on victimhood and paranoia. Narcissism is actually the belief that everything that happens, happens because of you, or revolves around you. As an example, feminist narcissists see the pro-life movement as being against women, or as a jihad against women, as opposed to an expression of those peoples’ concern for life. The issues for narcissists, whether they be feminist, gay or black, is always about them, surrounding them, or about how the opposition is out to get them. Paranoia is a key factor in narcissism and easy to exploit.
Victimhood. What makes a person in his/her late teens think they are a victim? What could happen in child hood to give a person that mind set? Tammy goes on:
Leftist politics, like a vicious circle, rely on the damaged as footsoldiers, while the most damaged, the “Malignant Narcissist,” as I explain in The Death of Right and Wrong, move into positions of power and leadership, furthering the cultural and political destruction of our culture and of the left in general.
From my personal experience on the left I would have to agree. I think my main attraction to the left came from two points. One is the natural sympathy for the victims of injustice, human nature. The second was that I was a victim of severe child abuse and felt at home with other abused kids standing against injustice. The narcissim Tammy talks about is real. However, it is for most not something chosen but inflicted on them. This is the biggest mistake of the right. The idea that the origins of the left are in malevolence and not in human nature. More specifically brain chemistry.

Phyllis Chesler expands on that theme:
As a Jew, I was always concerned with the suffering of others--and while I agree with the earlier analysis that this victim-identification can be both megalomaniac, narcissistic, and ultimately irrational, rigid, totalitarian, I also still believe that trying to help others, to repair the injustice in the world, is an ethical choice.
Too true.

John R. Bradley has noticed Tammy's money quote and comments:
Tammy Bruce's observation, that "Leftist politics, like a vicious circle, rely on the damaged as foot soldiers," is nowhere more relevant than the love affair of the Left with the Palestinians. The great French writer Jean Genet, who had a sympathy for the Palestinian cause, nevertheless got it just right when he wrote in Prisoner of Love that they only really come into their own when a camera is trained on them and they are playing the role of victim, basking in the media spotlight.
Victims. Nothing but victims. I noted in my article The Origins of Islamic Rage in which Phyllis Chesler reports on why Islam is the way it is, that Islam as a whole has this victim mentality. The article explains why. Child abuse.

And then Instapundit this morning links to an article about Lebanon by Michael Totten which has this to say about Lebanon:
I also wonder if this entire culture is still wracked with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and is accordingly paranoid about worst case scenarios.
So Michael diagnoses the problem from afar the same way Chesler does up close and personal. What is to be done? Well, Lebanon is famous for its quality marijuana and Blond Lebanese Hashish. So what does hashish have to do with it?

Dr. Tod Mikuriya says that cannabis is the best medicine for PTSD.

So now we know why a lot of lefties keep their bongs always at hand. They need them. The leftist cadre were always exhorting the dopers to give up the evil weed. Why? Not from any moral point surely. Of course not, it was because it dulled the will to fight. Now from a social and medical stand point might it not be best to let the left (and libertarians on the right) have their pot, mellow out and thus be less interested in fighting the rest of us and possibly even be more open to reason. Pot after all causes brain cell growth.

And why pot? Well for one thing it is unpatented. That will save a fortune in fees to the drug companies and since pot is a plant you just deliver seeds and growing instructions.

In the end Nixon's idea to use the War On Drugs to go after the left may have been one of the most counter productive things he ever did.

Cross Posted at Classical Values on 31 March 008, 0103z.

3 comments:

Mahndisa S. Rigmaiden said...

10 23 05

Whoa M. Simon! Thx for sharing your heartfelt story! Yeah, so many on the Left that I know have good hearts, they have simply come to some "misconclusions." Pro choice rationalizes baby killing and they will come up with any reason to justify it, such as the sovreignty of the woman's body argument. But it breaks down when you realize that this woman has a unique and separate being inside of her with fifty percent her AND the daddy's DNA. In terms of the underlying socialist philosophy of the Left, that bothers me. A socialist acquaintance of mine once said: "It is the job of a society to care for its members". I retort: "It is the job of the MEMBERS of a society to tend to themselves and others WITHIN the society". So I choose personal responsibilty over Uncle Sam to provide for me. Although there HAS to be a balance, as there are some who can't take care of themselves. I oft wonder how many people would really be that way if we removed the safety nets that some so blatantly abuse. Hard concept to balance folks having a decent standard of living, but not doing away with free choice and ambition! EXCELLENT post M. Simon!

M. Simon said...

You must understand that the reason the left doesn't like the family is that they (many individuals) were badly treated by theirs.

So the reaction.

I know I had that attitude for a long time. (BTW I have 4 fine children but I didn't start my family until I was 38).

jj mollo said...

This is just an ad hominem attack. When you don't agree with people, you should discuss the reasons for the differences. You shouldn't just impute personality defects or mental disorders. I could just as easily say that people on the Right are all control freaks caused by obsessive mothering, being forced to wash their hands too many times, and the only thing on TV in Muscogee are reruns of Hee Haw and Father Knows Best. Excessive parental authority and the carefully groomed image of social uniformity causes overdevelopment of the superego and induces transferrance to authority figures of all sorts. It's bound to warp their perspective, poor things. Inhaling gasoline fumes from tractor pulls kills brain cells, as we know, and the resulting mental inflexibility is related to the mental rigidity sometimes found in Parkinson's patients. The symptom of patriarchal aggression and latent megalomania leads naturally to political support for procrustean laws that attempt to restrict the actions of distant others, including love-hate relationships with inaccessible sexually active young females (not to mention virilent antipathy toward so-called self-medication.) Such a personality would naturally resent the experience of pleasure in others.