Todays Progressive, Socialist, Liberal leftism

The leftist is ant individualistic, and pro-collectivist. He/she wants society to solve everyone’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, and take care of them. They are not the sort of persons who have an inner sense of confidence in their ability to solve one’s own problems and satisfy one’s own needs. The liberal leftists are antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, they feel like losers.

What one is trying to get at in discussing liberalism is not so much a movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collection of related types. Yet today the movement is fragmented, and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When speaking of liberal leftists, one has in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, “politically correct” types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists, climate activists, globalists, and the like.

Yet not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is a leftist. Thus, what one means by “liberalism” is perhaps to indicate roughly and approximately the two psychological tendencies that are the main driving force of modern liberal leftism.

By no means can one group or movement claim to be telling the whole truth about leftist psychology. Also, this is meant to apply to modern liberal leftism only. The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern liberal leftism are called “feelings of inferiority” and “over-socialization”.

Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern liberal leftism, while over-socialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern liberal leftism; but this segment is highly influential.

By “feelings of inferiority” in the whole spectrum of related traits; low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him/her (or about groups with whom she/he identifies) one can conclude that he/she has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem.

This tendency is pronounced among minority rights activists, whether they belong to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities and about anything that is said concerning minorities. The terms “black”, “oriental”, “handicapped” or “chick” for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. “Broad” and “chick” were merely the feminine equivalents of “guy”, “dude” or “fellow”. The negative connotations have been Those who are most sensitive about “politically incorrect” terminology is not the average person of colour, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any “oppressed” group but come from privileged strata of society.

Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual white males from middle- to upper-middle-class families.

Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals) or otherwise inferior.

The leftist liberals themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems.

Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly, they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.

Liberal Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good, and successful. They hate Canada; and America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality and the view of others.

The reasons that liberal progressive leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They say and claim they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in third-world cultures, the liberal leftist finds excuses for them, or at best they GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas they ENTHUSIASTICALLY point out (and more often than not greatly exaggerate) these faults where they appear in Western civilization.

These faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. They hate, Canada, America, and the West because they are strong and successful.  Words like “self-confidence”, “self-reliance”, “initiative”, “enterprise”, “optimism”, etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary.

Have you noticed that art forms that appeal to modern leftish intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat, and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment?

Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, and objective reality and insist that everything is culturally relative. One can indeed ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge.

They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior).

The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he/she cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests.

Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behaviour because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it.

Thus, if a person is “inferior” it is not his/her fault, but society's, because he/she has not been brought up properly. The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of inferiority make him/her a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, or a ruthless competitor.

This kind of person has not wholly lost faith in himself/herself but rather a deficit in his/her sense of power and self-worth, but they can still conceive of themselves as having the capacity to be strong, and his/her efforts to make himself/herself strong produce their unpleasant behaviour. 

But the leftist is too far gone for that. Their feelings of inferiority are so ingrained that they cannot conceive of themselves as individually strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the leftist. They can feel strong only as a member of a large organization or a mass movement with which they identify.

Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists protest by lying down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke police and others to abuse them, etc. These tactics may often be effective, but many leftists use them not as a means to an end but because they prefer masochistic tactics. Self-hatred is a leftist trait. 

Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principles do play a role for the leftists of the over-socialized type. But compassion and moral principles cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behaviour; so is the drive for power.

Moreover, much leftist behaviour is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously, it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.

However leftist activists such as Black Lives Matter do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power.

In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.  If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to invent problems to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.

Let me stipulate and emphasize that the foregoing does not pretend to be an accurate description of everyone who might be considered a leftist. It is only a rough indication of a general tendency of leftism.