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Liberalism: Political View or Pop-Psychology
09/03/2019 | Chris Volkay

Posted on 09/03/2019 2:18:07 PM PDT by cvolkay

Gestalt, Behaviorism, EST, TM, Humanism, and many, many more. I have been trying for many years to capture liberalism in all its rapturous glory and form a complete picture of what’s really going on here. It seems to me that many aspects of liberalism are rarely if ever talked about. Snippets here and there but here I at least try to bring the whole big gooey ball of wax in for a landing. As a former liberal I can tell you by far and away the single most important aspect of leftism has always been how it personally made YOU feel. It was a sort of positive psychology, for its acolyte not for the alleged victim. Yes, it’s all about you, Al Franken. You see when you veer left, having done nothing concrete and just mouthing these words, you instantaneously get that big serotonin rush straight to the neuro-transmitters. It almost squirts out of your ears. You are immediately both intellectually and morally righteous and you become the citadel of just plain old-fashioned swellness. See how it all works? What a system, baby. You’re in with the in crowd, (sing along with me) the cool people. Flip on the TV and be indoctrinated by its longest running propaganda dispenser, Saturday Night Live. All the media, TV shows, sitcoms, talk shows, movies, and all the rest is bent strenuously left. The so-called stars become the de facto defenders of the faith and the realm. And I don’t use the term faith lightly. You see in my view liberalism is less a political position and more of a tried and true maven of the pop psychology crowd. It has nothing, nothing to do with its supposed pools of disenfranchised people, they’re really quite incidental, they serve as the basis of their continuous whining. If they lost these victims they’d be out in the cold, but no danger of that. The victims stay endless victims and the libs stay perpetually swell. How could anything in liberal policy actually ever help them? So it’s a circular marriage with everybody getting out of it what they want. But that’s the deal. This is what it really delivers to its acolytes. That buzz, that rush, a high. Liberalism remains popular just as other movements have. Liberals wrap themselves in oh so good, high mindedness, forever deeply caring about the down-trodden. But even their word “down trodden” is highly pejorative. It implies somebody held the victims down and then ruthlessly and quite vulgarly I might add, trod all over them for all the world to see. But no, that’s baloney too, most of this horrible troddeness of the downward type, emanates only from themselves. If these libs were just wrong and nothing else I suppose it might be better than trying to care for them and the constant attention they require. But nothing occurs in a vacuum, unfortunately. The harm this movement does is nothing less than enormous. Liberals almost always seem to be the children of the softer more malleable “sciences” such as psychology and everybody’s all-time favorite, sociology. The harder stuff, biology, chemistry, genetics, seem somehow to elude them, well, they’re just not pliable, damn it. And, when they demur from what real science says, they just re-write it to say whatever they want. Just as they re-write history. Frauds of a feather. Stephen J. Gould and his Diamond-star ilk, come to mind. You see, liberalism, to succeed and to last, had to come up with a user friendly narrative that people that were on the bottom could instantly fall in love with. Truly, love at first sight. And as said before, this becomes the really insidious part of it all. Because it distorts, lies, obfuscates and re-invents reality to make its adherents, (once again a recurring theme here) feel better about themselves. Once their cloying distortions are taken to heart, they become what our old friend Eric Hoffer wrote about, “True Believers.” Once you cross out reason and logic and start talking about all of the things that “Should Be” you immediately start drifting into those wonderfully utopian worlds where every hurt, slight and big booboo on your toe gets explained and ironed away like a steam iron on the ironing board. But I’m not just a theorist, let’s get specific, shalln’t we now? Modern liberalism, as communism and socialism have done before, makes up a bunch of crap based on various “thinkers” theories. For anybody that spent more than two seconds studying Socrates, philosophy, and especially something called Socratic sophism, you would know that a hundred people can look at the same things and come up with 100 different conclusions. There’s nothing factually going on here, just people with pre-existing ideas that then see only what they want to see and then pronounce their views as facts. Welcome to liberalism. Some can achieve certain things others cannot. Very briefly, can you ‘think’ like Einstein, play guitar like Clapton, play chess like Bobby Fisher? Of course not. This notion of people being equal is quite simply the most ridiculous shibboleth I have ever heard. Without one possible shred of evidence. So, of the 8 million other species on this planet, (one estimate) all 8 million other species are known to be different but in this blessed case, we are the one species out of 8 million that just happens to come out equal. Based on what, science? No, of course not just wishful thinking fantasy again. But herein is the strength and power of liberal thought. For people that cannot compete, cannot achieve what others can and do achieve, they can always fall back on this powerful system of various anodynes that will almost instantaneously absolve all of the work force and low achievers of any guilt, any introspection. They all have a common boogie man that can be blamed for all their shortcomings. Kind of like kids on the playground, the only difference is that most of these people now shave, but other than that, haven’t changed much, just children of a larger growth. In this way, all those doing poorly, because of their own obvious shortcomings, now can suddenly be fully exonerated. They are liberated, they’ve been imbued with the ubiquitous feel good spin of the facts, horribly twisted to say exactly what they want to say. And then these charmers carry on the belief in this nonsense as if it was their moral duty to accept all this feel-good nonsense. You see, no longer do I have to feel bad, I was cheated, it was all stolen from me. This is a very, very attractive and soothing balm to the so-called masses. It’s almost as good as booze or meth. Liberals with some intelligence know that the whole thing is a blatant lie but they go along as this is their path to power and relevancy. So-called feminism, same thing damn thing. You see the leftist women had a problem, not overly unusual is it? They noticed that men and women were different and that they excelled at different things. But what about equality, being dead on equal? This was vexing and painful to many. So, not all women, but these ‘fembots’ (referenced from the Lindsay Wagner TV show The Bionic Woman) pushed hard to make a big decision. Hmm? They could either accept the difference (hmm, seems to be a recurring theme here) in people, men and women or they could follow along and make up their own great prestidigitated fib that down through the centuries men were so afraid of the great prowess of women that we conspired to hold them down, to cheat them, chain them to telephone poles and call them foul names. The only problem with this narrative is that it is just plain garbage. All of these great horrors conducted against women were simply invented by these perpetually whiny babies, the nattering nabobs of negativity that so permeate the MST–(Main Stream Tedia). Nonsense on the most grandiose of scales. But many people, again, to feel better jump on this bandwagon of non-facts because it will make them feel better. Does reality matter at all? As alluded to earlier, when you have large portions of the population lost in all these feel-good fantasies it stirs up turmoil as everybody and their aquarium’s favorite seahorse, (yes, he’s named ‘SEA-Biscuit,’ BTW) is now an aggrieved party whose birth right and big florid future was cruelly stolen from them. Please. And so they persist with this politically correct and quite fashionable lie and society continues to disintegrate as there just aren’t enough people left that are, at least figuratively, over the age of about 12. But this really is the story of humanity. Every time throughout history when somebody comes up and tells people the truth, they want to hang him from the rafters, upside down, hanging from a very sensitive part of his anatomy. The really ironic thing, at least to me is that the left, the people who once laughed at the rote and concrete-like conservatives, their rigidness, their dogmatism, the left has now morphed into the very thing they hated 50 years ago. They are now the jack-booted thugs looking over an under every rock to unearth some kind of P.C. infraction and then, boom, Big Brother descends on you. But, as always, when you really, really are the epitome of a true believer, you really can’t see your own folly right there in the mirror in front of you. In a way it’s almost shocking how far afield they’ve gone. And, never forget this either, these social justice warriors, these freedom fighters derive a real and true high from their elevated views of themselves. They are the paragons of virtue, self-righteousness and their imagined moral superiority. It’s one long orgy of looking at themselves in the mirror, even little hand help mirrors from their back pockets and patting each other on the back and in a pinch patting themselves on the back. Yes, a political view, kind of, but not so much. It’s more a pop psychology feel-good movement, just as the TM, EST, Self-Esteem movements before them. (Just as a side light-they’ve followed these so-called boost in self-esteem projects through the decades. Care to guess? Nothing, absolutely nothing is accomplished. Another false goal that even if attained, produces, in the real world exactly nothing.) But liberalism doesn’t care, it wasn’t invented for the real world. But naturally this is the view put forth by the liberal-virus infected media. They always frame their comments as if the liberal view was “settled science and any variance was just about as horrid as blasphemy would have been in Salem some 250 years ago. And just as logical. Finally mercifully, to all of the liberal defenders who like to say things like “we’re on the right side of history,” you’ve heard that puerile-gem right? Sounds a bit like the Emperor proclaiming he’s wearing ever-so fancy new duds. But, well you’ve got me there, I’m trapped, I can’t escape, damn, liberals you are on the right side of history. How couldn’t they be? When history comes along that they don’t like, like everything else, they just re-write it, re-form it and re-constitute it to serve their Utopian righteousness. I’m prepared to give you that victory. In the words of the great writer Steve Sailer, yes the left is on the right side of history, but we, we are on the right side of the facts. And ever has it been so. With that I rest my case. And I’m expecting the jury to decide in my favor, and rather quickly.


TOPICS: Politics
KEYWORDS: conservatives; liberals; paragraphs

1 posted on 09/03/2019 2:18:07 PM PDT by cvolkay
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To: cvolkay

2 posted on 09/03/2019 2:19:58 PM PDT by humblegunner
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To: cvolkay

Paragraphs make me sane.


3 posted on 09/03/2019 2:21:49 PM PDT by nonsporting (MAGA -- Make America Godly Again)
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To: cvolkay

Paragraphs are your friends. This is totally unreadable.


4 posted on 09/03/2019 2:27:43 PM PDT by AlaskaErik
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To: cvolkay

I can’t read any of that shit.

Have you no mercy?


5 posted on 09/03/2019 2:29:33 PM PDT by chris37 (Monday, March 25 2019 is Maga Day!)
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To: cvolkay

one thing that would help our nation’s public discourse immensely, imho, will be to separate the use of “liberalism” and “leftism”

they are VERY different!

leftists are experts at the mis-use of language (see Orwell!).. they like to call themselves ‘liberals’ because it sounds better to many... better than “communist” or “socialist” or “nazi” or “extreme leftist ideologue”...

many other words are mis-uses, disguises, attempts to package things better......
gay, progressive, gun-control, “womens’ rights” (when used to disguise “abortion” and/or “infanticide” etc.

we’ll have a very difficult time restoring any sanity to our public arena until we can at least regain some control over the leftwing’s mis-use of language


6 posted on 09/03/2019 2:33:51 PM PDT by faithhopecharity ( “Politicians are not born; they are excreted.” Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BCE))
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To: cvolkay

Gestalt, Behaviorism, EST, TM, Humanism, and many, many more. I have been trying for many years to capture liberalism in all its rapturous glory and form a complete picture of what’s really going on here. It seems to me that many aspects of liberalism are rarely if ever talked about. Snippets here and there but here I at least try to bring the whole big gooey ball of wax in for a landing.

As a former liberal I can tell you by far and away the single most important aspect of leftism has always been how it personally made YOU feel. It was a sort of positive psychology, for its acolyte not for the alleged victim. Yes, it’s all about you, Al Franken. You see when you veer left, having done nothing concrete and just mouthing these words, you instantaneously get that big serotonin rush straight to the neuro-transmitters. It almost squirts out of your ears. You are immediately both intellectually and morally righteous and you become the citadel of just plain old-fashioned swellness.

See how it all works? What a system, baby. You’re in with the in crowd, (sing along with me) the cool people. Flip on the TV and be indoctrinated by its longest running propaganda dispenser, Saturday Night Live.

All the media, TV shows, sitcoms, talk shows, movies, and all the rest is bent strenuously left. The so-called stars become the de facto defenders of the faith and the realm. And I don’t use the term faith lightly. You see in my view liberalism is less a political position and more of a tried and true maven of the pop psychology crowd. It has nothing, nothing to do with its supposed pools of disenfranchised people, they’re really quite incidental, they serve as the basis of their continuous whining. If they lost these victims they’d be out in the cold, but no danger of that. The victims stay endless victims and the libs stay perpetually swell. How could anything in liberal policy actually ever help them?

So it’s a circular marriage with everybody getting out of it what they want. But that’s the deal. This is what it really delivers to its acolytes. That buzz, that rush, a high. Liberalism remains popular just as other movements have. Liberals wrap themselves in oh so good, high mindedness, forever deeply caring about the down-trodden. But even their word “down trodden” is highly pejorative. It implies somebody held the victims down and then ruthlessly and quite vulgarly I might add, trod all over them for all the world to see. But no, that’s baloney too, most of this horrible troddeness of the downward type, emanates only from themselves.

If these libs were just wrong and nothing else I suppose it might be better than trying to care for them and the constant attention they require. But nothing occurs in a vacuum, unfortunately. The harm this movement does is nothing less than enormous. Liberals almost always seem to be the children of the softer more malleable “sciences” such as psychology and everybody’s all-time favorite, sociology. The harder stuff, biology, chemistry, genetics, seem somehow to elude them, well, they’re just not pliable, damn it. And, when they demur from what real science says, they just re-write it to say whatever they want. Just as they re-write history. Frauds of a feather. Stephen J. Gould and his Diamond-star ilk, come to mind.

You see, liberalism, to succeed and to last, had to come up with a user friendly narrative that people that were on the bottom could instantly fall in love with. Truly, love at first sight. And as said before, this becomes the really insidious part of it all. Because it distorts, lies, obfuscates and re-invents reality to make its adherents, (once again a recurring theme here) feel better about themselves. Once their cloying distortions are taken to heart, they become what our old friend Eric Hoffer wrote about, “True Believers.” Once you cross out reason and logic and start talking about all of the things that “Should Be” you immediately start drifting into those wonderfully utopian worlds where every hurt, slight and big booboo on your toe gets explained and ironed away like a steam iron on the ironing board.

But I’m not just a theorist, let’s get specific, shalln’t we now? Modern liberalism, as communism and socialism have done before, makes up a bunch of crap based on various “thinkers” theories. For anybody that spent more than two seconds studying Socrates, philosophy, and especially something called Socratic sophism, you would know that a hundred people can look at the same things and come up with 100 different conclusions. There’s nothing factually going on here, just people with pre-existing ideas that then see only what they want to see and then pronounce their views as facts.

Welcome to liberalism. Some can achieve certain things others cannot. Very briefly, can you ‘think’ like Einstein, play guitar like Clapton, play chess like Bobby Fisher? Of course not. This notion of people being equal is quite simply the most ridiculous shibboleth I have ever heard. Without one possible shred of evidence.

So, of the 8 million other species on this planet, (one estimate) all 8 million other species are known to be different but in this blessed case, we are the one species out of 8 million that just happens to come out equal. Based on what, science? No, of course not just wishful thinking fantasy again. But herein is the strength and power of liberal thought. For people that cannot compete, cannot achieve what others can and do achieve, they can always fall back on this powerful system of various anodynes that will almost instantaneously absolve all of the work force and low achievers of any guilt, any introspection. They all have a common boogie man that can be blamed for all their shortcomings. Kind of like kids on the playground, the only difference is that most of these people now shave, but other than that, haven’t changed much, just children of a larger growth.

In this way, all those doing poorly, because of their own obvious shortcomings, now can suddenly be fully exonerated. They are liberated, they’ve been imbued with the ubiquitous feel good spin of the facts, horribly twisted to say exactly what they want to say. And then these charmers carry on the belief in this nonsense as if it was their moral duty to accept all this feel-good nonsense.

You see, no longer do I have to feel bad, I was cheated, it was all stolen from me. This is a very, very attractive and soothing balm to the so-called masses. It’s almost as good as booze or meth. Liberals with some intelligence know that the whole thing is a blatant lie but they go along as this is their path to power and relevancy. So-called feminism, same thing damn thing. You see the leftist women had a problem, not overly unusual is it? They noticed that men and women were different and that they excelled at different things. But what about equality, being dead on equal? This was vexing and painful to many.

So, not all women, but these ‘fembots’ (referenced from the Lindsay Wagner TV show The Bionic Woman) pushed hard to make a big decision. Hmm? They could either accept the difference (hmm, seems to be a recurring theme here) in people, men and women or they could follow along and make up their own great prestidigitated fib that down through the centuries men were so afraid of the great prowess of women that we conspired to hold them down, to cheat them, chain them to telephone poles and call them foul names. The only problem with this narrative is that it is just plain garbage. All of these great horrors conducted against women were simply invented by these perpetually whiny babies, the nattering nabobs of negativity that so permeate the MST–(Main Stream Tedia). Nonsense on the most grandiose of scales.

But many people, again, to feel better jump on this bandwagon of non-facts because it will make them feel better. Does reality matter at all? As alluded to earlier, when you have large portions of the population lost in all these feel-good fantasies it stirs up turmoil as everybody and their aquarium’s favorite seahorse, (yes, he’s named ‘SEA-Biscuit,’ BTW) is now an aggrieved party whose birth right and big florid future was cruelly stolen from them. Please. And so they persist with this politically correct and quite fashionable lie and society continues to disintegrate as there just aren’t enough people left that are, at least figuratively, over the age of about 12.

But this really is the story of humanity. Every time throughout history when somebody comes up and tells people the truth, they want to hang him from the rafters, upside down, hanging from a very sensitive part of his anatomy. The really ironic thing, at least to me is that the left, the people who once laughed at the rote and concrete-like conservatives, their rigidness, their dogmatism, the left has now morphed into the very thing they hated 50 years ago.

They are now the jack-booted thugs looking over an under every rock to unearth some kind of P.C. infraction and then, boom, Big Brother descends on you. But, as always, when you really, really are the epitome of a true believer, you really can’t see your own folly right there in the mirror in front of you. In a way it’s almost shocking how far afield they’ve gone. And, never forget this either, these social justice warriors, these freedom fighters derive a real and true high from their elevated views of themselves. They are the paragons of virtue, self-righteousness and their imagined moral superiority. It’s one long orgy of looking at themselves in the mirror, even little hand help mirrors from their back pockets and patting each other on the back and in a pinch patting themselves on the back. Yes, a political view, kind of, but not so much. It’s more a pop psychology feel-good movement, just as the TM, EST, Self-Esteem movements before them. (Just as a side light-they’ve followed these so-called boost in self-esteem projects through the decades. Care to guess? Nothing, absolutely nothing is accomplished. Another false goal that even if attained, produces, in the real world exactly nothing.)

But liberalism doesn’t care, it wasn’t invented for the real world. But naturally this is the view put forth by the liberal-virus infected media. They always frame their comments as if the liberal view was “settled science and any variance was just about as horrid as blasphemy would have been in Salem some 250 years ago. And just as logical.

Finally mercifully, to all of the liberal defenders who like to say things like “we’re on the right side of history,” you’ve heard that puerile-gem right? Sounds a bit like the Emperor proclaiming he’s wearing ever-so fancy new duds. But, well you’ve got me there, I’m trapped, I can’t escape, damn, liberals you are on the right side of history. How couldn’t they be? When history comes along that they don’t like, like everything else, they just re-write it, re-form it and re-constitute it to serve their Utopian righteousness.

I’m prepared to give you that victory. In the words of the great writer Steve Sailer, yes the left is on the right side of history, but we, we are on the right side of the facts. And ever has it been so. With that I rest my case. And I’m expecting the jury to decide in my favor, and rather quickly.


7 posted on 09/03/2019 2:36:21 PM PDT by UCANSEE2 (Lost my tagline on Flight MH370. Sorry for the inconvenience.)
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To: UCANSEE2

Thanks for doing that!


8 posted on 09/03/2019 2:55:14 PM PDT by EasySt (Say not this is the truth, but so it seems to me to be, as I see this thing I think I see #KAG)
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To: cvolkay
One problem is that you equate Progressives, Socialists and other statist goons with Liberals which are more closely related to Libertarians.
9 posted on 09/03/2019 2:55:28 PM PDT by Captain Compassion (I'm just sayin')
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To: cvolkay; UCANSEE2; humblegunner

Thanks; thanks; LOL!


10 posted on 09/03/2019 3:02:48 PM PDT by PGalt
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To: cvolkay

Liberalism is immaturity, cloaked with the pretense of moral and intellectual superiority.


11 posted on 09/03/2019 3:02:54 PM PDT by Wiser now (Socialism does not eliminate poverty, it guarantees it.)
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To: Wiser now
Liberals are the Dunning-Kruger effect applied to politics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Joe Biden is the classic example for our time.
12 posted on 09/03/2019 3:06:19 PM PDT by cgbg (Democracy dies in darkness when Bezos bans books.)
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To: cvolkay
Libs talk about this, that or the other "supremacy" and what you're supposed to forget is that they think their ideology is the only possible supremacy.
13 posted on 09/03/2019 3:26:56 PM PDT by equaviator (There's nothing like the universe to bring you down to earth.)
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To: Wiser now

“Liberalism is immaturity, cloaked with the pretense of moral and intellectual superiority.”

What they are...are maturity snobs.


14 posted on 09/03/2019 3:29:01 PM PDT by equaviator (There's nothing like the universe to bring you down to earth.)
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To: UCANSEE2

Good article. I might add that humans were always capable of great delusion and today is no different. But what make this liberal delusion successful today? A couple of points:

1) We can afford these delusions because they are trivial compared to other times in history where you starved to death or were savagely murdered for being different. We have a liberal education which teaches all of us about our rights, and that we are equal to the best, the brightest and richest. If were starving we wouldn’t think about people’s rights or if transgenders have a right to their own washrooms. Life would be a question of day to day survival.

2) Wealth gives us this opportunity to think about what we want and our rights. But with wealth we have a romanticized view that we are the best and are the heroes of our own story. We want to have adventures and be special just like the heroes we see in the media. Liberalism gives an indoctrination that makes us feel that we are special. We are noble and generous without actually doing anything noble or generous. If people tell us we are — then we are; and if we say we are — then we are.

Liberalism (or self flattery) comes about through the convergence or confluence of wealth and a mass media that show us a romanticized view of who we think we are. We don’t know who we are through studying history and we don’t know ourselves through serious thought. Feelings tell us who we are and what we want — we want to feel good.


15 posted on 09/03/2019 3:49:44 PM PDT by BEJ
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To: UCANSEE2

Thank you for the formatting.

One theme in the article is that liberals seek to feel good. But most leftists are bitterly unhappy. I think the “feeling good” part of liberalism is much like a drug: it gives a momentary high to proclaim that one really cares about the downtrodden group du jour. But the high lasts only until the echoes of the pronouncement die down, then they are back to feeling useless and angry because they have never done anything worthwhile.


16 posted on 09/03/2019 4:54:55 PM PDT by exDemMom (Current visual of the hole the US continues to dig itself into: http://www.usdebtclock.org/)
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To: cvolkay

Neither. It’s a mental illness.


17 posted on 09/03/2019 5:13:02 PM PDT by Savage Beast (Was the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency liberty's last gasp? Big Brother is watching you.)
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