The Secret to the Suicidal Liberal Mind

NewsMax ^ | Jan. 21, 2002 | Jack Wheeler

[ForGod'sSake]

What do Harvard president Larry Summers, Taliban John Walker, Delta Airlines officials and the editors of the New York Times have in common with Yanomamo tribeswomen in the Amazon jungle?

To answer this question is to understand the root cause of liberal "white guilt." Lakes of ink have been splashed on newspaper, magazine and journal pages ruminating and anguishing over the bottomless guilt that pervades the liberal soul.

[ForGod'sSake]

Very interesting if somewhat dated article. I had gone Googling for some insights into the "entitlement mentality" to get a better understanding of the mental illness known as liberalism, that eventually led to this article - somehow.

Enlightening, but it does raise the obvious question, and that is, where does the need to deflect envy spring from? There was a time in this country when success was tolerated, if not celebrated to a large degree. What went wrong?

[ForGod'sSake]

I apologize once again for abusing the 10th Amendment ping list. But, since I posted this in general/chat I don't expect it to garner many eyeballs and I would like to get as much feedback on the article as possible. And of course I hope it will shed additional light on the mental illness of our domestic enemies.

Once again, anyone not wanting to be pinged to these off-topic articles, please speak up.

[flash2368]

“What went wrong?”

Who came up with that business about “Now eat all the food on your plate because there are children starving all over the world”

Kind of a dumb statement to make (probably originated out of some Hollywood movie) but what a way to lay on a guilt complex.

[Jet Jaguar]

Bump for exposure.

[GiovannaNicoletta]

for later

[andy58-in-nh]

I think the article explains it quite well in terms of “atavism”: a tendency or predisposition toward behavioral recurrence occasioned by a deep-seated need. In the case of modern liberals, it is a need to create a sense of self-worth (validation) in the absence of a culture in which the individual is valued. Western culture used to supply such a support system, but liberals have labored mightily to destroy it in favor of a collectivist ethos. What results is a felt need to assuage the sense of guilt that follows from one’s achievement, or, alternatively, to find a external demon to excuse one’s failures.

[Riley]

Who came up with that business about “Now eat all the food on your plate because there are children starving all over the world”

I got that treatment as a small child from my stepmother. She was, unsurprisingly, a Lefty.

At the time, I remember being utterly puzzled what one aspect of that statement had to do with the other. How 'bout if I just eat enough to last me, without complaint, to the next meal?

[ForGod'sSake]

Who came up with that business about “Now eat all the food on your plate because there are children starving all over the world”

Hmmmm...

[ForGod'sSake]

Thanks.

[TigersEye]

Articles that explain how modern liberals suffer from a mental disorder.

• Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals "Think"
• Idiot Compassion
• The Secret to the Suicidal Liberal Mind
• Democratic Realism
• Swedish Moonbats Suppress Knowledge of Communist Genocide
• Is Liberalism Political Madness?
• Liberals clinically mad, concludes top psychiatrist
• Liberalism and the two roads to nihilism
• Liberalism is a Psychology

[Fiddlstix]

Good article!
Thanks for posting this and the Ping.

[EBH]

Funny, but I've been contemplating a similar thing. The “entitlement mentality” for which you are seeking a resolution to I believe rests with the removal of God from our culture.

Here is how I've been thinking about it. Way back when I was in school the late 1970’s they were only then starting to take God out of the schools. By the time I graduated He was pretty well permanently suspended from the psyche of most highschool graduates.

Your linked article points out Envy. Envy is considered one of the 7 Deadly sins. Lump in a few of the other deadlies like greed, slothfullness, anger, lust and pride you suddenly see the liberal standing in front of you.

They exhibit all of these sins as part of their lifestyle. Why? Because they have no God. They have no Guiding morality. The lack of this God factor causes them unknowingly to place others in the role of God.

The government to redistribute wealth because they themselves cannot overcome their own sin of greed and they assume we are all like them with no God.

The government to sanction their promiscuous ways. Gay marriage, abortion.

Do we really need to chat about liberal anger?

Gluttony, again they seek to regulate that which they won't control themselves and it stems from a lack of God in their lives.

Sloth, there was a time people were ashamed to be on welfare...because it was a sin. “was a sin” now generations live there.

The “entitlement mentality” or “envy” deal is really nothing more than a lack of God and His teaching. Or in many cases the outright rejection of Him and turning to a new god, the government for approval of their sins. The reading of, The 5,000 Year Leap, was instrumental in my coming to these conclusions. The founders knew we could not have a free nation with an immoral people.

[John Titor]

it is a need to create a sense of self-worth (validation) in the absence of a culture in which the individual is valued.

Brilliant observation.

When you fight natural law, you lose.

[ForGod'sSake]

I think the article explains it quite well in terms of “atavism”: a tendency or predisposition toward behavioral recurrence occasioned by a deep-seated need. In the case of modern liberals, it is a need to create a sense of self-worth (validation) in the absence of a culture in which the individual is valued. Western culture used to supply such a support system, but liberals have labored mightily to destroy it in favor of a collectivist ethos. What results is a felt need to assuage the sense of guilt that follows from one’s achievement, or, alternatively, to find a external demon to excuse one’s failures.

Interesting points. I would add, or maybe it's just IOW, the liberals of academia and journalism have labored mightily to destroy the recognition of actual achievement to be replaced by their fields of endeavor - talking or writing about it. It seems to me they believe, or want us to believe dialogue is the highest and best achievement to to strive for. All the while upbraiding those that actually get things done.

[oblomov]

>>Who came up with that business about “Now eat all the food on your plate because there are children starving all over the world”

Actually the origin was Herbert Hoover, who was responsible for food aid to Europe in the aftermath of WWI. The original saying referred to “starving children in Europe”. Hoover generated a lot of publicity for the aid effort. For good or ill, the propaganda stuck in the American consciousness.

http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9507E5D8103FE432A25751C2A9679C946095D6CF

It was employed again, though perhaps to less melodrmatic effect, after WWII. Western Europe was more or less destroyed. Industry, agriculture, and transport all had been obliterated. There were starving people in Europe, the ancestral home of most Americans, and so there was great concern among Americans, and unprecedented action on the part of the US government, such as the Marshall Plan.

[TADSLOS]

The fundamental reason why certain cultures remain static and never evolve (e.g., present-day villages in Egypt and India that have stayed pretty much the same for millennia) is the overwhelming extent to which the lives of the people within them are dominated by envy and envy avoidance: as anthropologists call it, the envy barrier.

For the Mambwe in Zambia, for example, "successful men are regarded as sinister, supernatural and dangerous." In Mexican villages, "fear of other people's envy determines every detail of life, every proposed action."

Members of a Hispanic "ghetto" in a community in Colorado "equate success with betrayal of the group; whoever works his way up socially and economically is regarded as a 'man who has sold himself to the Anglos,' someone 'who climbs on the backs of his own people.' "

It is an ultimate irony of modern times that left-wing Marxist-type intellectuals consider themselves to be in the progressive vanguard of sophisticated contemporary thought -- when in reality their thinking is nothing but an atavism, a regression to a primitive tribal mentality. What the Left calls "exploitation" is what anthropologists call "black magic."

Who could have predicted the extent that Obama Inc. played on these myths in such a devastating way 6 years later? He took tribal community organizing to the national level, and guilty white people swallowed the bait with abandon.

[flowerplough]

As the Amazon tribeswoman who says her baby is ugly, so the white male liberal says his gender, his race, his country, his civilization and even his entire species is ugly.

Been there, done that. Grew out of it. "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

[arthurus]

...deep-seated need. In the case of modern liberals, it is a need to create a sense of self-worth...

The lack of an ability to conceive of God feeds mightily into that mindset.

[arthurus]

Why? Because they have no God.

Actually, intelellectual Liberals do have a god of sorts. They believe that Humanity is God and that intellectual Liberals, especially those in the Academy, are God's brain.

[the invisib1e hand]

What do Harvard president Larry Summers, Taliban John Walker, Delta Airlines officials and the editors of the New York Times have in common with Yanomamo tribeswomen in the Amazon jungle?

If you really want to know, read "Spirit of the Rainforest" by Mark A. Ritchie, who exposes how elite anthropoligists have been pimping the Yanomamo for generations.