The Negative Hallucinations of the Left: In Search of the Lost Entitlement

OneCosmos ^ | March 26, 2007 | Robert Godwin

[Yardstick]

"Still up to your old tricks, I see. It is amazing how such sublime teachings can be so twisted to suit a limited, hateful ideology such as yours."

That imbacillus of a parasitic comment yesterday must take the cake, for the ignoranus who impropagated it is referring to my "hateful twisting" of the sublime Meditations on the Tarot. But if my ideology is hateful, then so too is Meditations on the Tarot, which is quite unyielding in its disdain for leftism. In fact, it is not possible for me to conceive of someone as wise as the author of Meditations on the Tarot falling for something as stupid and evil as leftism. After all, he's not Deepak Chopra or some other passive-aggressive new-age snake charmer.

As I have said before, any leftist who calls himself religious is primarily a leftist, only secondarily religious at best. The catalogue of foolish and harmful leftist beliefs is so extensive for the very reason that the leftist mind is not inoculated with the Word -- with perennial religious wisdom that prevents the mind from being hypnotized and lured down a host of fruitless, destructive, and anti-human paths.

Ontologically, leftism is "the substance of nothing," which is why politically it is the party of nihilism. There is no leftism without the intoxicated celebration of tearing down, of thanatos, the death instinct. When I say Democrats are the party of death, I mean it quite literally, but as always, in a way that the leftist cannot possibly understand. This is why, when they read this, they will have the subjective experience that I am "hitting" them instead of teaching them. Which is why they keep coming back, because they wish to be hit, as it gives them sanction to hit back -- which is what they wanted to do to begin with.

Not only is the leftist destructive, but his primary unconscious identification is with a destructive or absent object instead of a nurturing one. Bear in mind that I am mainly talking about activists and true believers; respectfully, the majority of Democrats are basically too stupid, too busy, or too informed by habit to know what they are supporting, but have simply internalized a "ruling cliche" repeated endlessly by the MSMistry of Truth, such as "Democrats are for the little guy" or "Republicans only care about the rich." But the true leftist believer is a sick soul and a dangerous person, probably a sociopath, not in terms of the DSM, but in terms of their unconscious mental structure.

In the sense I am discussing, the sociopath is someone who, for whatever developmental reason, was not safely ushered into the human community by benign parental objects, but was excessively frustrated or traumatized, leaving them deeply alienated and cynical.

Although we regard alienation and cynicism as common in our postmodern world, this only goes to show you how successful the left has been in normalizing a deeply pathological condition. On the one hand, alienation and cynicism are more or less absolute barriers to knowing God. On the other hand, you will have undoubtedly noticed that leftism represents the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Alienation and Cynicism. Its pope could be the foul-minded Bill Maher, but millions are equally qualified, as it takes no talent to have a catabolic mind capable only of mocking and tearing down.

Because of the developmental arrest, the leftist true believer is attached to that which originally frustrated him so. As a result, two things happen. First, he will spend his life "in search of the lost entitlement." This is because there is a time in our lives when we are entitled to the ministrations of omnipotently powerful caretakers who indulge our every whim. This period of time is called "infancy," and it is entirely appropriate that the infant should be granted this largesse, because it becomes the very foundation of the personality. All of us have a "foreground" self, but it is superimposed on an unconscious "background object" of infancy.

In fact, the word "object" is misleading, for the proper phrase would be something along the lines of "the background subject of primary maternal identification," coined by Dr. Grotstein. If you have ever wondered about the "dream substance" in which your self exists, this is it. This is why it is such a challenge to raise a baby, because this is precisely what good parents are trying to provide the baby -- not just food, warmth, and love, but a loving, predictable and "containing" psychic environment that the baby internalizes.

Importantly, the baby must do this in such a way that he believes that he himself is the creator of this benign psychic universe. A baby really does need to believe that his cries magically convert hunger into food, or fear into soothing, or psychic fragmentation into containment. In the mind of the omnipotent baby, he creates the parents, not vice versa. How could it be otherwise?

In other words, in the normal course of events, we are all born of magic. Only later are we gradually dis-illusioned to discover what is called the "reality principle." This means, paradoxically, that the psyche of a normal person rests on a foundation of benign magic. He lives in a trustworthy universe in which he is confident that his needs will be met, in which he can find love and give love in return, and where he can enjoy a generative creativity in the magical "transitional space" between brain and world.

For it is within this transitional space that the thing we call "reality" occurs. This is why there are so many arguments over what constitutes reality, for it really depends upon the nature of your transitional space. A generative person will see one thing, whereas a person whose transitional space has been foreclosed by trauma or disappointment will experience something entirely different.

In this regard, the pathological transitional space can become stuck in one or the other direction, either toward excessive fantasy or "malignant imagination" -- which we will call "hysteria" or "psychosis" -- or toward the excessive concreteness of the materialist or obligatory atheist. These popular lowbrow atheists such as Sam Harris or Daniel Dennett are essentially suffering from what I would call "negative hallucinations," in the sense that they imagine they don't see something that is there, as opposed to seeing something that isn't (which would be a positive hallucination).

Both forms of hallucination are equally dysfunctional, except that negative hallucinations are more subtle and can therefore go unnoticed. But I'm sure, now that you have the concept, you can think of countless experiences you have had with people who negatively hallucinate and "don't see things." This is why I would never bother to debate such a person, since it is an utter waste of time. They live in a certain transitional space which makes religion a closed world for them. All they can do is describe their proscribed little world and insist that it is the real one.

A moment's reflection will reveal to you that all meaningful human evolution takes place first in the transitional space. It is because the transitional space is so central to human evolution that political liberty is so critical. For the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of human cultures down through history have foreclosed the transitional space as a way to allay collective anxiety or to consolidate power. Only certain thoughts and attitudes are permissible. As such, the individual is not free to discover his soul's unique idiom in the transitional space of culture, but is forced to believe certain things and to behave in certain ways.

And this, of course, is where the perversion of modern Islamism meets the perversion of primitive leftist progressivism, for they share the pathology of foreclosing the transitional space. In the case of the Islamists it is rather obvious, as their project involves building and enforcing a cultural monument to infantile anxiety toward the mother, who must be controlled, devalued, and desexualized (which only makes her more insanely provocative and frightening, hence, the Islamic shadow world of anxiety-driven homosexuality).

For the left, political correctness is nothing more or less than an intellectual burqa to cover up various anxiety-provoking truths or to control the parents. It is equally sexualized, but in a different way. For example, there is an obsession with sexual differences that comes out as an irrational insistence that the differences do not exist (which is the unconscious basis of all perversions), as we saw, for example, in the firing of Larry Summers at Harvard. It is the same psychosis that insists that homosexuality and heterosexuality are indistinct -- a position that follows from the original psychotic effacement of sexual difference.

But perhaps the most troubling positive hallucination of the left involves the creation of victims. Importantly, the hallucination of victims is not a conscious process, but the end result of the unconscious logic that binds the leftist mind.

Recall that the true-believing leftist is traumatized and persecuted by the lost entitlement of infancy. As a result, he knows that he is a cosmic victim -- that the world owes hims something, something so deep that it is literally beyond words (infant comes from infans, incapable of speech, something to bear in mind when you watch those leftist demonstrations of raging inarticulacy on CSPAN).

This lost entitlement is too painful to bear, so the condescending and matronizing leftist projects it into others, to whom he then attempts to minister in fantasy (through the intermediary of government drained of its coerciveness through negative hallucination). You might say that he projects a type of primitive and painful emotional hunger, and then attempts to placate the projected mouth. But you will notice that the mouth only gets hungrier and more demanding, since it partakes of omnipotence -- of the (false) infinite.

This is very, very different from true charity, which comes from love (caritas), whereas leftist giving ultimately comes from rage and control. Here again, what I am saying is soph-evidently true to someone not caught up in the leftist fantasy world, but I cannot imagine that a leftist would be able to comprehend what we are talking about. But the full enactment of the leftist fantasy obviously results in an utterly selfish and ultimately death-bound world of entitled mouths, as we see in the welfare states of Western Europe, which are not just economically unsustainable, but psychologically and spiritually so.

Well, I can hear that His Majesty is starting to stir in the next room. He's almost two now, starting to reach that age when he will have to gradually be disillusioned and leave the infantile leftism of his youth behind. But not quite yet. There are still many illusions for me to nourish before he will be capable of creating reality. One of which is that he magically conjures his caretakers out of the morning Light -- caretakers who will continue to sustain him for the rest of his life, especially after he discovers their true source.