I've been driven to using the term "invincible ignorance" on the Darwin threads, and I'm greatly tempted to use it here.
But maybe "self-hating" is more apt, because I believe these attitudes are connected with the academic malaise that has decended upon the formerly civilized world.
Basically, it's a kind of cheerful nihilism. Nothing has any meaning, there are no basic principles, life is a product of accidental material forces, love is nothing but sex with illusions. Strip away the mask and you are left with--nothing.
You don't really feel anything for other people, so you have to find some ideological system to tell you what to do.
So, who wouldn't hate himself if those were his basic beliefs? What seems to remain is what Harold Bloom has called the lemming instinct. Leftists feel a basic urge to run in herds, like lemmings, and if the head leftists are taking them over a cliff, who is to question them? Far be it from any leftist to draw back from the herd for a minute and think for himself.
If a leftist parts company with the rest of the lemming herd over a single point of ideology, he will be driven out of the warm, comfortable herd and have to fend for yourself. That possibility frightens them worse than anything else, because thinking for themselves when they believe in nothing but a vast empty darkness beyond the small region lit by ideological memes is not something they can face.
Just how does that relate to this rubbishy article? Someone could disagree with the author for the best of moral reasons, and he'd call them Nazis or self-haters, and you'd label him a nihilist.
This is the "nuclear option" applied to differences of opinion -- if you disagree with me you believe in nothing, have a death wish, or are just plain evil. That sort of argument doesn't lead anywhere.
What seems to remain is what Harold Bloom has called the lemming instinct. Leftists feel a basic urge to run in herds, like lemmings, and if the head leftists are taking them over a cliff, who is to question them? Far be it from any leftist to draw back from the herd for a minute and think for himself.
It's not just leftists who have that problem. There are lemmings and would-be head lemmings elsewhere in the political spectrum as well. Once you believe that those who see things differently believe in nothing, you're set to become another lemming. To believe that people who disagree are bent on your destruction or their own is a good way to be comfortable in the herd as you rush to the cliffs.