[Steel Wolf]

My problem is that I am seeking after that which I cannot find. I want to find an explanation in logic for a phenomenon of emotion. It is easy for middle-class conservatives to overlook the power of emotion even though history provides plenty of examples even within our own culture in America.

You're asking the right question, but looking in the wrong place. Obama is something outside of our collective experience. We laugh at the terms liberals apply to him, 'a sort of god', 'a worker in light', and so on. What they mean is that he represents Absolute Moral Authority. The evolved state of man. One that doesn't need the mere construct of civilization, because he represents a new order, one based off of better ideals. One that will have Total Moral Legitimacy.

By holding to the old ideas of Constitutional law, the vestiges of the old Republic, we're blocking the evolution of mankind, past the flawed trappings of civilization and into a pan-tribal state of global harmony. One where there is no rich or poor, hunger or want, greed or racism or war or sin because we can choose to move past it all.

It's a nice thought. Anyone can see the appeal. Life sucks. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just dump all the BS that comes with civilization and just be cool with each other instead?

The inherent danger of civilization is that you eventually get so comfortable, you wind up forgetting why you built it in the first place. The problem is one we can't wish ourselves out of, even with the best of intentions.

Civilization exists because even the best intentioned of men slip easily into organized savagery. Especially when trying to serve a higher cause. Everyone reading this imagines themselves a different species of mammal than the Aztec priests who carved hearts out of living captives as sacrifice or the crowds that demanded it. We like to think that, but we're never more than a few steps away. It's the limits imposed by civilization that separate us from organized monsters. When men that refuse to acknowledge limits, they invariably hit the abyss, never the heavens.

Conservatives at least recognize the eternal danger of human nature. The need for limits. Liberals do not. They genuinely think that with a right thinking organization controlling what you see, hear and think, human nature is malleable enough to be evolved. It needs to be shepherded, of course, and the shepherds themselves must spare no mercy to ensure the flock is tended properly.

This is a fundamental difference. One side of America believes in the individual finding fulfillment through himself, and/or through a personal God. Another side of America believes in society finding fulfillment in itself, as expressed via a living conduit, the State.

Just as America was once half free and half slave, we've become a contradiction that seeks to destroy itself. We smile at each other and behave in public, but the internal strain is becoming too much to bear. Its easier for those of us that believe in freedom to disagree. It's part of our creed. It's harder for those who believe that freedom is a vehicle for unfairness and disharmony.

For a number of reasons, liberals are reaching the breaking point before us. They're hitting the ancient thing in the human heart, the blind, clenched teeth fury that wants to grab a rock and smash its enemies over and over and over. The old threats to human happiness. Greed. Envy. Fear. Anger. Pride. Their desire to push on to Utopia is maddening them. The old evil makes them want to crush dissent and force obedience. They believe in their hearts that they are right, but belief is not enough. They need everyone to believe along with them.

Here's why that's more dangerous than it sounds. Bear with me for a second. Everyone always laughs Superman's creed. Truth, justice, and the American way. It's so simple. Even as a kid I thought it was hokey. Who would subordinate themselves to serve others if they were all powerful? Every now and then, they play up an equally cartoonish 'evil Superman'. An easy villain to imagine and rally against.

Still, the worst possible villain, the one they can't show because the truth of it is too awful, is the liberal Superman. The one that acts without hesitation or remorse, because he believes in his own the ultimate moral authority. Whatever path strikes him as the most moral becomes mandatory. He can send dissenters to their deaths in labor camps, force professors into the fields to be reeducated at hard labor, tell villagers to build steel mills instead of harvesting crops. When they die of famine, he is not blamed and he feels no regret.

In the end, the amoral Superman who robs banks and escapes to the tropics to live a life of unearned comfort is a bad person, but just isn't that scary. The real nightmare villain is the omnipotent moral busybody, the one who destroys whatever he does not agree with, kills everyone who disobeys and demands they be remembered as criminals.

Obama's permanent look of frustration is the look of a moral busybody whose reach exceeds his grasp. You'll find the same look in the eyes of his supporters. It relaxes some when they scream 'The Tea Partiers are terrorists!'. It's incendiary talk, but soothing to their ears. Their eyes get more tranquil. More certain. It has nothing to do with budgetary mathematics and everything to do with the call of sharpening spears in their hearts.

They rush to blame us for every act of violence, because they themselves want us to provoke them. Push them. Dare them. Force them. They need a confrontation that doesn't end in words. Their minds don't understand it, not in so many words, but their blood does. They want a war, and they will not know peace until they get it.

[tomkat]

An outstanding essay, SW !

kudos

[spankalib]

GREAT posts!
Through the whole of human history, cultures, kingdoms, technologies change.
The one thing that never changes; the human heart.

[livius]

Obama is something outside of our collective experience. We laugh at the terms liberals apply to him, 'a sort of god', 'a worker in light', and so on. What they mean is that he represents Absolute Moral Authority. The evolved state of man. One that doesn't need the mere construct of civilization, because he represents a new order, one based off of better ideals. One that will have Total Moral Legitimacy.

Excellent, excellent and very interesting observations! If you don't write for an on-line journal, you should.

The progressivist mindset is precisely one of their moral superiority and thus the justification for force. After all, they're right and anyone who is blind enough to oppose them is not. But until now they haven't had an individual around whom these things can coalesce, and I think that was probably what they needed (that and decades of patient destruction of genuine moral authority outside of their control).

So we are seeing Alinsky's hero Lucifer (which is literally what "light-bringer" means) appearing once again to set himself up as the ultimate self-realized arbiter of good and evil, with "good" being one thing only, himself.

[andy58-in-nh]

Yours is a positively brilliant analysis. Breathtaking. Thank you.

And properly understood: your words are quite terrifying, or rather ought to be, for the meeting of diametrically opposed forces has the same result in society as in nature. In our present condition, Western civilization (or that which remains of it) now faces an increasingly belligerent force of Utopian collectivism, led by a cadre of elitists who avail themselves of an eager army of useful idiots: the mis-educated, the discontented, and the faithless. Those who cannot see the storm clouds gathering need to open their eyes, face the right way, and prepare.

[globelamp]

One of the best posts that I have read on Free Republic. It deserves wider exposure.

“They need a confrontation that doesn’t end in words.”

They are already locking people who express non-liberal opinions up, or fining them, for merely dissenting from liberalism.

In western countries. Without a peep of protest from their fellow liberals. That tells you everything you need to know about where liberalism is heading, and where its heart is.

[globelamp]

Random initial thoughts:

1. Civilization does probably impose a certain amount of unhappiness on man. This is why “the fruit of knowledge” is a curse. Add in technology and “social development”...

2. Most “conservatives” are merely liberals who have some limited quarrel with some aspect of the liberal project. Liberalism is much stronger than most people on FR can fathom.

3. While Liberalism inspires strong faith, it is at its core a nihilist ideology that seeks to preserve some ideals cobbled together from Christianity and other old religions. This is why liberal moral philosophy is a joke (Rawls, anyone?). This is why Liberalism is so intolerant in the face of dissent - Liberalism fails any non-superficial examination. This is also why liberals are compelled to falsify wide swathes of reality.

[caww]

Amazing read Steel Wolf! Am grateful you mentioned the "emotional" aspect of all this for it's very important to understand. I am saving your post...and thank you. Todays New Age Spirituality is fast crossing our nation and it's all about feelings...it's pushed thru the internet and successfully so. The schools are full of it thru the green movement and environmentalist, which many are involved in New Age...and their King Al Gore is also deeply entrenched in the mystical side of New Age. It's agenda is creeping into the churches as well under the disguise of "lets all get along" mode of thought.... Everyone involved wants to "feel good".

I watched a 21yr old college student burst into tears when she could not go to lunch with her friend, business required she wait. She then phoned a "feel good" manager who attempted to disuade the rest of us and let her go. We declined as a group, much to her dismay. She needed to comply with the pace of business as we all do. Then the girl got angry...spouted her anger..and sizzled the rest of the day. This is A-typical of the progression the liberals take from one extreme emotion to another. If you want to understand them you have to understand emotions, even if hidden, is what drives them equally as much as their agenda.

[Madame Dufarge]

What a masterpiece you've posted, eloquent and insightful.

I'm truly awed by it.

[nathanbedford]

Noumenon; CitizenUSA;Errant:

You all have raised the element of the spiritual condition of leftists. I too have been preoccupied with trying to understand what I believe to be a connection between the souless condition of leftists and their soul sickness which manifests itself in our political life. I have dredged up another old reply, or rather an amalgam of replies, which grope toward an explanation:

Steel Wolf:

I thank you for any marvelously well-written and really thoughtful reply. You have obviously thought deeply about the psychic condition of leftists and of Obama. Much of what you said, indeed, virtually everything you said strikes a chord with me and even an echo. For example, I have posted several times on the proposition-also made by Dennis Prager-which you raise that whether or not one believes in God, and therefore how man sees his own moral condition, is the most important determiner of one's politics. As another example, I have long been concerned about the epistemology of leftists and how they as a group and individually routinely take flight from logic and reality.

You say, "You're asking the right question, but looking in the wrong place." I would like to submit another old post of mine [it's actually an amalgam of several old posts] which takes on the very quest you are grappling with in your fine reply, why liberals think and behave the way they do? Here is the reply from a couple of years ago:

I have already read it for the citations which describe Obama as a narcissist. I was struck by the fact that they reflected what I had already written and which I will set forth below. I warn you it is quite lengthy. I find it interesting that the psychologist takes basic Biblical truths and recast them in modern language. In my post, which I repeat was written before, I have taken the jargon of the psychologists and tried to to put it in prosaic terms which make it less arcane and which perhaps are enhanced by some insight to Biblical truth.

Here is his previous post to which I have added some concluding paragraphs:

Liberalism is not a psychosis, it is a soul sickness which looks to us like mental illness.

The basic postulate of the Judeo-Christian insight is that man is either in submission to God or in rebellion against God. This is the basic condition of every human on this planet. That is why the first two commandments have to do with getting the basics right. The basics are the God is supreme and man a subordinate. This is a question of alignment. It establishes a vertical alignment.

The Christian experience confirms its Jewish heritage. On the Mount of olives Jesus is quoted in Matthew:

"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments" (Matthew 22:36-40).

So the Judeo-Christian faith tells us to get the alignment right first. The first alignment to be dealt with is vertical (man's subordination to God) and when that alignment is in order then and only then can and should attention can be given to the horizontal alignment (love thy neighbor).

The liberal is by definition not in submission to God because the whole concept is anathema to him. The inescapable reality is that the liberal is in rebellion against God. There is simply no other existence available to him. This rebellion can be quite unconscious but nonetheless real even though the liberal who is estranged from God is unaware of his true condition.

The condition of estrangement from God is described in the New Testament to be the equivalent of death-spiritual death which is by far more important than physical death. In modern jargon we call this estrangement a psychosis, a neurosis, an eating disorder, alcoholism, drug addiction, aggression, narcissism , or whatever other flavor of the month can be dreamt up by new age psychologists. It is a further postulate of this condition that one who is in rebellion against God is in the throes of a soul sickness of one kind or another.

One of the oddities of this condition is that the victim contrives always to see himself as God. Consider the case of Adolf Hitler. It is easy to imagine him playing God when he was at the height of his powers willing real armies across whole continents and devouring whole countries as well as whole races of people whom he murdered. But move your gaze forward in time to his last days in the bunker when reality and the Soviets were closing around him and he had virtually no armies left. Nevertheless, he ordered phantom armies to do his bidding. It made no difference that Subordinates told him that his armies simply did not exist. He created his own reality. He consumed more mind altering drugs. He threw more tantrums, he issued more orders. He ordered more insubordinates executed. Until, at the very end he played God by shaping reality for one last time: he determined the end by committing suicide- the ultimate expression of playing God.

The capacity of such an individual who is in rebellion against God to engage in self deception can be virtually infinite. Most people do not go to the extremes of Adolf Hitler, they employ a more prosaic means to shape reality, to play God. They drink, they abuse drugs, they close their minds to rational argument, they find refuge in fantasy. They commit their lives to reshaping society (usually not on the scale indulged in by Hitler).

When the individual gets himself into trouble one might think that he would be open to reason. For example, a husband arrested for beating his wife should rationally look at what the consequences would be if he were convicted a second time. But he does it a second time. And a third time if his wife sticks around. Why is he unable rationally to assess his condition and modify his behavior? Why was Hitler?

More prosaically, why can a liberal not see that since the social programs of the New Deal failed, and since the social programs of the Great Society failed, the social programs of Barak Obama must also inevitably fail? The short answer is that he cannot perceive the failure of these horizontal matters because he is out of alignment vertically.

From my previous post:

The real fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is the absence of or the belief in God. Liberals essentially reject God because they are committed to playing God. All of the rest of the belief structure, all the posturing of concern and commitment to society, all of the convolution of the language, all of the rejection of a rational discrimination, is nothing but a rationalization allowing the liberal to play God. This is the oldest and gravest sin known to the Judeo-Christian tradition. All of the hate, intolerance, and vilification of Christianity (read Sarah Palin) is a visceral reaction to the frustration they encounter from conservatives as they play God. Ann Coulter got it right in the tagline to one of her books: "they would be God." The ultimate example of playing God is the issue of "choice." Fundamental to the Judeo-Christian heritage is respect for human life because it is a creation of God. Abortion, even more than slavery, is the ultimate in playing God, one declares his transcendence over God's creation and in the stroke of a knife becomes God himself.

Let us back up for a moment to deal with the question why he (the liberal in general and Obama in particular) is unaware that he is in a state of rebellion. He is, and usually does not even recognize it. Worse, he has no idea that he is a prisoner in a psychic cage. In fact, he will swear that he is an exemplar of free will, that he is his own man, independent and free of the pitiable state of bondage which obviously afflicts people of faith. He sees those who confess to be in submission to God to be in bondage. He is free of the bondage which comes from such superstition. His whole world is upside down.

Obama lives solely on a horizontal plane. In other words, he cannot orientate himself on a vertical plane. He cannot place himself in relationship to God because he subconsciously thinks he is God. So he must find his self worth by comparing himself against others. His solipsism requires that he the superior to them at any cost-which really means any cost to them. Obama cannot have normal relationships with others because he is trying to live vertically in a horizontal world.

This misalignment means that the prisoner of the psychic cage is inevitably always playing a double game which requires him to lie and to find a fresh cast of characters or puppets to manipulate. So he runs through people as he discards those he no longer needs.

One last pair of observations about this soul sickness which it has become fashionable today to call narcissism. First, it is one of the things that impels liberals to engage in politics. Since they play God, they want, like God, to control the universe. They see this as doing the most good for the most people. They soon see that political power gives them the best chance of controlling the universe so they are inclined to enter politics.

Second, they are inclined to favor big government over small government for the same reason. This does not just mean a bigger federal government, it means County government over city government, state government over County government, federal government over state government, and world government over American government.

I think we will see all of these elements play out as Obama struts the world stage. As Obama plays his role on the world stage one can only pray that the ultimate irony does not play out. Liberals were desperate to replace George Bush whom they feared would pitch the world into war, with Barak Obama whom they had confidence would talk and reason the world out of war. If you have read this far, if you have contemplated the example of Adolf Hitler, you will understand that a God player like Barak Obama is far, far more likely to get us all killed.

[Ronin]

Very cogent, very precise, very readable. I’m stealing the whole thing.

Just joking, I’ll attribute — but it is very well written and needs to be spread around.

[Covenantor]

Well done. Your post deserves a place in the FR Hall of Fame.

Thank you for that lucid and piercing observation. It captures the primitive emotions unleashed and manipulated by. Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Islamic fundamentalism, crying for ever more blood and destruction with an insatiable hunger. Pure and primordial evil, nothing less.