Posted on 03/11/2022 6:56:33 AM PST by SJackson
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Ukrainian flags are flying on buildings across the country and Russian vodka is being poured into drains. Concerts are being canceled and books are flying off shelves over a cause that the vast majority of Americans would not have cared about and did not even know existed last year.
In a matter of weeks everyone has come around to having a passionate opinion on the subject.
And when the war in Ukraine has come and gone, some other cause will arrive to fill that void, and the outrage, blue and yellow flag waving, and all the rest of it will be gone with the vodka.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was perfectly timed to fill the emptiness left by the collapse of COVID restrictions. And what the reaction says about us matters more than what it says about Ukraine.
The desperate hunger for new causes is a spiritual vacuum. The Ukranians and the Russians believe in what they’re fighting for. We believe in the need to believe in something. The conflict over Ukraine stretches back centuries while our fervent investment in it goes back a few weeks.
It is quite likely that a few weeks from now we will be just as invested in something else.
It is no coincidence that the least religious parts of America are the most invested in this war, much as they’re the most invested in wokeness, in the COVID culture wars, and all the culture wars that have come before and that will come after to fill the void in their souls.
People without a purpose to their passions rush from one cause to another in search of a momentary sense of meaning. Conspiracy theories make the world meaningful and nurture their sense of outrage because it distracts them from the aching emptiness within.
Radical politics acts as a substitute religion with its own theology, momentous destiny and personal commitment, but without any sense of personal connection or enduring continuity. What is true in politics one week may not be so the next. Political touchstones shift and the partisan who is at the heart of the cause may find that a few years later he’s an outside enemy.
The Left’s purity tests and radical transformations force its followers to run to catch up or be left behind as reactionary bigots still protesting that we had not always been at war with Eastasia or that men have not always been considered the best possible women. Insecure social mobs embrace new causes because they have a deep fear of being left behind the bandwagon.
Politics provides them with external validation and internal purpose. To politically dissent is both the equivalent of losing their religion and their place in society. That is why cancel culture is dreaded at a psychological level, not just because of the loss of employment and educational opportunities, but because the affected party loses their society and their soul.
Herd behavior is a rational response to this threat. Virtue signaling protects their place in the herd. And offers a sense of temporary security in an extremely insecure sociopolitical order.
The seeming randomness and irrationality of some of the causes, the lack of personal connection to the mostly white upper class people who embrace them, are an asset. If a cause may have to be left behind at any time, it’s easiest if the cause, black people, a country thousands of miles away, mask culture, strange sexual fetishes, is impersonal.
A frictionless world in which family, sexual partners, friends, homes, and careers can be abandoned at short notice also requires frictonless causes that are equally disposable.
Replacing religion with politics has made for more frictionless souls who never grow. The emotional retardation can be seen everywhere as adults behave like teenagers and teenagers behave like children. No one ever grows up, instead they feign maturity through politics.
Advocating for causes makes them seem like they care about something more than themselves. The right politics bestows membership in a community based on politics, but behind all the virtue signaling is the fundamental immaturity of people who only truly care about themselves.
That is the dirty secret of leftist politics whose egocentrism is thinly masked as altruism.
Leftism is not an act of conscience, but an escape from conscience. Its causes, legitimate or illegitimate, are manifold, but what they all have in common is an underlying denial. The only form of liberation that their politics truly offer is the liberation from moral accountability and personal growth. The more radical the politics, the more radical of an escapism it represents.
True religion is an ongoing act of conscience while false religion evades the internal accountability and externalizes it into political causes. The external virtue signaling projects a false righteousness to mask the underlying failure to struggle for internal rightness.
Radicals jump from one unfulfilling cause to another because escape requires motion. The causes themselves are external and ultimately unfulfilling. No matter how hard leftists struggle to change the world, they fail to change what is truly within their power to change: themselves.
The addiction to causes is, like all addictions, initially a rush only to gradually become unfulfilling, frustrating, and debilitating. The rage is the suffering of the addict who is increasingly unable to recreate the seeming purity of their initial political involvements except by upping the dose and escalating the emotional and physical violence of their commitments. Radicalization, like higher doses of any substance, don’t address the anhedonia of the abuser.
Every cause gives way to another cause and then the original cause is often forgotten, occasionally to be picked up later when convenient. When the cause has its moment, then it eclipses all others, and for a week, a month or a year, nothing else deserves to be mentioned.
The cause fills all the airwaves, swallows up all other considerations, and becomes the single greatest issue in the universe. And then a little time passes and it’s forgotten and discarded.
The cause was never the true cause. It was only ever an effect.
ping
Now we know how WWI started. Bernays’ book has been dusted off.
Great article.
One should ALWAYS mistrust another person who tries to pressure one into taking sides over something that’s not of immediate import. The knights of columbus in their post about a coordinated minute of prayer every day make more sense and ultimately will be more effective in the Ukraine situation than roaming the internet trying to fight with people over it. (I don’t like the knights of columbus but it’s a good idea.)
Memorize some version of the following:
“My good fellow, I’ve never seen you become so emotional over these people before! I’m sure they are good people, but what on earth will starting fights with one’s friends and coworkers over their situation do to help them or anyone else?”
Not me. I'm waiting for the dust to settle.
So Jeb, Hillary, Podesta, Obummer, we create a quadrumvirate to rule us and give you absolute power. What is it you want to do? And the answer is that of the nihilists they are: continual war to make universal peace, making everyone poor to save the climate, suppressing racists [those who believe in anything] and supressing untoward investigations into the Hunter Biden class of lords of the underworld.
Very well done, a concise explanation of Leftist motivation and persona.
Here’s a whole article full of truth that is going to “offend” the sissies on the left and the sheep that follow them around.
The Frog Spirits.
Revelation 16
Womb baby murderers. All in.
The sudden emotional involvement with the war is astonishing and unsettling. I assumed it was because Soros is Putin’s nemesis, but it’s deeper than that. It’s mob manipulation. And it’s amazing how efficient it is. The hippies in the 60’s used to say “Question authority” . Now more than ever.
Ever since Trump came on the scene, all they’ve done is repeat the Big Lie over and over again that Trump and Putin are best buds, and that literally Putin stole the election from Hillary.
Tagline. Read.
Bkmk
This problem has also infected the Catholic Church. The most obvious example is the focus in the Vatican on leftist causes. Farther down the line is the failure from the pulpit to foster a struggle for internal righteousness.
My advice to my fellow Catholics is to ignore the modernists at every level, and to concentrate on the timeless teachings of Christ Himself that can be found in the teachings of the Church up until 60 years ago.
Fools rush in. I’ll stay back here with you if you don’t mind. I’m very uncomfortable when it seems everyone is singing the same tune.
Replacing religion with politics has made for more frictionless souls who never grow.
What is religion?
The ubiquitous department of religion in every college and university used to be called something else. Any guesses?
It used to be called the department of Theology.
What is the difference between the two?
But knowing this doesn't change the objective that the Russians broke the peace in Europe, destroying cities and creating a couple million refugees so far. The Russians have just declared war on the Pax Americana.
Unlike the Left, I believe in the Pax Americana, because in a single lifetime it lifted literally billions of people from absolute poverty by tying the entire world together in a secure network of free trade and secure capital flows.
The Pax Americana's astonishing achievements are institutional. You can be any race, color, religion etc. and still participate in them provided you agree to keep the peace, because it's all based on the peace that America imposed after 1945.
This is a fact. The Europeans (Germans, French), together with the American Left, act like teenagers demanding full rights of an adult while living under your roof and eating from your table. They absolutely hate this ego-bruising fact, but a fact it remains (As the Poles etc. know so well).
The Russians just issued a lethal threat to that same order that brought the world so much peace, security and prosperity in the crudest way possible.
We conservatives are disgusted by our Leftist enemies and understandably don't want to get on the pro-Ukrainian bandwagon with them because we know at some level we'll be serving their purpose.
Yet, at the same time, isn't that cutting off our noses to spite our faces? Are we really willing to let Russia take Ukraine, destroying it in the process, and thereby also deliver a perhaps lethal blow to the Pax Americana?
Think about it. In my opinion, we can't let this happen. We must stop Russia from doing this at the risk of war with them.
This is a good attempt to get at the shallow and trivialized causes of the left as a way to explain their inner motivation. Daniel claims here they are themselves trivialized by the shallow externalization of their lives. They lack moral foundation because they lack a sense of the absolute, of GOD. Morality for these lost souls has become political causes and not personal integrity.
Thus a Trudeau can condemn the very tyranny he practices without a twinge of conscience because he has none. There is no internal mechanism by which he meets the world, other than his vaunted sense of self. He is utterly incapable of judging himself. He is, in his own mind, perfect. He has become god and requires worship.
The “activist” has no internal mooring, is not tied to anything beyond self, and is guided by that which glamorizes their very public image. Virtue signaling is the essence of goodness for these infantile creatures. Being shamed has the power to destroy them.
And as causes go, opposing Putin's aggression isn't a bad one.
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