The Secret to the Suicidal Liberal Mind

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. Paul Craig Roberts, economist and columnist, writes eloquently about the anti-white racism endemic in American universities that demonizes white males as the font of all evil. Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institute explained in the Wall Street Journal recently how white guilt empowers racist frauds such as Cornel West.

The self-loathing of the white American liberal is as well-established and documented as Einstein's Special Relativity theorems. A typical example is writer Susan Sontag's denouncement of the white race as "the cancer of human history." A racist hatred of one's own race – auto-racism – has become a defining characteristic of the liberal mind. Yet the source of such suicidal guilt remains a mystery. Clearly understanding what disables liberals from wanting to defend their culture is today a mortal necessity – an absolute requirement if America is to be preserved and protected from Moslem terrorists and other folk desirous of her demise.

For such understanding, we need to travel to the Amazon. Among the Yanomamo and other tribes deep in the Amazon rain forests still adhering to the ancient hunting-gathering lifestyle practiced by our Paleolithic ancestors, it is an accepted practice that when a woman gives birth, she tearfully proclaims her child to be ugly. In a loud, mortified lament that the entire tribe can hear, she asks why the gods have cursed her with such a pathetically repulsive infant. She does this in order to ward off the envious black magic of the Evil Eye, the Mal Ojo, that would be directed at her by her fellow tribespeople if they knew how happy she was with her beautiful baby.

Anthropologists observe that for most primitive and traditional cultures, "every individual lives in constant fear of the magical aggression of others ... there is only one explanation for unforeseen events: the envious black magic of another villager." Reflect for a moment on the extent to which tribespeople in a tribal, "primitive" culture suffuse their lives with superstition, witchcraft, sorcery, voodoo, "black magic," the "evil eye." The world for them is teeming with demons, spirits, ghosts and gods, all of whom are malicious and dangerous -- in a word, envious. A great many, if not the majority, of tribal or traditional cultures, whether in the Amazon, Africa or the Pacific, have no concept of natural death. Death is always murder.

For the Shuara Jivaro of the eastern Amazon, the first tribe I ever stayed with, there are three ways to die: actual murder (such as a spear through your stomach); demon-murder (accidental death, such as being killed by a falling tree in a storm or by snakebite, which the Jivaros see as perpetrated by a demon); or witchcraft murder (death by illness or unexplained causes, perpetrated by an envious sorcerer). The Jivaro, just like the Tiv in Nigeria, the Aritama in Colombia, the Dobua in Micronesia, the Navaho in the Southwest U.S. and the tribal mind in general, attribute any illness or misfortune to the envious black magic of a personal enemy.

Envy is the source of tribal and traditional cultures' belief in Black Magic, the fear of the envious Evil Eye.

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." As sociologist Helmut Schoeck summarizes in his seminal work, "Envy: A Theory of Human Behavior" (and who collected the above anthropologists' observations):

A self-pitying inclination to contemplate another's superiority or advantages, combined with a vague belief in his being the cause of one's own deprivation, is also to be found among educated members of our modern societies who really ought to know better. The primitive people's belief in black magic differs little from modern ideas. Whereas the socialist believes himself robbed by the employer, just as the politician in a developing country believes himself robbed by the industrial countries, so primitive man believes himself robbed by his neighbor, the latter having succeeded by black magic in spiriting away to his own fields part of the former's harvest.

The primitive atavism of left-wing bromides like "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is best illustrated by arguing that one can be healthy only at the expense of others. That in order to be in superior health, bursting with energy and vitality, one has to make someone else sick or in poor health -- just as in order to be rich you have to make others poor. The healthy are healthy because they unjustly exploited and ripped off the sick, spiriting away the sick's fair share of health with black magic. In fact, the sick are sick because the healthy are healthy. If this is absurd, then claiming the poor are poor because they have been exploited by the rich is equally absurd.

Pandering to the envious, and intimidating those who are afraid of them, has been the path to power of all modern demagogues, from Lenin and Hitler to Yassir Arafat and Osama bin Laden. The three great political pathologies of the 20th century are all religions of envy: Nazism, preaching race envy toward "rich, exploitative Jews"; Communism, preaching class envy toward the "rich, exploitative bourgeoisie"; and Moslem terrorism, preaching culture envy toward the "rich, exploitative West." Envy-mongering has always been and continues to be the underlying strategy of all variants of the political Left, such as the Democratic Party. What a Yanomamo woman calls "black magic" and a Marxist professor at Harvard calls "exploitation," Tom Daschle calls "tax break for the rich."

So here we discover the secret fear at the source of the suicidal liberal mind. It is envy that makes a Nazi, a Communist or a terrorist. It is the fear of being envied that makes a liberal and is the source of "liberal guilt." This is most easily seen in the children of wealthy parents. Successful businessmen, for example, who have made it on their own normally have a respect for the effort and the economic system that makes success possible.

Their children, who have not had to work for it, are easier targets for guilt-mongering by the envious. So they assume a posture of liberal compassion as an envy-deflection device: "Please don't envy me for my father's money -- look at all the liberal causes and government social programs I advocate!"

This is also why Hollywood is so liberal. The vast amounts of money movie stars make is so grossly disproportionate to the effort it took them to make it that they feel it is unearned. So they apologize for it. The liberal's strategy is to apologize for his success in order to appease the envious. Liberalism is thus not a political ideology or set of beliefs. It is an envy-deflection device, a psychological strategy to avoid being envied.

Then there are those who are terrified of envy even though they have earned success themselves. Many Jews are liberals because such lethal envy has been directed at Jews for so many centuries that it is little wonder they consider avoiding envy to be a necessity of life. One definitive characteristic of both envy and the fear of it is masochism. Envy is not simply hatred of someone for having something you don't -- it is the willingness to masochistically give up any chance of ever having that something yourself as long as the person you are envious of doesn't get to have it either. Similarly, the more one fears being envied, the more one is driven to masochistic self-humiliation in attempts at envy appeasement.

It is possible to perceive the passions of the Left as frenzies of masochism. What could be more idiotic and masochistic than to oppose missile defense? This opposition cannot be understood unless one dispenses with its rhetoric and rationales and realizes that these folks at their emotional core do not want their country defended. The lunacy of the "global warming" hoax cannot be comprehended other than that its masochistic advocates do not want their civilization to prosper. The culture-destroying immigration policies that Pat Buchanan warns are causing "The Death of the West" were put in place by those who do not want their culture to survive.

The lethality of liberal envy appeasement is that personally felt guilt is projected onto the various social or tribal collectives to which the liberal belongs and are a part of his self-identity. Self-loathing is transformed into a loathing of one's society or race.

White male liberals become auto-racist and auto-sexist: racist toward their own race, sexist toward their own sex. Dime-store demagogues like eco-fascist environmentalists, feminazis, animal and homosexual rights types, race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton all get their strength from the liberals' fear of their Evil Eyes. 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.

I began to realize how liberal envy appeasement is the root of the problem when I was speaking at colleges back in the 1980s about anti-Soviet resistance movements in Soviet colonies such as Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique and Afghanistan. Students would invariably turn a discussion of Soviet imperialism into an assertion of moral equivalence between the USA and the USSR: "How can you criticize the Soviets when we're just as bad? What about what we did to the Indians?" I would be asked.

"I haven't done anything to the Indians," I replied. "What have you done to them?"

"OK -- let's give it back. And let's start with your property. To what tribe do you want your family's home to go? What tribe gets your stereo?"

Once I couldn't stand being heckled by a particularly loud and petulant student leftist any longer. I lost my temper and said to him: "Look, man, if you're into masochism, find some chick with long black hair who's into whips and chains and have her beat the hell out of you. Just don't take it out on your country."

The future of our economy, our culture and our civilization depends on an antidote to the corrosive social poisons of envy and envy appeasement. That antidote was first provided by Aristotle in the 4th century bc.

In the "Rhetoric" (ca. 350 bc), Aristotle distinguishes the two: "Zelos, emulation, is a good thing and characteristic of good people, while phthonos, envy, is bad and characteristic of the bad; for the former, through emulation, are making an effort to attain good things for themselves, while the latter, through envy, try to prevent their neighbors from having them." ("Rhetoric," 2.10.1)

Aristotle invokes the ancient wisdom of his 8th century (bc) predecessor Hesiod:

There is not one kind of Eris (Strife), but all over the earth there are two. One fosters evil war and battle, being cruel. The other is the elder daughter of dark Night, and she is far kinder to men. She stirs up even the shiftless to toil. For a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbor, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order. Thus neighbor vies with neighbor to hurry after wealth. This Strife is wholesome for men. ("Works and Days," 11-24)

Aristotle concludes that "Whereas phthonos, envy, is censured because it seeks to harm another, zelos, emulation, is praised because it encourages a person to attain excellence on his own merits." ("Rhetoric," 2.11.1) Fear of envy is very deep-seated in the human psyche. It can prevent a culture from progressing for thousands of years. Only a youthful culture full of vigor and confidence can shrug it off, enabling that culture to flourish. The road to cultural ruin lies in the fear of envy reasserting itself from the primordial depths.

America once had that youth, vigor and confidence, culminating in history's single greatest achievement, putting a man on the moon. After the triply debilitating debacles of Vietnam, Watergate and Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan resurrected America's self-confidence, with America's resultant victory in the Cold War. Yet America lost her way once more, indulging in a cultural debauch epitomized by the Clintons. America's response to the atrocity of Sept. 11 provided overwhelming evidence that her reserves of vitality and self-assurance remain abundant.

Those reserves are nonetheless depleted. America's most elite universities have degenerated into fascist cesspools of envy appeasement. They survive only on the inertia of their prestige. Delta and other airlines compromise passenger security by harassing people at random rather than racially profiling Arab and other Moslem men.

Indeed, the entire phenomenon of political correctness -- perhaps best exemplified by the New York Times editorial page -- is nothing but a massive exercise in envy appeasement. One of the most positive results of Sept. 11 is that it has made the American people mad enough to reject envy. They now could care less if Moslems or the French or whomever are envious of them. That rejection must now be applied to the envy panderers and envy appeasers within America herself. Rejecting envy is the key to preventing "The Death of the West," the key for America to continue to prosper. I suggest that this rejection begin with you.

Fear of the Evil Eye is the only thing that gives the Evil Eye any power. Without fear of it, the Evil Eye is impotent. So, the next time Evil Eyes are directed at you and demand you apologize for your existence, you might suggest that they indulge in S&M by themselves and leave you out of it.

great article. The only addition I would make to the article is that when liberals are talking about evil white males being racist, or being greedy, or being intolerant, all they are doing is projecting their character flaws onto other people. I think alot of liberals secretly recognize that they have these character flaws, so in order to deal with their feelings of shame, they project their flaws onto other people. Perhaps that is just another facet of the envy impulse -- but instead of being envious of what people have, liberals are envious of the character flaws that other people don't have.

This is definitely a worthy read, a nice new idea, Aristotle notwithstanding. There are rich people whose spirit is killed by envy and poor people who are free of envy.

Socialist countries seem to me to be a peculiar mix of equality and envy. When I spent some time in Norway, the first news story I was aware of had to do with envy. It seemed one family had built a deck on their house. The neighbors were up in arms, but not because the deck inconvenienced them in any way. They were simply unapologetically envious and felt justified in demanding the deck be torn down. It was sort of "Who does he think he is, building a deck on his house when his neighbors have none?"

I thought at the time bizarre, definitely unAmerican. Now not only has the envy industry arrived on our shores, we have perfected it.

Maybe the ideas in this article can help us get a handle on it and throw it back across the ocean.

LIBERALS

They do not want to win your fortune, they want you to lose it
They do not want to succeed, they want you to fail
They do not want to live, they want you to die

They desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself….They are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.
Ayn Rand, "Galt’s Speech" from Atlas Shrugged, 1957

The Age of Envy
Today we live in the Age of Envy.
"Envy" is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.
Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves….That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.
This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree….Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one’s own (conscious or subconscious) judgement. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.
If a child wants to get good grades in school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins to hate the children who do, that is hatred of the good. If a man regards intelligence as a value, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the good.
The nature of the particular values a man chooses to hold is not the primary factor in this issue (although irrational values may contribute a great deal to the formation of that emotion). The primary factor and distinguishing characteristic is an emotional mechanism set in reverse: a response of hatred, not toward human vices, but toward human virtues.
To be exact, the emotional mechanism is not set in reverse, but is set one way: its exponents do not experience love for evil men; their emotional range is limited to hatred or indifference. It is impossible to experience love, which is a response to values, when one’s automatized response to values is hatred.
--Ayn Rand, The Age of Envy, 1971

This was a great read. The author certainly does know how to hold people's interest. He doesn't differentiate as much as he could between 1) those who are envious, 2) those who want to appease or satisfy or exploit the envy of others, and 3) those who try to deflect or reduce that envy, though. It's also not clear that emulation is the antidote to envy. Sometimes the line between the two can be very thin indeed. Japan emulated the West successfully, but that did not prevent a truly horrific war. It could be that emulation can overcome envy, but sometimes the frustrations of emulation can produce yet more envy, as has happened in great rivalries between nations.

What we call modern "liberalism," is merely one of the facets of Fabian Socialism.

All forms of Socialism involve a denial of reality. Socialists are at war with nature. The very perception of equality as a goal, is the sheerest madness. There is no such thing as equality in nature.

For more on the techniques which have been used to control the susceptible by praying on their fears and compulsions, see The Lies of Socialism. For more on the Fabian corruption of Academia in pursuit of the compulsion for an undifferentiated humanity, see Myths & Myth Makers In American Higher Education.

We are arrayed against lunacy and madness, orchestrated by neurotic power seekers, desperate to destroy our culture, heritage and sense of identity. It could get very, very ugly, when more Americans wake up to what has really been happening.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site

"We are arrayed against lunacy and madness, orchestrated by neurotic power seekers, desperate to destroy our culture, heritage and sense of identity. It could get very, very ugly, when more Americans wake up to what has really been happening.

That is what I find to be truly frightening about the widening polarity between the left and right political factions in this country. The last 30-40 years have seen this gulf widening at a substantial rate. I can remember when the Demos and the Repubos, while somewhat divided on the proper role of government in the lives of a free people, were still on the same page when it came to the Bill of Rights.

Even that tired old hack, Hubert Humphrey, in retrospect, doesn't seem to be as vicious a socialist as DassHole and Teddy Kennedy are today. There seems to be a very clear line between those in the US Senate who desire total control of the wealth of the nation and those who seek power, but at a lesser level. The former make up nearly the entire Senate demorat contingency. Even Zell Miller, who seems like a 'conservative' Rat, still voted to acquit Bill the Rat in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. The absolute onslaught against the RKBA by the DemoRAT Party, the fight to render the clearly written 2nd Amendment moot, the clear use of race-baiting and the wish to foster hatred among new immigrants and America's poor, the drive to ensure the successful invasion of illegals from the south, does not speak well for the near future in America. Until recent times, I did not think that a second Civil War was possible; now I am not sure what to do in order to avoid it.

Thanks for the pings, Mike and John, and for posting this, 45Auto.

I don't often bookmark articles, but this one's a keeper!

There is just one assertion that Mr. Wheeler makes with which I take (huge, vociferous) issue: his phrase the self-loathing of the white American liberal. The white American liberal loathes his fellow whites (or fellow males, or fellow Americans, or fellow wealthy people, or fellow Christians....ad infinitum, depending upon how many 'oppressive' groups he considers himself to have been unfortunate enough to have been born into....). But he most definitely does not loathe himself.

On the contrary.

He has cast himself in the role of knight in shining armor -- the omniscient exception to the rule whose destiny it is to awaken those evil 'others' of his race/gender/nationality/economic status to the error of their ways. He has altruistically (*cough*) taken it upon himself to point out the sins of his ancestors, and the fact that the sins of the fathers have been visited upon their sons. Yet he is somehow a plane above the rest of his misguided 'siblings' and his calling consists of sanctimoniously making them aware of that fact (no matter how many revisions of history, character assassinations, fabrications of convenience....it takes). Self-loathing is not a popular pass-time among self-proclaimed, self-deified crusaders. Self-aggrandizement is more their style. They (surreptitiously) direct their loathing outward....

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