Posted on 01/24/2015 1:00:48 PM PST by DeweyCA
The first step toward an in-depth understanding of adult behavior is to comprehend its origins in childhood. Whether adaptive or maladaptive, the enduring patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that define adult personality begin in the early years of life. In fact, our earliest experiences with caretakers and others, acting on inherited temperament factors, strongly determine our later personality traits, including those expressed in political values and beliefs.
The dispositions of the liberal mind are no exception: his hopes and fears, beliefs and passions, values and morals are in great measure the legacy of his childhood from birth through adolescence. The traits that define who he is are the traits that lead him to pursue particular goals in the political arena and to use particular methods to achieve them.
The radical liberal mind’s goals are now familiar, of course, but another brief summary will prove useful in highlighting their essentially childlike nature. Just noted were the grandiose goals of providing for everyone’s material welfare and healthcare, protecting everyone’s self-esteem correcting all social and political disadvantages, educating all citizens, and eliminating all class distinctions.
In his pursuit of these goals, he intends to construct a universal human family, one united in bonds of mutual love, concern, caretaking and tolerance. Through drastic government action the radical liberal seeks the following:
* A powerful parental government to provide everyone with a good life and a caring presence
* An elite corps of surrogate parents that will manage the lives of the people through approximately equal distributions of goods and services, just as real parents provide equally for the needs of their children
* A guarantee of material security from the state, similar to that which a child expects from his parents
* A form of parental social justice that cures or mitigates all states of deprivation, inequality, suffering and disadvantage
* A guarantee that negative rights for the protection of individual liberty will yield to positive rights that reduce or eliminate inequalities of wealth, social status and power, just as good parents would balance benefits to their children
* Government laws that will punish the “haves” for their excesses and compensate the “have-nots” for the pangs of envy, just as good parents would do for their children
* Government directives from wise and caring officials that channel the citizen’s initiative and industry through social programs and tax incentives, just as wise parents determine the directions of the family’s labors
* Government policy that instructs the people in how to relate to each other politically, just as good parents instruct their children in how to conduct themselves properly
* Permissive laws passed by sympathetic legislators that lower the obligations of contracts, ease codes of acceptable conduct, and relax the burdens of established institutions such as marriage and adoption procedures, just as indulgent parents would do
* Government welfare programs that free the citizen-child from the duties of altruism, just as parents do
* An international caring agenda that will enhance the family of nations by understanding everyone’s hardships, tolerating destructive actions by others, and empathizing with aggressors to bring them to the negotiating table, just as good parents do in resolving family disputes
These and other goals dear to the modern liberal heart are remarkable for the childhood needs they address and the adult needs they ignore. As noted in more detail below, what the radical liberal mind really longs for, as revealed in his political goals, is a child’s relationship to a loving family whose caretaking compensates him for the injuries he suffered in his early years. He seeks all of this in the contemporary political arena.
The major problem he faces is that a substantial portion of the population is still competent: it is a population that deeply reveres individual liberty, readily accepts its responsibilities, and passionately opposes its destruction. It is not about to yield to the liberal’s mad dream. Because competent people know that they can direct their own lives and provide for their own security through voluntary cooperation, and because they love a world of freedom in which to live as they choose, they have no need for, and indeed vehemently reject, the oppressive intrusions of liberal government.
What the competent citizen wants, in contrast to the modern liberal, is a coherent and dependable structure for ordered liberty, secured by a limited government that respects the autonomy and sovereignty of the individual and protects his property rights against the constant invasions of collectivism.
The liberal mind rejects this prescription on principle and attempts to overthrow it in government policy. What the liberal seeks in order to feel secure is the modern welfare state with its endless guarantees and endless regulations. This goal is literally fantastic in its own right. But equally irrational is the method by which he attempts to achieve it.
He is willing to use any kind of government power, including power which destroys the foundations of civilized freedom, in order to get what he demands: government insured safety and security over the entire lifespan, along with accommodation to his neurotic demands. He seeks through the state that degree of coercion needed to redress the trauma, injustice, helplessness and humiliation experienced at the hands of his original caretakers. He hopes to do this by passing laws that indulge his impulses and exempt him from the proper obligations of mature adulthood.
Considered in its entirety, the liberal’s goal of making the state into an ideal parent/family and his method of achieving it by compelling competent people to do his bidding constitute the radical liberal agenda. Above all, the agenda is a blueprint for the use of irresistible government power. Driven by his irrational needs and desires, the radical liberal mind is more than willing to sacrifice the noble structure of liberty that originally defined America for the shabby asylum of the modern welfare state.
Srbfl
Excellent article, IMO
The liberal mind is adolescent psychosis, wrapped in sociopathy, steeped in bubbling hatred, looking for a brown shirt to wear to meetings.
IMHO
His premise it is Mommies fault after all, we are stuck with a bunch of whining, insolent, arrogant liberals...
My thinks liberals are liberals because they want control...no matter the cost...
You’re right. It’s only partially correct.
What is missing is the assessment that Liberals are in many cases psychopaths: desperate to control others, and always seeking government position and control to effect this.
People like this always form the nucleus of government. In its most ruthless form, the totalitarian states, they gather easily manipulated sycophants around them and then use any measure of force required to consolidate their power. Mass murder is always the outcome. Even better, they don’t have to fear legal reprisal because they ARE the law, and absolve themselves.
This is something entirely different from the angry child syndrome, and far more threatening. But being a rigid, controlling form of society, the thumb suckers eagerly sign on as long as their basic needs are met by others...which the psychos willingly do, as long as submission to their control is unquestioned.
Look back at any of the dictators of the 20th century and you will see this.
“Srbfl”
I put it in Google and it said, “Santa Rosa Beach, Fl.”
It is hard to “compel competent people” to engage in the irrational.
Liberals are elitists who believe that it is their right to do what they believe is in the best interest of society (i.e., the collective). They do not believe in individual rights. To the extent they refer to rights, they do so only because they believe it beneficial to society (e.g., abortion). Ultimately, Liberals view the human race as a giant machine that only they are smart enough to run correctly. When things don’t work out as Liberals want (a common occurrence), they simply blame others for interfering. In every way Modern Liberalism is a religion (Marx is their God).
George Lakoff wrote about this in his book, Moral Politics. The model of the ideal family motivates a set of metaphorical priorities which constitutes a family based moral system.For libtards, it is a empathetic nurturant parent type of family system that is the metaphor for government. And for conservatives, it is a strict father type of family system.
We need a paper written that is the conservative answer to the putrid lib screed “conservatism as motivated social cognition” or something like that. Written at least a decade ago by Jost, et. al. if memory serves.
This article could be the seed for that paper. And all the articles done by John Ray (?). Fuzzy on the name.
An answer, not just to this but to higher questions, is found in God. It is idolatry to put Caesar in God’s shoes. It never works.
Perhaps it’s “Should Read, Bump For Later”?
And no, I wouldn’t particularly try to formulate an answer in terms of secular psychology except as part of an explanation of how secular psychology cannot satisfactorily answer such questions.
God is more than imaginary. God if believed in actually comes through with promises. People know to look for God. But God will not have an idol stuffed into His shoes. Even atheists cannot evade the fact that they speak of universal norms, whose universality could not be supported without some central authority.
Deja vu.
Liberalism is he expression of an ancient, rabbit-like, r-selected reproductive strategy, programmed by nature, and designed to exploit free resource availability. Give a population free resources, and it will shift it’s psychology toward liberalism. The five traits of the r-strategy, are all adaptations to free resource availability. If resources are copious, fighting is pointless, so the docile have advantage. If resources are free, every offspring will get food, so you don’t need to find a fit mate, and monopolize them with monogamy, plus promiscuity will produce more kids. Once promiscuity is advantageous, single parenting will predominate, and sexualizing young will also increase offspring numbers. Finally, r-strategists have no loyalty to in-group because there is no group competition.
The five traits of the r-strategy - docility, promiscuity, single parenting, early sexualization of young, and no loyalty to in-group, explain every facet of the Leftist psychology, from early sex-ed for kids, to communism and free birth control for everyone.
Liberals are just the rabbits of our society, and I expect once resource contract in the coming collapse will reverse the leftist slide we have been seeing.
And Just Think Dr Rossiter Got His Md Degree From The University Of Chicago That Liberal Rats Nest !
In brief: liberals stop maturing at age 11.
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