The Secret Knowledge

The struggle of the Left to rationalize its positions is an intolerable, Sisyphean burden. I speak as a reformed Liberal.

How may one support higher taxes and government intervention as an aid to the economy, when all evidence historical and current (cf. Greece), records the disastrous folly of such a course?

How can one support racial preferences and set-asides, when they run contrary to the evidence of the results of all race–or genetic-based programs in history—their existence an incipient invitation to murder?

How can one deny (as the Obama administration insists on doing) that the military threat to the West has a name, and that name is Islamic Fascism?

Et cetera.

These positions, ad infinitum, are incompatible with reason, and one can embrace them only with great assistance, which, unfortunately, for the Liberal, is forthcoming.

That assistance is the Superego, capable of adjudicating all things.

A proposition or a person emerges promising the impossible. (“The New Economy”), or crooning about the unquantifiable (“Change”), and the Liberal finds this soothing sound consonant with his self-image as a brilliant and compassionate individual.

This individual is in the exact position of the confidence man’s mark. In fact he is the confidence man’s mark.

Now, the main problem in structuring a con game is in answering the mark’s question, “Why me . . . ?”

In the Spanish Prisoner, played for over two thousand years, and seen today in its incarnation as the Nigerian Letter, the individual is appealed to as one of noted repute and standing in the community, as someone who can be trusted with the confidence man’s improbable claim.

The mark is flattered. He understands why he has been chosen. He has been chosen because of his excellence. How could one (the Confidence man) who was that perceptive, then, be other than honorable also? The question does not arise.

The flattered mark glossing over all inconsistencies, and improbabilities, and indeed, impossibilities, in the confidence man’s story, forks out his money.

The Liberal is flattered that he, in contradistinction to his benighted countrymates, has been chosen to advance the policies and doctrines of Liberalism. He, in endorsing them, is part of the Elite, one of those empowered to eradicate those historical evils entailed upon humanity because of the unfortunate delay of his advent. (“We are the people we have been waiting for,” Obama campaign, 2008.)

He is the champion of Good, chosen because someone (the Candidate) has finally recognized his excellence.

His problem resides in this: that the doctrines, policies, and programs presented for his endorsement are senseless and destructive, and can be so-proved by any slight referral of them to the impartial verdicts of history.

What will the Superego do?

It will ensure that the referral will never occur.

How will it do this? By ensuring that the referral would occur only at the cost of relinquishing membership in the herd.

The Superego cannot increase the benefit of compliance (as it did with the stoplight), but will increase the cost of noncompliance. Questioning = excommunication.

The Left, in addition to its embrace of the false (higher taxes means increased prosperity for all), and its acceptance of the moot as incontrovertible (Global Warming); must account for the incidental effect of the sum of these decisions. This effect is the destruction of our culture.

All strife to the Left is error, and poverty and all human ills eradicable by new programs. But these revolutionary revisions destroy the human ability to interact, which, in its entirety, is known as Culture.

Note that, under the Statist revisions of the Obama administration, racial tensions have devolved to acrimony unknown in this country for decades. Sexual relations are universally subject to constant revision, and limits on language and behavior, once imposed unconsciously, and learned in family, community, and school, are returned to the conscious mind, erasing spontaneity and ease, and replacing them with consternation and fear.

Our beautiful American language is now subject to revision by those screaming loudest, and we have the enormity of s/he, the clunky continuous reiteration of his-or-her, and so on. This revision is presented by the Left as an aid of equality, but its result is an atmosphere not of happy compliance, but of anxiety, circumlocution, and a formalism destructive of the free exchange of ideas.

Our culture is being destroyed by the Left. What difference that the good-willed do so in the name of Equality? It is being destroyed.

The decision to allow a thirteen-story Islamic Center to be built in the vicinity of Ground Zero may be defensible under the rubric of law; but it is a cultural obscenity, allowable only if the State, the Left, or the individual asserts that every decision must be adjudicated according to the new understanding of the anointed.

The Government sues the State of Arizona for the enforcement of laws the passage of which are not only the right of the state under the Constitution, but the content of which is virtually identical with federal law.

The State of California sentences the farmers of its Central Valley to drought, and their farms to destruction, because a small fish called the delta smelt has been declared endangered.

That our culture is falling apart is apparent to any impartial observer. But what observer can be impartial? Conservatives are aghast; we are shocked at the actions of the Left, and we are astounded that they do not acknowledge these actions’ results.

It is not that they do not care. But that they cannot afford to notice, for comparing their actions to the results would bring about either their ejection from the group (should they voice their doubts) or, should they merely follow their perceptions to their logical conclusions, the psychic trauma incident upon a revision of their worldview.