One curious and difficult to explain aspect of the left, is the tendency to hate what is good and true and to love monstrous evil and barefaced lies. Thus, for example, compare the worshipful treatment of China from 1956 to 1972, with the high pitched moral outrage directed at China when the Chinese government ended mass murder and artificial famine in the late seventies, and set to replacing slave labor and command with wage labor and profitability in 1981. Similarly their affection for Islamists. While the left is evil, the company they love to keep is apt to be astoundingly evil, with the result that old fashioned Christians, those few of them that still remain, are apt to suspect demonic infiltration rather than communist infiltration.  You will still today get denial that the old China used mass murder, artificial famine and slave labor, combined with hearty condemnation of the current use of wage labor in China. Similarly, no one notices when our “allies†ethnically cleanse Christians from their lands, having already rendered those lands judenrien.
Below the fold, you will find an outlandishly disgusting video, which reveals that leftists frequently lack the gag reflex, are disinclined to turn away in horror and revulsion from that which is horrible and revolting. A bunch of leftists, smiling, giggling, and joking, simulate cannibalism on a living person, and don’t realize how it is going to look when normals view the video.
Roissy, now calling himself Heartiste, has an interesting explanation.:
A lot of the leftist program, for example feminism and gay liberation, is just inherently revolting and disgusting, due to our adaption to the ancestral environment, so to get along in progressive circles, you had better not have a gag reflex – but the same gag reflex that makes us turn away from women pretending to be men, and men pretending to be women, also makes us turn away from evil.
Consider, for example, Germaine Greer. When young and pretty, she had lots and lots of sex with lots and lots of high status males, mainly musicians of mildly successful bands. However, though she had lots of sex, she never had a sexual relationship. She probably believed she had sexual relationships with lots and lots of high status men, but they did not believe they had a sexual relationship with her. She wanted to have children, and always expected that some suitably high status man would choose to have children with her, but who wants to hang out with a raging slut? Any guy that she considered good enough to have sex with was good enough that he had better options. It appears that she was uniformly treated as a filthy hole in which to relieve oneself, for we hear about her sexual acts from her and her feminist friends, not from the numerous men that banged her. I conjecture that men did not want to announce they were dropping their loads in Germain Greer, any more than they wanted to admit to wanking off in a filthy public toilet. Eventually, approaching menopause, she woke up to the horrifying reality that she was no longer sexually attractive except as a hole to drop a quick load in, and spent a fortune on IVF, attempting to have fatherless children – unsuccessfully.
If you notice this sort of thing, that Germaine Greer was disgusting, it will blight your career as much as saying “nigger†(or saying “niggardly†– leftists do not know etymology). And so, as an unintended side effect, the left is, as in the video above, disturbingly comfortable with evil and horror. A old fashioned Christian would say that women’s liberation leads to demonic possession. I prefer the naturalistic explanation based on adaption to the ancestral environment, but Germaine Greer does look demonically possessed.
Rule by consensus has a similar effect. If you notice that the evil and the insane are having disproportionate influence over the consensus, you will not get far. If you want a career in progressive circles, you had best be incapable of noticing evil and madness.
Modern art is evil incarnate. If you every single person who has ever been to one of this “art events” was to be exiled in Madagascar, we would achieve the earthly paradise in a week.
Alas, the rot is more widespread. The “no pressure” video, where greenies enthusiastically simulate the murder of children, was in the same line. Wherever you see your taxes at play, you see monsters at play.
The striking lack of technical skill displayed by modern artists (observe how badly the black female was done) inclines me to doubt that our rulers are “the cognitive elite”. For that matter, if Murray really was cognitively elite, he would know not to eat barra in Washington.
Wins the prize for the best commentary on that video.
It’s far.
On the internet I’ve seen people beheaded, burned alive, mobs stone someone to death, but I’ve never seen anything as sick as that before. I know no ones being hurt, but the utter mundane way they go about cutting while the screaming increase just sickens me.
I’ll have a look at Heartiste’s explanation (he’s always interesting, if nothing else!), but my personal theory is this: political correctness and false, self-harmful beliefs of all kinds function as status displays in conjunction with a variant of Fisher’s Runaway Selection Hypothesis. These beliefs get started for whatever reason (perhaps a mutation or misapplication of genuine charity) and then they spiral out of control as “status” displays since only successful individuals can afford to entertain them.
The most extreme example of a self harming belief was the Khmer Rouge hostility to foreign educated intellectuals, wherein they wound up murdering most intellectuals and torturing to death most foreign educated intellectuals. The lefter you were, the higher your status and the less likely you were to be murdered. So the more you hated foreign educated intellectuals, the less likely you were to be murdered. And since most of the Khmer Rouge were foreign educated intellectuals, they were well advised to hate foreign intellectuals fiercely. This phenomenon is indeed closely analogous to Fisher’s Runaway Selection Hypothesis.
However the case in question is something different. It is failure of the disgust mechanism, a side effect of selecting for tolerance of disgusting things
Searing of the conscience is necessary to attain status in such a system… moderns are quick to forget that the primary way the conscience works is ‘gut reactions’.
It isn’t true that these folks are totally without conscience, as I have seen them get very upset when (in the rare case that it may occur) that a ‘person of color’ or ‘woman’ is ‘discriminated against’.
In my reckoning, forcing yourself to care about people you have no connection to has the exact result of treating those you should care most about as non-human enemies. You can’t ratiocinate yourself to love for all men, you can only suffer your way there.
I think having disgust for normal stock-response disgust helps destroy or subvert the conscience too… something in That Hideous Strength had something to do with this, not recalling exactly.
Sounds like CS Lewis. I wish you could nail it down.
I especially appreciate this piece here.
There’s so much gaslighting going on about what’s cool and acceptable, and what isn’t. Take that, up against my own psychological weakness — my inability to NOTICE my gaslighting in real time and reject it right away — has lead me down the chute of crazy in the past, plenty of times.
Someone smart — I won’t Google-search him and pretend that I knew who he was — once remarked that “Someday, the observation of a carrot will spark a revolution.” The modern analogy, I think, isn’t observing “aha, this is a carrot”, but rather “my God, this thing/person/event is horrible.”