Thursday 8 December 2011

Secular Leftism and brain rot

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One aspect of 'things coming to a point' is that everything is becoming connected: beliefs are much more connected and inter-correlated than they used to be and people who are wrong about the main thing are wrong about almost everything.

I can observe that those who continue to hold to Secular Leftism - the face of its evident evils - dishonesty, incompetence, psychosis - are nowadays becoming more and more obviously wrong about everything else.

In the past it was possible, indeed common, for people to have a mixture of wrong and right beliefs; or to be right about the main things but wrong about peripheral things.

Now we perceive that evil - falsity, ugliness, moral-inversion - has spread, permeated-through people's whole minds to render their judgements generally unsound.

Because Leftists have systematically suppressed their discriminatory abilities, they are now rendered incapable of detecting blatant lying, gross incompetence, charlatans, careerists, psychopaths, charm merchants, thugs and hysterics.

The same people who used to cultivate their instincts, develop their hearts, to navigate through the world are now helpless dupes.

Their carefully cultivated inability to acknowledge the obvious has opened their mental doors to wicked, destructive nonsense.

They have trained themselves in habits of abstraction such that - whatever happens - and I mean anything that happens - is almost-instantly re-framed into the narrative of political correctness. The cognitive dissonance lasts only a few seconds....

And this is our ruling elite.

They are now far beyond human help - and will lead us to utter destruction; unless replaced lock, stock and barrel.

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6 comments:

JP said...

Seems to me the elite's original intent was to destroy the ability of the masses to detect lying, incompetence, and ugliness perpetuated by the elite. However, the elite could not do this without destroying their own ability to judge truth, beauty, and goodness effectively, and so they made themselves ignorant and depraved along with the rabble. And among the first things to go was the ability to recognize that they, the elite, were ignorant and depraved. They think they are solely influenced by truth and proper morality.

CorkyAgain said...

Another explanation might be that it isn't the "elites" who are doing this.

Rather, it's the inexorable unfolding of Man's fallen state.

The obfuscation and denial of truth has, at bottom, one purpose: to evade the need to recognize our own guilt. Because that's the one truth we cannot bear to hear.

It's all one vast rationalization, in the sense of excuse-making.

Bruce Charlton said...

@JP - agreed. I saw this in the university administration - about 20 years ago they began deliberately lying to others, but before very long they were lying to themselves.

CA - agreed - but mine is just a different level of analysis. Of course by 'inexorable' we would agree that it is not inexorable for each individual since any individual may at any moment choose to repent - rather that over time there will 'inexorably' be (according to prophecy) an accumulation of free choices in the wrong and fallen direction.

Brett Stevens said...

Not to nitpick, but religious leftism would be just as destructive. Leftism knows only one god and that is itself.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Brett - Leftism is intrinsically anti-Religious, but sometimes it takes a while to show this.

Wurmbrand said...

From my friend Lars Walker, addressing himself to liberals, in a blog entry:

"Liberals—I want to share a serious word with you, in honesty and without malice. If you have any principles—any at all—I promise you that, if you continue on the Left, you will eventually either have to give them up or move to the Right. Because liberalism is not a position. It is a process. That process evolves continually. Nothing is out of bounds for it, given enough time. That’s why so many ‘60s radicals are Reagan Republicans now."

http://brandywinebooks.net/?post_id=4647

Lars is the author of a number of very enjoyable fantasy novels.