THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Liberals Beyond Stupid

Read the excerpt from an article by Ray Kraft below. It sets out well a problem that conservatives constantly encounter: Why are Leftists so unreachable by reason? You can point out holes in their arguments but they are unmoved. And some of their claims are entirely out of touch with reality. "All men are equal", being the prime example of that. And they can change positions on a dime -- as Mr. Obama did: In the Senate he was against gay marriage. As president he was for it.

I think I can explain why they are like that. Freud understood. Sometimes people NEED false beliefs to make them happy with themselves and with life. Not everyone can face reality head-on. The use of mind-altering dugs is proof of that. Even in prehistoric times they brewed beer. Men have always needed to blunt the harsh impact of reality. Some of us can come down from delusions and finally face the real world and others can do that only partially or not at all.

And the Leftist has a particularly strong need that he has to cope with. He is a born-angry person; Born-miserable; Born unhappy. And the happiness research is very clear: You are largely born with your level of happiness/unhappiness. Some things can lift you up and some things can drag you down but it is transient. You soon revert to your chronic level of unhappiness.

The Leftist could take anger management classes or prayerfully approach the wisdom of Christ but he does not do that. He does what Freud called displacement. He explains his anger as caused by something outside himself -- as caused by "injustice", for instance. But the world is awash with injustice. Just the fact that 50% of the population is of below average IQ is a huge injustice. So conservatives just accept that while doing what little they realistically can do to ameliorate problems.

But the Leftist does not want to solve any problem. He wants to mentally bathe and luxuriate in problems. Even if some problem is solved, there will always be more problems. He needs injustices to explain to himself why he is so angry. So he sees himself as living in a world of evil, conniving people. "I'm not mad. There really are lots of bad people out there" is his message to himself.

And as Freud pointed out, such false beliefs tend to be deeply entrenched. The defensive person cannot afford to let go of his false beliefs. Lose too much of his protective belief system and he will have to face his own unfortunate nature head-on. He would have to face the reality that there are no sufficient grounds for his unhappiness.

So, in a word, the Leftist NEEDS his angry beliefs. He cannot afford to let go of them. Compared to his needs, logic and reason is a very weak force

I am coming to suspect that liberalism may be a genetic defect, or at least a congenital defect, because in the correspondence I get froms libs I observe that most of them are completely unable to grasp even the most rudimentary concepts of logic and reason, and also completely unable to grasp the idea that they are not grasping the most rudimentary concepts of logic and reason.

I am not sure that it is merely beyond their will, I am coming to suspect it is beyond their ability.

Those who are able to think more or less rationally and logically tend to become conservative and Republican, while those who are unable to think more or less rationally and logically tend to become liberal and Democrat.

Which makes the Democratic party (as it is today) by definition the party of illogic and unreason, the party of emotionalism rampant.

This may have something to do with the fact that Logic, as a subject, is no longer taught in most schools.

The libs who are not thinking coherently always think (or feel) that they are thinking coherently, no matter how clearly and cogently one points out that they are not. They are apparently unable to recognize (much less understand, or analyze) the inconsistencies and non sequiturs in their own thinking -

For instance, if one points out that the observed one degree of global atmospheric warming over the last century (per the IPCC report) is hardly conclusive proof of catastrophic runaway global warming, and probably within the margin of measuring error (!) the response is Yes! There is Global Warming! Didn't you see Al Gore's movie?! . . . so there really is Global Warming, Toto, I guess, even if we can't actually see it.

Yes, some glaciers are melting, but the fact that glaciers have been melting for the last ten or fifteen thousand years since the beginning of the end of the last ice age is an uncomprehended, or incomprehensible, idea, that cannot possibly have any relevance at all to the faith and doctrine of Global Warming!

SOURCE

3 comments:

The straight and arrowNovember 7, 2019 at 5:54 AM
Your life is your fault. This is a rude main rule with room for exceptions. It is rude because false victims may have to bear the burden of their falsities. It has room for exceptions because life is what you make it and sometimes what others make of it. But if so be it, what will you do next, will you blame or embrace the main rule?

I have been thinking about values lately and fortunately good values are still being taught, absorbed and learnt. May good values be plentiful, encircle and conquer detrimental values. May sour values be exchanged for better ones by learning.

But reality is that sometimes even leftists and rightists come together to curse human liberty and try to save people from being able to learn their lessons. But leftism especially is quick to judge something as terrible and demand that those deemed responsible get naked in public and/or show their hand. And it may well be that some people make terrible decisions, but one should not be robbed of one’s responsibility. It is worth nothing that leftism will demand that others show their hand while in a sleight of hand is quick to disguise their resentment for liberty and human free will, which is how people learn.

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AnonymousNovember 8, 2019 at 1:21 PM
I know lots of lefties, and yes, they all have anger problems of a sort. None are contented people. Some try hard to portray themselves as calm, caring, new age, and not hateful, but underneath is lurking a barely contained tantrum. It may be open anger or it may be passive and subversive anger, it may be chronic irritation, resentment, jealousy, sulking or angry outbursts, the anger may alternate with depression and/or anxiety but it is always there in some form. I used to have an anger problem too, but I came to understand Christ’s teachings and received a new heart and with that new heart a whole new outlook. No anger since then, and no leftist inclinations. Just a contented kind heart that I cannot take credit for.
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AnonymousNovember 8, 2019 at 2:05 PM
PS. But admittedly my life is easy, certainly at present, I have employment (part time but enough), a house to live in, and my health is not good but not awful. I don't know how I would feel or cope if I were in unending painful ill health and unemployed and/or homeless. Such things are testing, and hardship can distort one's outlook.

But western lefties also mostly have comfortable lives. Most are very well off and materially have more comfortable lives than I do. Like me they live in civilised democratic countries with Christianised cultures, in capitalist systems with welfare provisions. So life for most is fairly comfortable. Yet the lefties at work are always unhappy, resentful over nothing or over minor inconveniences, always complaining about the unfair system, angry at their superiors (unless their superiors are stroking their egos), angry at the "glass ceiling", the "patriarchy", the need for more "equality" -- even though they all have good government funded jobs, they are always portraying themselves as society's good people, talking about "making a difference", how much they "care", "empowerment", the need to stop bullying and sexual harassment (of which I don't see any except from them), and the need for "emotional safety" (whatever that is)... etc.
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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights