Liberals and their mentality

SolitaryRoad.com

Website owner:  James Miller

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I confess to being a person of biases. There are some kinds of people I am inclined toward and others that I am biased against. I like clean, straight, honest, moral, good people. I am not well inclined toward people that I perceive to be dishonest or immoral. I guess it is part of my Christian upbringing and Christian faith. I think that what I say of myself is probably true of most people: I think most people are probably attracted toward some kinds of people and repelled by other kinds. People are attracted to others of their own outlooks and values, people who think as they do. Likes are attracted to likes. Opposites repel.

It is my guess that the kinds of people that I would view as “not my kind” would view me as “not their kind”. It is not my wish to try to force others to think like I do. I just accept the fact that there are all kinds of people in the world and I let people be themselves and find their own way. I live in a society that is given over to sexual immorality and depravity and I am content to walk my own solitary way. I have a good wife and that makes my walk easy. I live in a society that I think is on the road to Hell but know that there is little I can do about it. I write in my website what I think. That is about all I can do.

The modern liberal left has taken over in the countries of the modern western world. People of the Left have characteristic outlooks, attitudes and values. There are certain kinds of people that they are sympathetic to. There are other kinds that they don’t like, that they are biased against.

The modern Left

Kinds of people the Left likes, is sympathetic to:

● homosexuals (gays, lesbians, transvestites)

● criminal types

● poor Blacks, poor Hispanics

● low income and battered women and children

Kinds of people the Left hates

● Bible-believing Christians

● people who believe in the old-fashioned morality

● rich people

● business people, capitalists, industrialists

● Asians

● policemen

● Conservatives

To understand anyone you must understand how his mind works. People of the Left have a certain kind of mind. To understand their actions, you must understand their mind.

Unlike myself, Liberals don’t have a “live and let live” type philosophy. They believe in trying to force everyone into thinking like they do. That is why in today’s America one dare not speak badly of homosexuality. It is a strict taboo. Doing so will surely bring you trouble, all kinds of denunciation, perhaps being fired from your job, etc. America is supposed to be a free country where theoretically one can say what he thinks — but there are bounds. It is all of the liberal political correctness imposed by the Left and implemented by various laws that has molded our modern society, molded the modern mind. It is only the strong, independently minded person who maintains old-fashioned values.

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Intellectuals and Society. pp. 175 - 179

Ideally, the work of intellectuals is based on certain principles — of logic, of evidence, and perhaps of moral values or social concerns. However, given the incentives and constraints of the profession, intellectuals’ work need not be. There is ample room for attitudes, rather than principles, to guide the work of intellectuals, especially when these attitudes are prevalent among their peers and insulated from consequential feedback from the outside world.

While logic and evidence are ideal criteria for the work of intellectuals, there are many ways in which much of what is said and done by intellectuals, has less to do with principles than attitudes. For example, intellectuals who are receptive to claims of mitigation on the part of murderers who profess to have been battered wives, or others who have had traumatic childhoods of one sort or another, or the less fortunate in general, are seldom receptive to claims that policemen who had a split second to make a life-and-death shooting decision, at the risk of their own lives, should be cut any slack.

Some intellectuals who have been opposed to the principle of racism have nevertheless remained either silent or apologetic when black community leaders have made racist attacks on Asian storekeepers in black ghettos, or on whites in general or Jews in particular. The beating up of Asian American school children by their classmates — for years — likewise elicits little interest, much less outrage, from the intelligentsia. Some intellectuals have even redefined racism in a way to make blacks ineligible for the label — another exercise in verbal virtuosity.

Many among the intellectuals have denounced “greed” among corporate executives whose incomes are a fraction of the incomes of professional athletes or entertainers who are seldom, if ever, accused of greed.

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Such responses and non-responses by intellectuals not only represent attitudes rather than principles, often they represent attitudes that over-ride principles. Nor are such biases confined to reactions to particular groups of human beings. They apply to concepts, such as risk, for example.

Intellectuals who are highly critical of any risks associated with particular pharmaceutical drugs, and consider it the government’s duty to ban some of these drugs because of risks of death, see no need for the government to ban sky-diving or white-water rafting, even if the latter represent higher risks of death for the sake of recreation than the risks from medicines that can stave off pain or disability, or which may save more lives than they cost. Similarly, when a boxer dies from a beating in the ring, that is almost certain to set off demands in the media or among the intelligentsia that boxing be banned, but no such demands are likely to follow deaths from skiing accidents, even if these are far more common than deaths from boxing. Again, it is not the principle but the attitude.

While attitudes can vary from individual to individual, the attitudes of intellectuals are often group attitudes. Moreover, these attitudes change collectively over time, becoming transient moods of a given era and badges of identity in those eras, rather than permanent attitudes, much less permanent principles. Thus in the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, racial and ethnic minorities were viewed in largely negative terms, and Progressive support of the eugenics movement was not unrelated to the presumed desirability of preventing these minorities from propagating “too many” of their own kind. This mood had largely passed by the 1930s, and in later times racial and ethnic minorities became objects of special solicitude. After the 1960s, this solicitude became virtually an obsession, however inconsistent it was with earlier and opposite obsessions about the same people among intellectuals considered “progressive” in the early twentieth century.

During the earlier era, when farmers and workers were the special focus of solicitude, no one paid much attention to how what was done for the benefit of these groups might adversely affect minorities or others. Likewise, in a later era, little attention was paid by “progressive” intellectuals to how affirmative action for minorities or women might adversely affect others. There is no principle that accounts for such collective mood swings. There are simply mascot du jour, much like adolescent fads that are compulsive badges of identity for a time and afterwards considered passe — but seldom treated as subject to logic or evidence during the period of their dismissal. Back in the 1920s, when the Sacco-Vanzetti case was an international cause celebre because of the presumed injustice of their trial, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in a letter to Harold Laski about the arbitrary focus of that time:

I cannot but ask myself why this so much greater interest in red than black. A thousand-fold worse cases of negroes come up from time to time, but the world does not worry over them. It is not a mere simple abstract love of justice that has moved people so much.

A sealed bubble

The dangers of living in a sealed bubble of ideas should be obvious. But history offers examples for those who need them. China’s centuries-long intellectual and technological superiority to Europe not only ended, but reversed, after the fateful, fifteenth-century decision of China’s rulers to discontinue international explorations and deliberately become an inward-looking society, disdainful of peoples elsewhere, who were dismissed as “barbarians.” At that time, China’s capacity for exploration was one of many areas in which its progress greatly exceeded that of Europe:

These flotillas far surpassed in grandeur the small Portuguese fleets that came later. The ships were probably the largest vessels the world had ever seen .... The biggest were about 400 feet long, 160 wide (compare the 85 feet of Columbus’s Santa Maria), had nine staggered masts and twelve square sails of red silk.

Decades before Columbus, a Chinese admiral led a voyage of exploration that took far more ships a far longer distance, from China to the east coast of Africa with stops in between. China also had huge drydocks on the Yangtze River, technologically preceding Europe by centuries. At the height of its preeminence, China’s rulers decreed that such explorations would cease, and even made it a capital offense for anyone to build ships above a certain size, so as to isolate the country and its people from foreign ideas.

A century later, Japan’s rulers imposed a similar policy on sealing its people off from foreign influence. Thus Japan sealed itself off from the scientific and technological advances being made in the Western world and, in the middle of the nineteenth century, found itself helpless when Commodore Matthew Perry forced his way into Japanese waters and forced Japan to open itself up to the outside world. The later rise of Japan to the forefront of technology demonstrated not only the capacity of its people but implicitly, also what a waste of that capacity had been imposed by sealing them off for more than two centuries.

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Whatever the country, the century or the subject, sealing ideas in a bubble protects those with the power to seal the bubble, but often at a huge cost to those who are sealed inside the bubble with them. In contemporary America, no one has the power to seal the population off from ideas that clash with the prevailing vision. But institutions most under the control of intellectuals — the leading colleges and universities — are not only among the most one-sided ideologically, but also the most restrictive in what students can say without running afoul of vague speech codes and punishments that can range from “re-education” on up to expulsion. While this is a sealing off of a limited segment of the population for a limited number of years, the students who have been sealed off are a segment of society that can be expected to have a disproportionate influence in later years, and the years in which the ideas influence these students are the crucial formative years.

12 Jan 2024