Overgrown Children

This is what happens when you let the theatre kids run things...

Originally published on June 28, 2019.

If you’ve been around dissident Right circles for any length of time, you’re probably seen the term “clown world” used to describe the modern Western world.  If you’ve paid any attention at all to the state of the world around us, you know just how apt of a description that term really is.  Modernity as it is expressed today transcends the types of degeneracy and corruption that have been seen in previous decadent periods and has plumbed to nadirs of human depravity that previous generations would have literally found unspeakable because they would not have had the vocabulary to even describe them.  To any rational adult observer of any previous age, no matter how dissolute, today’s western social, political, and moral situation would seem completely clownish and unserious.

That this would be the case is practically inevitable given the type of people involved within the plethora of left-wing causes and intersectionality factions.  As a general rule, the political and cultural Left are very childish, not just in their behaviour, but also in their worldview, demeanor, and mindset.  Any normal person who has ever dealt with them on social media (or the real world, if you’ve had the misfortune) can abundantly testify to this.  Now, I’m not really talking about the “boss lefties,” the people who really run the show concerning left-wing activism.  Rather, I’m describing the rank-and-file lefties who fill out the echelons of “ground level” activism – ranging from the antifa street drek to the college students whining about microaggressions to the HR representatives in multinational corporations.

I sincerely believe that to understand the psychology of those on the Left, one must approach the issue from the standpoint of juvenile behaviourism.  Observing how and why children – as in actual children – act as they do will shed light on why those on the Left are the way they are.  I want to emphasise that what I’m saying here isn’t meant to be the usual derogation that people on opposite sides of the political divide routinely throw at each other.  I am literally saying that, for whatever reason, the stunting of the emotional and rational growth of the minds of those who are drawn to the hard core of the Left results in similarities in psyche and behaviour between the two groups.

The first and most obvious similarity revolves around the acceptance of wishful thinking as a credible alternative to verifiable reality.  This manifests itself in two related ways – the willingness to believe fantasies that have no credible claims to being truth, and the concurrent unwillingness to accept legitimate evidences which disagree with those fantasies.

Anyone who has kids knows that when a small child wants to believe something, they’re going to believe it, no matter what you say or show them to the contrary.  Children do this because they do not have a firm grasp on the nature of reality, since they’re still essentially learning from the world around them what reality even is.  They haven’t quite learned yet “how the world works,” so to speak, hence they’re still open to “other possibilities,” and assume that if they want these possibilities to be, then they can be.

Sadly, left-wing activists and SJWs operate on essentially the same set of basic premises.  Despite all evidences to the contrary, they will believe that homosexuality is normal, people can actually change their sexes, adult-child sexual relationships are healthy, large-scale third world immigration is enriching, computer simulations that predict extremes of global warming are credible reflections of actual climatological science, and so forth.  Instead of accepting that arguments to the contrary can even exist, much less penetrate their self-contained fact space, leftists will attempt to mold reality to their preferences by dismissing contrary arguments with one of more “signaling phrases” (i.e. racist, sexist, transphobic, etc.).  In this way, they believe they have negated the very existence of those contrary arguments, thus preserving their preferred perceptions.

Another area of similarity is seen in the social dynamics of cliquishness, which both children and leftists display in social settings.  We should understand that cliquishness involves much more than the mere existence of in-groups and out-groups.  Everybody has groups to which they belong and do not belong, and that is a fundamental factor in human sociability.  What makes cliquishness different is that it involves the purposeful engineering of social dynamics for the objective of establishing the power of and loyalty to one or a small group of actors within a set which normally would act as a broad in-group.  In other words, it functions as a way of destructively dividing a body of people who you would typically find bound together by more commonalities than differences.  For children, this could be classmates within a school setting.  For adults, it could mean anything from an office or church environment all the way up to the national level.  Ostensibly, children at a school are all there for the same purpose.  In the corporation, workers are, in theory, all supporting the company’s stated goals.  Within a nation, a sense of asabiyya, of social solidarity, is supposed to obtain.

The whole purpose of left-wing activism is to destroy social solidarity, and to do so in an ever-changing and unpredictable manner.  Within cliques, the accepted in-group is ever-shifting and individual members can be subject to sudden changes in status among the group based on anything from personal whim to the requirements of a newly imposed ideological orthodoxy.  This is seen regularly on the Left and serves to demonstrate the fragility of the Left’s intersectionality alliance.  This alliance is growing increasingly hostile, for instance, to white feminist women, even though these have been a mainstay of the Left’s power dynamics for decades.  At the same time, transgenders (who were barely visible even ten years ago) have suddenly become all-powerful within the Left’s hierarchy of victim groups, such that feminist women who object to cross-dressing men co-opting female identity are being marginalised and derided as “TERFs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists).

All of this has the overall effect of forcing members of the clique to radicalise, to become more fanatic about “proving” their devotion to the cause or to the leader of the clique, usually by becoming even more hostile toward those who are outside the clique and are considered acceptable targets for cliquish aggression.  This is exactly what we’re seeing in the USA and other western countries today – the Left is moving further left and self-radicalising to the point where it is becoming an actual physical danger to those outside the clique.

Children and leftists are also characterised by their emphasis on building and maintaining social organisation around the lowest common denominator.  If you’ve ever watched a group of children at play, one of the things they most consistently do is tear down those who are excelling at whatever the activity is, usually with accusations that the winner is “cheating” or is otherwise being “unfair.”  It’s usually the smart kids in school who get bullied, as well as the kids with “unusual” interests (like, say, chess or astronomy or reading) that seem more adult-like in their orientation.  Children actively seek to undermine the self-confidence of those other children who excel their peers.

Leftists do the exact same thing.  Despite all their “read a book” rhetoric, people on the Left generally don’t actually want you to read a book (unless it’s Harry Potter or some banal left-wing indoctrinational text).  People who self-educate tend to do so in wrong directions, hence from a leftist perspective self-education is dangerous.  This is what drives the left-wing push for Big Tech to censor “hate speech” on the internet.  At its root, the question is not really one of “protecting people from harm.”  Rather, it’s about insulating people from “dangerous” knowledge about things like human biodiversity or white genocide, which self-educators might learn about.  The ultimate goal is to restrict everyone to a lowest common denominator knowledge base while tamping down self-educators who get out of line.

Relatedly, another childish impulse is that which seeks to downplay or minimise the things that other kids are good at but which they are not.  Within a social setting with children where cliquishness is the rule, if an out-group child is good at running or playing basketball, then the in-group adopts the position that running or playing basketball are not important, or are perhaps even bad.  We see the same thing with those on the Left today.  Within the past year, I’ve seen various leftist outlets claim that (among other things) classical music, medical schools, proper grammar, and even logic itself, are all bad because they represent “whiteness,” which has become the new boogeyman for the radical intersectional Left.  Not surprisingly, all of these things require higher average IQ to appreciate or use, which many groups in the intersectionality alliance do not possess.  Hence, the downplaying and derision of things which “the cool kids” are not good at.

Children are known for having a high time preference, meaning that they are not willing to forego present gratification in lieu of delayed or future advantage.  As a result, children will have considerable difficulty with being willing to wait for the things they want.  Anyone who’s ever seen a child throw a tantrum in a store has seen that in action.  Likewise, it also means they will have trouble considering (or at least accepting) the ramifications of their choices.  They live in the present.  This is precisely the description of many, if not most, on the Left.  They want to buy votes NOW, regardless of future consequences.  They want free stuff NOW, and it’s racist or homophobic to ask who’s going to pay for it.

Lastly, children generally hold to the unspoken expectation that there should be no consequences attached to their actions, and will display anger when they are called to account.  Often they will scream about it being “unfair” when they are punished for bad behaviour.  This is basically the attitude of the Left writ large.  It drives everything from wanting to decriminalise socially detrimental behaviours of all kinds to demanding that celebrities like Jussie Smollett who belong to the “right” set of intersectional groups be allowed to evade consequences for criminal activities.  It is a temperamentally left-wing point of view to reject the legitimacy or morality of judgment and consequences.  This is why so many atheists are found on the Left – despite its misapprehension of itself as “logical” and “based on reason,” atheism essentially exists to serve as a vehicle for pretending that future consequences for present behaviour will not exist – everything else is just window-dressing to that end.

Having said all of this, keep in mind that despite the everyday rhetoric from people on the Right, many leftists – especially those in the managerial tier – are not particularly low IQ.  Indeed, a good chunk of the activist Left probably falls around the +1 SD range (say, 115±10).  They merely seem low-IQ because they display many of the behavioural traits discussed above, which are not traits that the normal person would expect to find in socially functional adults.  It is a combination of dynamics related to their upbringing (or lack thereof), education, and so forth that encourages them to think and act in a childish fashion, since they are rewarded by the “boss lefties” for doing so.

Sadly, childishness does not necessarily imply incompetence or a lack of cunning when you’re talking about left-wing activists.  While under “normal” circumstances their acting childishly would not be too much of a problem, the Left has managed (through its long march through the institutions) to come into possession of a vast amount of institutional power in western countries.  Unfortunately, giving power to left-wing activists in a great deal like giving whiskey and a loaded pistol to an angry five-year old.   And this is exactly what the “boss lefties” who operate the levers of power and move the money around in the left-wing constellation of power centres have done.  They have essentially released an infantile and vengeful kraken upon the ships of state all across the West.  The rank-and-file leftists have used, and will continue to use, their power to punish those who oppose their worldview because this is what the bosses at the top want for them to do – overthrow the established social and political order so that it can be replaced per the mandates of progressivism’s “permanent revolution.”

Metaphorically at least, the state of the West is reflected in the biblical warning of judgment,

“And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them. And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour: the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honourable.” (Isaiah 3:4-5)

Overthrow of “adult” government and replacing it with that of the metaphorical, as well as literal, child is a surefire prescription for inculcating genuine destructive oppression into a nation.

This is contrary to what has been seen historically in most traditional, well-ordered societies.  Now, those in power have always used their power for their own ends – that’s one of the perks of power, after all.   There is nothing particularly wrong with this, in and of itself, being the natural order of things.  However, what is fundamentally different with the present regimes being enforced by the Left versus what has been seen with the general run of kings, aristocrats, and even republics of the past is that there is lacking a sense of noblesse oblige toward the commons.  In the past, kings and nobles generally understood the necessity of maintaining social cohesion and of demonstrating a reciprocal loyalty to the lower castes.  Obviously, this was not always the case in practice, but even a greedy or vicious noble understood at some level that he couldn’t stay rich and powerful if he killed or drove off all of his peasantry.

The short-sighted, vengeful, high time preference leftists, on the other hand, have no real grasp on this concept.  Instead, every policy that the Left pursues, politically or socially, is designed to destroy social cohesion by introducing division and resentment into the national body.  The requirements of permanent revolution demand the perfect dissolution of all society that has come before and its replacement with the next iteration of globohomogayplex.  Even previous liberalism, such as the republican and capitalist regimes of Europe and the Anglosphere, were never good enough to satisfy the craving of the Left to tear down and destroy.

This is the Left’s whole program.  Certainly, in the economic realm it involves the kulakisation and destruction of genuine free market activity (which is, let us understand, distinct from the megacorporation oligopoly found in modern capitalism).  In the social sphere, they want to destroy all forms of authority that would restrain them – the church, the family, the authority of the father in his own home.  They’re angry at “whiteness” so they want to flood white countries with non-white third worlders who will destroy the high trust, high functioning societies upon which successful white civilisation is built (a form of “racial socialism”).  They systematically punish the most productive and effective members of society – the white working and middle classes – so that the leveling effect of universal poverty may be obtained.

So, if these leftists are so clownish and infantile, then why are they winning?

Well, at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, it’s because the “boss lefties” which I keep referring to have essentially gamed the system to allow them to win, where they would otherwise not have been able to do so.  What again needs to be emphasised is that these folks are most definitely not childish.  They are deadly serious and their intentions for undermining and destroying existing societies and structures do not arise from puerile resentments, but from a carefully crafted desire for total worldwide domination (Christian readers will recognise this as the antichrist system predicted in the Book of Revelation).  The exoteric Left – what normal folks see around us day by day – is merely a tool being used by the forces of globalism, those people at the top of the illegitimate “aristocratic” system of modern “socialist capitalism” (which is not a contradiction in terms, by the way) who run the international banks, the international agencies, the supranational organisations like the EU, the international media conglomerates, and who move billions upon billions of dollars around to fund all of their initiatives.

So in a very real sense, the esoteric Left is the real enemy, but one which is hard to strike at.  Certainly they’re not unassailable, else they would already be all-powerful and wouldn’t have to rely on behind-the-scenes machinations and Big Tech manipulations to accrue power.  The great task in coming years for the dissident Right is to seek ways to throw a spanner in the works, which will necessarily entail opposing the exoteric Left and the clown world nonsense it is driven to push, even though that might seem to be striking at the wrong enemy.  It nevertheless is necessary to win the samizdat war which must be waged.

While I am not a populist in the sense of believing that power, of itself, should be given to the masses (which is a form of modernism and democratisation), I do believe that the commons play an organic role in the protecting the body of the nation from those who would seek to destroy its cohesion.  To that end, “waking up” the masses, turning them against the exoteric Left clown world agenda (which is possible, by the way), serves to increase the investment costs of the esoteric Left, which lessens the impact of any one application of their seemingly overwhelming resources.  War must be waged across all fronts, and the informational, “public relations” war is one at which the dissident Right needs to become much more effective.