The Unreality Principle
A reprint of a column from 2006. I thought it worth posting again, because Mark Levin read an column of mine using the phrase ‘the unreality principle’ on the air, but not an explanation of what it means. I give that explanation here.
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Do they want to live?
This is from Frontpage Mag, an interview with one Rima Greene. She is one of the (alas, far too few) Jews of the Left who recognize the growing anti-Semitism of the Left.
She had been a member in the 1970’s of a rural all-women community of socialist feminists, but was shocked upon her return from a trip to Israel to discover that her feminist and lesbian friends favored the Arabs over the Israelis, even though Israel is the only nation in that part of the world where women can be free, and homosexuality is legal.
She found herself reduced to the status of an unperson, because the god of the Progressives is a jealous god, and no man can be Jewish, and have loyalties or love for his home, and also serve the Cause.
Please read the whole thing. It is fascinating and heartbreaking all at once.
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/04/01/a-leftist-feminist%E2%80%99s-journey-out-of-the-political-faith/
When I was part of the Left, I thought “evil” and “enemy” were outdated concepts brought on by indoctrinated mental patterns. When I was at a peace camp in Portugal – a German peace community – I met the people who’d paraded through Israel with the banner: WE REFUSE TO BE ENEMIES. This is new age thinking, that you can refuse reality and just keep going on your merry way. We as Jews are targeted. We as infidel Americans are targeted. We are the ultimate prize as the Big Satan — although Jewish blood is the best for the West’s contemporary adversaries.
We do not grasp the mental universe of our enemies. Their obsession with our blood, their obsession with butchering us. They are like an army of vampires. They actually want to suck our blood. Especially Jewish blood. We in the West have not a clue. They do not just want to kill us any old way. Poison gas will not do. They want to spill our blood. I could never make this stuff up. That is what I was trying to sort out with the Daniel Pearl incident, but my friend tried to put a stop to my thinking by calling me a racist.
[…]
When I started really understanding that Israel is in continual danger because of a theological commitment to destroy us, and that includes me, as a target, my body got it, my creatural body that fights for its survival with everything it has. That is a missing piece on the Left. My old buddy from high school, a famous Jewish anti-Zionist academic, would rather die in a plane terror incident than have “racial profiling.” I said, “It could save your life.” He said, “I don’t care. It’s racist. I don’t care.” It was a kind of petulant: “I don’t care.” It’s like a three-year-old’s outlook.
[…]
On the Left, with the “universal” values supposedly which transcend the need of the Jewish people to survive, there’s an ideology that Jews are selfish for wanting to survive together, as a collective. It is raw naked anti-Semitism.
My comment: The central tenet of the cultic and hysterical mental disorder called Leftism is what I call ‘the unreality principle.’ This is the principle, baldly stated, that reality is bad and unreality is good, therefore unreality is real.
The second tenet coming out of this first principle is that anything one would like to believe about Leftism is real, and the that facts are not real. Hence, the Leftist believes his cult is not a cult.
To the Leftist, the Christians are cultists; but the Leftist and his fellow are merely awake and aware people in a land of foggy sleepwalkers.
He and his are the only people who see the true danger from Global Warming, the danger of Zionism, the danger of Theocracy, the danger of Capitalism, and the danger from racism, sexism, and homophobia.
All these threats are clear, present, impending, terrifying and justify any action, from simple suppression of the truth to riots to state-sponsored mass murder, that the imagination of man can conceive in his dark heart. Leftism is scientific and enlightened.
The third tenet is that there is no war, there is only rebellion. Any action fought overseas is merely the Vietnam war over again, and not the real Vietnam war, which was meant to protect the innocent from slaughter and slavery at the hands of inhuman totalitarianism (and which American was winning) but the make-believe version of Vietnam the television generation saw over their televisions: the world where dope-addled psychopaths and draftees burned villages in order to save them, fighting against a dignified yellow-skinned people who sought only the preservation of their lives and property against the evils of spreading world capitalism. The unreal Vietnam War was a pointless expression of pure evil by The Establishment.
By the logic of the Unreality Principle, every war is that make-believe war: futile, useless, cruel, meaningless, evil, and something that sinister moneyed forces stir up for their own profit. I am old enough to recall when the Crusades of the Middle Ages were a matter of pride rather than shame. I am old enough to recall seeing World War Two portrayed in films and television as a noble war fought for a noble cause, not merely the collection of the firebombing of Dresden, the atom bombing of Hiroshima, the aggression of FDR and Churchill, and excuse for rounding up Japs into internment camps. Nowadays, even in comic books, our own government is always the enemy or in cahoots with the enemy: there is no foe but the Establishment.
In Unreality, all overseas wars are meant to extend or conserve the evil power of the evil powers. The only enemy is here, and rules us. Hence, the only fight is a rebellion.
This is all is eerily similar to the Gnostic belief that the world is an illusion created by an evil demiurge in order to trap the souls of us, we enlightened who are actually gods in disguise. Thou art God.
The unreality principle is a principal of despair. Despair is the default state of pagan man. It can take the form of grim stoicism, which vows to endure all suffering through self-reliant self-discipline; it can take the form of hedonism, which fiddles while Rome burns, and resents any imposition on its self indulgence, fornication, and abominations; it can take the form of Buddhist resignation to the world and the self as deceits, and escape is promised only into the serene non-being of Nirvana; it can take the form of Confucian pragmatism, which concentrates on maintaining the social order, and does not fret about deeper questions of the origins of the universe or the meaning of life.
And, more to the point, it can take the form of the unreality principle, the idea that man is sufficient unto himself to invent his own life and his own reality by unleashing the power of make-believe. The Modern mind is too undisciplined for Stoicism, too sensuous for Buddhism, too individualistic and ungovernable for Confucianism. These are not the philosophies lazy, fat and happy people find comfortable.
The nobility we normally associate with paganism, the dignity of Cato of Utica or Socrates who face death without flinching, or the grave good humor of Lao Tzu, the gravity of Pythagoras, the beauty the sculpture of Phidias, the beauty of a proof in Euclid — none of this is present in the modern version of paganism. This is because modern paganism is not paganism at all, but postchristianism, a corruption of a higher thing falling, not the innocent early growth of a low thing rising.
Despair can be seen in the art and literature of these modern heathens, which is why it is so ugly and ungainly: why they prefer Mervyn Peake to JRR Tolkien. You understand that a man in true despair does not long for the hope he has lost, he resents hope as a falsehood, a will o’ the wisp, and misleading or childish or unscientific. Their art and literature is based, not on an indifference to beauty, but a hatred of it. I mention the rise of movies whose only allure is to see the characters slowly and painfully tortured both physically and psychologically merely as an aside and an example. This is their world view.
One escape from the grip of despair is to cling to some pretty vision, some image in the clouds, and to pretend it is real so fiercely that one can deny the pain and emptiness that otherwise overwhelm. Ironically, this is the Leftist criticism of Christianity. They, who believe that the fairy unicorns of Gaea-friendly Green socialized welfare must save us from the bad goblins of global warming who otherwise will drown the planet next month, and accuse us, who believe in the Rights of Man as well as the Fall of Man, of being illogical and unrealistic.
WE REFUSE TO BE ENEMIES. Or, in other words, if you clap hard enough, children, Tinkerbell will come to life again. That is the unreality principle.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
