On Neobarbarism
I heard about this on the radio on my drive into work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUk-5R14jE0
Adam M Smith, CFO of Vante, Tuscon AZ, harangues Chick-Fil-A girl, who maintains a professional demeanor throughout. He filmed this himself, and posted it, that he might spread his fame throughout the world of his proud accomplishment.
My comment: This is typical rather than extraordinary for the Left.
What we are seeing is a moral retard, offended that anyone would dare work for a company that upholds basic Christian decency, assuming a stance of moral superiority to lecture and hector his betters.
I heard on the radio that the self-righteous Mr Smith was surprised, even shocked, to discover that everyone thought he was a braying jackass rather than a Richard the Lionheart the Bold Crusader. That he is a financial officer haranguing a working girl, or, if I may say, one of the one-percent hectoring one of the ninety-nine percent, merely adds irony to the unpleasant dimensions of a blind self-regard.
Make that FORMER financial officer. He has since been fired:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/vante-tucson-az-regrets-actions-210200513.html
For many, many years I have been puzzled and astounded at the behavior on the Left, both what they say and how they act, and I cannot figure out if they are serious or just seriously stupid.
Many of them seem perfectly bright and morally upright if you talk to them on issues unrelated to the particular areas of their thought prison called Political Correctness. Within those areas, they act like men possessed by spirits or drunk on spirits.
In their private lives many PC Thought Prisoners are decent and generous, even while they promote and applaud evils large and small, from vulgarity to blasphemy to pornography to sexual perversion to social breakdown to violent riots to tyranny and terrorism and genocide. They will help an old lady across the street, but protest when bold leaders resist and fight the Soviet Union or the Jihad, and do all they can to aid and abet these and other purveyors of unimaginable evil.
If it is not ignorance and not devotion to evil, what is it?
Political Correctness seems to be a psychopathology caused by the use of false-to-fact analogies and emotional images rather than rational thought.
To the PC Thought Prisoner, affirming the family is the same (by analogy) as opposing sodomy, and sodomites are regarded not as the practitioners of a disordered sexual appetite but (by analogy) as a separate race or ethnic group who suffer unjust persecution, such as slavery or Jim Crow laws. Hence, reasoning entirely by analogy, if a seller of chicken sandwiches and waffle-cut potato fries affirms the family (which, to sane men, is a comment as boilerplate and boring as being in favor of Mom and Apple Pie and the Flag) to the PC Thought Prisoner, that man is (by analogy) a slaver and a segregationist.
The emotions of the PC Thought Prisoner are, I suspect, a mixture of sincere outrage and a type of method-acting that is utterly insincere, but has by long habit become second nature.In other words the emotion is real, but the cause of the emotion is imaginary.
To the PC Thought Prisoner, hectoring a girl selling the chicken sandwiches is (by analogy) the martyrdom of Saint Telemachus.
For those of you who forget the bravery of saints and heroes of days long past, Telemachus was an graybeard monk visiting the Colosseum in 404 AD to behold the Games in their terror and splendor. Upon witnessing the gruesome spectacle of men slaughtering each other for the idle pleasure of the mob, Telemachus scaled the wall onto the bloodstained sands to interpose himself in between two gladiators. He shouted thrice: “In the name of Christ, forbear!” And the enraged crowd rose up and rioted and stoned Telemachus to death for interrupting their afternoon’s entertainments. Upon hearing this report, the good emperor Honorius commanded the gladiatorial games abolished forever.
Reasoning by analogy, the PC Thought Prisoner sees traditional marriage as an institution as oppressive as the gladiatorial games, and in the name of sexual indecency to urge a clerk to desist from her fastfood sales is the same as Telemachus in the name of Christ urging the gladiators to desist from their bloody sport.
Mr Smith was perhaps expecting the palm of the martyr. Small wonder he filmed himself and spread it abroad. Unlike the heroes of old, most PC Thought Prisoners expect the palm without the pain. They want only easy victories, and universal applause. They want praise for what they have not earned, and plaudits for what they have not done.
(Even for Christians, if you can stomach her bile, Ayn Rand is worth reading, because she has the psychology of these creatures perfectly and clearly autopsied. They are spiritual looters. The PC Thought Prisoner wants a moral dignity for which he has not paid.)
And the PC Thought Prisoners scream like brats when they do not get their way. Their complaints are loudest when the affront is least. (Recall the example of Lawrence Summers being expelled as Dean of Harvard University for listing biological differences as one of several possible factors to investigate to explain an inequality of number of women go into the hard sciences less than men.)
The screaming in this case has already started, or at least the pouting. The mainstream press, or so I have heard, has already given more press coverage to the “kiss-in” planned August 3rd, the anti-Chicken protest planned by the sodomites, than was given to the Chik-Fil-A day “buy-cott” on August 1st.
All I can say about this is that, reasoning by analogy myself, the mainstream media reminds me of the parents of Violet Beauregard from Roald Dahl’s CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. The press applauds and enables and encourages and flatters and pets the PC Thought Prisoners, and tells them that they are indeed Crusaders like Lionheart and Martyrs like Telemachus.
But seeing these events unfold, I finally begin to understand the psychology of the PC Thought Prisoners. I begin to see why they act like men possessed, men drunk, men unable to reason except by analogy.
They are barbarians.
A barbarian is a man who understands no civilized things, neither rule of law nor courtesy of court nor self sacrifice of the saint nor the courage of the hero nor the purity of the virgin nor where and how the luxuries and prosperity of the city are created.
To the barbarian, all these things come out of nowhere and pass into nothing at the whim of omnipotent and unseen goblins or fates or the inhuman materialistic forces of history.
The barbarian always feels inferior, always imposed upon, always insulted by the grandeur and honor of civilization, the soaring columns, the impartial justice, the awe-inspiring libraries of the accumulated lore and learning of centuries.
To the barbarian, all this is magic, and all of this is unfair.
He has been cheated by the goblins of fate of his due (for since it comes from nowhere for no reason, it was the bad juju of the oppressor that took it from him) and so his life consists of raids and thefts to restore to him what his envy tells him (reasoning by analogy) should by rights be his. No one has earned anything in the barbaric world view (nicely expressed in the slogan “You don’t Build That”).
To the post-christian post-modern barbarian, the mechanisms of the raid and the goods to be stolen are more often spiritual than material, the warfare more often legal than physical, but the impulse to eat the rich and loot their goods is never far from his mind.
The barbarian does not think in the long term. The past, to him, is forgotten, and the future is unforeseeable. This is why the modern barbarian of Political Correctness is unmoved by experience. All the failures of all socialist schemes means nothing to him because the barbaric mind cannot live other in the immediate moment. He eats his seedcorn because the idea of planting and harvesting in seasons yet to be is beyond the limit of his mental horizon.
A particularly sad example of this modern barbarism, this inability to think in the long term, was the Great Depression, which was caused by inflation of the currency and an artificial lowering of credit rates. The current depression was caused by the same economic behavior, this time with the housing market rather than the currency market; and the next one, which promises to be even larger, will no doubt be due to the same behavior in the student loan market. The economic behavior I mean is borrowing beyond one’s means or intention to repay. Inflating the currency is nothing other than a roundabout way of destroying the value of IOU’s and other debt instruments. All the convoluted nonsense, doubletalk, jabberwocky and bafflegab which is Keynesian economics is merely to cover up for this same economic behavior. The barbarian eats and drinks and make merry, and tomorrow he defaults on his loans and goes broke. When you have barbarians, especially New Deal barbarians, running the government, the whole nation defaults and goes broke.
Do you object that I am being too harsh? How could a refined Englishman of impeccable academic credentials like Keynes be considered a barbarian?
When told his policies would exacerbate the problem in the long run, Keynes merely smirked with impeccable wit, and said, “In the long run, we are all dead.”
Whether spoken wittily or vulgarly, Keynes just said “Piss Off!” to us, the generation that comes after him. We are living in his long run, members of the future Keynes was too self absorbed to bother with. Unconcern for the future is the slogan of the barbarian.
Now, you may object that the PC Thought Prisoners are very concerned about not just the future, but the remote future, the Global Warming which threatens to pounce a century or two from now, or other environmental concerns which might being to be felt in a thousand or ten thousand years. The PC Thought Prisoners are worried about overpopulation, which may crowd out space for growing trees by the year One Billion AD.
Don’t be deceived. To the PC Thought Prisoners, the “future” is a make believe place like the “Otherworld” found beyond the fairy mounds in Celtic folk yarns. It is a misty Cloudcuckooland who lack of reality allows them to paint any picture, utopian or dystopian, their current concerns inspire them to paint.
The PC Thought Prisoners talk about the future the way the Millenarians talk about “the End Times”; namely, as a culmination of a cosmic drama when all merely worldly concerns will fall by the wayside. If the Antichrist has already conquered Jerusalem, and the angels have extinguished one third of the Sun, all concern for long term plans and fears fall by the wayside.
Likewise with Global Warming and other secular, pseudo-religious forms of End Time prophecy: the point is not the think like a civilized man and prepare for things to come by making plans. The point is to prepare for the Second Coming by reaffirming your faith in the pious beliefs which sustain you. The difference is that the PC Thought Prisoners don’t believe in a First Coming.
The PC Thought Prisoners merely borrow the emotional flavor of Christian prophecy without borrowing the prophecy itself, which gives a reason for the emotion. This is yet again reasoning by analogy, but it is not the civilized planning for the future any farmer who stores his seedcorn must do.
But more than this, the prime and essential characteristic of a barbarian is his infantile self-regard combined with an embarrassing unmanliness in the face of adversity, suffering or toil.
The prime manifestation of this characteristic is cowardice combined with boasting of the sort we see in bullies.
What defines barbarism is the inability to imagine an honorable opponent.
If a barbarian strikes a girl, he laughs and vaunts with no trace of conscience, considering it an innocent amusement and a mighty victory. If a gentleman strikes a barbarian in return, he barbarian and yowls and rolls on the ground with tears streaming down his face, begging and groveling before the fight begins.
We saw this desire for preemptive surrender to the Jihad on shamefully shameless display in 2001. At the time it puzzled me, since it was so obviously self-destructive. Now I understand it. It was the groveling of barbarians.
The puzzle of why the libertine and semi-anarchic Left would ally itself with the Puritan Jihadists or totalitarian Soviets, otherwise impossible to explain, is simple enough. All barbarians are natural allies against their mutual enemy, that delicate wonder called Civilization. That they feud among themselves and hate each other does not obviate that fundamental and natural alliance.
To a barbarian, every war is total war, and every sleight and trick and treason is fair game. He tells lies because it would never even occur to him (were he in the other man’s shoes) to tell the truth, and he tells the simplest and laziest lie (the ad hominem) because inventing a believable lie takes effort.
He lacks the forethought to imagine a future where current foes might be allies and recall unmerciful treatment at his hands. The barbarian lacks the faith to imagine any foes might treat him justly or honorably (since he himself never so behaves); and he lacks the sportsmanship needed to be ashamed to boast when he wins and embarrassed to bitch when he loses; and lacks the moral imagination needed to be able to view other man as he views himself.
And so we have the spectacle of a man unashamed to pick a fight with a girl not only smaller and weaker than he, but bound by her trustworthiness to her post not to answer him discourteously. She must show him the same deference a servant of the old days must show a private master.
And yet he thought he would be applauded for this.
Only a barbarian, a childish and churlish bully, so thinks.
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.
