Why does the left act the way they do? Having pondered this question for a while, I have come up with a beginning answer. First I will list five things that motivate people on the left. After I list the five, I will point out various aspects of the leftist personality. Then I will contrast the motivation of people on the right–Christians and others who self-identify as being on the right. I will also have some concluding marks with which to, uh, conclude.
It sounds confusing, perhaps, but it actually should unfold in a logical pattern. Anyway, here goes. I will start with five things that motivate people on the left.
1/Leftists want to tell other people what to do, and to push them around. O’Brien in 1984 (George Orwell), himself a leftist, explains. ‘”If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–forever.”‘ (p. 220) He also told us why leftists want power.
‘”Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”‘ (p. 217)
Of course there are degrees of pushing people around. There is hard totalitarianism, and there is soft totalitarianism. People who don’t believe that they want to stamp on the human face forever, will find themselves acquiescing in the instructions of their hard totalitarian leaders.
2/Leftists want to think well of themselves. They want to consider themselves righteous–more righteous than other people. This point is much more important than might appear at first. Listen to the leftists. They hate and despise the rest of us. The reason they feel this way is that they are convinced they are righteous people, whereas we peasants are “deplorable” and “irredeemable,” morally far inferior to the leftists, who consider themselves generous and tolerant.
For a book demonstrating the thinking process of the left, consider reading Thomas Sowell’s wonderful The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.
3/A third motivation of the left is their desire to live at the expense of other people. Notice how all the programs supposedly aimed at giving things to poor people, also give highly paid salaries to middle class bureaucrats. Add up the people who work at the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, etc., etc., and you will find that they are numerous. They accomplish much less than nothing–they accomplish disaster–but they are very well paid for what they do.
4/The leftists are motivated by a hatred of reality. Reality is simply too hard. Reality, for just one example, says men are men, and women are women. Well, that is simply too hard. It is ridiculous, in fact. Men can be women, and women can be men. Children should not be assigned a gender at birth. They should choose their own gender, when they are ready to do so.
Reality says we need to work to provide for ourselves, or not eat. Well, that is ridiculous. Why should people–many of whom were born in challenging circumstances–have to work, often at ill-paying jobs, to provide for themselves? They shouldn’t. They should be given a living wage.
5/Leftists are motivated by hatred of the God of the Bible. This is so because He gives us such stringent rules on how we are to live, and those rules do not fall into accord with the morality of the leftists. What a bully! What a prude!
It is possible that this fifth motivating factor in the lives of the leftists is the key to the other four. Stop hating the God of the Bible, and maybe one would also drop the other four motivations as well.
Now that we have working theory as to what motivates leftists, let’s look at some aspects of leftist behavior. We will do this very briefly, for the most part simply listing the behavior. Let’s use the alphabet to enumerate these few aspects–others could be listed–of the leftist behavior. (We need to be grateful that the alphabet is always in the same order; where would we be if the dictionary started putting t before b?) The aspects are listed in no particular order, and in some cases one aspect very well may shade into another.
a/Leftists are unconcerned about justice; they just want to run things.
b/Leftists seem to lack sympathetic imagination. They seem unable to picture the horrors they unleash on other people. Iraqi women and children blown apart? They can’t picture that.
c/Leftists are baby killers. An unborn child in the womb? Why has that child not been murdered?
d/Leftists never learn, because they have no desire to learn. They are tellers, not learners.
e/Leftists are illogical.
f/Leftist are liars because they are of their father the devil (John 8:44).
g/Leftists want to manipulate other people rather than speak the truth to us. (Of course this one follows logically from point f.)
h/Leftists want to be part of the (winning) crowd. Thus they display what has been called a “hive mind.”
i/Leftists lack humility; they have an extremely exaggerated opinion of their own moral goodness.
j/Leftists are filled with hatred. If they were not filled with hatred, they would be much more willing to leave other people alone.
Those, a through j, are a few aspects of leftists’ behavior. Leftism is not a sickness. Sickness is something that can come to anyone. Everyone can be and often is sick, simply because life includes sickness in large and small degrees.
Rather, leftism is a moral failing. To think and live as a leftist, is to be on the side of evil against good.
Now we will try to see what motivates the Christian/rightist. There should be a tremendous difference.
1A/Christians (let’s use that word to include others who are in some way conservative or rightist) are often willing to push other people around. The Christians were in very large numbers gung ho for the preemptive war on Iraq. They shrugged at the torture the U.S. has done. Surprisingly, Christians are very often supportive of the boot stamping the human face forever.
2A/Christians like to think well of ourselves. We think of ourselves as more righteous than other people. How could we not be? We’re on the side of the angels, and on God’s side, so of course we are more righteous than other people. But to actually be righteous, rather than just to say we are on the side of God? Hmm. Sadly, we are not so much eager for that.
Again, point 2 and point 2A are not well enough understood. We all are motivated, highly, to think well of ourselves. But do we think well of ourselves because we should, or because we want to?
3A/Christians seem to be largely motivated by a desire to live at the expense of other people. We give God 1/4 of the tithe He asks of us–which should have warned us what is coming in our behavior in regard to our neighbors. We want our children educated by our neighbors’ tax money, we want Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation, farm subsidies, and anything else we can get at public expense.
4A/Christians seem to have a very tenuous connection to reality. We don’t think we hate reality, but if that is so, then why do we act in ways to bring down disaster on ourselves? Why do we keep sending our children to public schools, when it should be plainly clear that public education is the enemy of our children and of our God? We may not hate reality, but a Martian looking on could be excused for guessing otherwise.
5A/We don’t hate God. But we don’t trust Him. What challenging laws He gave us! Surely He doesn’t expect Old Testament laws to be any sort of pattern for civil government in the modern world!? Certainly He needs to be a bit more modern.
Having contrasted Christian motivations with leftist motivations, we are shocked–shocked–to find that the motivations of the left and the right are not as tremendously different as we might have hoped and expected.
In fact, as writers like R. J. Rushdoony and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn have been trying to warn us in their writings (from the grave, now), “We have met the enemy and he is us” (thank you, “Pogo” author Walt Kelly).
There is an eternal leftist in the heart of each one of us, and we need to battle against that eternal leftist if we really hope to stand on the side of the angels and God. Right now we are motivated much as the leftists are motivated. That is why the world we are bringing into existence is such a mess.
I won’t try to go through Christian behavior concerning points a through j. It would be very instructive to do so, and would readily show that our behavior is often just as wretched as the behavior of the leftists.
However, I will address point i. I said that “Leftists lack humility; they have an extremely exaggerated opinion of their own moral goodness.”
Is not this a key to our moral failure also?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said the following, in The Gulag Archipelago [first volume]:
“Pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig.” (p. 163)
He wasn’t talking about just leftists. He was talking about all of us. He gave some examples from his own behavior. This is where we have gone so dramatically wrong. An objective look at our behavior demonstrates that we have an exaggerated sense of our moral goodness. We have lacked humility. Pride has grown on our heart like lard on a pig.
But we don’t have to keep on living like pigs. We have moral agency. We have Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The latter will lead us into all the truth, when we want Him to do so (John 16:13).
We don’t have to give in to our inner leftist. We can tell him to go suck an egg. We can be people who are marked by humility, cheerfulness, generosity, honesty, love of truth, godliness, humility, purity, love of learning, humility, and love of our neighbor (enemy or friend). Did I mention humility? If I didn’t, I meant to.
The left is motivated by their inner leftist. They hate God, hate people. They are suicidal (Proverbs 8:36).
We have been surprisingly suicidal too, because we have listened to our inner leftist, and have far too often acquiesced in his idiotic promptings.
Inner leftist, here is a carton of eggs. Please go and politely suck the entire dozen.