By Daniel Greenfield June 08, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog
“Abortion
is sacred,” Planned Parenthood declared. Biden told Dylan Mulvaney that
banning transgender child mutilation is “immoral”. The head of the
Public Religion Research Institute preaches about the “sacred work of
white discomfort” in defense of critical race theory.
It
is a mistake to think of the Left as a secular movement. People don’t
throw their lives away for a set of ideas. They don’t turn on their
parents, societies and entire way of life over abstractions. Only
something that touches their deepest selves and offers them that sense
of purpose and meaning in a broken world that religious people call
revelation and holiness summons that fire.
That leftists don’t
believe in a central deity is confusing to monotheists, but what they
believe in is far older, a hybrid of primitive mysticism, laboriously
revived by western romanticism, and theoretical acadamese nurtured by
over two centuries of dilettante students, professional radicals and
assorted megalomaniacal cranks who litter the history of socialism.
What
these two strands of the western leftist worldview have in common is
their conviction that there is an underlying sense of order, found in
sociological patterns or energy auras, theories of race or tarot cards,
that explain everything and that by mastering them we can transcend and
fundamentally transform the universe, and everything in it, including
our societies and ourselves..
This is the continuum linking paganism, academic theories and conspiracy theories.
Where
leftist theology starkly divides from western and eastern monotheism is
in the notion of divinity not as a central intelligent point of being,
but as a hidden meaning scattered throughout existence to be decoded by
human intelligence and spiritual striving. That is why leftists were
attracted to eastern religions before dumbing them down into New Age
mysticism.
To the Left, there is no God, but we all have the
potential to become gods by mastering the secrets of the universe,
whether that means technotopian transhumanism or becoming one with the
AI gods they intend to create, forcing everyone into an ideal society
that will unlock human potential, or figuring out the right energy
patterns to usher in the age of aquarius. While seemingly very different
approaches, the various utopian strands of leftism speak to a common
yearning that pits them against the traditional beliefs of the societies
they aspire to overturn.
The Left’s intellectual pursuits are
primarily aimed at analyzing how power is distributed in a society.
These academic and journalistic critiques build up to justifying its own
power grabs. And the Left excels at analyzing and seizing power because
power is its only source of meaning.
Much as ISIS leaders
boasted that their brutal executions and mass rapes were their forms of
prayer, politics is the religious practice of the Left. It has become
the only truly meaningful expression of its beliefs after its social
experiments in implementing its way of life through cults, communes and
private arrangements fell through. Such side projects have been replaced
by a white collar movement embedded in the managerial class of
governments and corporations.
This movement is animated by a
culture war in which all morality is reduced to power. The redemption of
the nation and the salvation of the planet depend on a leftist takeover
implemented by a white collar cult that has put its career aspirations
and wealth at the service of leftist dogma in return for the conviction
that the professional aspirations and privileges of its members are
redemptive. An Ivy League education, an academic position, and a
corporate executive’s office are no longer just personal achievements,
but a moral crusade.
Mimetic movements like the Left take on the
characteristics and eventually become the thing they are imitating.
After spending all that time working from within the system, they have
become the system. And the system has become them. Bureaucrats and CEOs
have adopted the protective coloration of leftist virtue signaling to
cover their many sins much as leftists adopted the protective coloration
of government and corporations to cover their agenda.
The
bloated ranks of government, academia and corporate monopolies merging
into one blob is a symptom of leftism. The Left always thinks in terms
of systems rather than people, of rulesets rather than values (despite
devoting a good deal of its cultural propaganda to asserting that it
does the opposite, but the easiest way to understand leftism is to
invert every one of its claims to find the truth) and it is turning
societies into hives of systems and rules.
But systems are
leftist forums of religious experience and moral fulfillment. A leftist
church is any institution and its service is a collective takeover of
that institution. But the momentary triumph of the takeover is never
enough. When these systems fail to achieve their utopian promise through
technocratic rulesets, as they always must, they come to serve their
primary purpose of destroying everything that sinfully exists to clear
the ground for a glorious tabula rasa, a blank page,and a new form of
man, for a new creation.
Each leftist failure serves as evidence
that not enough of the past had been destroyed to make way for the
future. That is why killing or sexually mutilating children, or racism,
are sacred.
Much as to ISIS and Islam, destruction is sacred, so it is to all radical movements.
When
construction fails, the only path forward is through destruction.
Communist dictatorships drove millions out of cities or farms,
controlled everything they read and thought, and when that failed killed
millions. Declaring war on whiteness or deconstructing sex are more
precise and intimate forms of destruction meant to also usher in a new
future.
The “right side of history” requires completely remaking mankind. And that’s an ugly business.
Construction
is tedious and the Left isn’t any good at it. Building systems and
rules is different than actually creating anything. What the Left excels
at is taking over existing systems by exploiting their weakness. But
when the Left is actually able to build its own systems and rules to
implement its own agenda, it discovers that the systems and the rules
don’t actually do anything. Leftist bureaucracies ossify into pointless
exercises once they no longer have enemies to defeat. When the USSR was
stalemated by the Cold War, its Communist Party lost any reason for
being and collapsed under the realization that it had no function except
stealing.
The most reliable way to kill the Left is to give it
total power, but deprive it of external ambition. In real life, George
Orwell’s 1984 dystopia would not have lasted for generations, let alone
centuries, its dedicated sadists and fanatics, as embodied by O’Brien
would have killed each other off, as the Bolsheviks did, leaving behind a
cowardly bureaucracy with no vision.
The fanatical sadists are
overriding the normative impulses of the professional managerial class
that the leftists have become in America, as they did in the Soviet
Union. Riots or mutilating children remind them that they’re not just
diversity deans or think tank experts, they’re the radical vanguard of a
movement that is going to achieve what all religions have failed to do.
Abortion,
mutilating children and racism are sacred acts because they promise to
break through the complacency of the system, the routines of a suburban
lifestyle, the commute, the meetings and the minutiae of inhabiting the
system with orgies of blood and pain. Like Pol Pot murdering everyone
wearing glasses for being westernized, the leftist system strives to
transcend itself through ritual acts of destruction in the hopes of
finding the secrets of the universe.
Transgender experiments on
children began out of a conviction in human malleability. If men can
become women, then they can perhaps become more than men. Eliminate sex
roles and the family structure, and it becomes possible to imagine an
entirely new form of society. And, less ambitiously, destroying western
civilization is a prerequisite to building a new civilization.
What
does a post-civilization look like? Like the surgically mutilated
post-men and post-women, like the children never born, like ex-Soviet
ghost cities and mass graves from China to France, these are the evil
dreams of things that never were because they could never be.
Religion
without god is a dream that slowly becomes a nightmare, cults of
personality, human sacrifice and the search for meaning where there is
none. Madmen create their own patterns, they find their own truths in
the burning sun and in hallucinogens, and then write them in pain and
terror on the bodies of their willing and unwilling followers searching
for a reason to live.
The Left is not, as it believes, a new
story, but a very old one, and though it prides itself on knowing many
things, true and untrue, about the world, the one thing it does not know
is that which men of religion and philosophy make a point of knowing,
the knowledge of the self.
Leftists correctly believe that the
world is filled with meaning, but what they fail to understand is the
meaning of that meaning, believing that within those patterns are the
secrets to absolute power, when what actually lies in those patterns of
meaning is the One who made them.
Denying that truth, they worship power and then blood, they search for paradise and find death.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
