Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

special to tle

If I could communicate just one thing, across the increasing divide of language and thought to the left it would be this: that warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you’re running someone down is not righteousness.

It’s just the feeling apes get when they run off another ape.

If you’re part of a band and all of you were piling on an outsider — or an insider who was just declared an outsider and run off — you’ll also feel very connected to your band, and a feeling of being loved and belonging.

It’s not real. It’s the result of a “reward” rush of endorphins, oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine that flood your body after stress and a perceived “victory.” Oxytocin, particularly, promotes a feeling of bonding with those around you.

Just remember, as you’re high fiving each other and believing that something that feels so good has to be good and morally “just” you could be the victim tomorrow. Because the feelings don’t last, and that rush of “righteousness and victory” is addictive. Those who are your comrades today will be looking for someone to kick in the face tomorrow. And it really could be you.

I know there’s no point telling them that. The young ones were never taught to think, and frankly have been given no moral guidance whatsoever, besides (like all places whose communications and power structures have been taken over by leftists) “obey the party.” They have been reduced, in less than three generations to savages who cannot reason their way out of a philosophical paperback, even if it happens to be soaking wet, and instead identify good with “pleases the tribe.” They are therefore prey to the power hungry bullies in their midst, many of which are already addicted to the rush of victory. (And this is why I tell you not to let strangers raise your children.) And they’re scaring the living daylights out of me. And not the way they think they are.

Not the way they think they are, because the way they’re scaring me is not the way that will make me roll over to avoid confrontation. To be absolutely honest, I’m not sure there’s a way that makes me do that, anyway. I am broken in that I have a tendency to run screaming (and clutching something heavy) at whatever is scaring me. But I do have a default mode of “I’m too lazy to bother obliterating you” which causes me to ignore most people making threatening displays towards me (or say, manipulating their cat’s paws to keep me out of a con. Yeah. I saw that. One more move, missy, and I put in action my plan of taking a line a day from your copious social media use and making it famous for its total absence of thought and vicious idiocy. Keep it up and your name will become a laugh line till even your comrades are afraid of associating with you. You’ve been warned. At this point, only my laziness is saving you from having your lunacy exposed and mocked.)

But that’s besides the point. This is bypassing my laziness and engaging the “kill it before it grows” mode in my brain. Which I don’t like. I’m middle aged. My kids are almost on their own. Running around the hills with Kalashnikov has lost all appeal.

More importantly, if this goes hot I don’t think what emerges on the other side is a constitutional republic. And while not all other forms of government are bad (well run empires are okay. The problem being “well run.”) they all are more dangerous, in the sense that their triggers for going totalitarian are more easily tripped.

I just don’t know if we can avoid going hot. Not if the left keeps on the path it’s been.

You see, they took the wrong lessons from the 20th century. You could say they took the wrong lessons because the totalitarian-sympathizers in education and academia made sure they did so.

It simply wasn’t convenient to people who by the time the Nazis fell were mostly communist or socialist to point out that what happened under the Nazis was what happens every time under totalitarian and economically deluded regimes. Because then someone might take a close look at good ol’ uncle Joe and see his own death camps, massacres and enforced famines. Or the others around the world in regimes that STILL make the left moist with desire like the PRC.

So instead they took the one form that the National socialists of Germany had given to their murderous craziness and made that what was bad. I.e. despite the fact that the national socialists murdered in service of an invented theory of greatness that had no basis in reality, the left chose one aspect of that theory to blame for everything: the obsession with race.

Look, racism is insane. And it’s all over the left, right now, in their belief that culture is the same as race, and that therefore to disapprove of cultural dysfunction is to be racist. They, themselves are racist for subscribing to that theory. They’re also wrong on all levels, from genetics to history to human behavior, but never mind.

They are comfortable blaming racism for the evils of the 20th century because they never see their own racism (yes, wanting people of color to behave in a certain way, denying them agency, and also fetishisticizing them as the saviors of Marxism IS racism, kiddies) AND because they are happily and willfully unaware of the much greater numbers of dead under regimes that outwardly had no racial component to their crazy cakes theories. (Outwardly? Well, yes. Because communism — the Donner party of political theories — reduces everyone to abject poverty and need until they eat each other. And societies under stress enforce conformity. Racial minorities, or anyone visibly different, propaganda to the contrary, did not do well in the soviet union. And I would bet you cash money they’re pretty uncomfortable in Venezuela right now.)

However, what their obsession with the racial component of Germany’s mid-century murder spree has done is make it impossible for them to see what really causes it.

Any regime, any human group who walls out any other group for any difference can end up that way. If you think white males cause all the evil in the world; if you think you have the right to destroy people’s livelihood and careers because their opinions differ from yours; if you get a righteous and unexamined rush of mistreating people that you identify as “evil” and “not really people” you might as well be on the streets in your brown shirts, breaking windows.

This is how our maleducated youth has come around to believing crazy crap like that the Jews control the world, or that the rich are “hoarding the stash” without which we’d all live on unicorn (but not cow) farts and rainbows.

Because it’s easier to blame a group of people who have never actually done you any harm (expressing a contrary opinion is not causing you harm) and going after their ability to survive than to examine history, or look in the mirror and see the angry ape looking back.

And the more crimes you commit for your “victory rush” the less you’ll be willing to admit you were wrong and crazy.

This is how normal Germans — then the most civilized nation in the world — came to lie to themselves about the camps, even when they could smell the smoke and see the victims. This is how they could even pile on, and take the goods of those marched out to the camps with a clear conscience.

They’d made them non-people.

And the important thing there is not that they were doing this to racial (or other) minorities. The important thing is that they were this to a large group of people that their leaders had told them were bad-evil and not really human.

It’s a very ancient human mechanism. And one that has few brakes, short of an entire group of people having a moment of sudden recognition and rejection of everything they were taught.

And I can’t remember a single time in history that happened without massive military defeat first.

And no matter how much the rest of us wish to hold off, at some point the switch flips, and we’ll go after them as hard as they’ve been going after us. Only we’re competent. And frankly a lot more vicious than they can even imagine.

I wake up screaming.

 

Reprinted from According To Hoyt for March 22, 2019