Paying the Rent
One
of the more puzzling things about the leftists is their immense
adoration of the lumpenproletariat underclass and its "authentic"
values. This is quite strange for me personally, because the underclass
values are so very antithetical to the goals and values that the left
generally professes to hold. Colour me cynical, but I find it difficult
to imagine that the average member of the underclass really is that
friendly towards feminism, multiculturalism or gay liberation, neither
in principle or in his practical actions. There is really only so much
you can expect from someone who has not once in his life read a book
about anything, but the academic left of course cannot even imagine the
immense dullness that necessarily results from such lifestyle and
upbringing.
In the eyes of the left, the underclass is noble and virtuous and thus completely innocent of their bad lot in life. The misery that the underclass has to face is never a result of any lifestyle choices they have made, but it results from their systematic oppression by you-know-who, so if we could just somehow get rid of this oppression, the underclass would happily join the rest of the society and make it a better place. Until then, all efforts to make the underclass think and behave more like the mainstream must be resisted, since even at best they create only "false consciousness" and don't really solve the underlying structures of oppression and repression. Just observe the leftist reactions whenever somebody suggests that the poor and the underclass must hold their end of the bargain in the society.
By far the saddest-funniest delusion of the left is surely that the police oppresses poor people, whose vibrant communities suffer from the "pigs" harassing and arresting their young men. It is especially hilarious when feminists say this, since otherwise they adamantly hold the view that men are not really needed for anything, except perhaps for their wallets to finance the feminist utopia. You can again colour me cynical, but I just don't see all those arrested criminals being good provider dads and role models in the mold of Ward Cleaver. There is also the certain unavoidable humour when a leftist complains that the state oppresses people and tells them what they can do, or when a feminist complains that the police and legal system are oppressive even though her whole ideology absolutely requires these institutions to enforce the feminist policies and punish the dissidents. (As a side note, the ultimate absurdity in this sense must have been when I once saw a Finnish anarcho-feminist petition for giving the the police more manpower to investigate rapess and making the justice system give rapists harsher punishments.)
Perhaps the most hilarious popular delusion about the underclass, curiously shared by both left and right, is the belief that there is some code of "street justice" that punishes wrongdoers and those who hurt women, children and other protected groups. For example, when the pedophiles or rapists become targets of prison violence. This probably happens, but not for such noble reasons. The real reason is that when a bunch of sociopaths have been prevented from getting their daily kicks in the real world, they will eagerly take their fun especially when they know that attacking certain targets is tacitly approved and almost expected by the society at large. Everybody takes approval where they can get it. But we could observe the real nature of prisoners simply by no longer sexistly separating the men's and women's prisons, and then seeing what would happen to female prisoners in a mixed-sex prison environment especially when there is one female prisoner for every ten males.
The writings of Theodore Dalrymple have permanently vaccinated me against such idiocies. The horrifying picture he paints of the underclass life is so bleak and realistic that I have no difficulty whatsoever believing all of it to be true. Since Dalrymple writes about the British white underclass that he personally encounters in his work, and often admires the poor nonwhite people who live good lives because of their virtue, diligency and values, the leftists don't get to dismiss his writings offhand as racist, but instead have to find other ways to ignore and ridicule them. Fred Reed has often written about his observations of essentially the same dynamics playing out in the American black underclass.
At least in the visceral level, the leftists know perfectly well the truth about the underclass and the poor. This is evident when you look where leftists typically try to live and send their children to school: as far from the underclass and the poor as their net worth makes possible. Very few leftists even bother to make token demonstrations of solidarity by actually physically meeting the targets of their adoration, but use their automobiles (doors strictly locked) to zoom past the areas where the underclass congregates, leaving their solidarity on the level of words. For all their talk about how the poor and the underclass don't really commit any more violent crimes than the middle class and the wealthy, the leftists sure seem to understand that the middle class and the wealthy are generally much nicer and cooler folks to hang around with, especially if you are a woman. Whenever middle-class hipsters try to act poor to be "edgy", they are still careful not to adopt any actual underclass values, since anything they try to achieve by their little act necessarily requires a higher-class value system to support it.
After all, for some mysterious reason, the quality of life in a neighbourhood strongly correlates with the percentage of its population who are welfare recipients, and when that percentage exceeds a certain threshold, that neighbourhood is said to be "bad". As evil and oppressive and uncool and worth mockery as the middle class is, things sure go down the drain pretty quickly when they decide to take their oppression and squareness somewhere else. (One thing that I have never been able to understand in the American culture are the complaints of "white flight" whenever they are combined with complaints of white people being evil racist oppressors. If I was myself hated and oppressed by some group of people, I would want my oppressors to move as far away from me as possible.)
There is probably a similar dynamic going on with the leftists and the underclass as is currently going on with leftists and muslims, whose worldwide mainstream (let alone the well-known minority extremist factions) makes even the Western conservative extremists such as Vox Day that the leftists so like to revile look like permissive social democratics in their social and political attitudes. Consistency doesn't therefore seem to be a big thing the leftists.
The real motivation for the leftists for their support of ideologies antithetical to theirs are actually totally transparent in the end. I don't think that I'll ever grow tired of quoting the money paragraph of the posting "Today’s treason of the intellectuals" by Eric S. Raymond, in which he states:
In the eyes of the left, the underclass is noble and virtuous and thus completely innocent of their bad lot in life. The misery that the underclass has to face is never a result of any lifestyle choices they have made, but it results from their systematic oppression by you-know-who, so if we could just somehow get rid of this oppression, the underclass would happily join the rest of the society and make it a better place. Until then, all efforts to make the underclass think and behave more like the mainstream must be resisted, since even at best they create only "false consciousness" and don't really solve the underlying structures of oppression and repression. Just observe the leftist reactions whenever somebody suggests that the poor and the underclass must hold their end of the bargain in the society.
By far the saddest-funniest delusion of the left is surely that the police oppresses poor people, whose vibrant communities suffer from the "pigs" harassing and arresting their young men. It is especially hilarious when feminists say this, since otherwise they adamantly hold the view that men are not really needed for anything, except perhaps for their wallets to finance the feminist utopia. You can again colour me cynical, but I just don't see all those arrested criminals being good provider dads and role models in the mold of Ward Cleaver. There is also the certain unavoidable humour when a leftist complains that the state oppresses people and tells them what they can do, or when a feminist complains that the police and legal system are oppressive even though her whole ideology absolutely requires these institutions to enforce the feminist policies and punish the dissidents. (As a side note, the ultimate absurdity in this sense must have been when I once saw a Finnish anarcho-feminist petition for giving the the police more manpower to investigate rapess and making the justice system give rapists harsher punishments.)
Perhaps the most hilarious popular delusion about the underclass, curiously shared by both left and right, is the belief that there is some code of "street justice" that punishes wrongdoers and those who hurt women, children and other protected groups. For example, when the pedophiles or rapists become targets of prison violence. This probably happens, but not for such noble reasons. The real reason is that when a bunch of sociopaths have been prevented from getting their daily kicks in the real world, they will eagerly take their fun especially when they know that attacking certain targets is tacitly approved and almost expected by the society at large. Everybody takes approval where they can get it. But we could observe the real nature of prisoners simply by no longer sexistly separating the men's and women's prisons, and then seeing what would happen to female prisoners in a mixed-sex prison environment especially when there is one female prisoner for every ten males.
The writings of Theodore Dalrymple have permanently vaccinated me against such idiocies. The horrifying picture he paints of the underclass life is so bleak and realistic that I have no difficulty whatsoever believing all of it to be true. Since Dalrymple writes about the British white underclass that he personally encounters in his work, and often admires the poor nonwhite people who live good lives because of their virtue, diligency and values, the leftists don't get to dismiss his writings offhand as racist, but instead have to find other ways to ignore and ridicule them. Fred Reed has often written about his observations of essentially the same dynamics playing out in the American black underclass.
At least in the visceral level, the leftists know perfectly well the truth about the underclass and the poor. This is evident when you look where leftists typically try to live and send their children to school: as far from the underclass and the poor as their net worth makes possible. Very few leftists even bother to make token demonstrations of solidarity by actually physically meeting the targets of their adoration, but use their automobiles (doors strictly locked) to zoom past the areas where the underclass congregates, leaving their solidarity on the level of words. For all their talk about how the poor and the underclass don't really commit any more violent crimes than the middle class and the wealthy, the leftists sure seem to understand that the middle class and the wealthy are generally much nicer and cooler folks to hang around with, especially if you are a woman. Whenever middle-class hipsters try to act poor to be "edgy", they are still careful not to adopt any actual underclass values, since anything they try to achieve by their little act necessarily requires a higher-class value system to support it.
After all, for some mysterious reason, the quality of life in a neighbourhood strongly correlates with the percentage of its population who are welfare recipients, and when that percentage exceeds a certain threshold, that neighbourhood is said to be "bad". As evil and oppressive and uncool and worth mockery as the middle class is, things sure go down the drain pretty quickly when they decide to take their oppression and squareness somewhere else. (One thing that I have never been able to understand in the American culture are the complaints of "white flight" whenever they are combined with complaints of white people being evil racist oppressors. If I was myself hated and oppressed by some group of people, I would want my oppressors to move as far away from me as possible.)
There is probably a similar dynamic going on with the leftists and the underclass as is currently going on with leftists and muslims, whose worldwide mainstream (let alone the well-known minority extremist factions) makes even the Western conservative extremists such as Vox Day that the leftists so like to revile look like permissive social democratics in their social and political attitudes. Consistency doesn't therefore seem to be a big thing the leftists.
The real motivation for the leftists for their support of ideologies antithetical to theirs are actually totally transparent in the end. I don't think that I'll ever grow tired of quoting the money paragraph of the posting "Today’s treason of the intellectuals" by Eric S. Raymond, in which he states:
Behind both kinds of treason there lurks an ugly fact: second-rate intellectuals, feeling themselves powerless, tend to worship power. The Marxist intellectuals who shilled for Stalin and the postmodernists who shill for Osama bin Laden are one of a kind — they identify with a tyrant's or terrorist's vision of transforming the world through violence because they know they are incapable of making any difference themselves. This is why you find academic apologists disproportionately in the humanities departments and the soft sciences; physicists and engineers and the like have more constructive ways of engaging the world.
Just replace Stalin and Osama with your common underclass thugs of any skin colour and the paragraph doesn't become any less truthful.
It is easy to understand why people argue or vote against their interests, like a well-off person voting the left, if you bring in sociobiology.
A rich person usually shows off among his peers by spending money on useless things like unnecessary large house or even handing out money in terms of charity. This shows that they are so wealthy that they do not have to care about money (for men this is something to use to pull in females as well). You do not have to be millionaire for this to happen all the time.
As charity is not a big thing in Europe, the wealthy intelligentsia votes the left and and also tells that they vote the left. They show this way that they can support for example high taxes which is against their own interests. This is perceived as generous among the surrounding society. Among their right-voting peers they are not thought to be as greedy and frugal, both negative adjectives for rich people.
Sociobiology works the other way, too. A working-class woman or man very often votes the right. This way they can show around that they can afford to have less tax-based goods from society. They are thought to be brave and self-reliant. In their hearts they may also hope that voting the right they can rise up in a class society either with their self-reliant work (men) or by associating with more up class men (women).
People are basically animals whose sociobiologic instincts run against, without a problem at all and without them realizing it, against their own interests in the real world.
Posted by geenistö | 6:18 AM