Bruce Charlton's Notions

I have often argued - from my position as an ex-insider - that there is an important distinction between the Old Left and the New Left.

The inflexion point between Old and New Left was in the middle 1960s, indeed it was probably - exactly - the summer of 1967 when the New Left became dominant! And since then the Old Left has been all but displaced in ideology.

The Old Left was Utopian - it has a very explicit blueprint of the society it was aiming at; and in its aggression the Old Left was mostly predatory - by revolution and conquest the Old Left attacked and tried to kill those societies which opposed it. The weapons of the Old Left were organised mobs, guns and tanks. The Old Left ideology was based on economics and class.

The New Left is the Left of identity politics, feminism, antiracism and (especially) the sexual revolution. And the New Left is a parasite, not a predator.

The New Left preys upon its host, sucks its host's vitality. The weapons of the New Left are infiltration, subversion and inversion. Its ideology is based upon emotions, not economics; a  multiplicity of minorities not class: it is passive-aggressive rather coercive. The New Left saps the strength of its victims; rather than overpowering them.

Both types of Leftism are destructive, are indeed self-destroying. The Old Left because its utopia was unsustainable; the New Left because its success as a parasite will kill the host.

But the New Left parasite continues parasitising, corrupting one after another of its host's functions - because that is its nature: short-termist, selfish, hedonic: without conception of greater purpose or meaning.

*

The Old Left were intellectual revolutionaries and traditionalists about sexual morality.

The New Left are intellectual revolutionaries and sexual revolutionaries.

*

(Well, that was how it started-out; but the Old Left became the New Left - and the New Left have dumped intellectual revolution whenever it comes into conflict with sex.)

*

The Old Left were quite often Christians - in England, especially, they were often strict and ascetic, often Nonconformist Protestants (e.g. Methodists and Quakers) - who eschewed luxurious living, were often teetotal and/ or non-smokers, worked hard, were strongly against gambling, were honest, and were altruistically public spirited.

This was the tradition of Christian Socialism and Ethical Socialism - people such as Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb (dishonest, however, when it came to the USSR), economist RH Tawney, Prime Minister Clement Attlee or social scientists such as my old friend Norman Dennis.

(Ex-Mormon) Philosopher Sterling McMurrin was of this type - a Liberal who served in the Kennedy Administration and supported the usual fashionable Lefty causes; his personal sexual life was apparently very traditional and maintained along strict Mormon lines.

An Old Leftist would preach and live intellectual revolution - he was a professional heretic; but would support laws and practices of traditional sexual and social morality - plain living, self-improvement, being useful.

But this kind of Old Leftist is now very rare, almost extinct - and has been replaced by the New Leftist.

*

The New Left (some of whom were around a long time ago) can be distinguished by their 'Bohemian'/ scoundrellish lives of sexual license - 'open' marriages with extra marital relationships, lovers and mistresses; multiple marriages; non-married partnerships; exploratory and non-heterosexual sex, and so on - including the likes of Bertrand Russell, Fabians such as HG Wells, Hubert Bland (mega-unfaithful husband of writer Edith Nesbit), Margaret Mead, Sartre, Foucault and pretty much all of the nineteen sixties and post-sixties counter culture leaders.

Such people preached sexual revolution, and they lived sexual revolution; and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they preached sexual revolution mostly because they personally wanted to live that way.

And they often strikingly dishonest, deceitful and exploitative in their personal lives - as inevitably seems to happen with people who focus their lives around quantities of extra-marital sex. They may get a pseudo-honest reputation for confessing their sexual adventures - but only because they are putting them forward as revolutionary virtues. 

*

In general, therefore, it is sex that distinguishes the Old and New Left.

If in doubt - look at the sexual behaviour, and you will see what kind of Leftist you are probably dealing-with.

In terms of motivation, it looks as if the Old Left were sincere in their intellectual revolution lived by it, put that first; and that is what they really wanted more than anything.

In terms of the New Left, it is apparently sex they are most sincere about; and for the New Left, politics is a vast rationalization of sex, and the revolutionary intellect is something which must be bound and muzzled whenever it threatens to constrain their sexual appetites and preferences.

*

Despicable as are the New Left compared with the Old, the Old Left as a whole did not emerge well from the sexual revolution. The Old Left simply became the New; and - while there were some who withstood sexual temptations - there were very few of the Old Left who remained anchored by their 'puritanical' principles when the tide of the sexual revolution began to rise about them.

Most of them pretty rapidly cut their chains and began to join in the carnivale of sexual subversion, boundary-transgression and inversion of morality as best they could - and to demonize anyone who raised any objections to the abolition of traditional morality.

When it came down to freedom of sexual expression versus freedom of intellectual expression on the Left - sex won; and with barely a struggle.

*

I suppose there must, somewhere, be an example of a prominent New Left political activist who has retained the traditional morality of the Old Left - A New Leftist who was or is, lived or lives, and publicly defends and advocates traditional marriage and family sexuality...

I just can't think of anyone offhand.

*

I have noticed (in my shallow, headline-perusing way of keeping in touch with current affairs) that both in the UK and the USA there is a pseudo-revival of 'socialism' as an explicit political platform in the coming elections - or indeed crypto-communism in the case of the UK Labour Party - where the leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the shadow Chancellor John McDonnell are both revolutionary communists.

But there are no real socialists or communists now; or at least none in public life or positions of power. Not a single one. The species is extinct.


The Old Left (dominant up to the middle 1960s) was primarily economic in its focus - hence the role of Karl Marx as a founding figure. The primary unit of analysis was class.

The New Left which took over, marked a massive change - leading incrementally to the Left as we now know it everywhere - where there is a 'rainbow' coalition of multiple 'units of analysis' including strands such as anti-white antiracism, feminism, pro-non-biological sexuality and sexual identification, anti-native/ pro-immigrationism etc.

(It is important to recognise that dishonesty is foundational to the New Left - without systemic lying there have no policies. Their first, and continued, lie was to suppress and demonise the mass of common observation backed by science that psychological, as well as physical, attributes differ between classes, sexes and races - and these differences are substantially hereditary. This fact invalidates the totality of New Left policy - or rather reveals it as purposively evil.)

In the UK, the watershed came with Enoch Powell's 1968 defence of the native, white working class men against the damage of mass immigration; in which the Establishment Left all united against Powell, and against the native male white working classes that had previously been (ostensibly) their main focus and highest priority.

At that time; the trades union representatives of native, white working class men still had a major role in UK government and public policy; after that time the Left was progressively and completely taken-over by the upper middle classes ('student revolutionaries' and bureaucrats) and a few of their tame puppets. Leftist policy became focused on psychology rather than economics.


What happened to the Old Left? Almost without exception they became the New Left.

Some, like the current crop of politicians claiming to be socialists, maintained Marxist economics and a kind of nostalgic affection for The Working Class; but in practice these are merely window-dressing - and are utterly swamped and negated by the vast New Left agenda.

The modern pseudo-socialists see Marxist economics merely as a means to the end of getting control of the apparatus of the state, and extending direct state control into all institutions - where it will be used to pursue a New Left agenda: e.g. pro-mass immigration and the sexual revolution. 

(The same applies to the Green/ Environmentalist agenda. It has been selected, distorted and lied about to rationalise the totalitarian takeover of everything. The Left has always been totalitarian, hence destructive; but the New Left's aim is much more wholly destructive than the Old Left. The Old Left aimed at the total destruction of Christianity specifically and tradition in general; but the New Left aims at the inversion of values - which is a more advanced and complete type of evil.)

The native, white male working class will be destroyed or converted into an underclass (indeed, this has already mostly happened).


That is the difference between socialism 60 years ago and 'socialism' now.

In the past sincere socialists wanted a Marxist Proletarian economic utopia; now 'socialists' want their hands on the coercive and propaganda power of the state to enforce a New Left agenda that has no place for the Proletariat.

And nowadays there are no sincere socialists in mainstream public discourse: Not A Single One. They are all liars, serving the Satanic agenda - the only distinction on the Left is between the few high level strategists of deliberate evil, and the mass of low level dupes and psychos.


Note: New readers should be aware that I was a serious (but anachronistic) Old Left 'Fabian'-type socialist for a few years from my middle teens, reading the theory and history going back to the late 19th century, and the earlier precursors of socialism. I joined the Labour Party on my 16th birthday, and gave branch lectures and held some representative roles before I had left school. I rapidly became disillusioned with the mainstream Labour Party but went through several other types and degrees of Leftism, including the most extreme form of anarchism I could find; not finally and fully abandoning Leftism (including New Leftism) until after I became a Christian about a decade ago. Indeed, it was only after becoming a Christian when I realised that the entirety of actual (and possible) non-religious/ secular politics is a variant of Leftism.   

*

To summarize...

Political correctness is a delusional system, based on thought disorder; that is to say it is false, dominating and un-tested against reality, because the cognitive process underlying PC is fragmented, non-consecutive.

*

PC depends upon at least two conditions: an intellectual ruling elite and a mass media.

The intellectual ruling elite are necessary, because only they have the disposition for abstraction, the preference to regard ideas as real, and to privilege ideas even when they are in conflict with (apparent) reality.

The mass media are necessary because the media are the cognitive process, the mode of thinking, of modern societies.

*

Political correctness is a mixture of bureaucratic Old Left and subjective New Left, the interspersion of a system of communist/ Fabian central planning with irruptions of counter-cultural hedonism.

*

The difference between the late Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era and political correctness in the West, is the presence of a mass media.

In the Soviet Union the media were instruments of state propaganda, they were dull and the amount of media was kept low.

In the West, the mass media are primarily attention-grabbing, vast and still growing, the content is vivid and varied.

*

Perhaps the New Left 1960s counter-culture would have happened even without a mass media to report and record it?

Perhaps the children of the intellectual elite would still have rebelled against the dullness, boredom and alienation of modernity - even if they were not being shown on TV and in newspapers?

But without the mass media, student revolutionaries would have had no lasting influence on national life.

Inchoate, hedonic rebellion is of itself fragmented, directionless and unsustainable.

It fizzles out.

*

But as it happened, the mass media was there, and the New Left did not fizzle out, but became integral to the mass media, which is to say that it became part of the West's cognitive process.

*

Of course, the New Left cannot be integrated with the Old Left, visceral hedonism cannot be fused with bureaucracy.

But they can be alternated.

The Old Left bureaucracy is the basis and mechanism of governance, that which holds together society, that which provides that which is provided.

But Old Left bureaucracy on its own is intolerable, a mere machine for growing itself.

The New Left injected into this (periodically) qualities such as excitement (e.g. sexual), purpose - or at least direction (greater pleasure - less suffering), and variety (e.g. multi-culturalism, the 'other').

The New Left made the Old Left interesting and inspiring and idealistic - but at a cost.

The cost of incoherence, of delusion, of psychosis.

*

What was necessary to sustain the New Left countercultural spirit was that it became connected-with Old Left bureaucracy.

Away from the mass media, the connection is intermittent - in the mass media the connection is apparent.

Some mistook the modern mass media for mere propaganda - it is indeed propaganda, but not merely.

Some mistook the modern mass media for mere entertainment - it is indeed entertainment, but not merely, 

The Eastern Bloc media were indeed merely propaganda - dull recitations of 'the party line'. Pure content.

Parts of the Western media have indeed been mere entertainment - 'chewing gum for the eyes'. Pure form.

But the characteristic, overall tendency of the Western mass media relates to both content and form, and is focused on a core of mainstream media which dominate intellectual elite discourse.

*

The Western mass media consists of competing institutions, which force it to be attention-grabbing, and drive its continual expansion.

The modern mass media is itself politically correct (staffed by the leftist intellectual elite) and also the virtual arena for the perpetual warfare of of political correctness.

The battle ground of PC with its enemies (the Old Left, conservatives, libertarians) is the mass media; and this battle is itself a major - perhaps the major - content of the mass media.

*

The battle of good PC versus wicked reaction is of course depicted in the news and documentary 'factual' mass media content - but also in the fictional, narrative content.

And of course these categories overlap - much of the purported factual content being actually fictional; much of the fictional stories and speculations actually being factual (by being treated as implicitly fictional and speculative, they become grist to the media mill rather than triggering real world responses).

*

The modern mass media therefore both coerces and trains elite intellectual discourse - and it does this by content to an important extent, but more importantly by form.

It is from the media that the modern intellectual elite has learned how to think; has learned how to alternate between Old and New Left, between a baseline of rational bureaucracy and frequent irruptions of unbounded utopian idealism. 

The mass media disciplines intellectuals and organizations who endanger political correctness: disciplines by exclusion, by demonization, and like an inquisition by targeting the anti-PC for action by 'the secular arm'.

*

And the fragmentary structure of the modern mass media itself shapes discourse.

The underlying leftism of both personnel and the bureaucratic system (both are necessary) provides the default politically correct assumptions against which anti-PC intellectuals are requires to prove their contentions.

But the fragmentary and alternative cognitive process of the mass media makes such proof systematically impossible.

*

Once political correctness is established then the psychotic cognitive process of the media ensures that it is insulated from challenge, insulated from reality. 

The modern intellectual elite are trained in this Old/ New Left PC cognitive style by the media, they are evaluated on their competence and commitment to this mode of PC discourse (and excluded from power if they are deficient in either respect), and they deploy it as a default wherever they dominate.

So - the necessary source of the PC delusion is the modern mass media, but this is not sufficient - PC also requires an intellectual ruling elite (and not a military or practical or priestly ruling elite).

*

If either the mass media or the intellectual elite were removed, then PC would collapse.

If the mass media were removed, then PC would collapse into Brezhnev-style centrally-planned communism (which would eventually collapse from demotivation).

If the intellectual elite were removed from power, then PC would be reality-tested and would rapidly collapse into reactionary politics: probably theocracy (or mystical nationalism) if the society is to remain at a large scale - or if theocracy is not effective, then small-scale tribalism. 

*

*

The old Communist idea of Permanent Revolution is now reality.

We live in a world that is based on the idea that that the true revolutionary – such as the avant garde artist or radical intellectual – is intrinsically subversive; and will always be in revolt against whoever was in power, changing sides as necessary to achieve this.

(This is how the word ‘subversive’ came to have its current positive and approving meaning for modern intellectuals.)

This is the modern type of Leftism: more specifically New Leftism.

*

By New Left I mean that the ideology of the Media is that of the post-1960s evolution and development of communism, socialism, progressivism and (US) Liberalism – the Leftism of Political Correctness.

The Old Left was mostly focused on the economy – Marxism was mostly an economic theory. Thus its analysis was based on an economic category of Class; and its tools were economic things like nationalization and redistribution of wealth. The most favoured group was The Proletariat, which was in practice essentially the native male working class of manual labourers, especially as represented by Trades Unions.

But the New Left is in practice almost indifferent to the economy; and instead focuses on a rainbow of identity politics, 'Human Rights', ‘the environment’, anti-racism, feminism and (most of all) promoting the sexual revolution. Consequently, the New Left has ‘switched sides’, and turned-against the native class of male manual labourers; and now strongly favours women, other ethnicities, the unemployed and economically inactive, and newly arrived immigrants.

*

The qualitative transition from Old to New Left demonstrates that there is no stable, long-term positive ideology to the Left/ Liberals/ Progressives – and even the most fundamental values and principles may at some point be discarded or reversed.

And although relativistic, the New Left ideology is not tolerant. Whatever is being asserted now is absolute, on the one hand and opposition is not considered reasonable.

Yet, despite this totalitarian intolerance of dissent at any given point in time; what has been treated in this absolute manner can very rapidly be dropped and replaced with some other, equally ‘absolute’, priority.

So in practice strong opinions are cycled and re-cycled, promoted then vilified, suppressed then revived, turned upside-down, combined and split into fragments... 

*

In the long-run, anything and all is grist to the Mass Media mill; no topic is sacred or fundamental; everything is up-for challenge, discussion, mockery, analysis, criticism – anything at all may be discarded and replaced with something else, or not replaced at all.

This behaviour is, of course, profoundly negative and subversive – in particular the relativistic ideology of the permanent revolution has been subversive of traditional and orthodox forms of religion (especially Christianity – since this has been dominant in the West); and also subversive of 'tradition' – in all its forms: subversive of traditional socio-political order (traditional hierarchies and specialisms); subversive of traditional concepts of truth, beauty and virtue; and perhaps especially, subversive of traditional sexuality including marriage and the family.

Furthermore, the New Left has been subversive of the Old Left values and institutions – of Trades Unions and Labour Parties, of rational central planning and nationalization, and especially subversive of the tradition Christian and Ethical socialists characterized by modesty, frugality, earnest toil and puritanical sexual ethics.

Despite its fanatically-opinionated campaigns in favour of this, that or the other; relativism is indeed over time a profoundly negative ideology –indeed relativism sooner-or-later undermines any positive agenda which may emerge – even its own ideas such as the dictatorship of the proletariat which at one time seemed so terribly important to such a lot of people in the Mass Media.

*

In sum, we live in a state of Permanent Revolution. 

Permanent revolution means that the dominant ideology has no positive goal or aim – the is no long-term plan to structure society in some permanently sustainable way; indeed whatever is was or is or may in future be achieved exists only to be dismantled and replaced when expedient.

This is, indeed, the primary and essential difference between the Old and New Left – the Old Left intended to make Heaven on Earth – Utopia. And then stop – and maintain utopia (because who would want to change utopia?).

And utopia justified the humanly unprecedented ruthlessness of the Old Left – the End was so wonderful that any Means were justifiable in trying to reach it.

But when utopia showed no signs of arriving, the revolutionary impulse began to feed-off-itself; and revolution succeeded revolution in an iterative cycle aimed at destroying the forces opposed to revolution – but without any genuine or stable long term purpose.

This is precisely how the modern Left works. Over time, it identifies, mocks, subverts, weakens, destroys and finally inverts and reverses any group or person that opposes revolution – but with no goal.

There is no stable, explicit, long-term aimed-for state of affairs which is being implemented. 

(This is is done via the Mass Media ideology I have called Opinionated Relativism: a relativism which at any specific moment and on any specific topic denies its own relativism – but over time keeps on discarding its previous convictions as mere opinions.)

*

Thus the modern Left truly is a negative, destructive, meaningless, purposeless thing. 

Yet the modern world is utterly dominated by this nihilistic zeal: it is, indeed, the most powerful thing in the modern world. 

*

*

The key to understanding the modern Left is that it is 95% destructive, and its positive 5% is continually rotating between (for example) the primacy of equality, anti-sexism, anti-racism, promotion of sexual inversion, liberty, the environment... and others.

Which means that, in practice, the Left is 100% destructive - because its positive agendas conflict and destroy one another, as they rotate.

The modern Left is thus, over the long term, a means of wholesale destruction.

*

The Old Left (Marxists, Communists, Socialists) was essentially about promoting economic equality - and this took priority over everything else - including the abolition of poverty, which was done much better by 'Capitalism'.

But economic equality was (at first, anyway) sincerely-pursued by the Old Left - even when it led to economic collapse, famine, racism, sexism, and wholesale environmental destruction.

*

Post the mid-1960s the Left transformed into an ever-expanding 'rainbow coalition' of interest groups - feminists, assorted economically-unsuccessful minority races and ethnicities, environmentalists, Human Rights activists, promoters of first sexual liberation then inversion of traditional sexual values, criminals, illegal immigrants, the permanently-economically-dependent, and so on.

Thus the Left become democratically-overwhelming; while at the same time it became ideologically-incoherent - indeed utterly self-contradictory.

The actually-existing New Left is a loose grouping of asset-stripping interest groups, whose alliance is merely a tactical agreement to gang-up-on and exploit (or simply destroy) the diminishing minority of non-Left.

*

So the modern Left has no overall, cohesive, explicit strategy because all its claimed positive strategies cancel-out - its true underlying strategy is therefore implicit and denied.

Anyone who really cares about any one of the Left's supposed priorities - whether that be economic inequality, the sociopolitical situation of women, or of a particular race - can see that the New Left damages all of these groups in real terms.

*

The New Left actually, really, overall and significantly promotes inequality, damages the interests of women and racial minorities, damages the environment - over a timescale of decades, the Left damages everything for everybody.

All winners are temporary - today's winners (e.g. the Proletariat - the native male working class labourers) are tomorrow's demonized losers - in rotation.

Why is this not more obvious? Two words: the Mass Media - to which the population is ever-increasingly addicted, and which defines reality as whatever is expedient for Mass Media purposes. 

*

The Left is misunderstood.

The New Left, the modern Left of Political Correctness, is not a conspiracy of Men, it is NOT about promoting the interests of any particular group - overall and in the long term.

The Politically Correct Left is NOT about pursuing equality, fighting sexism or racism, saving the environment or anything else positive - these are merely tactical excuses.

*

The long-term reality is that the Left is negative, destructive; wholesale, all-round, and strategically.

And this is impossible to human agency: strategic universal destructiveness is only attributable to non-human, purposive evil.

*

This is why there is a fundamental and ineradicable conflict - indeed there is a war - between Christianity and the Left.

Good people, even real Christians, may for various reasons find themselves fighting on the wrong side in this war; but that does not affect the fact that they are objectively fighting on the wrong side.

At this point in history, where we are now; a Christian Leftist or a Leftist Christian is an oxymoron.

In war, everyone necessarily fights on one side, or the other: God or Satan.    

*

*

Anti-eugenics is, nowadays, much worse than eugenics; because mainstream, politically correct anti-eugenics involves the suppression and denial of descriptive knowledge and implicitly the complete take-over of child-birth and child-rearing by the State (with, no doubt, a purportedly anti-eugenic rationale).

But eugenics is itself bad. Bad specifically insofar as it involves government having a major role in controlling fertility; and bad in principle because it applies a purely this-worldly functional instrumentalism to a profound phenomenon of human existence (conceiving and giving birth to children): a phenomenon which by contrast ought to be seen in transcendental perspective.

*

How did the phenomenon of 'dysgenics' arise - that observation to which eugenics is proposed as a solution and against which anti-genetics reacts?
 
In a nutshell, dysgenics is a leftist phenomenon: a consequence of modernity; eugenics is a product of the secular Old Left (Fabian socialism and Communism); while anti-eugenics is a product of the secular New Left (political correctness). 
 
So, anti-eugenics is dominant nowadays since the New Left defeated the Old Left.

*

(And, contrary to current mainstream conceptions, the phenomenon of reversal in differential reproductive success, and the responses to it, and the suppression of this knowledge, are all essentially a matter of dispute among the atheist Left. The atheist supposed-Right, which has very recently taken an interest in eugenics since the New Left declared it taboo, does so only insofar as the secular-Right movement is actually on the left, and shares utilitarian and universalist leftist assumptions. )
 
* 
 
Time-sequence
 
First, from the advent of modernity (?17th or 18th Century) soul-denial/ atheism/ this-worldliness led to attempted and partially-successful sterility among the high IQ (in order to improve the lifestyle of parents, and reduce the risk of catastrophic outcomes).
 
Then the high-IQ geniuses (men) developed more and more methods of fertility regulation, of greater and greater combined-effectiveness (from 18th through to late 20th century), then high IQ and conscientious women used this to become on average all-but-sterile (beginning from the late 19th century to near-complete success by the 21st century).

Then, from the late 19th century, high IQ Old Left men noticed what was happening (dysgenics) and devised this-worldly and secular methods of combating the problem: i.e. eugenics - the rationale being utilitarian.

*

So, dysgenics is a consequence of secularism, and eugenics is the Old Left secular response to the problem.

Then political correctness (the New Left, dominant from about 1965) suppressed all discourse on eugenics, except for reflex condemnation, also for secular reasons.

The New Left suppressed eugenic discourse not for moral reasons, obviously, since the New Left believe the state can and should do everything;

and not because of the association with Nazism either, because this only happened from the mid-1960s and eugenics was Nazi only insofar as Nazis were socialists (National Socialists - it's a clue...);

but the left ruled-out awareness of dysgenics pretty much strategically in order to get elected in the medium term (decades ahead) - to create large and growing state-dependency = leftist votes. This electoral strategy has worked very well for the left, and now most of the population are indeed dependent on the state (for this and other reasons).

*

The (suppressed) eugenic observation was - at core - that in secular societies approximately-nobody (i.e. approximately no-women, women being the sex that matters) wanted to have enough children to replace the present population; and the way that this played out was that the high IQ and conscientious secular women were essentially sterile (fertility way below replacement levels and falling) so the only sectors of the secular population with above-replacement fertility were those too dumb, feckless or chaotic effectively to use reproductive control technologies.

Think about it, for a moment or two: a whole population committing genetic suicide...

Doesn't that fact suggest, well..., something seriously wrong with a society?

If we saw voluntary genetic suicide happening among a group of animals, we would think there was something profoundly nasty going-on, some dreadful fear.

Which is, of course, true.

*

Under 'natural' conditions, pre-industrial revolution, lacking effective methods of fertility control, all classes and types of people (except the sick and maybe certain groups of intellectuals) will produce children at above replacement levels.

Natural selection does not, therefore, operate primarily on differential birth rates/ fertility, but by means of differential death rates/ mortality.

The 'eugenic' mechanism throughout human history was therefore almost entirely via differential mortality - the children of the fit, healthy, high status, rich (etc) survived in greater numbers mainly because they didn't die so often - whereas the children of the poor, unfit, sick, enslaved etc would - on average - pretty-much all die without reproducing.

With only a few exceptions, ancient society was - over time - therefore populated by the children of the 'successful'.

(Success being attained differently in different societies, such that different societies led to different personality types and different levels of general intelligence - inter alia.)

*

Therefore the dysgenic phenomenon was primarily caused by modernity, caused - that is - by the reduction in childhood and age-adjusted mortality rates, due to increased productivity in food and other goods conducive to health and survival - and to improvements in hygiene and medicine; such that above-replacement reproduction occurred on average among all classes and types of people, clever and dumb, rich and poor, conscientious and feckless.

Then came the reduction of fertility among the high IQ and conscientious (using technology).

Then the dysgenic effects became very large and impossible to ignore (before the advent of the mass media and PC), and was documented by people such as Francis Galton.

*

Dysgenics, therefore, was not recognized as a problem until the high IQ and upper classes had actually started to reduce their fertility using technology, and the mortality rate (especially childhood mortality rate) had gone down so much that very large numbers of chidlren from the low IQ, poor, feckless and impulsive (etc) were surviving to reproduce in their turn: the phenomenon was, in other words, already far advanced by this point.

Nowadays, those groups that are characterized by lower than average IQ and more than average impulsive and chaotic lives, experience both the highest childhood mortality and highest standardised mortality and also have a higher than average level of reproductive success, driven purely by above-replacement fertility rates.

*

(When mortality rates are too-low to matter, too low to have an impact of reproductive success - so that differential mortality has almost no differential effect on reproductive success; then differential fertility becomes all-important in determining reproductive success, and demographic trends. Any group that reproduces above replacement-level will 'win' the demographic race - no matter what the cause of this higher fertility, even when that fertility is merely a result of negative factors such as incompetence or ignorance of birth control technologies or inability to see the consequences or one's actions or a psychopathic selfishness. And the bad news is that all of these are heritable traits.)

*

The above sequence of events led to a misleading (and dangerous) focus of eugenics on fertility (ignoring mortality), especially a focus on preventing the poor from reproducing.

*

Since the eugenicists were themselves high IQ there was much less (or in practice zero) emphasis on the need to increase fertility among the high IQ - to a margin comfortably above replacement levels.

The real reason for the New Left opposition to eugenics (beyond strategic electoral demographics) has nothing to do with preventing the state from imposing low fertility upon the lower orders (after all, the politically correct see no limit to the state's right to control people), and almost-everything to do with preventing the state from enforcing high fertility upon the higher orders - ie. the PC elite.

*

Politically-correct (i.e. mainstream) anti-eugenics is, in its implications, a profoundly eugenic policy (i.e. leading to state control of fertility); since it incorporates an unsustainable disjunction between the birthing of children - which is supposed to be a parental, or at least maternal - choice; and the rearing of children - which under PC becomes the states's responsibility when the consequences of having children are detached from their conception.

In effect, modern anti-eugenics tries to say that any person can birth as many or as few children as they want, by right and unconditionally; and the state will ensure, also by right and unconditionally, that these children are looked-after, fed and educated.

This will not last.
 
When education became an unconditional right, the state took-over education; when health care became an unconditional right, the state took-over health care; when prosperity became an unconditional right, the state took over welfare.
 
When the state takes-over a thing, the state decides all about that thing: decides how much and of what sort of that thing is good for you - good, that is, from the state's secular, instrumental, this-worldly perspective.
 
*
 
Unconditional rights are simply the flip-side of totalitarian state control; if you like, the excuse for totalitarian state control, since there is no guarantee that the state will actually supply that which is says is an unconditional right.
 
What will happen, however, is that the state will say that it actually does in fact supply that right (and the state has the statistics to prove it!) - whether it really does supply that or not... and of course it won't.
 
It never does.
 
*

Furthermore, a politically correct takeover of children would - no doubt (and I mean no doubt) be done with an anti-eugenic rationale; because that is what PC always does.

PC would control all aspects of conception and child care so that eugenics could not be pursued - to prevent (that is) the PC-disfavoured groups enhancing their reproductive success at the expense of the PC- favoured groups.

For instance, I don't find it at all unlikely that political correctness would take action to suppress (whether directly or indirectly) the high fertility of Christian evangelicals (such as the QuiverFull movement) or Mormons.

That is exactly the kind of thing which PC has done so far, does now, and will continue to do (until prevented).

Eugenics under the name of anti-eugenics - it is precisely analogous to inequality (affirmative action) under the name of equality...

*

So although modern political correctness may sound more humane (kinder) than the old days - when people gave birth to as many children as they wanted, but only successfully raised as many children as they could afford; children are people, hence are souls not just bodies, hence child-birth and rearing are matters of transcendental importance in the human condition; so it is wrong (I mean evil) to transfer the responsibility for children to the inhuman, bureaucratic, secular state.
 
Anything is better than that.
 
Even slavery - with a kind master - is better than that; because the state responsibility for children is totalitarian slavery of soul as well as body - a gulag for kids - and represents slavery to an indifferent master; a master who sees the slave (the child) not as another human being but as a tool.
 
*
 
In sum, dysgenics is the consequence of a soul-denying/ this worldly and secular society: and so also is eugenics; and so also (and even more so) is PC anti-eugenics.

In a devout society any phenomenon of dysgenics...

(if it happened - which is itself unlikely - at least in its modern form of sterility among the high IQ and upper classes; since devoutly religious societies value and want children, and voluntary sterility would not be 'a problem')

...ought to be open to discussion and study and description;

but the consequences of dysgenics should not be addressed using soul-denying/ this worldly, instrumental and secular 'solutions'.

Else the solution will be worse than the problem it was intended to solve.

*


Note - it is essentially women who most influence fertility, number of babies - as a generalization.


Reference: http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-are-women-so-intelligent.html

*

*

My own favoured explanation is that the Left realized that its traditional appeal - focused on the abolition of serious material poverty (starvation, homelessness, exposure to life-threatening cold etc.) and equal opportunity according to merit rather than birth.

By the 1950s it was apparent that these had already happened - so the Left needed a new agenda, and started systematically lying about reality.

This was the 'turn' from Old Left to New Left - old Left being about prosperity and opportunity - New Left (which became Political Correctness) about favourable outcomes for designated victim groups, and about 'oppression' of these groups conceptualized as psychological suffering rather than life-threatening deprivation.

*

In Measuring the mind: education and psychology in England c1860-1990, Adrian Wooldridge puts forward his list of reasons why the New Left in Britain turned against psychometric testing, especially IQ testing - and the previously dominant meritocratic project (pages 322-4).

(These changes in the British socialist movement were initiated by ideas outlined in New Fabian Essays of 1952, edited by the egregious Richard Crossman. I'm pretty sure I read this book in a library copy in my mid teens - certainly I read The Future of Socialism by the equally egregious Anthony Crosland of 1956 - which was another literary launch pad for the British New Left.)

1. Disillusion with the 1945-51 Labour government, and a wish to distance the future Labour Party from their methods and policies. Having tasted the reality of Old Leftism - Implementation of the 1944 Butler education act, massive nationalization, creation of the National Health Service and the Welfare State - they discovered it didn't live up to their hopes and dreams, and the coming generation wanted something different.

At another point,Wooldridge emphasises the inappropriate way that IQ testing done on one particular day in a child's life (i.e. 'the eleven plus') was (literally terrifyingly) misused as a way of the state allocating specific individual children to different types of school.

Whereas the tests were originally intended as a way in which an academic school could detect talent among those from non-academic (lower class, rural) backgrounds and those whose formal education had been insufficient or ineffective from the perspective of specific subjects (like Latin and Mathematics). Public, Private or Grammar schools could use psychometric testing offer specific poor but bright children opportunities they would otherwise have lacked.

There is a world of difference between the privilege of being offered an opportunity, and the coercion of state allocation.

*

2. Anti-communism. This is interesting, because in that era meritocracy was associated with the Soviet Union! By rejecting meritocracy the Labour Party could burnish its (in some respects unconvincing) anti-Soviet credentials in the Cold War era.

*

3. Fear of betrayal.

The British Left is replete with legends of betrayal (Ramsay Macdonald, Oswald Mosley, 1926 TUC General Council, 1984 'scab' Nottingham miners etc...).

The brooding over betrayal functions as a focus for unifying and mobilizing people with hatred and resentment - in this instance the hatred of class traitors (who rose from the working class and 'forgot their roots') and resentment of those who took advantage of the equal opportunities (by means of scholarships) - and 'creamed off' the working class intelligentsia.

Also the supposed low self esteem of those who had failed - and failed not by being victims of class prejudice against them, but because they were not-good-enough in the free-for-all competition of the meritocracy. This was blamed on psychometric testing and all it represented.

*

4. Rejection of the Labour Party program to nationalize all possible institutions (known as Clause Four) - the New (moderate, Gaitskellite) socialism would instead be focused on a crusade against the supposed injustice of selectivity and stratification in education - with the notion that this would abolish class divisions and create a truly socialist society.

The idea was that if everybody from all classes went to the same schools and mixed freely, then Britain would cease to be the most 'class-ridden' country in the world (sic) and become more like the classless USA (sic).

Therefore selection must be got rid of, implying that the the psychometric instruments of selection should be discredited. 

**

Well, all this may be so to some extent - it would not be a great surprise if something of this kind was contributory; but none of these four explanations account for the expansile dishonesty and sheer venom of the New Left in relation to the subject of innate and hereditary differences - especially between groups.

For this level of hostility there can be no good explanation - no plausible explanation in terms of being a by-product of the intention to do good; but rather a bad explanation - in terms of the Left becoming, from this point, ever more evil: ever more destructive of good.

A major indicator of this dishonesty is that the imprecision and defects of IQ testing when applied to specific individual children largely disappear when IQ testing is applied to groups - and yet it was group differences which the Left specifically ruled as taboo.

*

Dishonesty makes science impossible; but added to this in a lethal cocktail was gross incompetence in designing and interpreting research studies. And here I need to append a warning in relation to this very useful book.

Wooldridge does not remark on the astonishing incompetence of the critiques of psychometrics, perhaps because he does not understand the science of intelligence, nor does he make any apparent effort to do so.   

Measuring the mind is well-worth reading - but (from a scientific perspective) it is no more than a deft and cleverly-constructed mosaic of other people's opinions harvested from a very wide range of reading and meticulously documented.

Whenever the author ventures anything like a scientific opinion (which isn't terribly often) it is clear that Wooldridge doesn't have a clue; although (being a typical Economist journalist in this respect) he deploys a writing style characterized by the assumption of omniscience.

This scientific incompetence enables Wooldridge to avoid potentially career-threatening hate-facts in relation to group differences and heredity. But in doing so, the book has been seriously distorted.

*

In sum, this book is very useful, and seems historically solid on topics like the history of party and academic politics, but it is unsound on the science of psychometrics itself; because the author is scientifically incompetent and evasively dishonest - neither of which is surprising nor even particularly blameworthy, but these things need to be said lest readers be misled by the brilliant style and encyclopedic coverage.

All of which is to say that this book is social and political history written by an historian of the modern kind; it is not a work in the genre of the history of ideas.  

*

*

The success of the (post-sixties) New Left is a relabelling of the failure of the Old Left.

This is the Leftism of the End Times - on the side of Satan in making the best of (i.e. getting the most out-of) the collapse of society which Leftist strategic policies and Leftist tactical looting are hastening.

*

The major triumph of the modern Left, in these Latter-Days, has not been to implement a particular program of economic, political and social goals; but instead (merely) to subvert the goals and Goods of existing society, and relabel the consequences as 'what we meant all along'.

Thus New Left multiculturalism has replaced the Old Left intention and plan to implement a socialist culture.

*

The success of the New Left is therefore not been in effecting its desires (because what the New Left supposedly 'wants' changes from year to year, flips over and back again) but in persuading the masses that they always wanted whatever chaos ensues from Leftist destruction.

*

The New Left has reduced the population of the West to a rabble of squabbling orcs.

And, of course, nothing difficult can ever be achieved when implemented by a rabble of squabbling orcs.

Hence the Left have completely given-up on trying to achieve anything; and instead simply wreck stuff in the name of liberation - and leave the orcs to fight over the spoils.

*

*

In what follows I am talking about the process by which a false belief is created and sustained at a group level, and not about individual people.

Obviously, it would be plain silly (as well as wrong) to assert that PC is a mass primary delusion which happened to arise simultaneously among many individual people.

What I am talking about is the mechanism of PC delusion formation PC at the group level.

Individuals participate in the PC group delusion (indeed they are now forced to participate); but that is not its origin, nor is it individuals who sustain the process of thinking imposed by PC.


*

While some roots of PC are innate, and some trends of modernization can be traced back a long way (at least 1000 years, with acceleration from about 300 years ago) - nonetheless PC crystallized and grew to become large and powerful from the late 1960s.

People tend to forget how rationalist was mainstream Old Left political thinking up to the mid 1960s - it was essentially a highly intellectual, Marxist-based thing.

In the UK the dominant Leftism was from the Fabian society: an upper middle class led, meritocratic, non-revolutionary gradualism, based on the assumed superiority of the planned economy, the assumed superiority of bureaucracy over markets, and therefore nationalisation of all significant parts of the economy. 

This was highly meritocratic, based on equality of opportunity (enforced by the state), and egalitarian in terms of economic distribution - the state would substantially equalize incomes.

There was a belief that economic hardship damaged life chances, and that there was therefore more talent among the poorer classes than was being allowed to emerge.

But for Fabians there was no question about the fact that people were themselves unequal in character and ability. Socialism was not about denying the obvious facts - it was about rewarding people more or less the same, and giving them the same life chances, regardless of their character and ability.

So Old Left socialism was limited in scope mainly to economics (at least in its aspired scope - in practice it became corrupted into totalitarianism) - and it was not necessarily, nor even usually, atheist - there were many Christian socialists.

The Fabians were not trying to build heaven on earth, merely trying to alleviate some of the more extreme suffering on earth.

*

So mainstream Fabian socialism was very different indeed from political correctness - although, as a matter of observation, many Fabian socialists became PC, went along with it, as it emerged.

*

The other strand of socialism came from idealist roots, in people such as William Morris, but further back the romantics.

However, it did not come from specific people, it was not primarily rational - it was an irruption of animism, of id, of the craving for connection with the world - it sought a society in which alienation would be abolished, a society of positive bliss where people could live naturally, at their fullest human potential.

It hated industrialisation, hated bureaucracy, hated rationality - it sought a situation where for everyone impulse and instinct could flow swiftly and unimpeded into action.

It was about remaking society as paradise upon earth; and when existing humans impeded this, it was about re-making humankind.

It was this strand of unreasonable, irrational, Utopian leftism which irrupted in the 1960s among the intellectual elite and which threatened to sweep away the Old Left.

*

But the Old Left was already in deep trouble, although few had yet realized it.

The moral force of the Old Left came from the idea that lower class people of brains and ability were being kept down, while upper class people - many or most of whom who lacked brains and ability - were ruling the country.

Simply from the perspective of efficiency this was undesirable.

However, by the mid-twentieth century (with improvements in psychometric testing) it gradually became clear that modern societies already had equality of opportunity, the meritocracy was already in place - or at least as equal as could reasonably be aspired to, in an imperfect world.

So Old Left socialism - if it was honest - had lost it main moral driving force.

*

At around the same time, or a bit later, the Old Left also lost its economic legitimacy; as it became ever-clearer that economic planning, the replacement of markets with bureaucracy, was less- rather than more- efficient.

*

So the Old Left were, as a movement, en route to electoral destruction - caught between the hammer of the idealistic Utopian New Left and the Right. The Old Left had no idealism, and they had no rationale - and they were rapidly losing their electoral base.

The New Left electoral base was not rooted in the working class/ proletariat - but in gathering all kinds of groups (a 'rainbow coalition')  who felt (or could be made to feel) oppressed - and added these to the traditional proletarian (Trade Union) left, with its upper class Marxist leadership.


This involved systemic dishonesty - and it was from the mid-1960s that the Left became based upon dishonesty (not just accidentally dishonest, or corrupted into dishonesty - but dishonest at its deepest root.)

*

Political correctness emerged as a modus operandi between the Old Left and the New Left.

Although a rainbow coalition of the disaffected made electoral sense as a way for the Left to survive, there seemed to be no way that anything could possibly hold together groups whose interests were - in the end - mutually exclusive and even in the short-term were in conflict.



To survive, as it has, the Left evolved that group cognitive process which we call PC, which alternates between Old Left bureaucracy and New Left/ romantic Utopianism.

*

The psychological basis of the PC Left is simply, merely, being anti-Right - merely the idea that the Right is evil.

At an individual level this ascribed evil on the Right could be of many, contradictory origins - its fundamental basis might be economic oppression, racism, sexism, environmental destruction, hereditary aristocracy, free market libertarianism, some personal slight, nationalism, the soul-less  materialism of the Right, the Christianity of the Right : the specific grudge does not matter, so long as the Right-haters continue to work together, vote together.

*


Nobody invented political correctness, but over a relatively short period its amazing explanatory power dawned on more and more people on the Left.

In order to mobilize passion, PC can talk like a 1960s hippie revolutionary; in order to get power and stay in power PC can act like a 19th century Prussian bureaucracy. It simply flips back and forth in response to threats from the Right.

PC will use whatever works to defeat the Right, here and now, in this particular situation, regardless of the implications - because none of the implications will be followed through but merely swept aside in the next fight.

PC is a bundle of tactics. But PC tactics do not ever add-up to a strategy.

*

PC is hard to defeat, and impossible to defeat rationally, because it is not aiming anywhere in particular in any sustained way - it is aiming to defeat the right and to keep-together its coalition in this fight.


Sometimes PC is anti-racism, sometimes anti-sexism; sometimes pro-worker, sometimes pro-shirker; sometimes it is nationalist, sometimes it is internationalist; sometimes pro-economic growth, sometimes engaged in wrecking the economy; sometimes it aims to cover society in a blanket of bureaucracy, sometimes it wants a society of utterly free and spontaneous individuals - and so on.

Each of these happens for a segment of time, then is followed (but not consecutively) by something else happening; and the earlier is pushed aside.

PC is like the evening news, and then and then and then - something shocking, then something inspiring, then some politics, then a bad person, then a funny item, then a bit of gossip - it never adds-up, it cannot be added up, nobody tries to add it up; it is just a means of attracting and holding attention.

PC is functionally just a means of attracting and holding-together a short-term effective anti-Right alliance.  


These irreconcilable demands are not to be balanced, nor to be compromised, but instead a mode of disrupted social cognition is to be imposed in which apparently all of this is possible, or rather not-impossible.

*

Delusions are, at root, not about belief, but about a mode of thought, a style of cognition - they are rooted in thought disorder where consecutiveness is disrupted.

Political correctness is an insane mode of discourse. It cannot be argued-away because its mode of thinking is not rational.

If you argue rationally against PC you will be met by gut feelings, if you argue emotionally this will be discarded and forgotten, and you will be met by rationalist bureaucratic speak.

If you argue from the needs of proletarian workers, you will be met by the needs of immigrants and the underclass; but if you reverse the basis of the argument then PC will reverse its focus of concern.

PC knows that the Right is evil and that anything they do to defeat it here and now is justifiable.

*

That's it. PC is a delusional system which arose, evolved in order to preserve the power of the political Left; it must be intrinsically (not accidentally, not remediably) delusional (irrational, fragmented) in order to hold-together the disparate and conflicted members of the Old/ New Leftist rainbow coalition in their opposition to the Right; and the dishonesty of PC is an intrinsic (although unintended, because unperceived) by-product of this cognitive  irrationality.

*

*
Review of my new book
http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/
*

This is any authors's 'dream review' - thanks to Gerry T Neal

http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/a-cave-of-our-own-construction.html

*

SUNDAY, AUGUST 10, 2014

Subsidy kills - and not only because the money for subsidy is coercively extracted.

I have directly observed the inevitable consequences of increased funding in schools, colleges, medicine, health services and science...

Always there is an increase in

1. Managerialism - bureaucracy at at the cost of autonomy, process at the cost of results, obedience at the cost of agency.

2. Political correctness/ New Leftism - funding always has socio-political strings, funding is always ultimately For those strings.

3. Totalitarianism - by means of managerialism and with the excuse of the New Left/ PC agenda (socialism, feminism, antiracism, diversity, the sexual revolution...) - incremental increase in total surveillance and micro-control.

Evil via funding is the major characteristic that distinguishes the New Left from the Old (communist) Left - which worked by negative, punishing, sanctions of physical violence.

The reason for the Old to New transition was not an increase in kindness, but the increased effectiveness of destruction and neutralisation of opposition that the New Left brings.

The New Left cannot be 'fought', nor organised-against - rather we must opt-out from it.

And that is where courage is required: the simple courage to say No: (apparently) alone.

*

Before I was a Christian, I was very interested by New Age type spirituality - myths, neo-shamanism, neo-paganism and the like. But I was also on 'the right' politically - or so I supposed - being a sort of conservative/ libertarian.

I was recurrently amazed that everybody in the New Age movement was on the Left, often very far on the Left - and even mildly Right-ish people (such as Republicans or Conservative) were extremely unusual.

But New Age ideas, if they were taken seriously, often seemed to imply, if not a Right wing political world, then at least certainly not the mainstream Left wing politics of our era.

Yet the New Age writers and gurus were mad keen on the actuality of modern mainstream Left wing politics - and would on the one hand sometimes endorse the specific political leadership of the West, when they were members of Leftist parties - but certainly would never endorse any Right wing political figures - would express utter disgust about them.

*

However, going back just a few decades, some of the originators of New Age spirituality has been 'of the Right'. For example, Joseph Campbell (the mythologist) was a Republican. And Fritz (Small is Beautiful) Schumacher ended his life as a strongly Thomistic, distributist Roman Catholic - with a radically reactionary vision of the good society.

The New Age legacy of these men (and others) was almost uniformly Leftist - The Joseph Campbell Society and the Schumacher Society/ College both exuding the absolutely characteristic behaviours and concerns of the modern Left, and excluding and Right wing ideas.

*

Going back further than a few decades, there was a strongly National Socialist element in New Age ideas - with neo-Paganism a significant part of the early Nazi movement on the one hand, and the ideas of CG Jung (the major New age theorist) on the other.

And back in the mid-1980s, Andrew Dobson wrote an interesting book called Green Economics in which he (rather boldly and honestly) suggested that if Green ideas were taken seriously, Fascist organization was one of the logical directions they could take. And this would, I think, apply to New Age spirituality as well.

IF they were taken seriously.

*

The simple reason for the Leftism of New Age (and the Green movement) is that the ideas are not taken seriously, the beliefs are very weakly held - therefore, New Age ideas do not provide people with a fundamental motivation for their lives - and this can be observed empirically by the fact that the actual behavior of New Agers conforms to the dominant Leftist ideology even where this contradict New Age ideals (which is, actually, in most places).

In sum, New Agers are fundamentally Leftist and only superficially dedicated to New Age spirituality. 

*

New Agers (and Green politics in general) is uniformly Leftist for the simple reason it is motivationally weak; therefore, adherents believe in Leftism more powerfully and deeply than they believe in New Age; therefore, whenever there is a conflict, Leftism wins - and wins easily, with barely any sense of a conflict.

New Age is merely a set of superficial therapeutic lifestyle ideas and entertainments and diversions - the movement is spiritually just too weak to do any serious work in the modern world.

And that is why it is Leftist. The writers, performers, artists, gurus of the New Age are Leftists first and firmly; and spiritual only when and where it fits in with Leftism.

*

Note: Exactly the same argument applied to Liberal Christianity. The reason why Liberals are all Leftists is because their Christianity is so weak - they do not feel sufficiently motivated by their supposed Christian beliefs - in fact their 'Christianity' is far too weak ever to win against the Leftism which is their true primary motivation.
*

*
FROM THE COMMENTS BY 'GFC':

I believe the Left to be the child of Satan, and in this we see that the rotten apple doesn't fall far from the diabolic tree: the devil cannot create of his own accord but can only twist what has already been created into corrupted forms. Always the devil tries to ape the creation of God.

The modern Western Left works its part in this by undermining and eating away at legitimate authority, but once that work is complete, attempts to set itself up in the only way it can: as a funhouse mirror image of what it worked so hard to destroy.

This is why the Left today doesn't try to destroy institutions like the Church outright but rather corrupt and subvert them. They don't wish to do away with authority per se, only usurp those rightfully in authority and rule in their place.

***

My response:

Indeed!

As in many other respects, the modern Left (political correctness) more resembles the late, cynical and corrupt Soviet Union (Brezhnev era) than it does early and idealistic post-revolutionary Communism.

*

The Old Left tried to destroy whole institutions such as the cultured aristocracy, scholarly private schools and universities, independent scholarship, the serious Christian Churches.

Early Soviet Communists did this to the Orthodox Church+ (which still had immense status and power even in 1917) initially mostly by violence: imprisoning, torturing and killing vast numbers of bishops, monks and priests, and devouts adherents - by invasions, confiscating resources, wholesale demolition etc. (See also Solzhenitsyn's massive documentation.)

*

The New Left attacks on institutions are legal, regulatory and legislative; harassment is by official investigation and taxation, key individuals are publicly vilified by spreading lies and libels, the mass media is used for mockery and humiliation, employment is undermined, official scapegoat status is conferred, police protections are removed - and so on.

Unless, of course, these institutions tacitly acquiesce in their own re-making and re-direction - in which case they are showered with money, privileges, honours, and official admiration.

The New Left, as you shrewdly point-out - aim to preserve the hollowed-out shell of these institutions - and to fill these shells with inverted content (e.g. the aristocracy replaced by titled subvertionists, educational institutions by social engineering certificate-allocators, independent scholarship by state-funded 'research' bureaucracies++, Christian churches by this-worldly hedonism-sanctifiers and propagandists for 'the welfare state' etc.).

*

Again, the late Soviet Union were pioneers in New Left tactics with respect to the Orthodox Church.

After an decade or so spent in an orgy of blood lust, the State instead corrupted and subverted the Orthodox Church into a branch of the state bureaucracy by hollowing it out and inserting Communist personnel, functions and ideals; atheist KGB officials were put into in Bishop's jobs, Churches were used to spread Communist propaganda and engage in spying and surveillance.

A shell of surface continuity was maintained - while the official 'Orthodox Church' was enlisted to promote national cohesion and nationalistic zeal.

*

The West is nowadays full of 'official' Orthodox Churches.

Indeed, there is very little else...

***

Notes:

+ http://russiascatacombsaints.blogspot.com/

++ It is insufficiently acknowledged that the Royal Society of London - once the premier scholarly institution in the world, descended from the actual originators of modern science - is now merely a branch of the UK public administration; receiving the great bulk of their annual funding from the state in return for providing useful pseudo-scientific validation of government policies:- such as their support for the new quasi-religious moral dogma of 'Anthropogenic Global Warming' due to carbon dioxide pollution.

*

It is important to know what the Left is, and that it has evolved.

(See references below)

The Left is now mainstream, and almost universal, in the West - e.g. in 2010 Britain had a Leftist 'Labour Party' government replaced by a Leftist 'Conservative Party' - and there is absolutely no difference between them in terms of Leftism - indeed, in legally-'redefining' marriage - it was the Conservative government which forced into legislation the biggest piece of extreme Leftist legislation in recent decades.

So, at present in the West; the Left is essentially everyone with power in public life - the only non-Leftist groups are relatively-small traditional religious denominations.

The Left is, in its origin, the reaction against Western Christianity. Which means that Leftism is not a specific set of doctrines or beliefs, but a reaction against a religion - and therefore the Left has changed, and evolved - and become a very different thing at different times and places in history.  

But many people are confused by the fact that the Left has changed. For example, it is said that the US or the UK are 'communist' countries... This is true in one sense, but completely false in another - because modern Leftism in the West is up-front very different from Soviet, or Chinese Communism.

The fact is that throughout the success of Leftism in the West, Leftism has evolved; and this is no accident, but is in fact the primary reason for its success. The Left responds to the situation, and as it succeeds in defeating Christianity it changes its strategy in order to eradicate the latest problem.

Leftism was initially very clearly anti-Christian (often anti- the established church). The biggest change in the Left happened in the mid 1960s. (But of course there is a grey area, and change was gradual - even though it was swift.) Up to the sixties, Leftism was about 'rational' economics - nationalization, planning, meritocratic equality of opportunity etc; but after the sixties the Left was about culture - and in particular the sexual revolution - equality of outcome, and the fluid agenda of antiracism, feminism, and more recently the multi-culti/ diversity/ inclusive agenda.

This was a massive change in doctrine - and a change from a revolution to establish an eternal utopia; to establishing a state of permanent revolution with no end-point.

My point is that the Left has evolved and transformed - but there is continuity, and that continuity is that the Left is an opposition, a reaction - the Left is 'against' not for. And the main thing the Left is against is Christianity (real traditionalist Christianity, of any type); and against everything to do with Christianity.

Why else is the redefinition of marriage regarded by both sides as such a major victory for the Left? It is a major victory because it represents a massive blow against Christian morality - more exactly it all but completes the elimination of Christian morality from the legal systems of the West.

(Of course, another strategy of the Left has been to subvert the Christian churches, to make them non-Christian, indeed anti-Christian. Most mainstream self-identified Christian churches have been reconstructed - as evidenced by their support for the sexual revolution and redefinition of marriage. Indeed one of the greatest triumphs of the Left has been thereby to discredit Christianity as being the original source of the Left! So that in some secular circles - among those who imagine themselves to be opposed to Leftism - Christianity is damned when it succeeds and damned when it fails! Damned for being a cause of Leftism, damned for weakly capitulating to Leftism!)

But if the Left are currently obsessed by redefining marriage then who else in The West would care about traditional marriage (i.e. real marriage) except Christians? The Old Left, pre 1965 - would have considered a focus on sexuality and identity politics trivial and immature - they were focused on rationally restructuring society, encouraging and exploiting technological breakthroughs, efficiency and effectiveness...

The modern emphasis on this issue and other sexual issues is revealing of the covert and often unconscious agenda of the 'New' Left, which reveals what it shares with Old Left - that the Left is not for anything in particular, but it was, and still is, orientated against Christianity, especially Christian morality - and that is why and how the Left has evolved.

The Left becomes whatever is effective against Christianity, even when that Christianity is residual. Over the decades, the Left has evolved to defeat one defense of Christianity after another. And it has been able to do this precisely because the Left is indifferent to what kind of society it creates, and is indifferent to what level of chaos and destruction it engenders - it simply changes its attack until it finds something effective against Christianity, and if the attack fails the Left will change again.

There Left has no consistency or coherence, and no need for consistency or coherence - consistency and coherence just get in the way of attacking Christianity by any and every means.

The Left evolves, and Christianity is what the Left evolves around.


References: 

http://thoughtprison-pc.blogspot.co.uk/

http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/

It is easy to make too much of the change in mainstream socio-politics that happened in the mid-1960s. Leftism has been increasingly mainstream in The West for a couple of hundred years - but within that project, there was a change in the 1960s; and on the surface it seemed to be a qualitative change.

Some contrasts... The Old Left was about economics, the New Left was about the sexual revolution and antiracism; equality of opportunity versus affirmative action and group preferences; nationalisation versus globalisation; planned economy versus free trade; protectionism versus mass-unlimited population migration; the native workers versus immigrants...

For a while the idea became fashionable that this was a shift from modernism to postmodernism; where modernism was seen as a kind of Enlightenment Rationalism and progress; and postmodernism was seen as relativism, loss of all values, loss of all explanations, loss of all sense of purpose and progress - a world of change but no meaning.

However, although the surface change was indeed qualitative; underneath the change from Old to New Left/ modernism to postmodernism, can be seen as an unfolding of the same underlying impulse.


How do we know this? Because many millions of individual people on The Left, en masse, made this exact transition in their beliefs; and very few of them refused to do so.

The same individuals who in their youth championed white, native-born, working class men as the oppressed 'proletarian' heroes of society... by the time they reached old age had demonised this group (as racist/ sexist/ homophobic/ Christian bigots etc.), and now champions everybody except them.

Another example is eugenics. Before 1960 pretty much All intellectual Leftists (except Roman Catholics) were ardent advocates of eugenics: i.e. of state control of human fertility as an essential means towards improving genetic quality, and therefore social functioning. By 1970, the same group of people, often the same individuals, regarded eugenics as a hallmark of 'Right Wing', 'Fascist' evil; and anyone proposing eugenics was aggressively, often violently, excluded from public discourse ('deplatformed' as people would now call it).

The same happened with 'feminism'. Before the transition; Leftists regarded feminism as subsumed within socialism (racism too) - the sexes being unified by equality of opportunity. From the 1970s, women were increasingly split from men as a victim group with opposite interests than men; and with different laws and rules applicable to women and men; so as first to equalise sex outcomes, then to make women's outcomes higher than men's - in one area of public action after another. The ideal of equality has been replaced by an ideal of inequality.

Yet although these aims (sex equality of opportunity versus sex inequality of outcome) were extremely different, almost opposite; Leftists remained Leftists - with very few exceptions they obediently followed 'the party line', and (in their multi-millions) set-aside honesty and consistency.

And Many millions more joined them - as the Left took-over all mainstream politics, government, all all major social institutions.


The fact that people on the Left so easily, seamlessly, changed - and even reversed - their superficial opinions and their policies; and did so dishonestly, claiming that they were not doing so; tells us that the roots and motivation of Leftism are not at the level of obvious opinions and policies.

The roots of Leftism are much deeper - and are, indeed, at the level of metaphysics. That is, at the level of basic assumptions concerning the nature of reality.

The basic assumptions of Leftism have unfolded over the past couple of centuries (and were foreshadowed before that time). The most fundamental assumption is a set of linked assumptions rejecting divine agency and the immaterial. These are along the lines that there is no God, and no objective truth, beauty or morality; that the material (perceptible, measurable) realm of things is the only reality; and that human emotion (pleasure-suffering) is the only valid measure of goodness (aka 'utilitarianism').

(You should note that materialism and utilitarianism are ultimately contradictory - because other-people's emotions do not exist according to materialism, being objectively unobservable, not-measurable, unquantifiable; nonetheless this combination of assumptions is universal in mainstream public discourse for the past century and more.)


On the positive side of 'what was wanted', Leftism probably began with pacifism among mid-18th century Nonconformists, the abolition of slavery spreading from this same group, and a mounting demand for relief of the new kind of poverty and misery that was caused by the industrial revolution by means of state redistribution of wealth...

And from the beginning the sexual revolution was a strong element, although initially only among the upper class radicals (e.g. Lord Byron, Shelley); who immediately used a political rationale for advocating their own practice of unbounded sexual relations outside of religious marriage. 

We need to recognise that, even though its early advocates espoused some good causes, and many individuals at the low level of the movement were basically good-but-misguided people, the Left always was from its very roots a basically false (hence evil) human motivation.

By excluding or marginalising the divine perspective; by placing mortal life, materialism and human emotion as the focus of human evaluation and action; it was always inevitable that Leftism would unfold to short-termist hedonism, despair, and nihilism - and would lead its adherents (at first unconsciously, but increasingly explicitly) to seek their own self-annihilation - both in general - by working actively for the destruction of their own marriages, families, institutions and nations) - and individually.

This self-annihilation is rationalised by a publicly enforced cancerous compassion. Compassion is, objectively, a minor virtue intended as a duty in relation to a person's immediate circle of family, friends and neighbours. But post-60s Leftism has raised 'universal, unbounded compassion' to be the ultimate virtue to be striven-for - and, of course, this is a form of suicide - both at a group level and for individuals.  

Self-annihilation therefore also operates personally - with its compassion-driven focus on abortion/ infanticide, and euthanasia for an expanding and open-ended scope of indications. The ideal of unbounded non-procreative sex is also justified by compassion for those with 'unconventional' desires.

Ultimately there is the increasingly-accepted/ wanted transhumanist project of destroying and replacing humans (by drugs, genetic engineering, implanted social-mass media, microchipping, downloading etc) - again, advocated mainly on the basis of compassion for suffering.


All these 'new' phenomena have their motivational roots in the centuries-old and basic assumptions of Leftism; they were implicit from its very beginnings.

Which tells us that the origin of Leftism lies in the demonic; in immortal purposive evil with foresight.

And this is why Leftism has been by far the most successful of all evil strategies in the history of Mankind.