THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF THE LEFT
MARK GULLICK
1st April, 2020
Late-stage leftist egalitarianism is a psychosis and must be mocked as such.
Jim Goad
Do you have any idea how crazy you are?
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
We have seen in past editions of British Intelligence the paradoxes that attend the British Left. The Left, de facto, run Britain, and yet act as though they are the disenfranchised. They yearn for the political mandate of power in the form of a Labour government, and yet pursue perverse policies which alienate both its base and swing voters. Finally, the Left wages war on every traditional British institution it can find, despite the looming truth that the disruption to a civilised society that this aggression will cause will ultimately be ruinous for the country. So it is that we must conclude by treating what we must call the Alt. Left - the progressive, globalist, post-modern, woke, anti-nationalist, anti-Caucasian Liberal-Left - as the presentation of a psychopathology, a dysfunctional mental condition, in the same way that measles presents as red spots and lupus presents as hives.
Leftist personality types – marked most commonly by narcissism to greater or lesser degrees – are prone to histrionics and exhibitionism.
Kerry Bolton, The Psychotic Left
The Left does not display a psychopathology in and of itself. If you were to converse with someone who wished to see taxes lowered for the working class and concomitantly raised for the middle and upper class of earners, a large public sector funded by the state, nationalisation of public utilities, immigration and comprehensive school education, you would not think them mad or bad, even if you disagreed with them on broad points.
But daily coming across those who claim to speak for the Left, and believe not only that there are many genders, but that those who state that there are only two should be punished, who wish there to be no borders and no limits to immigration (in particular of unskilled Muslims useless as social capital, a financial drain, and socially inimical to the host country), who approve of very young children being taught about sexual practices which many still believe to be deviant, who claim that to link Islamist terrorism with Islam is racist, who see white culture as deleterious and in need of replacement, and we are in a different ideological arena. Diagnosis is a matter for dispute, but we will allow a heuristic principle to guide us.
Let us say that we attend a party and are led into a main room. Inside, some 50 people are standing in groups, chatting, laughing, and behaving in exactly the way you would expect party-goers to behave. You leave the party for half an hour and return. The same people are in attendance, but their behaviour has changed, and the reason for the change is that one man is now jumping up and down on a sofa, tearing at his hair and screaming obscenities. We are, it seems, entitled to draw an example of normative behaviour from this scenario, and also of abnormal or deviant behaviour. In these circumstances, these two poles of behaviour could quite appropriately be labelled ‘sanity’ and ‘madness’. As Justice Potter Stewart famously stated concerning the definition of hard-core pornography in Jacobellis v State of Ohio (1964);
‘I shall not today attempt to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it...’
Mason Verger: You never gave a statement in the course of Dr. Lecter’s trial… and he beat it all on an insanity plea.
Clarice Starling: The court found him insane. Dr. Lecter did not plead.
Thomas Harris, Hannibal
The need for a normative principle in the field of mental health is prone to what we will call the Arbiter Paradox. In other words, who decides the norm? This problem involves an infinite regress (who applied normative rules to the arbiter? and so on), but there are of course standards and yardsticks to ascertain whether a person is mad.
Judicially, the M’naghten rule is the most famous arbiter. Insanity is held to be a defence of a criminal act only if;
‘...at the time of committing the act, the party accused was labouring under a defect of reason, from a disease of the mind, so as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or, if he did know it, that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong.’ (Queen v M’Naghten, 1843).
The other near-canonical text which defines categories and sub-categories of mental illness is Diagnostics and Statisticians Manual (DSM) now in its fifth edition since its inception in 1952. Now, it is easy to rifle through the personality disorders in DSM V and find a composite diagnosis of the typical SJW personality type. Let us take four of them and one attendant symptom:
Antisocial Personality Disorder [presents as] ‘a pervasive pattern of disregard for the rights of other people’.
Histrionic Personality Disorder [presents as] ‘a pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking’.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder [presents as] ‘significant problems with [the sufferer’s] sense of self-worth stemming from a powerful sense of self-entitlement. This leads [the sufferer] to believe they deserve special treatment...’
Borderline Personality Disorder [presents as] ‘intense and unstable emotions and moods… [sufferers] generally have a hard time calming down once they have become upset’.
Anyone who has seen SJWs – and much of the rest of the Left - in action will recognise the accuracy of these diagnoses. Two more well-known mental disorders may help refine our layman’s diagnosis.
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
Cognitive dissonance is a mental disorder which, in the words of Ann Olson Psy. D, can be defined as ‘a state of tension that occurs when a person simultaneously holds two cognitions, thoughts or beliefs that are psychologically inconsistent with a person’s behaviour’. The attendant literature is plentiful, but we will concentrate on the epistemological polarity of two inconsistent beliefs and the ‘state of tension’ mentioned by Dr. Olson.
This condition and its resultant mental problems represent a possibility that the Left will find itself presently depleted in its numbers. To take the most recent deformation of reality it has visited on ordinary people, that of ‘gender fluidity’, we can say one thing to a near certainty; they don’t, by a long way, all believe it. The politicians who dutifully add their preferred pronouns to their Twitter profiles don’t believe those things are real. The interviewers careful not to ‘misgender’ their guests do not believe that there is any such need for care. The parent interviewing an applicant for a public sector post who has been asked to refer to them as ‘xir’ secretly views this as a waste of time. All of these psychic tensions will cause dropouts from the Left as ordinary people begin to see that these things are a miserable lie. If cognitive dissonance is true to its hidden and unconscious ministrations, the tension will prove too much and there will be defections back to reality.
And now, we will move on to the last of the potential mental disorders with which we can attempt at least an initial framing of the Alt. Left; Schizophrenia.
Then, to my intense confusion, it occurred to me that I was actually two different persons.
C J Jung, School, Days
Schizophrenia comes, as do so many medical terms, from classical roots. The Ancient Greek verb schizein meant ‘to cleave’ or ‘cut into two’. Phrenos meant the mind or seat of the mind which, as time passed, was held to be the head, as in phrenology. The mind cleaved, then, divided, split into two and destined to turn on itself.
A brief excursion to America is relevant. Since Trump’s victory, two tropes have been consistent. The first is that he is ‘divisive’. The election was very close, as was the British referendum on Europe. But the divisions were already present, and have simply been highlighted. We may have entered the age of the ‘schizocracy’, where every house is divided against itself, and thus destined to fail.
Also – and incidentally – the Left in the US have consistently questioned Trump’s mental health and by extension his fitness for the presidency. This is pure Freudian projection, whereby the sufferer from a condition, usually psychological, cannot accept their fault and so ‘project’ it on to another. It is extremely common.
Schizophrenia is classically – and culturally – seen as the ‘split personality, exemplified in art by Hitchcock’s Psycho or Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We note it in passing particularly with reference to Borderline Schizophrenia , in which the sufferer is aware, during their lucid moments, of the derangement they display during their episodes. I refer to this as ‘autognosis’. It is not applicable to the Alt. Left although, and in conjunction with our consideration of cognitive dissonance above, it may be applicable to those of the Left who realise that many of their doctrines are opposed to reality.
Schizophrenia, with reference to the Left, is really more relevant when nations – particularly the UK and US – are seen as a whole. Both Plato, in the Republic, and Hobbes, in Leviathan, use the device of the city-state or commonwealth viewed as though it were an individual person. In this sense, a schizocracy would have the political Right as its normative mental state and the Left representing its deranged episodes.
Finally, we will turn to a state which is really not a psychological condition at all, and one through which all of us must pass.
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T S Eliot, Little Gidding
It must be stressed that this is all amateur psychology, a layman’s sketch of a diagnostic possibility. As such, the conclusion is equally naive, just as much a guess at what it is that is causing life for those not in the strange house of the Midwich cuckoos of the Left to be increasingly onerous. We might call the conclusion childlike.
We began as children, searching an environment unknowing, like the fool of the tarot pack setting off blithely on his journey, looking for knowledge and experience. And, like inquiring children, there remains another possibility, one which is only psychopathological in a certain context, that of adulthood, of maturity, of being all grown up.
In the end, the psychopathology of the Left may not be a mental disorder at all but a regression, a retraction into a vanished childhood made by adults who never quite mastered or coped with the demands of growing up. David Horowitz, a man who crossed the floor from revolutionary communism to become one of the Right’s sharpest critics of socialism, invokes Freud and encapsulates the Left’s true affliction in one of his most important books, Radical Son;
‘In Civilisation and its Discontents [Freud] analysed the expectations of socialists – that the world would be governed by justice and love – as an adult fairy tale. Socialism was a wish for the comforting fantasies of childhood to come true…. Socialism was not only a childish wish, but a wish for childhood itself; security, warmth, the feeling of being at the centre of the world’.
And if we are dealing with children when we deal with the Left – as we will increasingly have to do until a crisis comes to the West – we can at least be absolutely certain what kind of children they are;
Children afraid of the night,
Who have never been happy or good.
W H Auden, September 1, 1939
Mark Gullick is a philosophy PhD from London, England, who went on holiday to Costa Rica four years ago and forgot to go home. He now works there as a musician. He blogs at https://postcardsfromtraumaville.blogspot.com/