Halo Effect

I’ve worked too hard for my illusions just to throw them all away

–W. Axl Rose/Slash, Locomotive (Complicity)

In my last post, I touched on the illusory aspects of the r mating selective strategy, the biological expression of leftism.  Feminism, socialism, gun control, and most every movement under its umbrella prioritizes wishful thinking over concrete reality.

One aspect of the r (leftist) mentality described by Anonymous Conservative is that the K approach is wholly unnecessary, a mere relic of more primitive eras and mindsets.  Not only does r believe in “unlimited resources”, it also believes that any restrictions on paradise result from the K‘s false belief in the harshness of reality.  Were we not so paranoid ourselves regarding personal safety and private property, we wouldn’t foster the paranoia that causes greed, violence, and theft.  K solutions such as stringent property rights, traditional family values, and the right to bear arms actually cause the problems they ostensibly solve.

Hence how they so often literally despise us.  They believe that telling women to mind their bodies when out drinking on a Saturday night actually fosters “rape culture”  (h/t Mina) by shifting responsibility for rape away from men.  Guns in the homes of private citizens who only want to protect their families are reduced instruments of death, essentially no different than the illegal firearms that gangbangers use for drive-by shootings.  Obamacare isn’t working because too many people are complaining about it, because we don’t believe enough, as if the Tea Party being less evil would somehow get the website to work better.

What we see as common-sense solutions to real-world problems, they see as heresy.  After all, how can you really believe in “peace” when you’re packing a revolver on the off-chance somebody might try to rob you?  If you tell them why one of their harebrained redistribution schemes won’t work because it defies human nature and economic law, it violates their illusion and tears into the requisite beliefs for it to work.  Thus your pessimism is the reason the policy eventually fails.  There shouldn’t even be any greed, so why the hell should we account for it when we plan the perfect economy?  How dare we assume that if we pay people to sit at home and do nothing that they’ll be less likely to find a job!

The reason their policies fail is that we don’t have enough faith.

Heaven Is Not a Place on Earth

Not unlike how our observations that damn near everybody everywhere relegating men and women to similar roles lead us to believe that gender is more than some social construct, it makes sense to believe that humans are hard-wired to believe in some sort of God for much the same reason.  Whether we’re in the jungles of New Guinea or in north Alaskan igloos, we usually believe in something beyond what we can see and feel.  The most hard-core realist must admit that Man seeks higher ideals.  Man shall not live by bread alone.

Yet religion has its downsides, as even the most devout will admit.  Secularists see the destructive aspects of religion and fight it by attacking beliefs in God.  As we see in post-Christian Europe, such efforts to encourage atheism and agnosticism can and do succeed.

However, just like feminism fails to keep men from preferring young and pretty women, these attempts do little to quell Man’s thirst for the Divine.*

But a man who thirsts for the Divine but believes not in Heaven will seek the Divine where he will never find it:  Earth.

Sanctifying the Profane

Imagine all the people sharing all the world

–John Lennon, Imagine

They may not believe in giving ten percent of what they make to God, but they sure as hell don’t have a problem with giving five times that to Uncle Sam (or at least not with you doing it).  They may not believe in fasting to please the Lord, but they have no problem with you sacrificing more of your income to pay for some random chick’s birth control.  Heaven is achievable in the here and now, and you’d best pay homage to the proper government gods.

This craving for Heaven on Earth (HOE) coincides with their r reproductive strategy.  Some HOE’s may objectively be perfectly capable of taking care of themselves in a hostile environment, but they’ve concluded for whatever reasons# that they’d do best in a kinder, gentler environment.  The more HOE’s believe that such an environment is what we’ve actually got, the more easily they can rationalize their own sub-optimal behaviors.  The more they can convince everybody else to believe the same, the more we foster the collective illusion of eternal prosperity and seemingly perpetuate it through fatuous economic machinations.  Only those who buy into r could possible sanction increasing our $17,000,000,000,000 national debt to pay for still more government giveaways, trick themselves into believing that something like Obamacare could actually reduce the debt, or that unemployment insurance is one of the best ways to stimulate the economy.

Such illusions are every bit as fantastical as any miracle, only HOE’s expect their miracles to come not from God but from mass reprogramming raising awareness, caring really hard, enthusiastic economic planning, and ignoring all evidence that what they’re doing doesn’t work.  Furthermore, those who believe that HOE is possible are by nature going to have a much lower tolerance for “sin” and other imperfections than those who accept that the world is fallen.  (I’ve heard it remarked on several occasions that conservative gays feel much more welcome among Christian conservatives than among gays.)

This secular manifestation of the Quest for the Divine also tends towards the Cult of Personality.  Christian conservatives can get pretty excited about Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, and Ronald Reagan, but there’s little possibility that any will ever be mistaken for gods.

Fervor

I’m aware of some of the Utopian instincts on the Christian Right, which is why I part ways with them on several issues.  Nonetheless, Christians believe in an other-worldly Heaven.  Some might want to create a City on a Hill here, but there’s the implicit understanding that we’ll never quite pull it off.

Much greater is the chance that you’ll be forced to comply with somebody’s morality when your beliefs and behavior can literally ruin their chance at “going to heaven”.  If you’re leading an immoral lifestyle that I abhor, I’ll pray for you and hope that your influence is limited until you turn your life around (so long as you’re not infringing on others’ rights), but I know that God’s going to take care of me regardless.  If I think “rape culture” is a myth and try speaking about it on some college campus, my assault on the leftist worldview is much more threatening.  My very existence, my beliefs and very ability to express them are a personal attack so HOE’s will do everything they can to shout me down and stop me. Campus Crusade for Christ isn’t exactly known for attacking leftist speakers.  La Raza is.

We therefore need to alter our strategic conception of the rhetorical “battlefield” with the left in two important respects.

First, understand that whenever you’re debating some feminist on a blog, whenever you’re trying to get some Obamasoxer to recognize the the dream of universal health coverage is destined to fail. you’re not just debating policy.  Instead, you’re facing some deep-seated illusions that have accumulated over the course of many years, you’re pointing out to them that they advocate policies that often worsen the very problems they care so much about, you’re telling them that the “heaven” they believe in doesn’t exist.  Wanting to help the poor doesn’t necessarily do a damn thing for the poor; it’s a bit more complicated than that.  Yet getting somebody to accept the obvious truth makes their “heaven” feel even farther away.  It hurts.

Second, although Heaven on Earth as created by man might be a myth, Hell on Earth most definitely isn’t.  Grassroots activists, young people, and other believers recognize that although politics may not be a legitimate means for salvation, there is something at stake beyond mere tax rates and ammo restrictions.  There’s more to our Founding than a bunch of guys who came up with a new system of government.  Our individual liberties and beliefs are sacred, and they’re under assault.  There’s plenty of reason to believe that we could lose just about everything we’ve got here.  Abject misery might not stay overseas indefinitely.

So we’re not going to be satisfied with political machinations and focus group strategies that don’t connect with people on a level somewhat deeper than Karl Rove’s whiteboard.  Sometimes we gotta suck it up and wait to strike, but sometimes we’ve also got to fight, win, find something political we can believe in with more conviction than “he’s not as bad as John Kerry”.

The left fervently believes in an illusion, yet they harness that belief to actually advance their goals.  We believe in Truth, yet we’re on perpetual defense.  Pure pragmatism never wins, and letting the swindlers monopolize our idealistic instincts is thoroughly unrealistic.

 

 

* You may feel so such compunction.  Millions of young adults in Japan don’t have much of a sex drive.  Exceptions don’t necessarily disprove rules.  I understand that you may either have not been born with much of a primitive “God-instinct” or have forsaken it, but we’ve never seen a society do that en masse, anywhere, ever.

# I’m sure that Anonymous Conservative has a theory as to who selects what, and it’s probably biological (there’s a lot I have yet to read).  Thus far, other than gender (unmarried females clearly incline towards r), I’m agnostic as to whether our biological natures dictate our political or spiritual inclinations or vice versa, but I currently incline towards psychological causes.