We are Cthulu
November 23, 2015 § 35 Comments
The current incarnation of right liberalism always has a different policy agenda, in the sense of favoring different tactics and metrics, than the current incarnation of left liberalism. But they have always and still do agree when it comes to their basic view of what politics is about and what justifies the exercise of political authority. Indeed that is precisely why the left (new) generation of liberalism always turns on the right (older) generation of liberalism.
(What takes the whole thing through the looking glass is that the principles upon which all liberals agree – that the primary purpose and justification of politics is to secure freedom and equal rights – are incoherent; so, by the principle of explosion, they logically imply everything and its opposite all at once, although in practice this is constrained by the reality in which we are situated).
The nature of the liberal insect hivemind is such that the offspring always devour the parents. Then the offspring become surprised after time passes, when they find themselves old and surrounded by larvae with knives.
So there really isn’t a stable ‘right liberalism’ and a stable ‘left liberalism’, let alone a categorically different ‘liberalism’ and ‘leftism’. There is a current ascendant liberalism, its immediate predecessor, and then prior generations before that. It is a mistake to view the little wasp nest we saw in 1776 or 1789 as something different from the monstrous hive we see today.
And even this generational model projects a discreteness onto what is really a continuous process. The march leftward takes place inside individual persons as time goes on, as they find themselves disgusted with the intolerant earlier versions of themselves and try to scrub away the despicable remnants of their own origins. Out, vile spot!
The exceptions are sociopaths.
Zippy Catholic 
[…] Source: Zippy Catholic […]
(What takes the whole thing through the looking glass is that the principles upon which all liberals agree – that the primary purpose and justification of politics is to secure freedom and equal rights – are incoherent; so, by the principle of explosion, they logically imply everything and its opposite all at once, although in practice this is constrained by the reality in which we are situated).
Extremely well put.
The nature of the liberal insect hivemind is such that the offspring always devour the parents. Then the offspring become surprised after time passes, when they find themselves old and surrounded by larvae with knives.
Don’t know if our most recent period in history (say, the past 60 years) agrees with this. It is entirely possible that I am misunderstanding your meaning here, but it seems to me (and it was glaringly obvious in say…2008) that the boomer generation has been more than happy to eat its grandchildren.
Additionally, the current crop of young people (under 18-25) seem to be increasingly “conservative” in that they are keenly aware of the fact that what has been sold them is a bit of goods as evidenced by the scrap heap example of family life they inherited from their parents. By “conservative” I mean wiling to concede that earlier iterations of liberalism are preferable than heading further down the current path.
They do seem to have bought into the notion of government as an arbiter of equality (which I guess proves your point) but in practice, a good number of them are rejecting the empty materialism of their parents (drowning in debt) and grandparents (who cashed out and party it up in The Villages)
Or is that just another example of implying everything and its opposite at once?
Elspeth:
I accidentally left out the contextual link for this post. I have updated the OP accordingly.
http://orthosphere.org/2015/11/21/the-revolution-devours-her-young/
Though it is certainly true that the hatred between different generations or iterations of liberals is mutual.
Zippy:
I think you’re stretching.
It’s the nature of a fallen world for the old to die, and for the young to live off what the old have left. I realize you’re trying to talk about something different with this idea of a liberal insect hivemind, but the biggest difference I see from some “time before the liberal insect hivemind” is the surprise of the parents that their death will be fruitful for the offspring.
Nor is it true that struggle (mutual hatred) between generations is a particularly liberal thing; if by liberal we mean something other than plain sinful. The specifically liberal aspect, to my mind, is the celebration of mutual hatred; not its existence. The celebration doesn’t change the course of nature, though; despite the ignorance of young celebrants who think they have done so.
Can there be anything more liberal and liberated than a sociopath? A sociopath is the embodiment of the liberalism you defame; hating his parents’ choices while living and often even prospering in the world those parents created.
There is much more paradox and mystery involved than can be explained by “ascendant liberalism”.
Cane:
There are glimmers here and there in your comment that give me reason to believe that eventually you’ll get the point of my posts. But they are embedded in so many objections to things I didn’t say and don’t mean that I remain unsure.
Zippy:
What is one of the objections I made to something you didn’t mean?
Cane:
The first words you wrote after “I think you are stretching.”
From my perspective it is as if I had quite carefully and specifically identified the munchus parentis insect, and stated that it is the nature of this insect that the young devour the parents. You then object and make the mundane assertion that “It’s the nature of a fallen world for the old to die, and for the young to live off what the old have left.” You go on to admit, correctly, that your objection doesn’t even address what I said, and then continue with more words as if it did.
It actually is not at all a necessary, general state of human affairs that descendants despise their ancestors and everything they stood for. And that there are doubtless other instances of descendants despising ancestors does not even slightly call into question the specific case under discussion.
The insect thing is of course a metaphor. To make it more concrete by specific example, there is a reason that SJW’s destroyed the career of Brendan Eich. Even though he is a die hard liberal himself, he is too old to have a pristine track record of unreserved abasement at the altar of sodomy – an abasement required by the current generation of liberals. Of course the targets of the night of the long knives are almost entirely liberals, because liberalism is the only political deontology (which again I have identified quite specifically, so your constant pose as if I was just engaged in general handwaving about the human condition is tommyrot) acceptable in polite society inside the padded walls.
Now you can toss up your hands and say “oh, we live in a fallen world, nothing to see here, move along.” I get that sometimes from people who are not interested in or not capable of thinking too clearly about the specifics of our specific abominations, and are always bringing up the red herring of other abominations.
But I don’t know why someone with those kinds of objections would bother reading here.
One way to think about American conservatives is that conservatives are the sort of people who revere and admire some previous generation of liberals and their liberalism, while failing to recognize that the current generation of liberals are the legitimate heirs of that previous generation of liberals and their ideas, even though the new generation despises the old – just as the old liberals despised and rebelled against their previous generation.
failing to recognize that the current generation of liberals are the legitimate heirs of that previous generation of liberals and their ideas
Which is the legitimate heir? The libertarian or the progressive?
Mike T:
Both. Anyone with strong loyalties to liberalism is a liberal. That the views of different kinds of liberals are incompatible – that the inferences they draw from liberalism’s incoherent premises are mutually opposed in many ways – is to be expected.
For example, to admire the Founders qua liberals is to, along with Jefferson et al, despise the English monarchy of George III. So liberalism shunts the conservative impulse to ground by giving people with the disposition to admire their forebears and their traditions some liberals and their “traditional” kind of liberalism to admire.
Hey Zippy! Since the conversation turned to how liberalism turns against itself, how about a post with a rough timeline of how this happened? I think it would be pretty interesting to try to understand how this movement has changed in the last couple of centuries and how people reacted to it.
Both
Well, glad to see you aren’t such a tradcon you’re embracing primogeniture.
Hey, it is the decision of Adam Smith, Frederick Douglas, Jefferson and Washington as to who will be the successor, not Zippy.
It isn’t that kind of succession. But it is true enough that it isn’t up to me. I don’t decide, I just observe.
Are we actually seeing this in remarkable real time with what is going on at American universities?
Lily white, obviously leftist, obviously not-a-racist-bone-in-my-body types are being eaten alive by angry black students who have been told everything is racist. Political velocity has increased here to where at some level even the good progressive’s of the Democrat Party cannot move fast enough to avoid being swallowed. They can’t exactly take off their skin, can they?
Are you trying to compare the effects of exposure to liberalism with the effects of exposure to Cthulhu? I have to admit that I don’t get the title unless that was what you meant. Cthulhu is actually not insane at all. It’s exposure to Cthulhu that drives humans insane, but Cthulhu is just to alien to be sane or insane by human reckoning.
Mark Citadel:
Right, that is one of those ways in which the perceptions of liberals are the opposite of reality. The liberal narrative is that the white race is the traditional-reactionary authoritarian antiliberal oppressor-untermensch. The actual reality is that white flesh encloses vastly more militantly tolerant political liberalism than all other races of flesh combined.
That is part of what makes “white supremacy” so ironic: the white race already rules supreme, and its ruling philosophy is liberalism.
[…] As the saying goes, guns don’t kill people: people kill people. Immigration (or pick your own favorite area of suicidal liberal policy insanity) doesn’t kill white liberal societies of generically European descent. White liberal societies of generically European descent kill white liberal societies of generically …. […]
@ Mark Citadel:
The big hoax with respect to the college campus messes that keep cropping up is the notion that any of it is about race, I mean really about race.
It’s not about race, although poorly educated black students (like almost all public schooled graduates) are allowing themselves to be used as useful idiot pawns in a war that is about something deeper and more insidious than race. This guys knocks on the door at least:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/11/does_any_of_this_campus_turmoil_have_to_do_with_race.html
Zippy,
For your schadenfreude-filled amusement. Best line:
“the risk of [marriage] dissolution is highest where either wives or husbands encounter an abundance of spousal alternatives.” In other words, the likelihood of divorce increases when there are more opportunities to cheat.
We needed science to tell us that when you are provided opportunity to cheat, you’re more likely to cheat than when you have to seek it out. I can’t wait for the impact on modern minds when it’s discovered that children get fatter when their parents present them with an array of sugary foods instead of a healthy meal plan.
Elspeth:
The article states:
Bonald (and I am inclined to give his view significant weight, since he is an astronomy professor) has a somewhat different take from the author. I suppose I am also inclined to give it weight because it fits my ‘offspring devour the parents’ view of how liberalism plays out across generations.
I give due weight to Bonald as well, and I agree with him. In fact, I don’t think the administration and tenured staff have anything at all to do with the nonsense.
I was more convinced of the former, the provocateurs off campus Think along the lines of George Sorros and the Black Lives Matter movement as just one example.
Sounds about right Elspeth. For that matter “Grievance Group X Studies” departments probably have to be understood as their own distinct kind of pathogen.
Zippy – I regularly read the blog Glory to God by Orthodox priest Fr. Stephen Freeman. He has recently been addressing modernity in ways that mirror some of your observations. His most recent post may be of some interest:
https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2015/12/01/you-cant-make-a-difference/
That’s a great post, CJ.
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