Rational Idealism

My Leftist Youth October 5, 2009

Those who have read Theodore Kaczynski’s treatise, “Industrial Society and Its Future”, are familiar with his psychoanalysis of the modern American leftist movement.  If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend you do.  I first read this paper sometime in my late teens, and was shocked at how aptly described my emotional problems growing up, and how accurately it described my political attitudes.  He focuses on the feelings of inferiority among leftists, and their tendency to be what he called “over-socialized”.  His language is refreshingly straightforward for an academic paper, and the unerring truth of his words certainly explains why universities consistently denied him publication:

Words like “self-confidence,” “self-reliance,” “initiative,” “enterprise,” “optimism,” etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.

He goes on to discuss oversocialized individuals — people who have internalized the moral principles that society pays lip service to, but few actually follow:

The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are not in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes^[4]) for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles.

Kaczynski perfectly sums up my motivations for being a leftist when I was younger, and I believe these arguments apply to the majority of modern leftists.

It is nearly impossible for me to identify the ideological influences of my early life, but I think I can guess at them.  One is the Christian church, which emphasises forgiveness, unconditional love, and selflessness.  Taken seriously, these values are devestating to the achievement of real value and joy in one’s life.  To forgive is to trivialize good behavior.  To love unconditionally is to make love cheap and meaningless.  And to be selfless is, literally, to negate one’s own self and one’s own desires.  Selflessness is essentially mental suicide.

The second is the fact that I grew up relatively poor, and was aware that some of my peers were materially richer than I.  I understood this inequality, but not the causes of it, which were largely hidden from me, and couched in fatalistic terms like, “That’s just the way it is.”  My father almost completely eschewed his parental responsibilities as I was growing up, choosing instead to live his life as he saw fit, earning little more than he needed to survive, refusing to make child care payments, etc.  I don’t blame my mother (who is incredibly hard working and struggled for much of her life to lift us out of poverty) for avoiding open disparagement of him in front of us.  However, I believe this avoidance of the root cause of our condition led to my early sense of injustice and powerlessness in our economic system.

Third, I believe that as a child I was subjected to endless propaganda about the goodness of the state and its ability to provide for the citizenry, as well as the civic virtues of fairness, being selfless, and working for the good of the group.  This propaganda came from no place in specific, but was embedded in the programs I watched on television, the curriculum I was exposed to in public schools, and the general dialogue among the adults in my life (which I realize in retrospect was highly hypocritical).

All of these influences lead me to, though I had no previous exposure to formal political theory, invent communism when I was six years old.  My approach was essentially the same as that of Karl Marx — “to each according to his need, from each according to his ability”.  In my childish mind, I imagined people producing goods and dropping them off in giant bins, which others could come along at their leisure to take.  I didn’t do much political thinking again until my adolescence, when I learned to hate PCs and Microsoft.  It was the height of cool in middle school to be a nonconformist Apple user, and it turns out that one of the prime tools in a Mac advocate’s reportoire is leftist rhetoric.  At that time I was also beginning to be aware of the virulent anti-capitalist sentiment in pop culture, which blamed everything bad in the world on “greed”.  Environmentalism was really taking off in those days, with propagandistic cartoons like “Captain Planet” and “Fern Gully” pitting industry vs. all that is moral and beautiful.  All this leftist rhetoric would have left me unaffected if it had ever been critically challenged, even slightly, by any of the adults in my life.  Instead, the most incisive moral messages being presented to me went unopposed, and in the vaccuum of political knowledge and values that was my environment, these ideas rushed in and filled my mind.

By age sixteen I was a militant, Stalinist communist.  This, I found, was the only logically consistent position given the assumptions of collectivism — that selfishness and private property are evil.  I was also a militant vegan and atheist.  I firmly believed that my positions were irreducable, fundamentally “logical”.  I was so steeped in the implicitly leftist values of my society, “oversocialized”, in Kaczynski’s analysis, that I was incapable of recognizing my premises as arbitrary.  Everyone I debated these issues with was powerless to oppose my logic, because they, too, were unwilling or unable to check their premises, which matched mine.  The only special thing about me was that I had extrapolated these moral assumptions to their logical consequences.

I had one teacher in high school, an American Literature teacher, who, to her credit, tried to explain to me that logic alone could not lead one to moral conclusions.  However, her intervention came as too little, too late.  Public schools don’t teach logic, philosophy, or critical thinking.  Moreover, I had by that point lost all respect for the adults in my life, who seemed hopelessly hypocritical, compromising, soulless.  It wasn’t until a friend of mine who had come to grasp the fundamentals of reasoning finally challenged me, and threw down with me, that things changed.  For this I owe him endless credit.  He won the debate, and I left speechless, grasping for the right rebuttal.  I spent the next few weeks searching for a resolution to this, but never found one.  I was forced to adjust to a new, amoral, existence.  It took several years before I was able to find a new, objective, morality.