Lefticography and Spiritual Autism

I swear I could devote an entire spin-off blog devoted to analyzing how leftists write. I mean, some days I catch myself trolling the most intolerable left-wing sites just looking for stuff to scrutinize. This is entirely different than the weird leftist proclivity for getting themselves offended; it's a deep and abiding intellectual fascination with the language used by leftist minds.

I've always had the sense that there was a vast and unbridgeable chasm between the left and right, probably going back to the days when I first read Fred Kerlinger's Liberalism and Conservatism in college. There's much to hate about that book, including Kerlinger's questionable statistical methods and reductive treatment of conservatism as merely modern Burkean pseudo-libertarianism, but his criterial referents theory (according to which political attitudes can be measured according to the criteriality attached to certain ideological referents, e.g., "gun control," "abortion," "divorce," etc. -- which was a relatively novel idea at the time) was nevertheless an interesting one because it exposed the inadequacy of the traditional polar conception of politics. Instead, he found that liberals and conservatives didn't just stake out opposite positions on the same referents: they were fundamentally different in terms of the referents they valued. The liberalism and conservatism subscales of his social attitudes scale correlated at a mere -.30 or so, meaning that variance in liberalism subscores could explain, at best, around 9% of the variance in conservatism subscores. That's not nothing, but it's certainly not a lot, and considerably less than the 100% suggested by the typical formulation according to which L = -C.

Ever since then, the realization dawned on me that the left-right split isn't merely just a difference in values (autonomy/equality for the left, tradition/authortiy/duty for the right). The world looks fundamentally different to leftists than it does to rightists. I can't conceive how they see it -- any more than I can, say, conceive of how a person with synesthesia experiences the world -- but I know the difference is there, and I feel like the way that leftists write offers some glimpse into their worldview.

It seems to me that liberalism is characterized in part by (and may well spring largely from) what I like to call spiritual autism. Autism spectrum disorders tend to be characterized by a few neurodevelopmental deficiencies, particularly in the areas of communication, social interaction, and sometimes impulse control. The ordinary liberal's spiritual deficiencies mirror these.

First, I've documented before the extent to which the rise of liberalism in the West has coincided with the corruption of language. Leftists just don't grasp the language with which spiritual matters might be discussed. Consider, for instance, the pathetic delusion that Christian love is nothing more than drippy affection and brainless tolerance, rather than an act of will. In this vein, I've noticed a tendency among liberals to write in a manner that is painfully literal, bereft of even the slightest concession to metaphorical ornamentation. I used to think that when liberals describe, for instance, God as a genocidal tyrant-in-the-sky, they were merely being superficial, blasphemous assholes. Now, though, I think they describe Him that way because they genuinely think religious people see Him that way -- because they cannot grasp that it is proper for God to ordain the deaths of men (even the deaths of whole races of men, such as the child-sacrificing, demon-worshipping Canaanites) and proper for man to obey the will of God, Who creates and sustains him.

I think this communicative deficiency produces profound frustration in those liberals who make an effort to engage religion (and the vast majority don't). This is why liberals and atheists alway seem so damn angry, not to mention deliberately impious. Since liberals cannot grasp religion on its own terms, those who can't reduce it to mere universalized liberalism (God as tolerance) reduce it instead to a collection of superstitions which people need to be shocked out of by means of grossly socially inappropriate displays of desecration. Impiety and sacrilege are to the liberal as aggressiveness and destructive tantrums are to the autist: both spring from an inability to mentally acquire and adhere to proper spiritual or social roles.

If this is true, liberals are in quite a sorry state. The world to them must seem irrational and intimidating; it can hardly seem otherwise. They ought to remain in our prayers, even as we continue to fight them and the false and evil creed their deficiencies lead them to defend.

Comments

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I concur with your idea. I'm a bit on the aspie side and I have no use for religion despite growing up in a very evangelical christian home. I'm an agnostic. I've haven't seen, met, or interacted with a creator and frankly none of the regions I've looked at make 100% logical sense to me.

I don't hate Christianity and it pisses me off when people attack it without a decent reason. I'm not an atheist as modern atheism seems to be it's own very retarded form of a religion that's about bashing christians and being dicks to random people. I've come to the conclusion that my brain just doesn't have the religious sense that most people have. I would describe myself as a retarded smart guy. I'm very smart at programming and logic, but I'm missing important parts of the normal human programming.

I'm not a leftist. I don't know how any serious student of history and human nature could believe anything put out by most leftist sources. Leftism reminds me more of a godless theocracy that keeps retreading the same old things that have failed before.