>>339069I came here to post Ted, but you beat me to it fren. "The psychology of leftism" is a chapter that felt out of odds with the rest of the manifesto at first reading but its now both integral to the rest of the essays and prescient in its predictions.
"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."
"Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist
that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foun-
dations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be
defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians
systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in
their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological
needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful,
it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because
they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed,
inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification
of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies
the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests."
READ UNCLE TED!