The Terrible Twos

For those of us who are witnessing the strange coming apart of the Democrat party in the United States, there is something very familiar.  The anger, the irrationality, the self-contradiction, the wild swings between hysteria and sanctimony, none of this is new.  It feels ancient, almost primordial.  Because it is.  Yet, what we are seeing is not a political disagreement but the re-emergence of the world’s second oldest religion. 

 The masks have fallen, and the thin façade of “compassion” has collapsed.  Murder, violence, and destruction is now rationalized and celebrated.  What remains is unadorned envy in motion, a movement that defines itself not by what it loves or builds, but by what it hates and destroys. 

There is no reasoning with such a force, because envy has no interest in the truth.  The success of the country angers them, patriotism drives them wild with rage.  Order angers them.  Stability angers them.  Community, family, marriage, all the pillars of civilization anger them.  Achievement — especially by anyone who is not of their tribe — is taken as a personal insult. 

Rousseau diagnosed this emotion as amour-propre, the cause of all inequality, conflict, comparison, vanity and social misery.  This is different from the natural self-love that we have as a means of survival.  Amour-propre is an artificial self-love, not rooted in the desire to be healthy, but to be seen as superior to others.  This is the false self-love that feeds on comparisons and withers under excellence.   It is the principal engine of vanity.   It constitutes the ugly part of our nature that thrives on status, admiration and recognition, that suffers when others excel. It is manifested in the drive to tear others down, which produces envy, resentment and shame.  And it is the psychological worm at the core of modern progressivism. 

Amour-propre is not about becoming better, it is about destroying whatever exposes your inadequacy.  This is why the modern Left is antagonistic to patriotism, gratitude, national achievement, individual excellence, religion, or anything that lifts the human spirit.  Anything that reminds them of their inadequacy must be torn down. 

This is the same ugliness was the root of the world’s oldest murder, the murder of Abel.  Cain made the decision that because he could not rise to Abel’s level, Abel had to die.  It is this biblical tendency that is at the root of the New Democrat party.  But this did not happen overnight.  The transformation of the Democrat party is the resurrection of ancient rootlessness.  The American version is the residue of a spiteful narcissism that disguised itself as modern philosophy and political theory in the 19^th century.    

In the 1830’s Marx dressed up this envy as “class consciousness.”  His partner, Engels, labeled it as “historical inevitability.”  Gramsci, the Italian communist who has inspired so many American intellectuals with his dark cynicism, concealed this ugly emotion as “counter-hegemony”.  Marcuse called it “liberators’ tolerance.”  The Frankfurt School puffed it up as critical theory.  And today, modern progressives simply call it “equity.”  But it follows the same pattern.  The psychological core is unchanged.  The core expresses itself as “someone else has something I don’t have,” “someone else’s excellence humiliates me,” and “therefore, they must be leveled.” 

Mao, who put this hideous vindictive into action, wanted a world without heights, because he could not tolerate the existence of mountains.  The result was the “cultural revolution”, a profoundly anti-cultural movement that sought to erase Chinese history and culture, murdered intellectuals and common people alike.  He sought to create a nation of communist robots too weak or afraid to challenge his authority.  All in the name of liberation—which is the usual mantra we hear from the Left.

But these violent tantrums go all the way back to pre-history;  to the serpent itself.  The serpent’s appeal to Eve was that God should not have more than his creature, humanity.  God was, after all, keeping the best stuff for himself.  And so, the Serpent urged, if we only ate of the precious fruit, we would be like God.  This same belief—that man should displace God—is the appeal behind every utopian idea of leveling or revolution. Marx, Engels, Gramsci, Mao, Stalin—the entire rotten family tree—has produced nothing but political violence and murder disguised as credible theory.  The writings of these charlatans are not deep or profound.  They are the pseudo-intellectual ravings of lunatics who resented brilliance and cursed the light because it exposed their inadequacy. 

Solzhenitsyn, the prophetic Russian writer, epitomized the disaster of the Soviet Union by stating that the Russian people had “forsaken God.”  He agreed with the thousands of years of Orthodox theology that human misfortune is the result of an arrogant creature who has chosen to separate himself from God, who strikes back with futility against his obvious and dangerous moral and physical limitations.  Our self-imposed exile is like the spoiled child who runs away from loving parents to “be cool” and winds up dead in a ditch.  But not before she has destroyed the lives of everyone around her. 

And so, the modern Left are not builders, they are accelerants.  They wish to see the house collapse so that no one will live in a better home than they do.    And being two or three steps removed from Marx and Mao, who at least offered a vision however misguided, it is not clear what these posers want to build in place of western civilization other than to create chaos. 

We can see the rootlessness in the Left’s legislation or lack of it.  Their performative pranks of closing the government, wearing matching outfits to Congress, carrying juvenile signs, siding with drug dealers, letting criminals out of jail to murder again, opposing police, and refusing to accept the will of even the majority in a Republican Democracy.  It is not worth even asking them what they want to build in its place, because the answer is that they don’t know. 

Their anger at God has never been more manifest.  Churches are burnt, Christians are mocked or even murdered, the Sermon on the Mount is turned on its head.  Political positions that only five years ago were widely held are now considered to be immoral to the point of committing violence against anyone who holds them.  Criminal activity is lauded because it is destructive.  Radical Islam is lauded because it is destructive.   Arsons are common, and leftists opening fire on schoolyards are met with yawns, or baffling calls to take the guns away from those who are being targeted. 

This same love of destruction long ago seeped into the art world.  The instinct within much of modern art is not to create but to destroy, to mock and ridicule western civilization.  Whereas Kandinsky explored the spiritual, modern artists are loathe to follow any rules that require skill or discipline.  Apes can create much of what the art critics laud as art, and in certain cases, apes have.  There is  the famous case of “Pierre Brassau”. Pierre was lauded as “the best painter in the exhibition” in 1964 in Rothenberg at a show at the prestigious Galleria Christiane. Pierre the chimp impressed the art world with his “powerful brush strokes and clear deliberation.”  When it was revealed that it was not in fact a young French avant-garde artist, but a chimpanzee, some critics even doubled down and praised the chimp’s natural ability.  It was ludicrous then, but nothing is ludicrous now.  Indeed, we have come a long way from Donatello’s long nights seeking perfection, or Michelangelo consumed with trying to find the perfect human form.  Art is not chasing after the divine order of the universe, it is now rebellion against aesthetic, a child knocking over his Legos. 

Anti-aesthetics have moved to the skyline.  Modern architecture’s war on beauty began with the angry socialist architects of the 1930’s in Germany.  The  battle soon spread throughout the western world in the form of giant, ugly, utilitarian boxes, the destruction of neighborhoods, barrios, and communities throughout civilization.  Today, the aesthetic ideal has completely toppled.  It has now spread to literacy, mathematics, and of course religion and even the slightest form of order or hierarchy.  All through this we can hear the cry of Cain against his brother Abel, “I will not be judged, I will not improve, I will deny excellence, I will destroy the one who outshines me.” 

The Leftist wet blanket has even moved to sports.  Female athletes, finally receiving attention for the hard work and discipline they have put in, now have to deal with childish men imitating women in an effort to destroy a fair competition.  Leftists laud it for no other reason that it is destructive.  Their rationale in defense of this silliness is mindless.  It has the intellectual content of a jealous older brother coming in and smashing his little sister’s tea party—with the older brat defended by his weak and worthless parents. 

Terrorist groups like ANTIFA, created by the anarchist and communist fringe in 1930’s Germany (that veritable fun factory of political ideology) are at least more honest about their goals.  ANTIFA is not opposed to western civilization because they believe it is immoral.  They are opposed to western civilization because it is civilization.  It is one thing to oppose a civilization that is cruel and barbaric.  But to oppose a civilization that is self-reflective, that has openly stated its sin, that has eradicated slavery, that has elevated women above slave status, that has—for the first time in human history—created a welfare system to provide for the poor, and however imperfectly continues to reach for excellence and openly tries to eradicate its flaws?  To oppose this kind of civilization can only be explained through jealousy, anger, or lunacy.  Or all three. 

And now….for the final rebellion.  And the Lord God made man “male and female.”  This is the next logical step in the rebellion.  Now we are opposed to even nature, we are opposed to any kind of imposed categories.    How dare anyone tell me that I must accept my body the way it is? Why should my lips be under my nose or my head on my shoulders?  How dare a tyrannical divinity try to dictate to me—who seek to stand in the place of God?  Why should an evergreen be evergreen, or zebra have stripes?  How dare God try to dictate to us — proud humanity — what the world should be?

And so, we even apply the new anti-aesthetic to ourselves.  We no longer wish to support the traditional categories of beauty as applied to the human form.  My hair is blue, my lips are green, I am “they” not he or she, and I am not going to be bound by anything anyone else tries to make me what I don’t desire at this exact moment, especially and most importantly God. 

      Western Civilization is in the throes of the “terrible twos”, the stage at which a toddler wants to throw himself down the stairs and crack his skull and doesn’t want anyone to tell him what to do.  Don’t look for any reason, rationality, or profound thoughts here.  There aren’t any.  It is infantile rebellion and jealousy—with violent consequences—cloaked in false ideology. 

Archaeologists dig in the ground for clues as to why civilizations—great civilizations evaporate into nothingness.  But the answer is all around us, and it is obvious.  Collapse comes as the inevitable result of the world’s oldest sin :  pride.