DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE PROGRESSIVE MISSIONARIES OF UNHAPPINESS
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There is no one that the left hates more than a man who does not hate, who goes through the day without outrage and who does not spend his life stewing with vindictive resentments.
Leftists call it “privilege” now. They have called it apathy, escapism and a hundred other things.
They will find a thousand other names for it as they march through the future centuries grinding their teeth and cursing their country for its backwardness, their people for their provincialism and their culture for its mercantilism. But privilege is simply freedom from resentment.
To be of the left is to confuse perpetual outrage with righteousness. The professional leftist believes that the path to utopia on earth lies in constantly denouncing thought criminals until they have all been unthought so that only their kind of ethical and empathetic people walk the earth.
Like most utopians, they plan for a utopia that they could never actually live in.
Leftists without grievances are like an army without guns. That is why leftist experiments in communes dissolved into denunciations, power grabs and authoritarian rules as soon the drugs ran out. Often even before. The leftist isn’t seeking freedom from capitalism, religion, nationalism, racism, sexism, office dress codes, bar codes and any of the other great evils of the moment. These are just the outrage fuel of the willfully outraged whose resentment has become both culture and religion.
What he wants is to express an egotistical grievance at a world that is not built around him. His resentments came before his ideology. They are in a very real sense his ideology. The idealistic leftist is a passing phenomenon. He is useful for getting the actual work done while everyone else shouts. Unless he is very dim, he eventually realizes that and heads off to volunteer in Africa. The core is the aggrieved leftist whose grievances merge with his storytelling skills into the compelling narrative of a narcissist.
The perpetually aggrieved deeply resent those who are oblivious to their anger. It is the theme that dominates the literature, the music and the political writings of an infuriated left throwing its anger at a mindless mass that is perfectly happy collecting paychecks, living in the suburbs and watching television. It is not their prosperity that the left hates, but their uncomplicated happiness.
It is this uncomplicated happiness that the left sets out to ruin at all costs.
Leftist activism is drama. It is deliberately destructive and disruptive. It glories in taking the happy lives of ordinary people and wrecking them. It plays the part of the troubled sibling, the one who is driven to destroy the happiness of the rest of the family out of his or her own willful unhappiness.
Happiness is a choice. It is not dependent on the condition of the individual, but on his state of mind. The essence of enduring happiness is a state of stability. Leftist politics are instability incarnate; the opposite number of happiness. That is why the left acts as the destroyer of happiness.
The left does not think that anyone should be happy. It is not unhappy because it is personally enmeshed in suffering. The ideological leaders of the left tend to come from the upper classes. They know no hunger except when they are dieting. They experience so few material shortcomings that they treat poverty as a lifestyle; slumming in poor areas and showily living on a few dollars a day.
It is the happiness of others that makes the left unhappy. It is convinced that this happiness is unearned and illegitimate because it does not take into account how unhappy this happiness makes the left.
Privilege is the accusation that the very lack of resentment and grievance, neurotic responses to simple phrases and a cloud of free-floating anger, represents an ignorant oppression. The happy are only happy at the expense of the unhappy and must recognize the unhappy privilege of their happiness.
Leftists are missionaries of unhappiness. Their creed is salvation through anger. Their governing philosophy is to make others miserable in order to teach them how they have overlooked the misery of others. They are forever spreading misery around the world for the sake of the greater good.
If the left sees anyone being happy, it must immediately set out to ruin the fun. The simple joy of others turns out to be only a cover for monstrous abuses that they are determined to make everyone else see. If it’s an object, it was made by oppressed workers. If it’s a social group, it’s discriminatory. If it’s food, it makes you sick. If it’s a sport, it’s abusive. If it’s art, then it’s escapism from the misery the left creates.
It is straightforward happiness that the left hates most of all. It is unable to appreciate anything directly unless it is medicated. It likes things only askew. It says that it likes bad art and ugly fashions because it is being ironic. What it really means is that it is only capable of liking something as a commentary on the absurdity of the thing and the emotion of liking it. Even its happiness is a critique of happiness.
Its joys are as sour as the rest of its nature.
The left views simplicity as dishonest. It is full of secret agendas and projects this in paranoid fashion. It is always finding the subtext in everything because it brings the subtext to the table. It is forever carrying around Rorschach inkblots in its head and shouting about all the terrible things it sees around it.
Deriving its happiness from the unhappiness of others, the left must see the destruction of happiness as moral and its victims as immoral. Happiness is selfish, it insists, while the awareness of how many evils are hidden beneath the simplistic façade of happiness is ethically enlightening. And yet its own obsession with destroying the happiness of others is the selfish way in which the left finds its happiness.
The left is only truly happy when it is destroying something. Its sublime transcendent moments are revolutionary. Their joy is derived not from what is being created, but from what is being destroyed. Every leftist revolution from the reign of Madame Guillotine to Obama’s election was full of vicious glee at things coming undone. Under the banner of equality, the left inaugurates inequality. Through calls for peace, it brings war and with cries of prosperity, it ushers in an age of terrible poverty.
Unable to create, the left ultimately only destroys. Its creative energies spring from bitterness. It glories in subversively undermining the happiness of others, directly and indirectly, but once all the things that it sought to destroy have been banished, it has nothing more to offer. Its hatred is sterile. It poison can be artfully disguised as idealism, humor and passion, but when there is nothing left to attack or subvert, it shows its true viral form by dying, as every virus that kills its host must inevitably do.
When the left finally triumphs, its first order of business is a total ruthless purge of its own professional dissenters because without such a purge, it would remain in the same dysfunctional state.
The left is satanic in its original sense of ‘antagonist’. It represents the darker side of human nature. It is the ideology of those who cannot let their anger go, who gain a perverse enjoyment from their grudges and define themselves less by what they are for than by what they are against. Its followers are motivated by an endless resentment that cannot be appeased because the resentment is their purpose.
It is impossible to meet the left halfway or to compromise with it because it is not seeking the stable balance that so many conservatives are. It finds its true purpose in the chaos of conflict. It gains its meaning in opposition not in co-existence. To compromise with the left is to rob it of its purpose. And the left pushes back against any such efforts through renewed bursts of radicalism.
Conservative parties lose when they fail to come to terms with this antagonistic dynamic and assume their opponents on the left also seek a stable state that they can find common ground on. Stability is the enemy of the left. Stability is privilege. Stability is happiness. Stability is everything that the left despises.
The left has learned to cloak its animosity and destructive aims in positive rhetoric. It destroys economies, families and freedoms in the name of equality. Its cheering mobs realize too late that its cause is not the equality of opportunity, happiness or liberty, but poverty, misery and slavery.
The left does not redistribute wealth. It redistributes want. It does not want everyone to share in the happiness of others, but to be burdened with a larger burden of their miseries.
No compromise can be had with the missionaries of unhappiness. Happiness can be shared without diminishing its quality, but the division of misery is the aim of the professionally miserable.
The left has suffered its worst defeats at the hands of the happy warriors of the right. Its greatest vulnerability is its meanness of spirit. Its defeat comes when its malaise is contrasted with happiness, when its deep suspicion of humanity is met with patriotic optimism and when its alarmist crises are met with laughter.
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