Where Have All the Grown-Ups Gone?

Posted By Stephen Paul Foster On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled
[1]

Karl Marx, Chief Adolescent who never worked a day in his life.

1,543 words

If I ruled the world,
Every day would be the first day of Spring
–Tony Bennett, “If I Ruled the World”

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.–1st Corinthians, 13:11

One at times has to marvel at the hordes on the Left. They cling tenaciously to adolescence; never do they grow up and come to terms with reality. To remain on the Left is to lock one’s self into a permanent state of arrested development.

The upset election of the Orange Man five years ago unleashed Leftist adolescence in a peak of pathological frenzy manifested as Trump Derangement Syndrome. It demonstrated how an ideology marinated in the juices of an alternative reality can turn adults, young and old, into disagreeable, unmanageable children fixated on a long-dead Austrian with a Charlie Chaplin mustache. Post-election 2016 was a unique period in American history, a four-year collective temper tantrum that led to the extraction of Joe “You know? The thing” Biden and Wille Brown’s concubine, Kamala Harris, from the lowest dregs of the ruling class and put them in the country’s highest offices.

One of the most distinctive marks of adolescence is a relentless, self-centered view of one’s place in the world. Work — because it is not always easy, fun, and instantly rewarding — is not readily embraced by highly self-centered creatures like adolescents. Full-time, hard work is something that Leftists devoutly believe other people should do since they themselves have higher callings — like dismantling the old corrupt order and installing a regime of virtue in its place –, grandiosity being another stage of late childhood.

Karl Marx, worshipped by adolescents worldwide, spent his adult life dodging gainful, full-time employment. His wife, Jenny, and the Marx children languished in squalor while Karl scribbled away and sponged off his pal, Friedrich Engels. Stalin as a young, ambitious Bolshevik robbed banks. Mao wrote poetry. Jean-Paul Sartre lounged about in Paris cafés affecting a distinctively French anti-bourgeois style while producing reams of unreadable bilge that aspiring sophisticates in college dorms and faculty lounges would later flaunt as deep existentialist thought. Bill Ayers tried to blow up the Pentagon before he settled into his sinecure as an “education” professor and aging celebrity-radical. Now at a ripe old age of 77, retired on a state pension, it’s unlikely that he has put in a day of hard work in his entire life. Leftist, professional radicals, for all of their professed dedication to the betterment of the oppressed working masses, would never be found in a factory, near a coal mine, on a tractor, or emptying a bedpan.

The “Occupy Wall Street” adolescents a few years back, with the encouragement of their Hope and Change President, who himself has never had a real job, squatted in public places and railed and fumed at “rich, greedy bankers” while ignoring a couple of obvious questions: Why would anyone want to be a banker if he couldn’t be rich? Presumably, they didn’t object to poor bankers, but why would any sane person trust their savings to one?

You see, “greedy” is “adolescent-speak” that describes someone who makes more money or has more than you think he should. I believe that it is safe to conjecture that in the history of the world, it would be exceedingly difficult to discover many examples of individuals confessing themselves to being greedy. Certainly no one on the Left would ever make such a confession. Greed is the cardinal sin for the Leftist, and its application is most flexible — sort of like undeserved “privilege” — and only white people have it. George Clooney, Michael Moore. Hillary Clinton, and Mark Zuckerberg have more money than most of us could dream of, yet I have never heard of anyone calling them greedy.

Adolescents also tend to be know-it-alls. They gaze around at the world, observing and deeply resenting all of its injustices and pettiness. They know exactly what is wrong and how to fix it. If only they were allowed to, every day would be the first day of Spring. Some pass through what their elders patronizingly and euphemistically call the “idealistic” stage, come to terms with the imperfections, and live out their imperfect lives in this most imperfect world without being in perpetual high dudgeon and projecting their malignancies onto normal people.

However, we have the amply sad history of permanent adolescent know-it-alls, professional Leftists, in charge of fixing things. One word is sufficient to summarize the state of the paradise that two adolescents with homicidal instincts promised would unfold if they were put in charge: “starvation.” Two of the world’s largest countries, Russia and China, were run for decades by a couple of “boys” widely proclaimed to be “geniuses” and paragons of virtue. No field of study or body of wisdom was beyond their mastery. No aspect of the character or personality of either leader was sullied by self-interest. Both Stalin and Mao went on to engineer famines that killed tens of millions of their own countrymen. Mao, whose real forte was poetry, untrained and wholly ignorant of agronomy and basic science, nevertheless overturned centuries of traditional Chinese agricultural practice and inserted his whims and fantasies as law. The Great Leap Forward is the ultimate demographer’s challenge to this day as researchers try to determine how many millions of Chinese people perished as the result of Mao’s fantasies.

[2]

You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s new novel When Harry Met Sally here. [3]

In addition to starving to death millions of Ukrainian farmers in the 1930s, Stalin put the ignoramus, Trofim Lysenko, in charge of Soviet agronomy. He proceeded to persecute and drive out real scientists and agronomists. Our own Trofim Lysenko, Tony Fauci [4], is following a similar modus operandi. One single statistic that forcefully expresses the staggering ignorance and incompetence of the know-it-alls that governed the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991 is the following: “In 1917 Russia had been the world’s largest exporter of grain; by 1989 it was the world’s largest importer.”[1] [5]

In speaking of the connection between Communist miracle workers and starvation, I would be remiss here if I did not also mention that when Fidel Castro’s Sugar Daddy, known as the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991, the following decade was a very hungry time [6] in El Maximo Lider’s Socialist Workers’ Paradise. No opportunities for Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers in that corner of the Caribbean.

When adolescents do not get their way, those who disappoint them are made to feel the extreme effects of their resentment. At the hard rock bottom of all Leftist ideology is the premise that all inequitable social outcomes are caused by groups of bad, morally inferior people who oppress and exploit nice, superior ones. For them, history à la Karl Marx in its truest form is grievance-mining — and Leftists are perennial grievance-mongers. The social world is always and inevitably about one group exploiting and dominating another. All that is wrong with the world becomes the doing of the unfairly advantaged Exploiter-Dominators (EDs) who pummel the lowly Exploited-Victims (EVs). Being an EV means that there is always an ED to resent and to blame. An EV in good standing must have a grievance to polish and villains to excoriate. EVs are heroes. They used to be Communist intellectuals and revolutionaries (Marx, Che, and one of Obama’s favorites, Frantz Fanon). Now, in the spirit of defining deviancy down, they are black, career criminals like George Floyd, cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal (born Wesley Cook), and Black Life Matters rioters.

EDs are villains. They used to be fat cat capitalists, corporate executives, and rich people. Now, they are middle class, blue collar, and church-going white people, all lumped together as “white supremacists.” “Workers of the world unite!” has given way to “Black Lives Matter.” The designees have changed; the formula still holds. EVs are virtuous — compassionate, selfless, and wise. EDs are greedy, selfish, and mean-spirited; their intended destination, extinction. Lenin, Mao, and Stalin liquidated the capitalists. Liquidation in the form of replacement and disenfranchisement of white people by champions of the EVs is going on before our very eyes.

This stark, Manichean, hero-villain picture of the world is perfect for the adolescent theorist-moralist. With it, he can feel downtrodden, virtuous, and special all at the same time. The source of his discomfort always redounds to those self-centered adults (projection) who lack the unique insight and knowledge he has (more projection). From this picture flows what Bertrand Russell called “The Doctrine of the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed,” which means that whatever the EVs do to the EDs is morally justified. Lies, character assassination, rioting, looting, and arson — all can be justified because the EDs are all the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler, even though they pretend not to be. When everyone who opposes you is some variety of Nazi, Fascist, or Klansman, your toolbox of weapons is quite expansive.

On May 5 we will celebrate the 204th birthday of the original adolescent, grievance-mining philosopher. Happy Birthday in advance, Karl. You would be pleased to see that so many of your “children” rule.

*  *  *

Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.

To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:

Paywall Gift Subscriptions

[7]If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:

To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.

Note

[1] [8] John Mosier, Hitler vs. Stalin: The Eastern Front, 1941-1945 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 11.