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CHAPTER 4
THE AGE OF UNREASON
A Dark Enlightenment
A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, “You are mad; you are not like us.”
St. Anthony the Great
The new Left, those anti-Enlightenment martinets seeking (and succeeding) to orchestrate and mandate what can be and what cannot be expressed or even thought, these post-modernes, are adequately described by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents in his description of traits shared by members of such a group:
“It might be said that the intense emotional ties which we observe in groups are quite sufficient to explain one of their characteristics – the lack of independence and initiative in their members, the similarity in the reactions of all of them, their reduction, so to speak, to the level of group individuals… the weakness of intellectual ability, the lack of emotional restraint, the incapacity for moderation and delay, the inclination to exceed every limit in the expression of emotion and to work it off completely in the form of action – these and similar features… show an unmistakable picture of a regression of mental activity to an earlier stage such as we are not surprised to find among savages or children.”
Now, in the middle of a cultural putsch, the problem is not that the Left act like children. They do. The problem is that biologically grown adults acting like children is not just irritating or amusing, it’s dangerously psychopathological, and not in the mundane, quotidian ways described by Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The danger of infantile adults is not that they are weak as individual personalities, but that they are collectively strong in societal terms. Children don’t learn to reason until a certain age and if that is arrested the effects do not end with the individual. Unreason is accepted in the child and the mentally ill. It is dangerous in anyone else.
Late-stage leftist egalitarianism is a psychosis and must be mocked as such.
Jim Goad, Taki’s Magazine.
There are three types of unreason, the childish, the insane, and the political. The first two are involuntary, the last deliberately orchestrated. Firstly, it is necessary to take a brief excursion to sketch at least a provisional reading of the psychopathology of the new Left.
So it is that we must examine the Alt. Left – the progressive, globalist, post-modern, woke, anti-nationalist, anti-Caucasian, Liberal-Left – as the possible presentation of a psychopathology, a dysfunctional mental condition, in the same way that measles presents as red spots and lupus presents as hives.
The Left does not display a psychopathology in and of itself. If you were to converse with someone who wished to see taxes lowered for the working class and concomitantly raised for the middle and upper class of earners, a large public sector funded by the state via that taxation, nationalisation of public utilities, generous immigration and comprehensive school education, you would not think them mad or bad, even if you disagreed with them, and given that they could at least defend their position.
But daily coming across those who claim to speak for the Left, and believe not only that there are many genders, but that those who state that there are only two should be punished, that climate change is racist, who wish there to be no borders and no limits to immigration (in particular of unskilled Muslims and blacks, useless as social capital, a financial drain, and generally socially inimical to the host country), who approve of very young children being taught about sexual practices which many still believe to be deviant, who claim that to link Islamist terrorism with Islam is Islamophobic, who see white culture as deleterious and in need of replacement, and we are in a different ideological arena, one in which whites are the quarry.
Diagnosis of Leftist psychopathology is a matter for dispute, and I am a layman, but we will allow a fanciful image to guide us.
Let us say that we attend a party and are led into a main room. Inside, several people are standing in groups, chatting, laughing, drinking, and behaving in exactly the way you would expect party-goers to behave. You leave the party for half an hour and return. The same people are in attendance, but their behaviour has changed, and the reason for the change is that one man is now jumping up and down on a sofa, tearing at his hair and screaming obscenities. We are, it seems, entitled to draw an example of normative behaviour from this scenario, and also of abnormal or deviant behaviour. In these circumstances, these two poles of behaviour could quite appropriately be labelled “sanity” and “madness”. Where do the new Left stand?
Mason Verger: You never gave a statement in the course of Dr. Lecter’s trial… and he beat it all on an insanity plea.
Clarice Starling: The court found him insane. Dr. Lecter did not plead.
Thomas Harris, Hannibal.
Before we write off the Left as incurably insane, we should note that the need for a normative principle in the field of mental health is prone to what we will call the Arbiter Paradox. In other words; who decides the norm? This problem involves an infinite regress (who granted normative rules to the arbiter? and so on), but if this is not a problem solvable de facto, there are of course de jure standards and yardsticks to ascertain whether a person is mad.
Judicially, the M’naghten rule is the most famous. Insanity is held to be a defence of a criminal act only if:
“…at the time of committing the act, the party accused was labouring under a defect of reason, from a disease of the mind, so as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or, if he did know it, that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong.” (Queen v M’Naghten, 1843).
This summation, when applied to the new Left, is dynamite. Are they mad or bad? They are certainly dangerous to know.
The canonical text which defines categories and sub-categories of mental illness is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) now in its fifth edition since its low-key inception in 1952. It should be noted that the DSM is fraught with controversy, and it illustrates technocracy in action, having a Koranic role in the medico-pharmacueutical complex. In Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm than Good, James Davies notes that the reference work quickly became a marketing tool for what is nowadays called “big pharma.” Davies notes:
“…the DSM’s journey from its modest 130 pages in 1952 to the 886 pages it boasts today. In short, the first edition of the DSM was written in order to solve a problem that had plagued the profession for decades.”
From the moment of DSM’s “Big Bang”, it is accused by Davies of medicalising much of what passes for ordinary human existence, which is, of course – or once was – the province of philosophy. Socrates had hemlock to put an end to his philosophizing. A range of opioids has the same effect now with potential philosophers. With that proviso, let us see what DSM has to say that might enlighten us as to the psychopathology of the new Left. Consider four personality disorders in DSM V and we will make a composite – albeit amateur – diagnosis of the typical SJW personality type. Let us examine four disorders, with one attendant symptom for each:
- Antisocial Personality Disorder [presents as] “a pervasive pattern of disregard for the rights of other people.”
- Histrionic Personality Disorder [presents as] “a pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking.”
- Narcissistic Personality Disorder [presents as] “significant problems with [the sufferer’s] sense of self-worth stemming from a powerful sense of self-entitlement. This leads [the sufferer] to believe they deserve special treatment…”
- Borderline Personality Disorder [presents as] “intense and unstable emotions and moods… [sufferers] generally have a hard time calming down once they have become upset.”
Anyone who has seen SJWs – and much of the rest of the Left – in action will recognise the accuracy of these diagnoses. Two more well-known mental disorders may help refine our layman’s scratch diagnosis.
Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.
Cognitive dissonance is a mental disorder which, in the words of Ann Olson Psy. D, can be defined as “a state of tension that occurs when a person simultaneously holds two cognitions, thoughts or beliefs that are psychologically inconsistent with a person’s behaviour.” The attendant literature is doubtless plentiful, but we will concentrate on the epistemological polarity of two inconsistent beliefs and the “state of tension” mentioned by Dr. Olson.
This condition and its resultant mental problems represent one reason that the Left may soon find itself depleted in its numbers. To take a recent deformation of reality it has visited on ordinary people, that of “gender fluidity” and “non-binary gender”, we can say one thing to a near-certainty; those who enforce it don’t, by a long way, believe it. The line-managers who dutifully add their preferred pronouns to their Twitter/X profiles don’t believe those things are real. The interviewers or teachers careful not to “misgender” or “deadname” their interviewees or students do not believe that there is any need for such solicitude. The parent interviewing an applicant for a public sector post who has been asked to refer to them as “xir” secretly views this as an impertinent waste of time. All of these psychic tensions will cause dropouts from the Left as ordinary people begin to see that these things are a miserable lie. If cognitive dissonance is true to its hidden and unconscious ministrations, the tension will prove too much and there will be defections back to reality.
We will move on to another mental disorder with which we can attempt at least an initial framing of the Alt. Left; Schizophrenia.
Then, to my intense confusion, it occurred to me that I was actually two different persons.
C. G. Jung, School Days
Schizophrenia comes, as do so many medical terms, from classical roots. The Ancient Greek verb schizein meant “to cleave” or “cut into two.” Phrenos meant the mind or seat of reason, which was held to be the head. The mind cleaved, then, divided, split into two and destined to turn on itself. The term “schizophrenia” was first used by Eugen Bleuler, Jung’s director at the Burghölzli Clinic.
Schizophrenia is classically – and culturally – seen as the “split personality”, exemplified in art by Hitchcock’s Psycho or Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We note it in passing particularly with reference to Borderline Schizophrenia, a condition in which the sufferer is aware, during their lucid moments, of the derangement they display during their episodes. This comparison is not applicable to the Alt. Left although, and in conjunction with our consideration of cognitive dissonance above, it may in time be applicable to those of the Left who realise that many of their doctrines are opposed to reality.
Schizophrenia, with reference to the Left, is just as relevant when nations – particularly the UK and US – are seen as a whole. Both Plato, in the Republic, and Hobbes, in Leviathan, use the device of the city-state or commonwealth viewed as though it were an individual person. In this sense, for a conservative, such a schizocracy would have the political Right as its normative mental state with the Left representing its deranged episodes.
Finally, we will turn to a state germane to understanding the Left, but which is not a psychological condition at all. In fact, it is a stage through which all of us must pass. The question is, who left that place? And who stayed?
At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child – miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of snivelling brats.
P. J. O’Rourke, Give War a Chance
It must be stressed again that this is all amateur psychology, a layman’s sketch of a diagnostic possibility. As such, the conclusion is equally naive, just as much a guess at what it is that is causing life for those not nested among the strange Midwich cuckoos of the Left to be increasingly onerous. We might call the conclusion childlike.
We began as children, unknowingly searching an environment, like the fool of the Tarot pack setting off blithely on his journey, looking for knowledge and experience. And, like inquiring children, there remains another possibility, an inevitability, one which is only psychopathological in a certain context, that of adulthood, of maturity, of being all grown up.
In the end, the psychopathology of the Left may not be a mental disorder at all but a regression, a retraction into a vanished childhood made by adults who never quite mastered or coped with the demands of growing up, intellectual Peter Pans without the charm. David Horowitz, a man who crossed the floor from revolutionary communism to become one of the Right’s sharpest critics of socialism, invokes Freud and encapsulates the Left’s true affliction in Radical Son:
“In Civilisation and its Discontents [Freud] analysed the expectations of socialists – that the world would be governed by justice and love – as an adult fairy tale. Socialism was a wish for the comforting fantasies of childhood to come true…. Socialism was not only a childish wish, but a wish for childhood itself; security, warmth, the feeling of being at the centre of the world.”
And if we are dealing with children when we deal with the Left, we can at least be absolutely certain what kind of children they are, those described by W. H. Auden, in September 1, 1939:
“Children afraid of the night,
Who have never been happy or good.”
Malevolent children, belligerent sociopaths, dysfunctional pack animals. So much for the phenomenal aspect of the New Left. What if, as it were, progressivism, woke, and the rest of the caravan of fools also had a genotype? They do. It is not possible simply to opt out of the history of rationalism and its other, irrationalism. What the Left are doing has grave philosophical consequences, and their irrationalist approach contravenes many of the – doubtless white and therefore oppressive – epistemological protocols always in play if not seen. The Left, as they are today. What of their philosophy?
Tomorrow he finds out what’s true and what’s not.
Mick Jagger’s character, Turner. Performance.
The key epistemological difference between Left and Right revolves around a philosophical decision concerning knowledge and truth. For the Right, knowledge is the intermediary state between information as raw material and wisdom as the ultimate state of this process of transformation, what you might call a Platonic trajectory. The role of the subjective is to be trained in first principles of analysis and synthesis so as to best effect this change of state to its own advantage. The information and resultant knowledge should stay firmly on the side of the objective, which enables it to be open to shared consensus and thus partake in the communitarian.
For those on the Left, however, the subjective is everything. Opinion is equally as valid as objective knowledge (doxa and episteme in Ancient Greek, the first travelling to today’s English as “dogma”, the second as “epistemology”). Whereas for the Right, emoting is seen as wholly subsidiary to the acquisition of knowledge, incidental and, if anything, a hindrance on the path to wisdom, for the Left it is the key functional state. This is the rematch between Hume’s reason and the passions. But if classical emotio is held to be more methodologically vital than ratio, then a whole apparatus of reasoned thought is made obsolete and the shaky, Heath Robinson machinery of the emotions take over, with ruinous effects. An example of epistemological dysfunction.
Let us suppose a subject is shown four apples. She is asked how many oranges she sees. She replies, none. She may also add what will turn out to be a crucial enforcer, I see no oranges. A curious thing has happened, almost imperceptible. For a moment, the apples in and of themselves are being defined by what they are not. That is, p = not not-p. Now, suppose in answer to the question the subject says that she sees three oranges and one apple. The experimenter is in a very modern bind. He can either assume the subject has faulty perception or a mental imbalance, that she is lying for some sort of effect, exhibiting meta-behaviour in terms of the experiment, or one other option. He can accept the statement as the state of affairs as perceived by the subject as “her” truth. For the subject, the fact that there are three oranges before her and one apple is ‘her truth’, and must be respected as such. This is known as “standpoint epistemology”. Thus, theoretically, experience of the world is viewed by billions of Leibnizian monads who all reserve the prerogative of having a different evaluative outcome. This is what is happening to the West’s epistemology right now. It is not, or not only, the global redistribution of people and wealth we should worry about, it’s the global redistribution of truth.
Epistemologically, this division between the ruling far Left and the dissident Right is world-historical, metaphysical, and central to the avoidance of the trying times that seem to be ahead. Where the Right acts and thinks as though the objective world exists, the new Left, wrapped in the swaddling clothes of post-structuralism, sees the external world as a construct owned by the winners of history, or at least currently held by those who are winning.
A radical subjectivity, devoted to itself and its attributes, and solipsistic in outlook, is given the right to arbitrate concerning reality. It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie, but this is what is happening at the epistemological level. The concept of truth may have been de-stabilised by Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, but these were abstract exercises not intended to cross over into the nightmarish, real-world vision of the new Left. Truth can be “deconstructed” as long as it is just a field exercise. The Left like to talk about “deconstructing” things because it makes them feel as though they were doing useful manual work. The most dangerous thing about the inscription on Karl Marx’s tombstone, that philosophers seek to interpret the world while they should be changing it, is rising up from his garish and vulgar grave. The actual world in which truths exist is less forgiving.
The Left have, however, provided themselves with epistemological get-out clauses. Thus, there is no need for them to equip themselves with philosophical knowledge to bolster their arguments, because philosophy is rendered null by virtue of having been written by white men. It has thus become illegitimate, what Plato termed “bastard reasoning”. This also and conveniently absolves them of the arduous task and reading and understanding Western philosophy and they are further under no compunction to apply its time-honoured principles, because that honour was granted by white men during a time controlled, oppressively and hegemonically, by that same cabal. Nor are they tied in fealty to its standard and accepted (by others) use of language. And language is a major battleground in the Left’s war against reason.
Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
The new Left display an interesting attitude to language, involving ritual, taboo, and in particular words of power. They practice a type of magical thinking and are well described by Plato in the Theaetetus:
“If you ask any of them a question, he will produce, as from a quiver, sayings brief and dark, and shoot them at you; and if you inquire the reason of what he has said, you will be hit by some other new-fangled word, and will make no way with any of them, nor they with one another; their great care is, not to allow of any settled principle either in their arguments or in their minds, conceiving, as I imagine, that any such principle would be stationary; for they are at war with the stationary, and do what they can to drive it out everywhere.”
As well as linguistic meaning, the Left are also at war with history, and forgetting the past is another indicator that all is not well with the mental health of the afflicted individual.
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
Cicero, Orator
The Left have a selective and pragmatic view of history, but one which presents a paradox. They require samples from it as evidence for their racial grievances, but at the same time they also desire a huge revisionist program, an abridged version of history which expunges any notion of white achievement and leaves only their version of white oppression. The black man invented everything from the plough to the Large Hadron Collider, while the white men tried to hobble this meteoric progress with chains and plantations.
And this utter revulsion concerning the free exchange of ideas, plus the possibility of a micro-version of Hegel’s triad of thesis/antithesis/synthesis emerging from debate, means that Socratic humility is never possible for the post-modernes. They cannot be wrong, and so they cannot know that they know nothing. They cannot even, in accordance with “Cromwell’s rule”, acknowledge that there always exists the possibility of being mistaken. When you know all you need to know about everything of import – which today is simply the parsing of perceived victimhood and justifying violence in the name of the fable of oppression – then you don’t need to know anything more. You have the sanctity of certainty, and we are back at the burning library of Alexandria, with the Muslim commander justifying his actions against antiquity by stating that if any of the books disagreed with the Koran, they must be burned while, if any agreed, they were superfluous and could be burned.
The post-modernes shun debate as vampires the light. Their ex cathedra pronouncements of ex nihilo propositions carry with them the full gravitas of Papal infallibility. They know they are not equal to debate and so, by an extraordinary anti-rationalist sleight of hand, they deem debate to be a tool of white oppression, one of the stratagems of a system designed to maintain the white supremacist patriarchs the modern Left see everywhere, like the devils seen by the shrieking nuns of Loudon in 1634.
There is a strong bond between the anti-historical, iconoclastic stance of the new Left and Islam’s historical revisionism. For Muslims, the jahilya was the time before Islam, and so everything that existed before it is ripe for destruction. This is why they blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas, as one example among many. They existed before Mohammed, therefore they didn’t exist. Practical epistemology, with added dynamite. The jahilya period for the millennials is not the time before the sixth century, it is the time before they were born.
As for philosophy and historical racism, post-modern academics are like crooked cops determined to pin a rap on an old enemy by planting evidence. Kant is a target for the post-modernes (who could never understand his work) due to this sort of passage:
“The white race possesses all incentives and talents in itself… The race of Negroes can be educated, but only as slaves. The [indigenous] Americans cannot be educated, they care about nothing and are lazy.”
Again, it is not necessary to rehearse the defences of this snippet ripped untimely from its context. That would be somehow to admit that Kant and his statement need defending, which they do not.
To have no history, to expunge a fallen state and start history afresh, was an essential aim of the revolutions in 1789, 1917, and 1957. But there is a hidden danger in the erasure of the historical, as enticing an opportunity as it seems.
In Plato’s version of the creation myth in the Timaeus, it is related that Solon, the great lawgiver, converses with a high priest of a town called Sais in the Egyptian Delta. Surprisingly, the great man is somewhat embarrassed to discover that his knowledge of antiquity pales in comparison to that of the High Priests. There is a reason for this; the great Hellenic lawmaker Solon is admonished with regard to a sense of history the priest did not feel the Athenians had:
“Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition…”
So it will be in the brave new world, in which malevolent sprites chanting “we don’t need no education” will have no support from centuries of wisdom built up gradually as it was before being washed away by a tide of ignorance. To read philosophy is to read history from a certain angle, but without that history and the men who made it, philosophy as we have it would not, could not exist.
Now, the new breed have done something rather slippery to build their own version of history. By using phrases such as ‘critical race theory’, they have made non-subjects look not only as though they actually exist in a meaningful sense, but as though they were actual branches of theory of knowledge, and thus directly related to the bloodline of philosophy. And so, although the new Puritans despise philosophy, they like its livery. They think they look good in it.
One of the key strategies of “woke” academia is to ostracise and belittle those who find the study of Western white culture to be advantageous rather than riddled with racism. We will see the philosopher as escaped prisoner in Chapter 7, but her shackles have already been fitted.
If truth is not on our side, then away with the truth!
Solzhenitsyn, March 1917
A revolution against the current order is happening on an epistemological battlefield rather than – or alongside – the streets of major cities. Reason, facts, empirical research and commentary, and all the other apparatus of the Enlightenment, are no longer effective as weapons and must face the Jacobinism of the mind we see currently in the West. This is an age of unreason, of epistemological revolution. And philosophy is the first to be led to the gallows, with its traditional 13 steps leading to a noose wrapped with 13 loops.
Philosophy offends the post-modern sensibility in other ways than the mere skin colour of its great writers, albeit not ways they would recognize or understand. The simple, methodical use of reason to link observations and recognize that they legitimately lead to knowledge goes against the anti-ratiocinative anarchy of the woke mobsters. For the post-modern teacher, for example, mathematics is racist, and having the right answer to a problem has no merit except to make those with the wrong answer, or no answer at all, feel uneasy. She is right, of course. Mathematics is racist, just not in the way she thinks. Mathematics is racist because blacks consistently fare worse at it than whites (who in turn are out-performed by Asians, in the north American sense). It is therefore an indicator of racial difference, and thus has to do with race, is racist.
The Denaissance and resulting Age of Unreason rely on the re-childing of the West. That type of unreason seen in children, and which I separated off from unreason as displayed unwillingly by the clinically insane and willingly by the political class, has as its emblem infancy where the Renaissance showed the possibility of human intellectual maturity.
When I became a man, I put away childish things.
Corinthians 13:11
“Why should we not,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, “speak like children?” I suspect that were the prophet (never the advocate) of nihilism – who himself babbled like a child during his final decade in the Jena Clinic and finally at his sister’s house – to put in an appearance today, this is one of the aphorisms he might like struck from the record.
Now that so many adults in the west really are speaking, acting and dressing like children, we can only note with sadness that the result is not the childlike state Nietzsche envisaged but an epidemiological childishness. Children do not, of course, read philosophy, and this is another way of disabling the discipline. If you don’t want children to be able to reach something, you put it on a high shelf.
The re-childing of the West is well charted by Diana West in The Death of the Grown-Up. A shift in status has taken place in the last half century which begins with the relocation of the locus of authority and influence:
“Long before the Baby Boom crested, adults – parents – were abdicating their rights and privileges by deferring to the convenience and entertainment of the young. Rather suddenly, adults were orbiting around their children, rather than the other way around.”
Children are venerated now just as the elderly are left to die in cold, damp hospital corridors. This is the reason so many adult male Muslim economic migrants to the West claim to be children. They know that this will play on Western heart-strings that Muslims do not have and therefore cannot be tuned. The only veneration Islam has for childhood is in sexual terms and as demographic weaponry in Europe or human shields in Gaza. But youthful behaviour can be deceptive. The desire for youth in the old is a perennial feature of age, and becomes quite literal in the very old and Alzheimerian who often abreact their childhood selves.
It is a simple psychological observation that, like children, a certain type of person becomes irritated and even angry in the face of something it does not and cannot understand. So it is with philosophy. Teenagers who would be all thumbs with a cartoon Antifa handbook are not going to get far with philosophy. Then they will claim that they “would never read” that type of Caucasian hegemonic trash, while actually meaning that they could never read such work. They have hidden their doctia ignorantia at the same time as remaining on the side of the angels. Also, philosophy absolutely does not suit the Leftist, associated as it is with quietude, meditation, solitariness, concentration and reason. The Left hold this coin at little or no value, preferring ‘ideologies’ that enable them to parade their woke plumage. As Kerry Bolton writes in The Psychotic Left:
“Leftist personality types – marked most commonly by narcissism to greater or lesser degrees – are prone to histrionics and exhibitionism.”
Histrionics and exhibitionism. These are just two of many ways in which Leftists, caught up as they are in the feedback loop of an unhappy childhood, nest Venn-like with another ideology, one that is much older and is currently taking advantage of both the Denaissance and the Age of Unreason in order to achieve their reconquista.