Projection & the Left

2,484 words

Why dost thou behold the mote in thy brother’s eye, and behold not the beam that is in thine own?
Matthew 7:3

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The psychopathology of the left is a significant factor in the decline of the West, and yet we don’t fully understand it. In fact, we don’t understand it at all. We know that many on the left have genuine mental health problems, but we don’t know what they are and so are unaware of how they will affect us, and what we can do about it. I have written about this before, here at Counter Currents, and I will quote from that piece, as well as looking briefly at the left in relation to DSM V, (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition. Essentially, DSM is the Bible of the psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex):

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.

We have to understand the left as suffering from (although it is we who are doing the suffering) a deleterious psychopathology. A psychopathology is not necessarily as sinister as it sounds, despite containing the word “psychopath”. There are perfectly healthy psychopathologies as well as unhealthy ones. The surgeon and the serial-killer both exhibit psychopathologies, and we understand their respective actions accordingly. But, as noted, without even a layman’s diagnosis of what is wrong with the left in psychological (not moral) terms, we don’t properly understand what it is we are fighting.

I must stress that I am not a psychologist, but I am of the opinion that a grounding in philosophy allows you the equivalent of a day pass to the discipline, as it were. You are invited, and equipped, to come in and browse. A geologist studies rocks, but is not himself a rock. Both philosopher and psychologist, in contrast, are included in their own field of study, and there is therefore a Venn-type overlap between the disciplines. For both, there is the possibility of advanced self-knowledge. In a piece on the relation between the personal and the collective unconscious, Jung writes the following: “Whoever progresses along this road of self-realization must inevitably bring into consciousness the contents of the personal unconscious, thus enlarging the scope of his personality”.

It’s my contention here that those on the dissident right have a greater facility for self-knowledge than those on the hard left, and that this is a weapon to be used against the latter.

Know Thyself, said the Delphic Oracle to Socrates, but as both Freud and Nietzsche attested to, that is not easy. I’ve called this deep self-knowledge “autognosis”. Armed with this, we are better equipped to understand the type of virus infecting the minds of our enemies on the left. Marcus Aurelius, perhaps the kindest of the Caesars and certainly the wisest, invited us to, “Ask of each thing, what is it in itself? What is its nature?” We must ask this question with regard to the left. What type of creature are we dealing with?

To make a start on at least a layperson’s diagnosis of our friends on the hard political left, I’ll reprise something else from the article linked: four personality disorders from DSM V. They invite comparison with a good deal of what we see from the left. And it is very much what we see, rather than what we read. The left, being intellectually negligible, are not much given to the written word, preferring to make their often-chaotic ideological points using a combination of verbal and actual violence, and a type of personality-based performance art. See if you recognize stereotypical leftist behavior in the following personality disorders and their symptoms taken from DSM V:

• 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.’

Anything there ring a bell? Now, there is an argument that DSM has made disorders out of quite common personality types in order to sell more pharmaceuticals, and are thus making medical conditions out of unremarkable – albeit irritating – character traits. Even if that were the case, it is still noteworthy which aspects of human, Western existence they choose to highlight. As far as the far left are concerned, there’s your psychological profile right there.

Many on the left are unstable narcissists who verge on the solipsistic, believing the world to center on them. Muslims refer to a period of time before Islam, the jahiliyya, a time of chaos and unreason. For the new breed of leftist/SJW, that time of chaos and unreason was the time before they were born. They privilege, in classical terms, emotio over ratio. They have allocated a moral calibration to their value-system rather than one guided by empirical observation. This is why to be, as we are, “race-realists” is truncated (funnily enough, by removing the word “real”). We are racists. Now, given that it is the views of this activist class which the globalists are using to introduce dysfunction into white, Western civilization, this should give us a major cause for concern. These are useful idiots, certainly, but it doesn’t make them any less dangerous on the ground, the cultural terrain.

Now, there are sub-traits that go to make up these personality disorders – they are syndromic – and we find one particular term present in all of the above: projection. Terms from various disciplines occasionally make their way into the mainstream, and “projection” has been a recent cross-border traveler. Freud was the first to use the term – Projektion – in 1896, and it has been noted that this is a reductive version of a theory of Giambattista Vico’s some 150 years before Freud. Vico states that mankind has a tendency to project its current value-system on the world and its history, making man very much the measure of things regardless of what phase of evolutionary development he happens to be in. We see much of this today with the retrospective morality with which historical phenomena such as the British Empire are revised and rewritten. To utilize a distinction from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure, morality is synchronic, not diachronic. It is a snapshot of the contemporaneous, not something to use in order to bludgeon the past into moral conformity. Morality is de facto, not de jure, as Nietzsche shows, at least to my satisfaction.

Ludwig Feuerbach’s theory of projection posited that God, the heavens, and religion in general are human projections of their own identity, Mankind writ large. We imagine a grunting Neanderthal striking two flints together and seeing an arc of electricity, a spark. He is then soaked by a thunder storm, sees the lightning flash terrifyingly down, and concludes that, just as he had created a tiny version of lightning, so it must be a much larger man who produces the lightning he sees in the heavens.

However, we only require simple fare when it comes to analyzing projection by the left. At the level of a non-historical, non-cosmological understanding of the word, projection is a psychological defense mechanism. It is the deflective technique of the schoolboy who, caught out in some act of mischief, points at his classmate and says, “It wasn’t me. It was him.” It’s an attempt to relocate guilt, “blame shifting”, a diversionary tactic. Modern psychology seems to be in agreement that projection is a psychical defense mechanism whereby one attributes personality traits one finds undesirable in oneself to another person. I am sure all readers have experienced it. The question is: how does the left’s projectionist nature affect us?

I believe there is a Chinese proverb (although I can’t source it) which says that to understand something, you must first call it by its proper name. (If anyone recognizes that, I would be grateful). But how do we get our psychological profile of the left, those who defy conventional definition, create their own meaning, and would consign the Oxford English Dictionary to the flames if only they could? They are like Renfield in Dracula. So in thrall to the master have they become, they have gone insane. Bram Stoker notes one interesting point about the vampire. As deadly as he is, he cannot enter your dwelling unless you invite him in. Have we assisted the left in their projective condemnation of “our side”?

Jung, in a monograph on psychic energy (“psychic” means the object of the discipline of psychology, rather than Ouija boards), writes that the “victim”, as it were, of projection is a hook on which to hang the undesirable attributes of the projectionist. Ours is obvious: the worm in the rose. It plays on Josef K’s mind in Kafka’s The Trial. It’s the terrible temptation to agree with your enemies’ opinion of you, the dreadful fear that they might be right. This will affect those on the Right considerably more than their counterparts across the great divide. Ordinary, healthy people desire a degree of conventional reinforcement. They just want to be liked. The left prey on this need, and realize that if you call someone a racist long enough, they might start to believe it, and believe that it is an undesirable thing to be, rather than the necessary default position we must recognize it as. “Racism” – race realism – is our inbuilt self-defense mechanism where projection is that of the left.

The main lode the left project onto the Right is hatred. Their own is compounded of impotent self-loathing and an inability to wonder at the world. The ancient Greeks – Anaxagoras, Democritus, Parmenides – asked of the world: Ti esti? What is it? This is the inquisitive stance those of us on the Right should maintain at all times. The left have a tendency to ask of the world, “How best can you serve me?” They believe they are already at the pinnacle of a meritocracy, despite rarely having any actual merit. Most creatures of the left are entirely expendable. Few have value as social capital. They would scarcely be missed.

It seems highly likely that NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) is at the heart of much of the training of the new political class, and it plays a key role in projection. The basic repetition of words and phrases on which NLP relies is beginning to be noticed in the US, where YouTubers regularly assemble collages of news commentators from CNN, MSNBC, and so on. They will all be using the phrase du jour, such as “the walls are closing in” for Donald Trump, which was all the rage as the left began their campaign of lawfare against the President. These phrases often change with the news cycle, like the phases of the moon, but some remain, ideological words of power. “Hate” fulfils exactly this function in the UK, and the Right become the vessel for the left’s hatred by way of projection. HOPE Not Hate; Stop Funding Hate; Hate Speech; Hate Crime; Non-Crime Hate Incident; Religious Hatred; Inciting Hatred. Methinks they do protest too much. The title of Morrissey’s first solo album, Viva Hate, has become a mission statement for today’s left. The mantra has all the insistence of an advertising campaign, which is essentially what it is. But the hatred originates with the left, and we must sum up the process by which it is transferred to the right.

It is essential, of course, that the left hide their own hatred from themselves. This is achieved by a sort of controlled cognitive dissonance. Nietzsche writes, in one of the Maxims and Interludes from Beyond Good and Evil, the following: “Memory says, ‘I did this.’ Pride says, ‘I did not do this.’ In the end, pride wins.”

This leads to the Freudian screen-memory, “false recollection”, as the Austrian calls it in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. This “paramnesia” is a key component of the apparatus of projection. The memories you are screening off, redacting, putting under erasure, are destined for elsewhere. This is the cargo of guilt to be offloaded onto another person or party.

I recently wrote a piece on Plato’s Meno, part of which dealt with the Platonic concept of anamnesis, or “unforgetting”. This is how Meno’s slave-boy is able to exhibit geometrical knowledge he could not have acquired empirically. The left operate this system in reverse, forgetting their own hatred by erasing it in themselves as they transfer it to others. Transference is famously a by-product of psychoanalysis, a type of Freudian “displacement”, and it is worthwhile making a point about the “science” Freud founded.

In no sense is it necessary to “psychoanalyze” the left. I view psychotherapy as a luxury service, personal pampering, like an aromatherapy massage or a manicure. I am not just taking my opinions from Woody Allen movies, but rather from the close proximity of psychology and philosophy. Freud began his career absolutely clear about keeping his distance from philosophy, and ended it believing that philosophy was what he had been aiming at all along. I agree with the later Freud. Psychoanalysis strikes me as a proxy friendship, a prosthetic relationship for people who never learned the simple social skills necessary to have ordinary conversations with ordinary people. Cognitive therapy may help some conditions, but even that is repairing a psyche damaged by too little conference with fellow humans. A journalist friend of mine in England makes the excellent point that Generation Z, as they are known, are the first generation to grow up largely in the company of machines and not other humans. They will not be terrific company when they become, physically, at least, adults.

So, to sum up, the left are suffering from a range of disorders, from the layman’s point of view, and their main coping mechanism is projection, the relocation of undesirable thoughts and beliefs to others (“the far right”, ie., all dissenters) which would otherwise cause them mental anguish. Their (unconscious) maxim is as follows: I cannot entertain the fact that I have a certain personality trait or belief. The trait or belief exists, however, and so it must exist somewhere. Because I am assured of its existence, and yet cannot tolerate it in myself, it must be relocated. Because I cannot be its host, it must exist in another.

Projection is a strange epistemological move, a sort of moral exorcism of the self, but then the left are strange people. We must treat them as such before they have sufficient power to prevent us from treating them at all.