In other words, since this destructive progress must reach its end point fairly soon, and since it is an intrinsic aspect of the modern liberal order, therefore the modern liberal order must come to an end fairly soon.

James Kalb, philosopher of hope.

It is quite evident that the liberalist order will self-destruct eventually. It is a matter of when. Hopefully the process will speed-up quite a bit.

A soul-less society is not immortal.

“It is quite evident that the liberalist order will self-destruct eventually. It is a matter of when.” — Matteo

“A matter of when”? Aren’t we seeing the opening of our civilization’s final chapter already now, in the complete triumph of those twin pathologies, multi-culturalism and excessive, wildly ethno-culturally incompatible immigration? Aren’t we seeing before our eyes the final, actual killing of the Œdipal father being acted out?

Liberalism per se is of course a pathology which can be a major nuisance and even inflict serious wounds on society. To arrive at the actual civilization-killing stage it must get deadly weapons into its hands which it can wield without encountering élite opposition above a certain threshold level.

The irony is that the demographic transformation which the twin attacks mentioned above necessarily entail for our near future — let’s say within the next 45 to 60 years — will not permit left-liberalism as we know it to continue to flourish, and the reason is: totally apart from partly-inborn IQ differences among races, there exist, *ON AVERAGE* (NOT on an individual level, but *on average*), partly-inborn “personality” differences which strongly (to some degree, *decisively*) give societies and, yes, whole civilizations, their “flavor” in important ways. The kind of society which incompatible immigration and multi-culti will leave in their wake in this country will not be congenial to liberalism. Thus does the parasite perish with its killing of the host (which is not supposed to happen in nature, by the way — in the ideal situation the parasite does not kill the host: so, there is a multi-faceted pathology going on, the key to which is likely be found in the pathologies present on the so-called “conservative” side of the spectrum).

On a separate but related subject: Further proof of the œdipal theory of liberalism which has been advanced on another thread: part of the Freudian theory of the Œdipus complex is that the son, in his subconscious fantasy, doesn’t just walk away from the scene after killing the father. He gets to marry the mother. Notice how many liberals don’t just walk away after toppling those people and institutions who are in control of, or constitute, the establishment, but become exactly like them, in controlling what becomes a new establishment. They have killed the father NOT in order to live a John the Baptist sort of existence of modesty, humility, and truth — the values they preached during the actual overthrow — but rather so that they can TAKE THE FATHER’S PLACE. No, this doesn’t apply across the board. But just think of Jann Wenner and the how-many-thousands more like him (who’ve become rich as Crœsus to a man, by the way) and, I believe, this idea will be seen to hold some water.

So, that makes two fundamental insights into liberalism — liberalism as parasite and as œdipal phenomenon — which I’ve gained in the mere four or so months I’ve been visiting this site (neither of which I would’ve seen any hint of in the establisment media, of course).

Thank you, View From the Right.

Further evidence:

1) Bruno Bettelheim was a prominent Freudian psychiatrist (specializing, I believe, in child psychiatry). During the student take-over of the Dean’s office at Columbia University which was part of the leftist upheaval of the late ’60s, Prof. Bettelheim made a comment which I remember reading, in Life Magazine (or a similar magazine). One of the student leaders had been captured in a widely-seen photo sitting at the Dean’s desk, smoking one of the Dean’s cigars. Bettelheim said that the Freudian significance of that gesture on that student-leader’s part was unmistakable.

2) That cigar-smoking student leader at the 60’s Columbia U. insurrection was (if memory serves) David Horowitz. I haven’t yet read his autobiography, “Radical Son,” but isn’t it the case that much of Horowitz’s and Peter Collier’s writings on their coming to grips with their radical-revolutionary pasts deal with their father-related problems?

Unadorned writes:

“Thus does the parasite perish with its killing of the host (which is not supposed to happen in nature, by the way — in the ideal situation the parasite does not kill the host … ).”

I suppose liberalism could be described as a “normal” parasite, one that feeds on its host and weakens it and even hates it and demonizes it, but doesn’t want to kill it. That’s where the unprincipled exception comes in; the liberal doesn’t want to die, though everything he believes would lead to that. When the liberalism crosses over the line and seeks to kill the host, that is leftism. Of course, these distinctions are only situational or expressive; at bottom, the whole phenomenon of liberalism/leftism is aimed at the death of the host.

Re David Horowitz, he didn’t have anything to do with the Columbia uprising in ‘68. He was born I think in 1939 and was already an establisehd radical by the late ’60s. Also, while I’m not sure of this, I don’t think hatred of his father is part of Horowitz’s “profile.” His father was a Communist so he was not rebelling against him (except insofar as the New Left was a rebellion against the Old Left); and I think he got along well with father or at least respected him. In fact, the absence of an “Oedipal”-type motivation in Horowitz’s case may explain why he was able to repent of his leftism; he wasn’t as driven to it as much as some others were.

A very brief additional word about Freud’s theories: yes, they’ve come under withering attack these past twenty-five or thirty years, and no, that attack has not been entirely without merit. BUT: though Freud may be down, he is by no means out. Advances in neuroscience are showing what I think could be the beginnings of a vindication of at least parts of Freud’s work — the most fundamental parts. I predict that within the next twenty or thirty years Freud’s deduction of the existence of the id, ego, and superego as components of personality, each possessing sort of an independent volition (and, for the “id,” possible direct motor connections to carry out that volition to a limited degree), will be demonstrated on an objective neurological and perhaps anatomically mapped-out basis and this will result in enhanced clinical and pharmacological tools for psychiatry. (I’m not commenting here on the superstructure of his ideas, such as the Œdipus complex and other elements of Freudian psychoanalysis.)

When Unadorned referred to “the œdipal theory of liberalism which has been advanced on another thread,” evidently meaning my blog on hatred of the father, I took “oedipal” in a generic sense of “hatred of the rather” and continued the discussion. But apparently Unadorned thinks I was advancing a Freudian explanation of liberal resentment. That is not the case. For all I know, there may be overlaps between what I was saying and what Unadorned believes Freud would say on the motives of leftists, but my ideas on this have nothing to do with Freud. When one reads some leftist talking her furious rage at her parents, and how that became the basis of her leftism, one does not need any Freudian explanation of a child hating his father and wanting to marry his mother to explain that. It’s self-explanatory. This doesn’t mean that the Freudian angle might not be relevant to this topic. But it’s just that what I was saying has nothing to do Freud, at least consciously. :-)

I thank Mr. Auster for that important clarification and I stand corrected. Of course, the not-technically-Freudian psychological mechanisms which he invokes seem completely true, and shed a great deal of welcome, refreshing, long-overdue, fog-dispelling light on the nature of at least a portion of the left-liberal “project” in this country.

In regard to the liberalism-as-parasite metaphor which I also mentioned above and Mr. Auster commented on: I meant to say that, in nature, when the host has the wherewithal to withstand the physiological insults inflicted on it by the parasite it survives, succumbing otherwise. (The parasite, of course, hasn’t a thought about the host’s welfare and wants only to maximize its own success.) Might not the fact that the U.S. seems to be in the process of succumbing mean it no longer has the defensive wherewithal it once had? And could the cause of its diminished wherewithal have to do with Mr. Auster’s metaphor that the airliner carrying our society to its national-suicide doom needs both a right and a left wing to fly?

To answer Unadorned’s question in his own terms, Yes: What was once the defensive wherewithall against parasitical infection has changed into the right wing of the suicide jetliner.

My above comment reminds me of Orwell’s take-off on mixed metaphors in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English language”:

“The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot.”