THe Liberal Mind:A Psychological Problem

Rico

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Apr 11, 2006
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As if there were a further need to prove it. But here's another physician/psychiatrist deliniating the problem.



The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness
By Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr, MD
Monday, December 4, 2006

Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.,a forensic psychiatrist, explains the madness of liberalism in his new book The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness. You can read an excerpt below, and read more at his website libertymind.com.

Like all other human beings, the modern liberal reveals his true character, including his madness, in what he values and devalues, in what he articulates with passion. Of special interest, however, are the many values about which the modern liberal mind is not passionate: his agenda does not insist that the individual is the ultimate economic, social and political unit; it does not idealize individual liberty and the structure of law and order essential to it; it does not defend the basic rights of property and contract; it does not aspire to ideals of authentic autonomy and mutuality; it does not preach an ethic of self-reliance and self-determination; it does not praise courage, forbearance or resilience; it does not celebrate the ethics of consent or the blessings of voluntary cooperation. It does not advocate moral rectitude or understand the critical role of morality in human relating. The liberal agenda does not comprehend an identity of competence, appreciate its importance, or analyze the developmental conditions and social institutions that promote its achievement. The liberal agenda does not understand or recognize personal sovereignty or impose strict limits on coercion by the state. It does not celebrate the genuine altruism of private charity. It does not learn history’s lessons on the evils of collectivism.

What the liberal mind is passionate about is a world filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust, anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation and injustice. Those who occupy this world are “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,” “women,” and the “unemployed.” They are poor, weak, sick, wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited and victimized. They bear no responsibility for their problems. None of their agonies are attributable to faults or failings of their own: not to poor choices, bad habits, faulty judgment, wishful thinking, lack of ambition, low frustration tolerance, mental illness or defects in character. None of the victims’ plight is caused by failure to plan for the future or learn from experience. Instead, the “root causes” of all this pain lie in faulty social conditions: poverty, disease, war, ignorance, unemployment, racial prejudice, ethnic and gender discrimination, modern technology, capitalism, globalization and imperialism. In the radical liberal mind, this suffering is inflicted on the innocent by various predators and persecutors: “Big Business,” “Big Corporations,” “greedy capitalists,” U.S. Imperialists,” “the oppressors,” “the rich,” “the wealthy,” “the powerful” and “the selfish.”

The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to grave agenda of redistributive caretaking. It is a government everywhere doing everything for everyone. The liberal motto is “In Government We Trust.” To rescue the people from their troubled lives, the agenda recommends denial of personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other-pity, fosters government dependency, promotes sexual indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial obligation, justifies theft, ignores rudeness, prescribes complaining and blaming, denigrates marriage and the family, legalizes all abortion, defies religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against the duties of citizenship. Through multiple entitlements to unearned goods, services and social status, the liberal politician promises to ensure everyone’s material welfare, provide for everyone’s healthcare, protect everyone’s self-esteem, correct everyone’s social and political disadvantage, educate every citizen, and eliminate all class distinctions. With liberal intellectuals sharing the glory, the liberal politician is the hero in this melodrama. He takes credit for providing his constituents with whatever they want or need even though he has not produced by his own effort any of the goods, services or status transferred to them but has instead taken them from others by force.

It should be apparent by now that these social policies and the passions that drive them contradict all that is rational in human relating, and they are therefore irrational in themselves. But the faulty conceptions that lie behind these passions cannot be viewed as mere cognitive slippage. The degree of modern liberalism’s irrationality far exceeds any misunderstanding that can be attributed to faulty fact gathering or logical error. Indeed, under careful scrutiny, liberalism’s distortions of the normal ability to reason can only be understood as the product of psychopathology. So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche. The modern liberal mind, its distorted perceptions and its destructive agenda are the product of disturbed personalities.

As is the case in all personality disturbance, defects of this type represent serious failures in development processes. The nature of these failures is detailed below. Among their consequences are the liberal mind’s relentless efforts to misrepresent human nature and to deny certain indispensable requirements for human relating. In his efforts to construct a grand collectivist utopia—to live what Jacques Barzun has called “the unconditioned life” in which “everybody should be safe and at ease in a hundred ways”—the radical liberal attempts to actualize in the real world an idealized fiction that will mitigate all hardship and heal all wounds. (Barzun 2000). He acts out this fiction, essentially a Marxist morality play, in various theaters of human relatedness, most often on the world’s economic, social and political stages. But the play repeatedly folds. Over the course of the Twentieth Century, the radical liberal’s attempts to create a brave new socialist world have invariably failed. At the dawn of the Twenty-first Century his attempts continue to fail in the stagnant economies, moral decay and social turmoil now widespread in Europe. An increasingly bankrupt welfare society is putting the U.S. on track for the same fate if liberalism is not cured there. Because the liberal agenda’s principles violate the rules of ordered liberty, his most determined efforts to realize its visionary fantasies must inevitably fall short. Yet, despite all the evidence against it, the modern liberal mind believes his agenda is good social science. It is, in fact, bad science fiction. He persists in this agenda despite its madness.

Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr, MD is the author of The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness. He received his medical and psychiatric training at the University of Chicago and served for two years as a psychiatrist in the United States Army. He is currently in private practice in the Chicago area.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/...the_psychological_causes_of_political_madness
 
As if there were a further need to prove it. But here's another physician/psychiatrist deliniating the problem.



The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness
By Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr, MD
Monday, December 4, 2006

Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.,a forensic psychiatrist, explains the madness of liberalism in his new book The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness. You can read an excerpt below, and read more at his website libertymind.com.

Like all other human beings, the modern liberal reveals his true character, including his madness, in what he values and devalues, in what he articulates with passion. Of special interest, however, are the many values about which the modern liberal mind is not passionate: his agenda does not insist that the individual is the ultimate economic, social and political unit; it does not idealize individual liberty and the structure of law and order essential to it; it does not defend the basic rights of property and contract; it does not aspire to ideals of authentic autonomy and mutuality; it does not preach an ethic of self-reliance and self-determination; it does not praise courage, forbearance or resilience; it does not celebrate the ethics of consent or the blessings of voluntary cooperation. It does not advocate moral rectitude or understand the critical role of morality in human relating. The liberal agenda does not comprehend an identity of competence, appreciate its importance, or analyze the developmental conditions and social institutions that promote its achievement. The liberal agenda does not understand or recognize personal sovereignty or impose strict limits on coercion by the state. It does not celebrate the genuine altruism of private charity. It does not learn history’s lessons on the evils of collectivism.

What the liberal mind is passionate about is a world filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust, anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation and injustice. Those who occupy this world are “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,” “women,” and the “unemployed.” They are poor, weak, sick, wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited and victimized. They bear no responsibility for their problems. None of their agonies are attributable to faults or failings of their own: not to poor choices, bad habits, faulty judgment, wishful thinking, lack of ambition, low frustration tolerance, mental illness or defects in character. None of the victims’ plight is caused by failure to plan for the future or learn from experience. Instead, the “root causes” of all this pain lie in faulty social conditions: poverty, disease, war, ignorance, unemployment, racial prejudice, ethnic and gender discrimination, modern technology, capitalism, globalization and imperialism. In the radical liberal mind, this suffering is inflicted on the innocent by various predators and persecutors: “Big Business,” “Big Corporations,” “greedy capitalists,” U.S. Imperialists,” “the oppressors,” “the rich,” “the wealthy,” “the powerful” and “the selfish.”

The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to grave agenda of redistributive caretaking. It is a government everywhere doing everything for everyone. The liberal motto is “In Government We Trust.” To rescue the people from their troubled lives, the agenda recommends denial of personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other-pity, fosters government dependency, promotes sexual indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial obligation, justifies theft, ignores rudeness, prescribes complaining and blaming, denigrates marriage and the family, legalizes all abortion, defies religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against the duties of citizenship. Through multiple entitlements to unearned goods, services and social status, the liberal politician promises to ensure everyone’s material welfare, provide for everyone’s healthcare, protect everyone’s self-esteem, correct everyone’s social and political disadvantage, educate every citizen, and eliminate all class distinctions. With liberal intellectuals sharing the glory, the liberal politician is the hero in this melodrama. He takes credit for providing his constituents with whatever they want or need even though he has not produced by his own effort any of the goods, services or status transferred to them but has instead taken them from others by force.

It should be apparent by now that these social policies and the passions that drive them contradict all that is rational in human relating, and they are therefore irrational in themselves. But the faulty conceptions that lie behind these passions cannot be viewed as mere cognitive slippage. The degree of modern liberalism’s irrationality far exceeds any misunderstanding that can be attributed to faulty fact gathering or logical error. Indeed, under careful scrutiny, liberalism’s distortions of the normal ability to reason can only be understood as the product of psychopathology. So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche. The modern liberal mind, its distorted perceptions and its destructive agenda are the product of disturbed personalities.

As is the case in all personality disturbance, defects of this type represent serious failures in development processes. The nature of these failures is detailed below. Among their consequences are the liberal mind’s relentless efforts to misrepresent human nature and to deny certain indispensable requirements for human relating. In his efforts to construct a grand collectivist utopia—to live what Jacques Barzun has called “the unconditioned life” in which “everybody should be safe and at ease in a hundred ways”—the radical liberal attempts to actualize in the real world an idealized fiction that will mitigate all hardship and heal all wounds. (Barzun 2000). He acts out this fiction, essentially a Marxist morality play, in various theaters of human relatedness, most often on the world’s economic, social and political stages. But the play repeatedly folds. Over the course of the Twentieth Century, the radical liberal’s attempts to create a brave new socialist world have invariably failed. At the dawn of the Twenty-first Century his attempts continue to fail in the stagnant economies, moral decay and social turmoil now widespread in Europe. An increasingly bankrupt welfare society is putting the U.S. on track for the same fate if liberalism is not cured there. Because the liberal agenda’s principles violate the rules of ordered liberty, his most determined efforts to realize its visionary fantasies must inevitably fall short. Yet, despite all the evidence against it, the modern liberal mind believes his agenda is good social science. It is, in fact, bad science fiction. He persists in this agenda despite its madness.

Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr, MD is the author of The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness. He received his medical and psychiatric training at the University of Chicago and served for two years as a psychiatrist in the United States Army. He is currently in private practice in the Chicago area.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/...the_psychological_causes_of_political_madness

Pretty much nails it !
 
Yadda yadda yadda. Extremism in any direction is unhealthy. A case can be made that ultra-conservatives are mentally unhealthy. Besides, there are moderates and people at all points on the political spectrum.
 
Yadda yadda yadda. Extremism in any direction is unhealthy. A case can be made that ultra-conservatives are mentally unhealthy. Besides, there are moderates and people at all points on the political spectrum.

make it-----I'd like to see it !
 
Yadda yadda yadda. Extremism in any direction is unhealthy. A case can be made that ultra-conservatives are mentally unhealthy. Besides, there are moderates and people at all points on the political spectrum.

But herein we are NOT discussing extremism merely liberalism as it exists.

But ones requiring therapy and healing, like yourself, are so often the last to recognize the problem. Liberalism is a mental disorder. It is an example of arrested mental development. Hence why the more mature and intellectual are not liberals..... Sad.. Perhaps an intervention of some sort is needed for you..
 
But herein we are NOT discussing extremism merely liberalism as it exists.

But ones requiring therapy and healing, like yourself, are so often the last to recognize the problem. Liberalism is a mental disorder. It is an example of arrested mental development. Hence why the more mature and intellectual are not liberals..... Sad.. Perhaps an intervention of some sort is needed for you..

That article was describing extreme liberalism, not your typical moderate left-of-center individual. Contrary to what the great Doctor Michael Weiner Savage has to say, liberalism is no greater a mental disorder than is conservatism a mental disorder. They are merely two sides of a political spectrum.
 
That article was describing extreme liberalism, not your typical moderate left-of-center individual. Contrary to what the great Doctor Michael Weiner Savage has to say, liberalism is no greater a mental disorder than is conservatism a mental disorder. They are merely two sides of a political spectrum.

I think he had you in mind when he started this thread. :dev3:
 
That article was describing extreme liberalism, not your typical moderate left-of-center individual. Contrary to what the great Doctor Michael Weiner Savage has to say, liberalism is no greater a mental disorder than is conservatism a mental disorder. They are merely two sides of a political spectrum.

BALONEY!!!
Cite one position that Rossiter mentions and characterize it as anything other than the mainstream liberal dogma. Problem is he nailed it. You refuse to accept his premise because of its validity. Liberalism is the antithesis of individual freedom, liberty, and expression. The libs ceaselessly jawbon about "rights" as long as it's group rights of a group they plan to exploit politically.
 
BALONEY!!!
Cite one position that Rossiter mentions and characterize it as anything other than the mainstream liberal dogma. Problem is he nailed it. You refuse to accept his premise because of its validity. Liberalism is the antithesis of individual freedom, liberty, and expression. The libs ceaselessly jawbon about "rights" as long as it's group rights of a group they plan to exploit politically.

It is a simple article by a conservative – a silly political rant.
 
Well I for one just applaud the U of C for turning out great minds on the right and left. :laugh:
 
But herein we are NOT discussing extremism merely liberalism as it exists.

But ones requiring therapy and healing, like yourself, are so often the last to recognize the problem. Liberalism is a mental disorder. It is an example of arrested mental development. Hence why the more mature and intellectual are not liberals..... Sad.. Perhaps an intervention of some sort is needed for you..

You got it Rico. This krammer fuck is the sickest steaming pile of perverted liberal dog shit we have on this board. Just ask him about how he wishes he had a nice looking daughter he could fuck on.
 
Great article, Rico. If libs don't see themselves and their philosophy reflected in Rossiter's article, all I can say is they are deaf, dumb and blind. Rossiter paints a clear picture of why I am a conservative not a liberal.
 
You got it Rico. This krammer fuck is the sickest steaming pile of perverted liberal dog shit we have on this board. Just ask him about how he wishes he had a nice looking daughter he could fuck on.

As I said before, I would not have sex with a daughter if I had one. I said that I think that consenting adults, even those within the same family, should be free to engage in sex. Get the information straight and stop spreading lies about my personal views and my political views. Yet, I’m confident that you will continue to twist my statements and misinform people about me.
 
As if psycho's can't be moderates.

That article was describing extreme liberalism, not your typical moderate left-of-center individual. Contrary to what the great Doctor Michael Weiner Savage has to say, liberalism is no greater a mental disorder than is conservatism a mental disorder. They are merely two sides of a political spectrum.

But, but, conservatism is a disorder per Richard Dawkins. Who's crazy now?

It is a simple article by a conservative – a silly political rant.

I said that I think that consenting adults, even those within the same family, should be free to engage in sex.

???

Say again about extreme liberalism? That's a hallmark of an enlightened mind to you?
 

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