OpinionEditorials.com Liberalism is a Psychology - Beltt
Liberalism isn’t a political ideology; it’s a psychology - the psychology of self-satisfaction to be precise.
A liberal (or a leftist; I use the terms interchangeably), is a person who only cares about politics to the extent that doing so makes him or her feel good, or avoid feeling bad, due both to external and internal factors. Their motivations can include things like a desire to feel intelligent, moral, noble, or unique, as well as a desire for peer acceptance or reverence, and aversion to being ostracized, among many other things.
With that said, I’d like to restate the main point. Liberalism isn’t a political ideology. T
he only common bond that truly holds liberal ideas together is their straight-forward simplicity (pass a law, raise taxes, hand out money, talk it out, etc), which is solely a consequence of the fact that liberals are completely uninterested in real solutions to real problems.
It is the political activism itself that interests them, in that it makes them feel good about themselves for a number of reasons. The particular cause they fight for is relevant only insofar as different causes stroke different emotional needs (moral superiority, intellectual superiority, group acceptance, aversion to emotional trauma, etc).
Liberals also want to feel revered by the people they see as their peers (other well-to-do liberals usually). That’s what motivates many aspects of their politics, like foreign policy for example.
If you listen for it, you’ll hear a trend in liberal speech, over and over again. That is, the most important aspect of American foreign policy should be maintaining and elevating America’s image
(i.e., the American liberal’s image in the eyes of their foreign peers).
We all want the rest of the world to look highly upon us,
but to the egotist, that concern overrides every other. America’s safety, our prosperity, and our ability to exercise power in the world, all take a back seat to our image (specifically to our image among certain groups of people, like the French). If certain people don’t like us, our foreign policy is a “disaster” in the minds of liberals. Why? Because it makes them feel bad that the people they see as their peers don’t look upon them with reverence, let alone that they look upon them with disdain, and avoidance of that is a massive part of their psychology, and therefore their politics.
No where is liberal egotism more evident than in the way they argue and debate though. To conservatives, debate is about the issues, which can make arguing with liberals quite frustrating, since to liberals, debate is about them.
Liberals argue, not to show the value of an idea, but to show the value of themselves, either to the other person, or to some other observer. They either want to “prove” their superiority or the other person’s inferiority (or more often both). Rationality simply isn’t required as long as they can feel good about themselves in the end.
, attacks on the credibility of opposing sources, claims of bigotry, denial and evasion, and any number of other tactics
That’s why debate with them so often devolves into personal attacks which do nothing to advance their argument. All of these are psychological defense mechanisms (“you’re being too simplistic” and “the world isn’t black and white” are two major defense mechanisms liberals use when an opposing position is straight-forwardly true).
Anything liberals can do to avoid facing damage to their ego, they will do, both consciously and unconsciously. But they rarely put real thought into the consequences of their positions, because those consequences simply don’t interest them. They engage in politics solely because it feeds their ego.