The Norwegians and their Monsters

But great ideas that command instant allegiance no longer exist, because our skeptical contemporaries believe in neither God nor humanity, kings nor morality—unless they believe in all of them indiscriminately which amounts to the same thing.

                                                           Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities

What kind of people are the Norwegians?  I suspect that they regard themselves as exceptionally decent and highly civilized. They enjoy the good fortune of having the Americans to condescend to and help them feel morally superior and culturally refined.  Like the rest of the Western Europeans, the residents of this Scandinavian enclave eschew the death penalty and cast a horrified glance at unruly outposts of the western world, places like Texas and Florida where killers still have to give some thought to the possibility of facing an executioner bearing a syringe.

The recent trial and sentencing of Anders Hehring Breivik in Oslo, however, cannot help but suggest some invidious comparisons of these most civilized descendants of Viking marauders with those less civilized people who cannot quite put aside that primitive notion that the innocent victims of cold-blooded murderers are owed something – justice, perhaps – and that the murderers themselves are something other than clinical curiosities, perhaps very bad people who plan and do terrible things, people who should pay a steep price for the pain and misery they inflict on others.

Breivik is not an ordinary mass murderer. Last year he shattered his country with a killing spree that left 77 Norwegians dead, including a large number of children. Here then was a particularly gruesome and most extraordinary case for the Norwegians to grapple with – a proud, smirking, fascist-saluting, child-slaying monster in the midst of a violence-loathing people.  What exactly do you do to or with someone like this? This would not be a hard question for some societies (the end of a rope or in front of a firing squad) but for the Norwegians it was very complicated and agonizing. The collision of Mr. Breivik with the criminal justice system of Norway exposed, to put in kindly, some very serious inadequacies with the country’s legal system and brought to light what I believe are some strange and incomprehensible features of their society.

Was Breivik sane? It depends. From the perspective of a lay person he certainly appeared to be. He knew who he was and where he was. He planned, systematically carried out and appeared to be pleased with his “accomplishments.”  But this was a question for the doctors to decide, the professionals, the psychiatrists.  How did they do?  Their definitive, expert, clinical opinion was:  no ... well, actually… yes.  The first two psychiatrists who examined him pronounced him insane, and under Norwegian law, no prison cell for the most prolific mass murderer in Norwegian history.  Even for the high minded, punishment-averse Norwegians, this was too absurd.  A public outcry compelled the government to bring in a different team of psychiatrists who opined that he was, indeed, sane. Was the first team or the second team right?  Who of us can say?  Perhaps they should have resorted to a coin-flip.      

Breivik went to trial and a panel of five judges rendered a verdict of guilty and sentenced him to 21 years in prison, the maximum sentence under Norwegian law for any criminal.   That comes out to a little over three months in prison that he will serve for each of his 77 victims.  Ah, yes, the victims! But they are of less concern than how Mr. Breivik’s psychic profile is construed and what “treatment” might be his due.  The sentence, it should be noted, could be extended beyond the 21 years if it is determined at the point of release that he remains a threat, a provision which exposes the utter absurdity of such a sentence in a case like this: when is someone who has proudly murdered 77 people no longer a threat?  Who would be arrogant or stupid enough to ever want to answer that question and be held to account?  But even more to the point: what if we could somehow know that he was not a threat? Should a man who has done something like this ever be permitted to walk freely among other human beings? What kind of people lavish such concern over someone who ravaged and murdered their children?

The government prosecutors – that is correct, the prosecutors – were convinced that Breivik was not criminally responsible (that he was indeed insane) and argued (unsuccessfully) that he should go to a hospital rather than a prison.   The defense attorneys, on the other hand, were convinced that he was mentally intact. They prevailed. No case in Norwegian legal history had ever produced this strange alignment of prosecutorial-defense opinion. The question of sanity perhaps has a range that extends beyond Breivik.

Why, one might be tempted to ask, was the government so determined to render Mr. Breivik as an insane person?  The answer, I suspect, is that insanity as an explanation for Breivik’s crime makes it all very easy and tidy for everyone.  The “insanity” label relieves Breivik of both legal and moral responsibility – he becomes just another patient attended to by doctors in a hospital – and as well “Anders as insane” relieves everyone in Norway of having to contemplate a criminal justice system that is limited to detaining a murdered of 77 people to twenty-one years.    

          The thirty-three year old Breivik who prior to his rampage lived with and was attended to by his mother, it was reported,  will serve his sentence at Ila prison near Oslo where he will have access to no less than three separate cells – one to sleep, exercise and study, a sort of extended bed-n- breakfast.  No hard labor or bread and water for this prisoner.  He will be able to read, write, keep himself fit, and perhaps, if we may be so hopeful, improve himself.  His “baseline” fortunately gives him a lot of room. The father of one Breivik’s victims, a seventeen year old boy, made a bitter observation.  “Now he’s going back to his boy’s room just with different walls, and exchanging his mother with a prison guard bringing him prison food.” Indeed. Norwegians, if nothing else are most attentive to the comfort of their prison population.

In Norway we have a society that has nearly succeeded in completely medicalizing morality.  Maybe this is progress. I think not. 

The Left and Its Enemies

We will merciless destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, by his thoughts—threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!*

                                                          Joseph Stalin, November, 1937

We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us…**

                                                    President Obama, October, 2010

From Karl Marx to the present day the modus operandi of the Left, whenever and wherever it competes for power, is not compromise with the opposition or even the defeat of the opposition, but its elimination.  Power is to be completely owned, not shared.  The ideology of the Left always drives its practitioners toward total monopoly.  Competition when it exists is disdained and when possible, disallowed.  Lenin defined the rules of political engagement from his earliest days – “Everything that is done in the interest of the proletarian cause is honest” ***– which was a remarkably honest declaration of the Leninist determination not to be bound by any rules, and in effect makes politics into a theater of total war with no quarter given to the enemy.   Lenin’s prescription of politics as war still holds for his progeny.

             The Left’s quest for a monopoly of power is and always has been inevitable because it derives from the foundational premise that every social evil comes into being and persists because the wrong people are in power. What these “wrong people” believe is delusion. What they say is false.  What they do is self-serving. What they own is undeserved.  All that matters is that they are removed: whatever means that accomplishes this is permitted.

“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles,” as we remember from the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels.  The “final” struggle puts the right people, the proletariat, in charge, people free of false-consciousness, above personal and class interest, dedicated to creating a just society where everyone will have what they need and deserve what they get.

Opposition to the Left is defective in two fundamental regards. The first is intellectual.  Those in opposition do not recognize their own ignorance and responsibility for the corrupt status quo that produces the misery of those they exploit.  The second defect is moral.  Their ignorance lives and grows through a rationalization of their self-interest which supports their false and pernicious views of the world.  Phony, greedy and mean-spirited, not only do they benefit undeservedly from the status quo, they hypocritically rationalize it and defend it.  

            The Left in stark contrast is both intellectually and morally superior.   They see through the rationalizations and delusions of the opposition and understand the world as it really is. With the audacity of hope they do not “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment….”  Rising above naked self-interest, religious and ethnic bigotry, and sectarian small mindedness, their moral superiority comes from the altruistic purity of their motives, their unlimited benevolence and empathy for the oppressed, and the nobility of their aspirations.   

            This sense of vast superiority explains the Left’s monopolistic impulse for control – the opposition is unfit for power and should not be permitted to compete for it.  Thus, when the Left does have to compete for power they regard the opposition not as worthy opponents to engage in a respectful rule-governed contest and defeat by showing the deficiency of their ideas and programs.  Rather, they regard them as enemies and move against them as enemies.  The character, motives and personalities of the opposition are the focus of attack, a relentlessly ad hominem barrage.  The ideas and programs of the opponents of the Left do not even have to be seriously considered because they are formulated and advanced by people who are intellectually primitive, morally suspect and at times clinically deranged.    

            No norms or protocols of mutual respect, civil debate or procedural fair play will be observed by Leftist political strategists because they have no respect for those who do not share their ideological convictions or enthuse over their programs. There can be no serious debate about alternative ideas or approaches or perspectives because the truth is already settled and grasped only by those who lay claim to the gnosis of the Left.  Those who dissent or disagree are stupid and simple minded.  Or, their opposition comes from the corruption of their character and personalities. They are motivated by greed and full of hatred for those not like them.  “Republicans want dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health care,”**** remarked President Obama recently.  Of course they do.  They are the wrong people – morally bankrupt, heartless and uncaring, servants of the rich.  They are the enemy and if they think that they will ever be treated otherwise, they are hopeless amnesiacs. 

*Quoted from Jonathan Brent, Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia, Atlas, 2008, 272.

**http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/25/in-appeal-to-hispanics-obama-promises-to-push-immigration-reform/

*** Quoted from: Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, New York: Random House, 1994, 275n.

****http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/10/17/obama_gop_wants_dirtier_air_dirtier_water_less_people_with_health_insurance.html

Personalism & the Medicalization of Morality*

If every action which is good or evil in a man of ripe years were under pittance and prescription and compulsion, what were virtue but a name, what praise should then be due to well-doing, what gramercy to be sober, just, or continent?

                                                                                          John Milton

Personalism is both a modern attitude and an implicit ideology that enthusiastically advances the liberation of the individual self from traditional institutional and conventional constraints. Liberation of the self from the constraints of convention necessarily involves an abandoning of self-restraint. Self-restraint has long been encouraged by ancient and modern moralists: the personalist, however, equates self-restraint with repression and judges it to be unhealthy.

With the increasing bureaucratization and rationalization of modern life and its resulting fragmentation, the appeal and attractiveness of personalism has intensified over the last two hundred years. Personalism has relentlessly expanded its reach and both broadened and refined its applications.  It permeates our thinking and conditions many if not most of our assumptions about how we should give order to our lives, discharge our obligations, and develop our expectations of ourselves and others. It has deeply affected in numerous ways many or most of our social institutions.

Personalism has also altered the premises of our moral conversations. We talk in a different way, and thus ultimately think about ourselves and our action, specifically about our personal accountability for the things that we do and the kinds of people we want to become. The shift in vocabulary is an important measure of a basic transformation in the way we think about what principles we should live by, in the assumptions we make about how we ought to act as human beings and as members of communities bound by moral obligations. Our ethical figures of speech, our basic tools of moral articulation, if you will—applied to matters of individual accountability and moral character—have changed remarkably over the last fifty years and reflect what is a relatively new but increasingly dominant perspective of human conduct in our society. 

This perspective is one of the most distinctive marks of our age. It rests upon an understanding of human behavior that regards conduct considered by our predecessors to be vicious, immoral or sinful, as a manifestation, more precisely, a “symptom” of sickness, illness or disease. That view of behavior reflects an important, perhaps the most important, of the many twentieth-century revolutions :the medicalization of morality.

This view is revolutionary because the entire sphere of human conduct to which moral evaluation and judgment have been applied (that sphere of human conduct in which the freedom of an individual to make choices and to be held accountable for those choices), has increasingly become subjected to evaluation by experts who employ a normalcy-pathology perspective of behavior. Human conduct under a medicalized view is regarded as a causally determined phenomenon: the method for dealing with problematic conduct, given this view, is a therapeutic one. The science of medicine and the related practice of the therapeutic arts have been applied to problems of human conduct once considered as moral ones engaged in by beings once considered morally responsible and personally accountable. Thus, the sorts of deeds that traditional moralists have been usually disposed to consider as “immoral” conduct are now understood as the behavioral effects of pathologically induced causes. As the medicalized perspective of moral conduct comes to dominate our thinking, the notion of immoral or sinful conduct upon which blame is properly directed and upon which punishment is justly applied must give way to the recognition that human wrong doing is ultimately a symptom of mental illness to which treatment must be given.

The medicalizing of morality is a most important late-twentieth-century social phenomenon with far reaching consequences for our everyday lives. Viewing the moral core of our lives differently than we once did means that we begin to act differently than we did before. Medicalizing the assumptions about human behavior de-moralizes our notion of moral conduct. This de-moralization process is captured in a vocabulary in which important moral words that have been traditionally applied to human wrong doing—immoral, evil, reprehensible, blameworthy—are conspicuously absent. The removal of the words that prescribe blame and punishment for wrong doing brings the disappearance of the notions behind the words. Then there follows the decline of the practice of blaming or punishing people for wrong doing. A medicalized approach to morality prescribes treatment rather than punishment for people who do things that they are not supposed to do. Punishment deliberately inflicts pain. Treatment, on the contrary, attempts to minimize pain and to change behavior that we disapprove of into behavior we approve of: so why intentionally inflict pain when it is unnecessary to do so?  Such is the logic and the ethic of medicalization.             

The medicalization of morality creates a dramatic turning away from our traditional moral practice of holding individuals accountable for their actions and the kinds of people that they become. This turning away is a turn toward personalism.  One important and specific concrete measure of the extent to which the medicalization of morality has been successful in transforming our attitudes towards certain kinds of behavior and our practical responses to them can be seen with the passage by Congress of The Americans for Disability Act of 1990, a milestone in civil rights federal legislation signed into law by President George Bush. The ADA put the official and legal stamp of medical “disability” on many kinds of behavior that used to be commonly regarded as vices under the old nomenclature, such as habitual drunkenness and gluttony—now alcoholism and eating disorders—along with a whole host of other addictive and compulsive “disorders” such as drug addiction and compulsive gambling. Institutions are responsible now not only for relinquishing any attachment to “judgmental” or moralistic views of these sorts of behaviors but, more importantly, must provide those who “suffer” from them with what the law makers have called “reasonable accommodation.” Sorting out the meaning of the highly disputable “reasonable” in a society already immersed in moral subjectivism and relativism and its implications for the obligations imposed upon institutions, of course, must ultimately be done by means of litigation with all of the attendant social and financial costs and with an enormous shift of formal power to the adjudicating legal system.
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*Excerpted from Stephen Paul Foster, Desolation's March: the Rise of Personalism and the Reign of Amusement in 21st-America, Bethesda, Md. Academica Press, 2003.
   Complete electronic copy free on demand.

I am the Immaculate Deception: The Dying of Dictators

“He needed to defecate…Stalin got out of the car and asked ‘whether the bushes along the roadside were mined .  Of course no one could give such a guarantee…Then the Supreme Commander-in-Chief pulled down his trousers in everyone’s presence.’  In a metaphorical commentary on his treatment of the Soviet people, and his performance as military commander, he ‘shamed himself in front of his general s and officers… and did his business right there on the road.’”  Stalin on the way back from the Front, 1943.

 (From: Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tzar, New York, Random House, 2003, 652)

The grief-extravaganza that engulfed North Korea following the recent demise of Kim Jong-Il, the first and only Communist boss to inherit from his father his own personal dictatorship and cult of personality, displayed for the outside world a curious and bizarre array of death rituals traceable back to the collective insanity in Russia that ensued after J.V. Stalin took his last breaths on March 5, 1953. 

Kim Jong-Il, like Stalin and like Mao, descended from ordinary folks but during his revolutionary travails acquired superhuman attributes – virtue, wisdom, selfless devotion – beyond the likes of any other in his midst.

Stalin, Mao, Kim – these Marxist Übermenschen ruled over lesser mortals as near perfect beings.  They are not supposed to die. But die they do, which comes as a jarring and untimely reminder of their ordinary fleshly composition.  Breathless and cold they are now just like all of those millions who were made to perish under their benevolent watch – food for the worms.  Thus the fiction of their perfection must be affirmed, first by an elaborately choreographed theatrics of universal despair and grief, with a cast of distraught thousands. Then the worms must be denied.  From the embalmer’s table the grayish corpse, transformed, moves to center stage, a rosy colored, death defying shrine. “I am the immaculate deception.”  The leader in death lives forever as an object of veneration.

The passing of a creature such as Kim Jong-Il is the kind of event that perhaps more than of any other exposes and dramatizes the absurd and fraudulent nature of Communism, an ideology whose enthusiasts have always been pleased to have us know speaks to the modernizing, progressive impulses of humanity and moves relentlessly toward the calculated improvement of the human condition.

The highly demonstrable, wide-spread grief that we see emanating from the throngs of people, crying, wailing with their faces contorted in the pain of sorrow and loss.  Why are they so distressed?  Is it genuine or feigned?    Both probably, but this hedge of an answer only serves to underlie the difficulty making sense of the collective outpouring of grief for the tyrant-turned-cadaver.   This difficulty, however, can be addressed with the maxim that: communism is the highest form of pretending.  The greatest communists are the greatest pretenders.  “Dizzy with success,” was how Stalin in the 1930s described the efforts his party underlings as they completed the forced extraction of the grain harvest from the Ukrainian farmers and then watched them starve by the millions.

  

These grief rituals for the passing of the communist bosses are the crowning absurdity of the cult of personality, the consummate achievement in the art of pretending.  They bring to culmination the life of the Dear Leader which has been long imaged to mirror the exact opposite of reality – criminality masquerading as glory, ruthlessness celebrated as genius.  The wisdom of the Leader has been folly; his benevolence, unspeakable wickedness.  Progress has been nothing more than stagnation and corruption.  The people’s highly visible anguish for the loss of the Leader is sublimated relief.  Is he really, finally dead? Everything in the worker’s paradise is the opposite of what it appears.

 

Stalin’s death was consistent with his life as a supreme communist ruler.  For the world to contemplate, his funeral in the middle days of March 1953 was a massive production out of which emanated the love, devotion and worship of the millions of Russians.  The circumstances of his death on March 5^th , observed only by his family and underlings, were desperate, sordid and disgusting.  Death came from a stroke that left him lying on his bedroom floor, speech impaired, soaking in his own urine.  His assistants, terrified of him, were reluctant to call the doctors. Stalin distrusted doctors, especially Jewish doctors.  His devoted henchman – Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov – deserted the deathwatch, fled to the office to destroy the Boss’s papers and the evidence of their criminality.

Fidel tarries.  The embalmers are anxious.           

The Left: “Yes, I’m the Great Pretender”

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
                                                                                George Santayana

Gazing across the political spectrum one might search for a single word or phrase that captures the essence of any one of the ideological occupiers.  The Left has long settled on “stupid” as the most fitting for conservatives.  “Conservatives as stupid” reaches a long way back with England’s great utilitarian philosopher and reformer, John Stuart Mill, calling the Tories the “stupid party.”

So it was then and so it is today.  The pundits have recently savaged the current crop of Republican Presidential aspirants mostly with aspersions on the paucity of their intellects. Whatever other many unseemly qualities they may evince – meanness, ignorant religiosity, greed, and hypocrisy – all are overshadowed with the low levels of intelligence by which they operate.   Rick Perry was stupid. Michelle Bachmann was ignorant and dumb.  Newt Gingrich may appear to be smart, but it is merely superficial camouflage. He is not really bright at all.  All of these troglodytes by comparison now, so we hear from columnist Clarence Page, make Ronald Reagan look wise.   Of course when Reagan was a candidate for President he too was simple-minded, senile, “an amiable dunce,” per Clark Clifford, vapid and intellectually inferior. 

By contrast the Left is the Mensa segment of the political spectrum, a brainy, high IQ society of college professors, trial lawyers and Hollywood actors, actresses and directors.  Whatever their shortcomings, they are smart. No one impugns their intellects.  George W. Bush, the only President to earn an M.B.A (from Harvard) was widely disparaged as much dumber than divinity school drop-out Al Gore.  President Obama, qualified “to heal the planet”, as he promised in his campaign, is said to be a brilliant constitutional lawyer and scholar, although he has never published a single article on the subject, even as editor of the Harvard Law Review, much less a book.  His only publications to date are two books are about his favorite subject, himself.  

So, what single word might we essay to capture the essence of the Left?  “Pretenders” – the politicos of compassion are the Great Pretenders.  What then do they pretend to?

First, they pretend to know.  Karl Marx, the Great Pretender of the 19^th century claimed to have discovered the “laws of history” from which he deduced and then predicted how the history of the modern world would unfold and what the end result would be.  The “good guys”, the oppressed workers of the world, would rise up take power from the capitalist exploiters and build a society free of domination, poverty, war and unhappiness.  Of course, none of this worked out.  Marx as a knower, a theorist was an abject failure.  But Marx’s disciples continued to pretend in the theory.  Not only would the “socialist workers paradise” predicted by Marx come to pass, but they pretended to be the chosen ones who would make it happen. 

The pretend-knower persists to this day.  The academy abounds with Leftists who invent “theories” which, they proudly assert, “unmask” the culprits in social world who dominate and exploit an assortment of unfortunates.  The University of California at Berkeley’s Judith Butler’s is one of the acclaimed knowers.  This theoretical bombshell appeared in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the “scholarly” journal Diacritics (1997):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

No one outside of a university philosophy and English department would bother to decipher this mental ordure.  Other than her graduate assistants and an assortment of her queer theory, post-modernist, post-structuralist camp followers, no one else would pretend that this says anything important, insightful or even interesting.  Good theories lead to inventions, innovations, deeper understanding.  Theories of this sort lead only to tenure, promotion and academic conference junkets – to read them makes for a headache.

Second, the Leftists pretend to be virtuous.   Their intellectual and theoretical superiority is complemented by their moral superiority.  They represent and speak for the oppressed, exploited and marginalized, and unlike conservatives who are motivated solely by greed and narrow self-interest, the luminaries of the Left are genuinely altruistic and benevolent.  They put people over profit, light candles and protest at the execution of murders, and congratulate themselves for their boundless compassion and devotion to the environment.  

Of course, these moralists are no more upright and decent generally speaking than the stupid conservatives and the masses they look down upon, including the rubes in the flyover states who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them.”  The Left too is full of antipathy – particularly for cigarette smokers, traditional Christians and owners of gas guzzlers – but they pretend to be open-minded and tolerant.  The many heroes of the Left – Lenin, Mao, Castro, Che, Ho Chi Minh – while they were building the gulags, murdering their opposition and impoverishing their own people, were lionized and lauded by Leftist in the West as Robin Hoods, benefactors of humanity, tireless and selfless devotees of the poor and oppressed. 

      

Third, the Leftists pretend that their failures are successes.  For decades Leftists in the West pretended that the Soviets, then the Chinese Communists, then Fidel Castro had built societies far superior to the capitalist ones they comfortably lived in and disparaged.  The pretending persisted across the years in spite of the accumulating evidence of misery, penury and servitude in these paradises.  No one in Miami was building rafts and braving the open ocean waters and sharks to arrive in Havana. Yet, Fidel remains a hero who gave the Cubans who couldn’t escape his paradise free health care. His eventual New York Times obituary will pretend he was a humanitarian.  In the U.S. the Left has presided over the apotheosis of FDR pretending he was the greatest of American Presidents in spite of ample evidence that his policies greatly prolonged the Great Depression and that he seriously misjudged Stalin and was manipulated by him.  The peoples of eastern and central Europe paid dearly for FDR's avuncular view of Joseph Stalin.

While conservatives may remain the stupid party, the Left has been and continues to be the party of pretenders, to paraphrase Santayana above, it persists as “a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.”     

The Left: Celebrating One Hundred and Fifty Years of Adolescence

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.  (1^st Corinthians, 13:11)

One has to envy the people of the left.  They have managed to cling tenaciously to adolescence for at least a century and a half.   To remain on the Left is to lock one’s self into a permanent state of arrested development.  

One of the most distinctive marks of adolescence is a relentless self-centered view of one’s place in the world.  Work, with its often tedious, routine and time-demanding nature, is not readily embraced by highly self-centered creatures like adolescents.  Full time work is something that Leftists devoutly believe other people should do since they have higher callings like dismantling the corrupt old order and installing a regime of virtue in its place – grandiosity being another stage of late childhood.  Karl Marx spent his adult life dodging gainful full time employment.  His wife, Jenny, and the Marx children languished in squalor while Karl scribbled away and sponged off his pal, Engels.  Stalin as a young, ambitious Bolshevik robbed banks.  Mao wrote poetry.  Sartre lounged about in Paris cafes affecting a distinctively French anti-bourgeois style while producing reams of unreadable bilge that that aspiring sophisticates in college dorms and faculty lounges could flaunt as deep Existentialist thought.  Bill Ayers tried to blow up the Pentagon before he settled into his sinecure as an “education” professor and aging celebrity-radical. 

The “Occupy Wall Street” youngsters squat in public places and rail and fume at “rich, greedy bankers” ignoring a couple of seemingly obvious questions: why would anyone want to be a banker if he couldn’t be rich?  Presumably, they don't object to poor bankers, but why would any sane person trust their savings to one?  “Greedy,” by the way, is “adolescent-speak” to describe “someone who makes more money or has more than you think he should.”  I believe that it is safe to conjecture that in the history of the world it would be exceedingly difficult to discover many examples of individuals confessing, themselves, to being greedy.  No one on the Left would ever make such a confession.  Greed is the cardinal sin for the Leftist, and its application is most flexible. George Clooney and Michael Moore have more money than most of us could dream of. Yet, I have never heard of anyone calling them greedy.

As well, adolescents also tend to be know-it-alls.  They gaze around at the world observing and deeply resenting all of its injustices and pettiness.  They know exactly what is wrong and how to fix it -- If only they were allowed to.  Most pass through what their elders patronizingly and euphemistically call the “idealistic” stage, come to terms with the imperfections, live out their imperfect lives, in this most imperfect world.  

    

However, we have the amply sad history of permanent adolescent know-it-alls, professional Leftists, in charge of fixing things.   One word is sufficient to summarize the state of the paradise that two of the more ambitious adolescents promised would unfold if they were put in charge – “starvation.”  The world’s two most populous countries, Russia and China were run for decades by a couple of men widely proclaimed to be “geniuses” and paragons of virtue.  No field of study or body of wisdom was beyond their mastery.  No aspect of the character or personality of either leader was sullied by self-interest.  Both Stalin and Mao went on to engineer famines that killed tens of millions of their own countrymen. Mao, whose real forte was poetry, untrained and wholly ignorant of agronomy and basic science, nevertheless overturned traditional Chinese agricultural practice, and inserted his whims and fantasies as law.  The Great Leap Forward is the ultimate demographer’s challenge to this day as researchers try to determine how many millions of Chinese people perished as the result of Mao’s policies.    

In addition to starving a sizable portion of Ukrainian farmers in the 1930s Stalin put the ignorant know-it-all, Trofim Lysenko, in charge of Soviet agronomy who managed to damage it even more than Lenin and Stalin.  One single statistic that forcefully expresses the staggering ignorance and incompetence of the adolescent know-it-alls that governed the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991 is the following:  “In 1917 Russia had been the world’s largest exporter of grain; by 1989 it was the world’s largest importer.” [Quoted from John Mosier, Hitler vs. Stalin: the Eastern Front, 1941-1945, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2010, 11.]     

    

When adolescents do not get their way those who disappoint them are made to feel the extreme effects of their resentment.  At the hard rock bottom of all Leftist ideology is the premise that social conflict and struggle both underlies and explains all human interaction.  Leftists are perennial grievance-mongers.  The social world is always and inevitably about one group exploiting and dominating another.   All that is wrong with the world becomes the doing of the unfairly advantaged Exploiter-Dominators (ED's) who pummel the lowly Exploited-Victims (EV's).   Being an EV means that there is always an ED to resent and to blame.  An EV in good standing must have a grievance to polish and villains to excoriate.   EV's are heroes (Marx, Che, Joe Hill). ED's are villains (Capitalists, Bankers, George W. Bush).  EV's are virtuous – compassionate, selfless and wise.  ED's are greedy, selfish and mean-spirited.     

     

This stark, Manichean, hero-villain picture of the world is perfect for the adolescent theorist-moralist. With it he can feel down-trodden, virtuous and special, all at the same time.  The source of his discomfort always redounds to those self-centered adults (projection) who lack the insight and knowledge he does (more projection).  From this picture flows what Bertrand Russell called, “The Doctrine of the Superior Virtue of the Oppressed,” which means that whatever the EV's do to the ED's is morally justified.   Lies, character assassination, bombing the Pentagon – all can be justified because the ED's are all the moral equivalent of Adolf Hitler, even though they pretend not to be. When everyone who opposes you is some variety of Nazi, Fascist or Klansman your toolbox of weapons is quite expansive.

In 2018 we will celebrate the 200^th Birthday of the original adolescent- philosopher. Happy Birthday in advance, Karl.   You would be pleased to see that so many of your “children” rule.