The Progressive Missionaries of Unhappiness
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
There is no one that the left hates more than a
man who does not hate, who goes through the day
without outrage and who does not spend his life
stewing with vindictive resentments.
Leftists call it “privilege” now. They have
called it apathy, escapism and a hundred other
things.
They will find a thousand other names for it as they
march through the future centuries grinding their
teeth and cursing their country for its
backwardness, their people for their provincialism
and their culture for its mercantilism. But
privilege is simply freedom from resentment.
To be of the left is to confuse perpetual outrage
with righteousness. The professional leftist
believes that the path to utopia on earth lies in
constantly denouncing thought criminals until they
have all been unthought so that only their kind of
ethical and empathetic people walk the earth.
Like most utopians, they plan for a utopia that they
could never actually live in.
Leftists without grievances are like an army without
guns. That is why leftist experiments in communes
dissolved into denunciations, power grabs and
authoritarian rules as soon the drugs ran out. Often
even before. The leftist isn’t seeking freedom from
capitalism, religion, nationalism, racism, sexism,
office dress codes, bar codes and any of the other
great evils of the moment. These are just the
outrage fuel of the willfully outraged whose
resentment has become both culture and religion.
What he wants is to express an egotistical grievance
at a world that is not built around him. His
resentments came before his ideology. They are in a
very real sense his ideology. The idealistic leftist
is a passing phenomenon. He is useful for getting
the actual work done while everyone else shouts.
Unless he is very dim, he eventually realizes that
and heads off to volunteer in Africa. The core is
the aggrieved leftist whose grievances merge with
his storytelling skills into the compelling
narrative of a narcissist.
The perpetually aggrieved deeply resent those who
are oblivious to their anger. It is the theme that
dominates the literature, the music and the
political writings of an infuriated left throwing
its anger at a mindless mass that is perfectly happy
collecting paychecks, living in the suburbs and
watching television. It is not their prosperity that
the left hates, but their uncomplicated happiness.
It is this uncomplicated happiness that the left
sets out to ruin at all costs.
Leftist activism is drama. It is deliberately
destructive and disruptive. It glories in taking the
happy lives of ordinary people and wrecking them. It
plays the part of the troubled sibling, the one who
is driven to destroy the happiness of the rest of
the family out of his or her own willful
unhappiness.
Happiness is a choice. It is not dependent on the
condition of the individual, but on his state of
mind. The essence of enduring happiness is a state
of stability. Leftist politics are instability
incarnate; the opposite number of happiness. That is
why the left acts as the destroyer of happiness.
The left does not think that anyone should be happy.
It is not unhappy because it is personally enmeshed
in suffering. The ideological leaders of the left
tend to come from the upper classes. They know no
hunger except when they are dieting. They experience
so few material shortcomings that they treat poverty
as a lifestyle; slumming in poor areas and showily
living on a few dollars a day.
It is the happiness of others that makes the left
unhappy. It is convinced that this happiness is
unearned and illegitimate because it does not take
into account how unhappy this happiness makes the
left.
Privilege is the accusation that the very lack of
resentment and grievance, neurotic responses to
simple phrases and a cloud of free-floating anger,
represents an ignorant oppression. The happy are
only happy at the expense of the unhappy and must
recognize the unhappy privilege of their happiness.
Leftists are missionaries of unhappiness. Their
creed is salvation through anger. Their governing
philosophy is to make others miserable in order to
teach them how they have overlooked the misery of
others. They are forever spreading misery around the
world for the sake of the greater good.
If the left sees anyone being happy, it must
immediately set out to ruin the fun. The simple joy
of others turns out to be only a cover for monstrous
abuses that they are determined to make everyone
else see. If it’s an object, it was made by
oppressed workers. If it’s a social group, it’s
discriminatory. If it’s food, it makes you sick. If
it’s a sport, it’s abusive. If it’s art, then it’s
escapism from the misery the left creates.
It is straightforward happiness that the left hates
most of all. It is unable to appreciate anything
directly unless it is medicated. It likes things
only askew. It says that it likes bad art and ugly
fashions because it is being ironic. What it really
means is that it is only capable of liking something
as a commentary on the absurdity of the thing and
the emotion of liking it. Even its happiness is a
critique of happiness.
Its joys are as sour as the rest of its nature.
The left views simplicity as dishonest. It is full
of secret agendas and projects this in paranoid
fashion. It is always finding the subtext in
everything because it brings the subtext to the
table. It is forever carrying around Rorschach
inkblots in its head and shouting about all the
terrible things it sees around it.
Deriving its happiness from the unhappiness of
others, the left must see the destruction of
happiness as moral and its victims as immoral.
Happiness is selfish, it insists, while the
awareness of how many evils are hidden beneath the
simplistic façade of happiness is ethically
enlightening. And yet its own obsession with
destroying the happiness of others is the selfish
way in which the left finds its happiness.
The left is only truly happy when it is destroying
something. Its sublime transcendent moments are
revolutionary. Their joy is derived not from what is
being created, but from what is being destroyed.
Every leftist revolution from the reign of Madame
Guillotine to Obama’s election was full of vicious
glee at things coming undone. Under the banner of
equality, the left inaugurates inequality. Through
calls for peace, it brings war and with cries of
prosperity, it ushers in an age of terrible poverty.
Unable to create, the left ultimately only destroys.
Its creative energies spring from bitterness. It
glories in subversively undermining the happiness of
others, directly and indirectly, but once all the
things that it sought to destroy have been banished,
it has nothing more to offer. Its hatred is sterile.
It poison can be artfully disguised as idealism,
humor and passion, but when there is nothing left to
attack or subvert, it shows its true viral form by
dying, as every virus that kills its host must
inevitably do.
When the left finally triumphs, its first order of
business is a total ruthless purge of its own
professional dissenters because without such a
purge, it would remain in the same dysfunctional
state.
The left is satanic in its original sense of
‘antagonist’. It represents the darker side of human
nature. It is the ideology of those who cannot let
their anger go, who gain a perverse enjoyment from
their grudges and define themselves less by what
they are for than by what they are against. Its
followers are motivated by an endless resentment
that cannot be appeased because the resentment is
their purpose.
It is impossible to meet the left halfway or to
compromise with it because it is not seeking the
stable balance that so many conservatives are. It
finds its true purpose in the chaos of conflict. It
gains its meaning in opposition not in co-existence.
To compromise with the left is to rob it of its
purpose. And the left pushes back against any such
efforts through renewed bursts of radicalism.
Conservative parties lose when they fail to come
to terms with this antagonistic dynamic and assume
their opponents on the left also seek a stable state
that they can find common ground on. Stability is
the enemy of the left. Stability is privilege.
Stability is happiness. Stability is everything that
the left despises.
The left has learned to cloak its animosity and
destructive aims in positive rhetoric. It destroys
economies, families and freedoms in the name of
equality. Its cheering mobs realize too late that
its cause is not the equality of opportunity,
happiness or liberty, but poverty, misery and
slavery.
The left does not redistribute wealth. It
redistributes want. It does not want everyone to
share in the happiness of others, but to be burdened
with a larger burden of their miseries.
No compromise can be had with the missionaries of
unhappiness. Happiness can be shared without
diminishing its quality, but the division of misery
is the aim of the professionally miserable.
The left has suffered its worst defeats at the hands
of the happy warriors of the right. Its greatest
vulnerability is its meanness of spirit. Its defeat
comes when its malaise is contrasted with happiness,
when its deep suspicion of humanity is met with
patriotic optimism and when its alarmist crises are
met with laughter.