Saturday, November 23, 2013

The superstitions of the Left

In a brilliant post that starts with Carl Jung on what used to be call "Primitive Man" (in a less enlightened age), Ace hits center mass on one of the biggest blind spots of the secular left:
Magical thinking reasons not just from cause to effect (my fetish doll will give me control over the target), but from effect back to cause: if an extraordinary event occurred, such as a crocodile eating a woman, it must be due to an extraordinary cause, such as conclave of sorcerers using their Words of Power to manipulate the crocodile into its lethal bite.


Modern Man and Primitive Man are hardly any different at all. Modern Man likes to think he's given up on magical thinking, of hokum and superstition and dream-logic somewhere between "mythology" and "sustaining lie," but in fact they think precisely the same way. They just call things by different terms.

It is too hard to accept that the Great Progressive Hope could have been killed down by such a pissant little loser of a malcontent crocodile, I mean communist; therefore, he wasn't.

No, no piddly little crocodile, I mean communist, decided to kill Kennedy on its own; rather, it was bidden to do so by a conclave of Rightwing Sorcerers, sorcerers who poisoned the very air with Magic Words, Magic Words of great power, like "socialist" and "Anyone But JFK."

These Magic Words commanded the crocodile, I mean communist, to kill the King.
And thence to Global Warming, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party.  The hysteria is a religious hysteria, from people who pat themselves on the back about how they have left all that idiotic superstition behind, not realizing that they have simply given it free rein.  As he sums up:
You don't need God to be religious hysteric.
All you need is a Dogma and a Devil.
This is absolutely brilliant.

9 comments:

juvat said...

BP,
You're running a pretty great win streak in outstanding posts here in the last month or two. This is another winner! Keep up the good work.

Anonymous said...

well stated my friend. good post!

Goober said...

I posted at length about this recently. It really is a psychological thing people just can't accept the most powerful man on earth was killed by this total loser.

But pretty much everything on the conspiracy side it's been pretty thoroughly debunked. An 88 yard quartering shot on a target moving 11 miles an hour is not even that hard. It is certainly not superhuman.

And the magic bullet just wasn't magic. It did what bullets do.

Goober said...

*has. Not it's. Posting on my phone. It apparently wanted my grammar to be horrible today.

Anonymous said...

On the flip side I can say I have met very few true Christians in my sojourn in the USA. Many hypocrites but few true believers.

Anonymous said...

Before you grumble I'm a hypocrite too, but at least I'm aware I am.

Borepatch said...

Juvat, thanks.

Knottedprop, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

Goober said...

Knottedprop;

I've always been taught that there was only ever one perfect Christian.

The example set is a good one to strive towards, but so far, but for one, appears to be impossible to actually obtain.

I don't call it hypocrisy. I call it "being human".

Ken said...

For a second (and arguably even more ruinous) example, I give you Gavrilo Princip.