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.