A common observation made about the Left is their penchant for projection. If you want to know what kind of shenanigan a Leftist is up to, the old saw goes, pay attention to what he accuses others of doing.
Conservatives aren’t immune to projection, though. Most notably, they tend to predicate of the Left those same motives that drive them. It’s understandable. Conservatives tend to be practical people who, when they seek such things, tend to pursue money and influence for utilitarian ends. The Republican movie star or best selling author uses his earnings to buy a ranch in Idaho so he can live as freely as possible. His natural dispositions lead him to assume that the Left seeks money and influence for similar, but inverse, reasons. Instead of using their gains to secure greater freedom, he reasons, the Left wants power and control.
Look beyond the veil of binary politics, and you’ll soon see that Leftists don’t pursue government control as an end in itself. Their governing track record shows them to be the proverbial dogs chasing cars in that regard.
Modern Leftists aren’t Bolsheviks whose end goal is implementing socialism. That’s just a means to their true ends. In reality, they’re unholy crusaders seeking to imminentize the eschaton of their heretical Death Cult. What the freedom-loving Conservative’s worldview won’t let him see is that the Cult doesn’t hate freedom. It loves it with an untamed abandon he can’t even contemplate. Unlike the Conservative, the Cultist takes absolutizing freedom to its logical extreme. Reality itself stands in the way of unrestricted license, so reality is the ultimate foe to be defeated.
You can see it in Leftist memes–or what passes for them. Memes are symbols, and symbols convey complex meaning in simple images. As Catholic author Dean Koontz once said, stained glass windows don’t have subtitles.
But to be of the Left is to be at war with reality, and thus with inherent meaning. Their stock in trade is using language to obfuscate ideas. Thus we have “gender” instead of sex, “undocumented migrant” instead of illegal alien, and “gay marriage” instead of sodomy. Because their whole game entails replacing simple concepts with overwrought fabrications, their attempted memes end up as word salad walls of text.
It’s also why the Pop Cult’s IP agitprop factories can’t produce art–or even tell a coherent story. Effective storytelling relies on tropes, which could be called literary memes. Attacks on established tropes are favored tactics in the Cult’s war on meaning. Think of all the bluehairs on YouTube decrying good vs evil plots, damsels in distress, and orcs.
Author David Stewart and I delve deeper into these and many other related topics in his latest livestream. Watch it here.
Thanks in part to Corona-chan, indie has its best-ever shot at replacing oldpub. Attaining market dominance over dreary message fic may not win the war on its own, but politics is downstream from culture, so it will be a major step back from the precipice.
You can help indie creators take back pop culture by supporting us instead of people who hate you. I wrote a #1 best seller to that effect. Buy it now!
