John C. Wright Strikes Bone

John C. Wright cuts deep into the malfunctioning minds of AtheoLeftism... again. I can't resist excerpting a large part from the beginning, but please go to his page to read it all.

A reader with the abstract yet addictive name of Concept Junkie leaves this comment regarding the case in favor of marriage, now, for some reason that does not bear close examination, called traditional marriage. (As if a three-sided triangle needed to be called a traditional triangle to distinguish it from all those square triangles with four sides):

Our gracious host has made the case better than anyone I’ve ever seen, but I don’t think his arguments, however sound and logical would change the vast majority of minds.

An understatement. My reasoning will change NO minds, zero, nada, zip, simply because those who uphold the perverse as equal to the decent, the sick as equal to the hale, the unwholesome as equal to the wholesome were never reasoned into that worldview, no, not one, not ever.

You cannot reason someone out of a stance he was not reasoned into.

A Leftist is not someone who has an alternative political philosophy to yours, or different reasons. He is someone who, in the realm of politics, has decided to eschew philosophy and abandon reason.

Leftism is what you get when you stop reasoning, kill it dead, and substitute word fetishes instead.

Consider: Marx proposed an economic system where goods and services would be produced without reference to prices, to supply and demand, and to the scarcity of resources. In other words, he proposed economics without economics. This would like someone who proposed a geometric system without points and lines, without definitions and without common notions. In order to answer his critics, Marx told them that to minds conditioned by bourgeoisie means of production, the results of the material dialectic once the dictatorship of the proletarian had ended the exploitation of private property forever was unimaginable to them. For those of you who don’t speak Leftist, Marx merely proposed that oldest and most favorite of Leftist counter-arguments: he told them to shut up.

A close study of Marx will show that he was not an economist at all, he was someone making up a plethora of windbaggy excuses, slurs, counter-attacks, and slanders to deconstruct, that is, to destroy economics. Economics led to a conclusion that Marx did not like, namely, that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch; you cannot eat your cake and save it, too. So rather than accept the conclusion, he rejected the art of reasoning. Keynes followed in his footsteps, and used a more convoluted terminology.

These terminologies are word-fetishes. A fetish is a magic token you use in order to get a magic effect in the world, and, when the effect does not take place, instead of throwing the fetish away, you adore it and implore it all the more.

A word-fetish is when you have a bit of language which you hope will have a magical effect on the world, turning gold into lead.

The simplest example is the phrase ‘wage slavery’ which, like the phrase ‘bright darkness’ or ‘four-sided triangle’ or ‘homosexual marriage’ is a nonsense phrase, signifying nothing and meant to signify nothing.

What word fetishes do is carry a connotation without carrying a denotation. In the above example, a slave is defined as one who is coerced into doing labor without a wage. The payment of a wage is the defining thing that makes a laborer not a slave; it is the sign that the exchange was voluntary. Hence the term ‘wage slavery’ has a connotation of a horrible and involuntary servitude, akin to bondage, and the connotation is affixed to working for a wage, a voluntary exchange between equals, which is the opposite.

Word fetishes are used instead of reasoning. When a man reasons, he defines his terms. When a Leftist unreasons — or whatever the mental activity is called whereby mental activity is deliberately made unable to act — what he does is undefine his terms. He makes clear terms muddy.

When the word fetish does not work, they, like the zealous medicine man whose rain dance cannot make it rain, merely dances again, this time harder. So the Leftist says his word fetish again louder or more forcefully or more scornfully. When nothing continues to happen, they try again. And so on.

I used economics as my first example because Marx is the defining pioneer of Leftism. But the same neurosis and the same results obtain for any topic discussed by the Left.

In philosophy, the word fetish is to declare that the only truth is that there is no truth. It is, in other words, an insolent abandonment of philosophy, the love of truth.

In ethics, the word fetish is to say that it is evil to distinguish good from evil, and that being judgmental or condemnatory must be brought to judgment and condemned. This is an insolent abandonment of ethics.

In politics, the word fetish is to call a greedy desire to plunder others a right or an entitlement, and to call a man’s right, especially to his own property to which he alone is entitled, greed. This abolition of all rights and boundaries is an insolent abandonment of politics, even of the concept of politics.

The other word fetish is to put the word ‘social’ in front of a second word so as to rob that second word of meaning, or reverse the meaning: ‘social justice’ in other words, means punishing the innocent and rewarding the guilty, as when non slave owners pay black rioters reparations for a non existent crime.

In logic, they use the word binary to indicate that they disapprove of the proposition that ‘A is A’ is true and that ‘A is not-A’ is false. Of course, without the binary distinction between self consistent and self contradictory statements, logic is vain. It is the insolent abandonment of logic.

Some more energetic Leftists make the argument — pardon me, they unlimber the word fetish — that unless you share the sex, tastes, race, social class, faith and nation of origin of the other man in the argument, your logic is disqualified, on the grounds that all races have different logical systems. Jew logic is not the same as Aryan logic. The mere fact that Nazis invented this argument so as to elude the need to answer critics should deter the Leftist, who claims to hate Nazis, but in truth does not.

In art, ugliness is called daring or subversive and beauty is insulted and deconstructed by any number of words mocking the motive of the artist and ignoring the merit of the art.

The mere fact that all these arguments are self defeating, absurdly obvious logical absurdities, does not shame them. Nothing does. The whole reason why the Leftist abandons reason is to quell his shame. Leftism is shamelessness.

Shamelessness is like guiltlessness in that one is free of feeling guilty, albeit, of course, one can endlessly continue to indulge in the most vile, low, vulgar, and shameful of vices. Neither the virgin nor the whore blushes, albeit, obviously, because the first has no need where the second no ability.

Shamelessness is like guiltlessness in that neither the sinner nor the saint goes to confession, albeit, of course, for opposite reasons.

If you have ever had the unpleasant experience of attempting a rational debate with a Leftist, you have no doubt come away with the same queasy sensation one might encounter if watching a man try to eat a rubber chicken, or copulate with an inflatable doll, or, to use a less grotesque example, like watching a retarded man in clown make up who does not know how to juggle tossing a single ball up into the air and letting it drop, and then smiling and bowing to the puzzled and bored children in the audience, as if he does not know that dropping the ball is not what juggling is, and does not understand why they are not as thrilled as he could be when he watches a juggler.

What the Leftist does in debate is utter his idiot word fetishes and slogans with the sneering hauteur of a card player displaying his trump card, or a chessmaster a checkmate.

And when his nonsense does not win the debate, or even address the debate, he realized you are the OTHER, and he blames you, and insults your character, your intelligence, your education, your moral stature, your maturity, et cetera.

The more mentally agile Leftists will invent some implausible sounding motive for you to be dishonest, such as (and this is the least plausible I have ever heard) he will answer cite your mental incapacity is due to ‘Christian Privilege’.

As far as I can recall, no one either in a debate or as an onlooker to a debate has ever been convinced by the ad hominem, or any like it. Why do Leftists always resort to this shift?

Naturally, he does not expect this bit of verbal drool to convince you or impress you: it is a code word, a shibboleth, a display of his credentials, a secret handshake.
[All emphasis added]