Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter, a psychiatrist, diagnoses liberalism as a psychopathology.
The degree of modern liberalism’s irrationality far exceeds any misunderstanding that can be attributed to faulty fact gathering or logical error. Indeed, under careful scrutiny, liberalism’s distortions of the normal ability to reason can only be understood as the product of psychopathology. So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche. The modern liberal mind, its distorted perceptions and its destructive agenda are the product of disturbed personalities.
As is the case in all personality disturbance, defects of this type represent serious failures in development processes… Among their consequences are the liberal mind’s relentless efforts to misrepresent human nature and to deny certain indispensable requirements for human relating. In his efforts to construct a grand collectivist utopia—to live what Jacques Barzun has called “the unconditioned life” in which “everybody should be safe and at ease in a hundred ways”—the radical liberal attempts to actualize in the real world an idealized fiction that will mitigate all hardship and heal all wounds. (Barzun 2000). He acts out this fiction, essentially a Marxist morality play, in various theaters of human relatedness, most often on the world’s economic, social and political stages. But the play repeatedly folds. Over the course of the Twentieth Century, the radical liberal’s attempts to create a brave new socialist world have invariably failed. At the dawn of the Twenty-first Century his attempts continue to fail in the stagnant economies, moral decay and social turmoil now widespread in Europe. An increasingly bankrupt welfare society is putting the U.S. on track for the same fate if liberalism is not cured there. Because the liberal agenda’s principles violate the rules of ordered liberty, his most determined efforts to realize its visionary fantasies must inevitably fall short. Yet, despite all the evidence against it, the modern liberal mind believes his agenda is good social science. It is, in fact, bad science fiction. He persists in this agenda despite its madness.
And John Perazzo identifies one of the most seriously afflicted of our contemporaries:
Every so often, a public figure will speak a sentence that succinctly sums up his or her entire worldview in just a few words, exposing the core belief that is the wellspring of his or her every position on matters of consequence. Consider, for instance, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s recent assertion: “If we [the U.S. military] leave Iraq, then the insurgents will leave Iraq, the terrorists will leave Iraq.”
Dominique R. Poirier
History taught us that liberalism and leftist ideas in general produced ultimately monstrous or absurd outcomes challenging any logic or rationality. That’s why most of us still continue relying on the term of utopia to describe it.
But in going as far as questioning, all at the same time, centuries of facts and figures on fields as varied as psychology, mass psychology, behaviorism, political science, the intrepid Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter is venturing into vast and challenging grounds.
Besides, leftists — and more especially far leftists — accuse of antisocial behavior, troublemaking, and individualism, intellectuals who refuse to share their ideas and to mix with the labor class; and in some cases, even send them to psychiatric asylums. Perhaps wouldn’t be it so good of a path to follow.
I think that in publishing this week this “Joke of the Day,” dated November 6, 2006, JDZ found a more convincing theory.
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