Getting into Leftist Headspace

Thanks to @Gitabushi for inspiring this post. [alt link] 

The only way to understand the Left is to get into their headspace, which is a completely foreign place to the average conservative or even centrist thinker.

I'm not so good at leading people down the path, so I drop little nuggets and hope it attracts people who "get" it.

"The Left can't discern"

"There are problems on both sides: problems on the right and problems in America"

"BLM has almost nothing to do with dark skinned people."

I know there are others, but those come top of mind.

In simplest lay terms, this all means that there is a double-standard, which folks on the right have known, but I don't think really understood. (I certainly didn't until sometime mid-Obama.)

The Rightist way of thinking is very formal. Righties get caught up on logical fallacies and whatnot. Pipsqueaks like Ben Shapiro (luv ya, Ben) get airtime. To the Right, a double-standard is "one set of rules for me, another for thee." And that's not wrong, it's just incomplete.

The Leftist way of thinking, while necessarily having formal elements (it is thinking, after all) is not so formal. For decades, far-looking people have tried to point out the Deconstructivist way that Lefties approach things.

That is, the Left is dominated by people who approach everything looking for ways to take (not necessarily tear, but that will often do) it apart. 

When the two mindsets clash, it creates a sort of dueling utopianisms.

Lefty utopians think that if everything is dismantled, we can start over from Eden and get it right this time. (e.g. to reach communism we must "return" to a pre-market state.)

Righty utopians think that we can achieve perfection if we just keep refining.

~~~

The Left likes to operate in the chaotic realm of conflation, juxtaposition, inversion, and general bad-faith. In a certain sense, everything implies its opposite, so the only way to connect with anyone is to actively attempt to relate to others.

In case it hasn't been made abundantly clear, the Left professes zero interest in relating to the Right—and they will decide who is on the Right.

This naturally gives way to a war mindset. In most competitions, there are parameters agreed upon by both parties. What sets war apart—real war—is that there are no rules. The victor is whoever is left at the end of the melee.

(Stuff like the Geneva Convention is just a group of countries saying, "If you fight us, you'd better beat all of us, or we're gonna ram our bureaucracy—which we are scarily good at—down your throats so hard, you're gonna wish you had died on the battlefield.")

This is a very selfish-utilitarian mindset. "Good" is whatever helps your side. "Bad" is whatever helps their side. It doesn't matter if it's the same thing.

If you can make your opponent adhere to their own code of honor while having none of your own, that's to your advantage.

~~~

This is still mostly in the realm of what folks on the Right sort of already know in their heads, but it's hard to tell who "gets" it. Admittedly, when I find myself realizing the Leftist way of thinking, I can no longer communicate in Rightish terms. It's that different.

The best illustration I have, the topic I've come the furthest on explaining (to myself, mainly) is the subject of Whiteness and Blackness. Each of these terms has two top-level meanings—one that I'll call the normie, the other I'll call the woke.

The normie meanings are the apparent ones. Whiteness has to do with white people, Blackness with black people. These are basically interchangeable with "white" and "black" as pertains to race. And that interchangeability surreptitiously lends woke meaning to the brief terms.

The woke meanings of "Whiteness" and "Blackness" are a bit harder to pin, because they mean opposite things depending on whether you're Left or Right. In terms both could maybe agree on "Whiteness" is "the way things are" and "Blackness" is "the way things aren't."

Already, I'm in danger, because to the Right "the way things are" means "what works" whereas to the Left, it means "arbitrary (bad) rules."

By extension, "the way things aren't" means to the Right "what doesn't work" and to the Left "a better set of rules."

~~~

You may recall this Smithsonian poster that was a brouhaha a few weeks ago. This is a great illustration, but to see it you have to move past the reaction "I thought these ideas were racist" and see it from a vantage that doesn't think it is racist AT ALL.

click to enlarge

Stated differently, yes, this looks exactly like something that David Duke would put together to claim Blacks are inferior to Whites, except for one thing.

David Duke KNOWS he is a racist and he means to be.

The Smithsonian, as far as it is concerned, is not racist.

What's racist, as far as Smithsonian is concerned, are the arbitrary rules that say, for example, there is a relationship between cause and effect.

It's truly hard to get into a mindset that sees no relationship between cause and effect, let alone enter it and explain it back.

~~~

Now, I'm far from the first to point out that Right and Left speak different languages using the same words.

(This is most often observed by thinkers on the Right. Lefty tend to explain the same phenomenon as Righties being somehow broken. [Nominal Left-wing thinkers who make the former observation are, in my estimation, reluctant-to-admit-it centrists, if not Righties. (As far as the Left cares, they're all Righties.)])

The wrinkle that I think those who've made the observation before me have missed—and maybe someone has caught it—is that Leftists don't compartmentalize the normie and woke meanings of words that have both. They mean them both at the same time always.

@BBC_dip puts it more succinctly:

Newspeak. Taking a word and actually meaning the opposite, while trying to hold onto the old definition.

"Inclusive"

By EXCLUDING.

"Progressive"

by REGRESSING into more and more partisan lines.

(h/t @Twexiteer for spotting it.)

The closest way to explain that to a Rightist thinker is to say that they keep always open the option to use whichever meaning is most advantageous to their situation. But that's just rhetoric for other people.

The greater power of words is in what they mean to ourselves.

In those brief, flashing moments where Leftist ideas make the most sense to me, there’s no having to figure out which meaning makes the idea work. There is no process, no act of molding words to create the necessary justification.

Orwell almost had it with the Party slogans.

The part he couldn't explain, the part that required the entire story to tell, and even then he was hindered, not by words, but a certain relationship to words, was the part where you don’t actually have to say the slogans anymore.

When you find the Leftist headspace, there is no justifying, only justification. This is right. I join a destructive mob in the name of a cause, this is not a riot, this is right. I loot a store that sells things I can’t buy, this is not theft, this is right.

I burn down a house that’s nicer than mine, this is not arson, this is right. I shoot a stranger for wearing a hat I don’t like, this is not murder, this is right.

What is the prescription for this? I don’t know. Maybe it’s simpler than we think. The counterargument to “this is right” is simply “no, that is wrong.”

@Gitabushi: Thoughts: “can’t/don’t compartmentalism” seems to be the cause/source of “can’t/don’t/not allowed to distinguish”

Can’t distinguish if there is no separation

Also a good explanation of why the Right thinks it wins by discovering and pointing out a double standard, and why it fails to make a difference: the Left DGAF and may even feel pleased their moral superiority is acknowledged by seeing the double standard.

Into the extent all this is true and accurate, there are two effective counters: I am convinced by your argument that we should respond with “No, this is bad and wrong, and you are a bad person for thinking it is good.”

The other being what I’ve advocated for a while: consistent, sustained electoral defeat of Democrats.

Because to them, gaining and exercising power is proof of their moral superiority.

@AndToddsaid: I very much agree that it pleases them, tho' I don't think they can rightly "see" the double-standard. Rather, when the Right points out/acknowledges a double-standard, the Left understands that as an admission of weakness and defeat.

It is as Trump says, the only thing they understand is strength. 

I like that he says that. The common misstatement of that notion is that they only thing people understand is violence. That's not true. 

The Left has mistaken it's own violence for strength.

~~~

@Gitabushi: The brilliance of this insight is it helps me understand something I've been missing: Obama being a "black" President.

The Right is fond of pointing out he's only half-black. Or he's half-white.

...or, at least, I am.

But, of course, the Left is never persuaded by it. They usually act like I didn't say it.

Because it doesn't fit into their paradigm, so it's just gibberish to them.

Obama never even *had* the experience of growing up as what US Blacks would consider black.
He grew up without his black father around ever, and grew up in Indonesia. The first time he was probably even treated as a black American was in Hawaii, which is NOT like the Deep South.

They don't care.

They treat Obama as "black" in a way that Ben Carson, who grew up in a ghetto, can never be.

Because Obama represents critical race theory, and Ben Carson, Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain, et al, just demonstrate it *wasn't* racism that held leftist blacks back.

The GOP blacks represent success in "the Way Things Are", and Obama represents success in "the Way Things Aren't," as well as in transforming the US into a place where "the Way Things Aren't" can become the "New Way Things Are".

While exploiting or sidestepping the popular will.