The origins of gooneybirdism.

The following is a repost from 12 years ago on the Intergalactic Source of Truth with minor edits, mostly in the formatting department. The question of the lunacy of the modern West has only been imperfectly explained, quite simply because it is such consummate lunacy. Navies exist not to repel invaders but to ferry them to the homeland. Western governments seem to take it that their most sacred duty is to fall at the feet of whatever savage can make it across the national border – wide open – and mouth the phrase "human rights" or "colonial exploitation." What is involved is a lethal cocktail of cowardice, stupidity, and a sickness of the soul seemingly unique in the all the years since mastrodongs roamed the earth.

I don't know what modern psychiatry can add to the 18th-century insights of Johnson set out below on mind fevers. Jonathan Swift in the same era had the measure of disconnected scientists on Laputa who are so lost in thought that they need to be swatted by inflated bladders tied to a stick. Distracted man.

Ours is a sickness that has deep roots in the past. Perhaps what makes the modern version so pathological is the fantastic wealth and comfort afforded by capitalism, vestigial though it might be in its present-day form. Bladders and pitiless crowbars are in short supply these days and who then is surprised to read of homosexual "marriage," "gender fluidity," weaponized equality, strength through diversity, birthright citizenship, quantitative easing, intersectional feminism, identity politics, or open borders?

Surely, humans were more grounded in less opulent times because of the discipline of work and a politics that did not extract vast sums from others or give wings to the fantasies of morons and children.

Here then that old post. Johnson's insights are extraordinary and we should keep them in mind in these strange times:

______________________________________

Liberals, leftists, socialists, National Socialists (leftist, btw), commies, multiculturalists, fanatics, and other idealists (pardon the taxonomical confusion) seem most beset by the pain of dealing with life's intractable realities: cupidity, personal failings, faction, ignorance, ethnic difference, sloth, rejection, disease, uncouth motherplunkers, etc.

Marcus Aurelius said, "[Consider] that men will do the same things nevertheless, even though thou shouldst burst." Meditations, VIII, 4. Aurelius counseled acceptance of the natural order (man's nature).

Idealists cannot. They must either bend reality to conform to their imagination by denial, or conform reality to their imagination by murder and revolution. It is probably this that explains the appalling blindness of the left, their inability to see communism as the abhorrent system that it is. Anyone else who can agree that the "is" of one's own society is deficient has to be noble. Like oneself it happens.

The U.S. is in trouble because we have thrown aside the mechanisms that the Founders devised to deal with man's actual nature. Today, the politicians vie amongst themselves to offer the most attractive dream (sic).

To attack the dream is to attack the dreamer. Hence the disproportional vehemence of the liberals, the "angry left."

Samuel Johnson nailed the psychodynamics of dreamers 246 years ago -- way before anyone had even heard of psychodynamics. He had no illusions about the pathetic search for a perfect government.

Enjoy this vignette from Dr. Johnson's Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia:

CHAPTER XLIV--THE DANGEROUS PREVALENCE OF IMAGINATION.

"Disorders of intellect," answered Imlac, "happen much more often than superficial observers will easily believe. Perhaps if we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state. There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his reason who can regulate his attention wholly by his will, and whose ideas will come and go at his command. No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannise, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability. All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity, but while this power is such as we can control and repress it is not visible to others, nor considered as any deprivation of the mental faculties; it is not pronounced madness but when it becomes ungovernable, and apparently influences speech or action.

"To indulge the power of fiction and send imagination out upon the wing is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent speculation. When we are alone we are not always busy; the labour of excogitation is too violent to last long; the ardour of inquiry will sometimes give way to idleness or satiety. He who has nothing external that can divert him must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is pleased with what he is? He then expatiates in boundless futurity, and culls from all imaginable conditions that which for the present moment he should most desire, amuses his desires with impossible enjoyments, and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion. The mind dances from scene to scene, unites all pleasures in all combinations, and riots in delights which Nature and fortune, with all their bounty, cannot bestow.

"In time >some particular train of ideas fixes the attention; all other intellectual gratifications are rejected; the mind, in weariness or leisure, recurs constantly to the favourite conception, and feasts on the luscious falsehood whenever she is offended with the bitterness of truth. By degrees the reign of fancy is confirmed; she grows first imperious and in time despotic. Then fictions begin to operate as realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind, and life passes in dreams of rapture or of anguish.

"This, sir, is one of the dangers of solitude, which the hermit has confessed not always to promote goodness, and the astronomer's misery has proved to be not always propitious to wisdom."

"I will no more," said the favourite [Pekuah], "imagine myself the Queen of Abyssinia. I have often spent the hours which the Princess [Nekayah] gave to my own disposal in adjusting ceremonies and regulating the Court; I have repressed the pride of the powerful and granted the petitions of the poor; I have built new palaces in more happy situations, planted groves upon the tops of mountains, and have exulted in the beneficence of royalty, till, when the Princess entered, I had almost forgotten to bow down before her."

"And I," said the Princess, "will not allow myself any more to play the shepherdess in my waking dreams. I have often soothed my thoughts with the quiet and innocence of pastoral employments, till I have in my chamber heard the winds whistle and the sheep bleat; sometimes freed the lamb entangled in the thicket, and sometimes with my crook encountered the wolf. I have a dress like that of the village maids, which I put on to help my imagination, and a pipe on which I play softly, and suppose myself followed by my flocks."

"I will confess," said the Prince, "an indulgence of fantastic delight more dangerous than yours. I have frequently endeavoured to imagine the possibility of a perfect government, by which all wrong should be restrained, all vice reformed, and all the subjects preserved in tranquillity and innocence. This thought produced innumerable schemes of reformation, and dictated many useful regulations and salutary effects. This has been the sport and sometimes the labour of my solitude, and I start when I think with how little anguish I once supposed the death of my father and my brothers."

"Such," said Imlac, "are the effects of visionary schemes. When we first form them, we know them to be absurd, but familiarise them by degrees, and in time lose sight of their folly."^[1]

Notes
^[1] "Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia." By Samuel Johnson, 1759 (emphasis added).