Why I Became So Disillusioned With The Left
The insidious dangers of leftism just aren't as obvious
It would be foolish—utterly buffoonish as my mom would say—not to start this essay with a disclaimer. Here it is: I’m against the (far) right as much as I’m against the (far) left. And I don’t consider myself a rightist.1 Got it? Okay. Cool.
The reason I’m writing to you about how I’ve become particularly disillusioned with the modern American left is due to the following logic: From my perspective, the embarrassing stupidity—and sheer evil—of the far right is as obvious to people as the reason a fish needs water; as clear as the Texas sky on a summer day.
Let’s say you see someone on X posting about how we should deport people who were born in the United States, or trying to frame Hitler as not as bad of a guy as we thought. What a lunatic, you would think. You wouldn’t hesitate to think this because, well, common sense. And you know all about the horrors carried out by other right-wing lunatics, fascist dictators like Tojo, Franco, or Mussolini. For people with an ounce of sense, there is not any moral gray area here. These psychopaths had insane ideologies and committed unforgivable atrocities.
But as far as I can tell, what is not as obvious to people is the evils of leftism gone too far. And that, if you go far left enough, the tyranny looks no different than the kind inflicted by right-wing authoritarians. It’s cruel oppression that stifles human flourishing of all kinds—economic, spiritual, artistic, you name it. It’s disaster, death, and decay. We have no shortage of examples of this throughout history. Yet this is not as self-evident to people. Why?
One reason is that leftists are both very skilled at and fond of leveraging incomprehensible jargon, and fancy humanities and social science degrees. These weapons often afford them a certain level of perceived knowledge. Therefore, it is easier for them to appear to have some wisdom—as opposed to, say, an uneducated MAGA J6er from middle America—even when what they’re saying is just as ridiculous.
Another reason the horrors of leftism aren’t as transparent to people seems to be due to empathy hijacking. Why should you support defunding the police, even if you think it will lead to more dangerous communities? Because you’re heartless if you don’t. Why should you pretend like men and women are not different, even if you think that is like saying the ocean doesn’t have water? Because you’re heartless if you don’t. Why should you support letting people stroll across the southern border, even if you think countries need boundaries? Because you’re heartless if you don’t. This stuff doesn’t make sense, but who wants to be seen as heartless?
Empathy hijacking is also a part of the left’s so-called anti-racism initiatives, popularized by the book How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. But “anti-racism” places the color of someone’s skin atop a pedestal, as if it were a person’s ultimate defining trait. That is, the thing which no one chooses or has control over. Can you think of anything more racist? Yet somehow this is supposed to be the more compassionate perspective on things.
And of course, the left is still drooling over the collectivist ideologies of socialism and communism that promise utopia but lead to anything but, as in China under Mao Zedong, Cambodia under Pol Pots, and the Soviet Union under various tyrants, most (in)famously Lenin and Stalin. Collectivism fails time and time again and leads to unimaginable despair in large part because their principles are contrary to basic human nature, specifically the desire to be creative and exercise individual freedom.
But above all, the biggest problem with many leftists nowadays is that their operating system is textbook bad philosophy. As the physicist David Deutsch explains, bad philosophy is that which actively prevents the growth of knowledge. Whether through censorship or a cancel culture which invokes sufficient fear in people to stop them from criticizing certain ideas, it’s bad philosophy all the way down. You can’t create new knowledge if you’re not allowed to speak new, sometimes controversial ideas in the first place, and you can’t improve existing knowledge if you’re not allowed to criticize it. And yet this is characteristic of many leftists. Especially in academia, of all places.
Many of these strands of leftism—postmodernism, “anti-racism,” and collectivism—run on bad philosophical software, and form this weird sort of woke dogma. At the risk of stating the obvious, the danger of dogmatism is not limited to the left. But they seem to be the worst culprits right now. Every part of me rebels against it and rejects it. Because when dogmatism starts, learning ends, and when learning ends, progress stops, and when progress stops, suffering begins.
I don’t claim any political tribe, side, or ideology. I try to just be an individual who seeks to correct errors and get closer to truth.
"Because when dogmatism starts, learning ends, and when learning ends, progress stops, and when progress stops, suffering begins." : )