I found myself asking this familiar question once again this week, as I surveyed the carnage taking place on university campuses across America.
Now, when I say “retard,” I don’t just mean “stupid” or “poorly organised” or “inept.” Of course these people are stupid, poorly organised and inept, however much money and training George Soros has thrown at them. (If The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal are correct, that’s a lot of money and training.)
You don’t need to study these people for long to see this—whether they’re issuing absurd demands about being provided with Plan B pills, dental dams and HIV medication, or attempting, farcically, to break out of a police cordon wielding shields made from old bins and wearing paintball masks.
Yes, the Gaza encampments are definitely more than a few sandwiches short of a picnic.
But I mean something deeper. I’m talking about the type of people who are leftists. I’m talking about biology.
I realise I’m on dangerous ground here. The last time I gave strong voice to my opinions on this subject, in a podcast appearance in 2021, the doleful agents of left-liberal orthodoxy swung into action, as they do, to put me back in my place.
How can you say those things? Do you know who else said those things?
I think you can guess who they were referring to. He had a little moustache that went out of fashion in the 1940s and has never come back in again since.
Even so, I’ll say what I said then. Look at the mugshots of the arrestees from the Columbia and New York Gaza protests. What do you see? Be honest.
These people are ugly, ill-formed. They send the lizard brain haywire—the parts of your brain that are so old, that have persisted so long, because the notifications they send pinging to your conscious mind prevented our ancestors from, literally, going extinct.
These people are not just ugly. They’re bad too.
These people have the faces and the bodies they deserve. They are literal physical manifestations of the ugliness of leftist ideas.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to tell you that ugly people are bad. Roald Dahl nailed it in The Twits. People who are not conventionally attractive—people who are overweight or have buck-teeth or a big wonky nose and jug ears, or all of these things—can still be beautiful if they are good. The goodness shines out of them.
These people are different. These people are physical avatars of chaos, and their physical form is not incidental to that fact. And you know it.
Listen to your lizard brain.
In the 1930s, in the aftermath of Spain’s bloody Civil War, a Spanish psychiatrist listened to his. He wanted to understand whether there was a particular type of person who became a radical leftist of the kind that would—oh, I don’t know—dig up and publicly defile the bodies of monks and nuns when they weren’t bayoneting and bludgeoning all the living ones they could find.
Dr Antonio Vallejo Nagera classified a third of the English members of the International Brigade he examined as “mental retards.” Another third were categorised as suffering degenerative mental illnesses that were making them schizophrenic, paranoid or psychopathic. Many of these people were “social imbeciles,” he deduced, which made them prey to Marxist ideology.
“Once more we see confirmed that social resentment, frustrated aspirations and envy are the sources of Marxism,” Nagera wrote.
“The persistence of the ideological attitude of the English Marxists is the result of their closed minds and lack of culture.”
Like James Lindsay, you might feel squeamish when a certain period of Spain’s recent history is mentioned, despite its obvious importance for understanding the depth of the evil we face today and the terrible price of failure if we don’t defeat it. Thankfully, there are plenty of other very clever, very perceptive people who looked at leftists and saw the same things as Dr Nagera did.
The great Oswald Spengler, for example, described, in The Hour of Decision, how the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was not some great victory of the working classes, but of “the work-shy rabble of the cities which is ready at any time to plunder and murder”—of the lowliest, worst, most resentful people in Russian society. Legendary White Russian general Pyotr Wrangel tells us, in his memoir Always with Honor, that one of the first things the Bolsheviks made sure to do when they entered a town or city was to empty the jails, because within their cells lay the Bolsheviks’ true demographic: the criminals and the insane. These people didn’t need to be told to rob and murder. They didn’t even need to be told who to rob and murder. They would just do it, and be thankful and loyal to anybody who gave them the opportunity.
One of the most telling recent analyses of the individual psychology of leftism, and therefore its biological underpinnings, was by Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a the Unabomber. He devoted a long section of his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, to discussing the deep-set neuroses of left-liberals, especially their feelings of inferiority.
Kaczynski’s close examination of these neuroses provides insights of stunning clarity and importance with regard to the shape of modern leftism and its dangers as a movement.
Like this, for example:
“Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help.”
You don’t have to endorse Ted’s own politics or approve of his actions to see that he was right about leftists. Every word rings true. And the last thing you could accuse Theodore Kaczynski of being was right wing, either.
Oh—and while you’re at it, read Nietzsche too. He had plenty to say about the roots of leftism in biology.
The funny thing about this talk of the biology of leftism, and the howls of outrage it elicits from the usual suspects, is that the discipline of psychology has established, beyond any reasonable doubt, 1) that psychological traits are inherited and 2) that political orientation is determined, to a large extent, by those inherited traits. We’re talking about Science (TM) here—and we should all Trust the Science, right?
Personality psychology is the field where Jordan B. Peterson established himself, and his latest work focuses on understanding radical leftism within the framework of the so-called “Big Five” personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism).
But it’s not just leftism that’s under study, of course. Right-wing political orientations are receiving just as much attention. As you’d expect, left-wing academics are busy at work doing their best to pathologise basic human attitudes as being “right-wing” and therefore “dangerous.”
This has been happening quite subtly for some time, in a wide variety of fields. You see it, for example, in studies that claim testosterone is an “anti-social” hormone because men who have higher levels of testosterone demonstrate greater comfort with inequality, competition and individual achievement. Never mind that every single society ever has been unequal and, to some extent, prized competition and the deeds of great individuals—testosterone is anti-social.
I saw an egregious instance of this a couple of days ago. “Right-wing authoritarianism appears to have a genetic foundation,” ran the headline on PsyPost. A new study in the Journal of Personality claims that individual views on “hierarchy and social dominance” have a distinct genetic basis. So far, so good. I can agree with that. It’s probably true.
But look at how “right-wing authoritarianism” is defined by the researchers.
“Right-wing authoritarianism is characterized by three broad attitudes: submission to authorities perceived as established and legitimate, aggression toward individuals or groups that are seen as deviant or dissenting from perceived societal norms, and adherence to conventional norms and values of the society”
That’s basically every normal person ever, every hitherto existing society, including our own, until about five minutes ago. The vast majority of history is right wing and authoritarian.
On second thoughts, maybe this isn’t the own the presumably liberal authors of the study want it to be.
Think again. What they’re implying serves the purposes of leftist social engineering perfectly. Remember what Marx said: “The weight of dead tradition weighs on the minds of the living like a nightmare.” The job of communists is to end that nightmare, once and for all.
This study, like many others, is barely more than science running cover for the fever-dreams of Marxists, who look forward to a Day Zero when the entire burden of history—all the past attitudes, all the social institutions, customs and beliefs—is just thrown off, and man can finally stand up straight and walk tall, right into the sunny uplands of a communist future.
Except it doesn’t work out that way. Just ask the Cambodians.
I can understand why linking political orientation to biology might be unsettling. It suggests, quite clearly, that fundamental political problems have no solution, because biology has no solution. You can’t argue with biology, you can’t write a stump speech to alter a person’s genes. Biology can’t be changed. Biology is intractable. Intractable, that is, within the pleasant, neatly delineated confines of the liberal system.
But we’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy—are we?
