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Below are selections from the book
The Liberal Mind: The
Psychological Causes of Political Madness, by Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.,
M.D.
On the Madness of Modern Liberalism:
The egalitarianism and welfarism of modern liberal government are
incompatible with the facts of human nature and the human condition. But the
rise to power of the liberal agenda has resulted from the fact that the people
of western societies have irrationally demanded that governments take care of
them and manage their lives instead of protecting their property rights. This
misconception results in massive violations of those rights while permitting
government officials to act out their own and their constituents’
psychopathology. The liberal agenda gratifies various types of pathological
dependency; augments primitive feelings of envy and inferiority; reinforces
paranoid perceptions of victimization; implements manic delusions of grandeur;
exploits government authority for power, domination and revenge; and satisfies
infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation.
Modern
liberalism rejects, to one degree or another, the competence and sovereignty of
the common man and subordinates him to the will of governments run by liberal
elites. The western world’s twentieth century capitulation to this philosophy is
obvious--and the implications for liberty are ominous. But the history of the
world also documents the heroic struggles of human beings to escape from
tyrannies of all types, whether imposed by the brute force and declared
entitlement of a dictator, or falsely justified by economic, religious or
political sophistries. The science fiction of Marxian economic evolution, the
grandiose fantasy of a New World Order, the utopian dreams of The Great Society,
the myth of the divine emperor, have all had their turns on center stage in
irrational man’s attempts to legitimize government control and deny individual
liberty. The realities of the human condition, especially the inherent
sovereignty of individuals and their inevitable differences in choice and
preference, render all collectivist doctrines absurd. A rational biologist will
not transport a mountain goat to a prairie and declare a match between organism
and environment. A rational social policy theorist will not create an
environment of rules for human action that dismisses individual differences,
ignores the critical roles of free choice, morality and cooperation, and
otherwise distorts and violates the nature of man, and then announce that utopia
has arrived in a workers’ paradise.
Like all other human beings, the
modern liberal reveals his true character, including his madness, in what he
values and devalues, in what he articulates with passion. Of special interest,
however, are the many values about which the modern liberal mind is not
passionate: his agenda does not insist that the individual is the ultimate
economic, social and political unit; it does not idealize individual liberty and
the structure of law and order essential to it; it does not defend the basic
rights of property and contract; it does not aspire to ideals of authentic
autonomy and mutuality; it does not preach an ethic of self-reliance and
self-determination; it does not praise courage, forbearance or resilience; it
does not celebrate the ethics of consent or the blessings of voluntary
cooperation. It does not advocate moral rectitude or understand the critical
role of morality in human relating. The liberal agenda does not comprehend an
identity of competence, appreciate its importance, or analyze the developmental
conditions and social institutions that promote its achievement. The liberal
agenda does not understand or recognize personal sovereignty or impose strict
limits on coercion by the state. It does not celebrate the genuine altruism of
private charity. It does not learn history’s lessons on the evils of
collectivism.
What the liberal mind is passionate about is a world
filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust,
anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation and injustice.
Those who occupy this world are “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,”
“women,” and the “unemployed.” They are poor, weak, sick, wronged, cheated,
oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited and victimized. They bear no
responsibility for their problems. None of their agonies are attributable to
faults or failings of their own: not to poor choices, bad habits, faulty
judgment, wishful thinking, lack of ambition, low frustration tolerance, mental
illness or defects in character. None of the victims’ plight is caused by
failure to plan for the future or learn from experience. Instead, the “root
causes” of all this pain lie in faulty social conditions: poverty, disease, war,
ignorance, unemployment, racial prejudice, ethnic and gender discrimination,
modern technology, capitalism, globalization and imperialism. In the radical
liberal mind, this suffering is inflicted on the innocent by various predators
and persecutors: “Big Business,” “Big Corporations,” “greedy capitalists,” U.S.
Imperialists,” “the oppressors,” “the rich,” “the wealthy,” “the powerful” and
“the selfish.”
The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large
authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to
grave agenda of redistributive caretaking. It is a government everywhere doing
everything for everyone. The liberal motto is “In Government We Trust.” To
rescue the people from their troubled lives, the agenda recommends denial of
personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other-pity, fosters government
dependency, promotes sexual indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial
obligation, justifies theft, ignores rudeness, prescribes complaining and
blaming, denigrates marriage and the family, legalizes all abortion, defies
religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against
the duties of citizenship. Through multiple entitlements to unearned goods,
services and social status, the liberal politician promises to ensure everyone’s
material welfare, provide for everyone’s healthcare, protect everyone’s
self-esteem, correct everyone’s social and political disadvantage, educate every
citizen, and eliminate all class distinctions. With liberal intellectuals
sharing the glory, the liberal politician is the hero in this melodrama. He
takes credit for providing his constituents with whatever they want or need even
though he has not produced by his own effort any of the goods, services or
status transferred to them but has instead taken them from others by force.
Radical liberalism thus assaults the foundations of civilized freedom,
and for that reason it is a genuine evil. Further, given its irrational goals,
coercive methods and historical failures, and given its perverse effects on
human development, there can be no question of the radical agenda's madness.
Only an irrational agenda would advocate a systematic destruction of the
foundations on which ordered liberty depends. Only an irrational man would want
the state to run his life for him rather than create secure conditions in which
he can run his own life. Only an irrational agenda would deliberately undermine
the citizen’s growth to competence by having the state adopt him. Only
irrational thinking would trade individual liberty for government coercion, then
sacrifice the pride of self-reliance for welfare dependency. Only an irrational
man would look at a community of free people cooperating by choice and see a
society of victims exploited by villains.
The liberal agenda urges the
citizen to place his basic trust in government, to see it as the mother of all
providers, and to mistrust those with whom he would have to trade voluntarily in
order to get what he wants. In doing this, the politician seeks to redirect to
government offices the trust which can and should empower the individual to run
his own life through voluntary cooperation with others. Government programs
appeal to the citizen’s passivity by implying that he need not provide for his
own health care, housing or retirement. And he need not cooperate with his
fellows for these purposes either. Instead, he is told, he need only trust the
government to make available to him whatever he needs and to implement that
trust by ceding to its officials the power to tax the people and regulate them
for his benefit. In short, the government invites the citizen to vote for the
candidate who promises what a parent gives a child. It invites him to assume the
dependent role of the child, to surrender his personal sovereignty to the state,
to ignore his existential obligation to take full responsibility for his
material and social welfare, and to empower government officials as his
guardians.
His neurosis is evident in his ideals and fantasies; in his
self-righteousness, arrogance and grandiosity; in his self-pity; in his demands
for indulgence and exemption from accountability; in his claims to entitlements;
in what he gives and withholds; and in his protests that nothing done
voluntarily is enough to satisfy him. Most notably, the radical liberal’s
neurosis is evident in his extravagant political demands, in his furious
protests against economic freedom, in his arrogant contempt for morality, in his
angry defiance of civility, in his bitter attacks on freedom of association, in
his aggressive assault on individual liberty. And in the final analysis, the
irrationality of the radical liberal is most apparent in his ruthless use of
force to control the lives of others.
In a competent society the
principles of ordered liberty guide the citizen throughout the life cycle. They
inform him and his children and the community of the rules by which human beings
make good lives for themselves. Because the rights, laws and duties of the
competent society are all of a piece and reflect the bipolar nature of man, the
entire ensemble of individual citizen, family, community, society and
institutions forms a coherent whole in support of life, liberty, social
cooperation and the pursuit of happiness. Under the rules that govern ordered
liberty, the human organism and its physical and social environment are in
harmony to the maximum extent possible given the turbulent nature of man.
By contrast, a society organized under radical liberalism comes into
immediate conflict with the bipolar nature of man and with the rights, laws and
duties needed for human beings to live in peace and freedom. Rather than
coordinating the life of the individual citizen with the institutions of his
society, radical liberalism sets individuals and institutions into perpetual
conflict with each other through its rhetoric of class warfare and
victimization, its violations of personal freedom through confiscatory taxation
and invasive regulation, its attacks on family integrity, and the endless
bungling of government bureaucracy.
With an incomparable record of
flawed analysis, faulty solutions and destructive consequences, liberal
government grandly proclaims itself indispensable and presumes to regulate and
administer our lives from the business office to the bedroom. The inherent
potential for madness in all human beings--our tendencies toward grandiosity,
overestimation and extravagance; our impaired judgment, distortions of fact,
misunderstanding of cause and effect and resistance to learning from experience;
our lack of perspective and obsession with irrelevant details; our foolish
goals, paranoid fears and irrational counter-aggression; our power-grabbing and
criminality--all are writ large in the madness of liberal government. Its
policies and operations are a study in the psychopathology and sociopathology of
human nature.
On the Ideals and Dangers of
Liberalism:
It has corrupted the moral and ethical basis for civilized living. It has
polarized the population into warring classes with false claims of victimization
and villainy and contrived needs for political rescue. With enormous growth
beyond the definition of government and its functions set forth in the U.S.
Constitution, modern American liberalism has created the idealized parental and
administrative state and endowed it with vast managerial, caretaking and
regulatory powers. History records the inevitable result of such expansions of
government power: individual liberty and the peaceful coordination of human
action are severely compromised or lost altogether.
The liberal agenda
is the liberal neurosis made manifest. It is not a rational program for the
organization of human action. It is instead an irrational conglomeration of
neurotic defenses which the modern liberal uses for his mental and emotional
equilibrium. By attacking the sovereignty of the individual and the
institutions essential to ordered liberty, the agenda attacks the very
foundations of a free society. In fact, modern liberalism does not seek
authentic freedom, despite its historical association with that ideal, nor does
it foster the individual’s growth to competence. It does not promote the
virtues of individual liberty: not self-reliance, responsibility, dependability
or accountability; not cooperation by consent or initiative or industry; not
high moral standards or caring or altruism. It does not seek a society of
sovereign citizens, but fosters instead a society of allegedly victimized
dependents under the custodial care of the state. In keeping with its origins
in early childhood, the liberal agenda endorses self-indulgence through
short-term hedonism and primitive impulse gratification. In keeping with its
ethic of injustice collecting, the agenda seeks ever increasing government
regulation to defeat alleged villains, and ever increasing levels of unearned
compensation, reparation and restitution to compensate alleged victims. In
keeping with its secular tradition, modern liberalism attacks the legitimacy of
formal religion, dismisses its historical importance and denies its critical
role in maintaining the nation’s moral integrity.
