Left without Conviction: Psychodynamics of Trump-Triggered Rage Decompensation
By Deborah C. Tyler
Psychological decompensation refers to the loss of mental stability and self-control due to the failure of overtaxed coping mechanisms to handle stress. The term decompensation is typically applied to breakdowns in individuals who are psychologically fragile in the first place. For minds burdened with a fallacious self-image, unrealistic life expectations, or a distorted view of reality, heightened stress overwhelms the already brittle ego defenses, and raw psychic pain and rage flows unrestrained.
The election of President Trump has triggered a rage decompensation across the left wing, causing disgusting, dehumanizing, and violent expression to break out. The categories of left-wing caterwauling are mainly racist, sexist, and eco-psychotic. In that order, there was the aspiring Democratic Party chair who declared that "white people need to shut up." The Midol March on Washington featured a pathetic, wizened Madonna fantasizing about mass murder at the White House while Ashley Judd inflicted a PMS rant from hell. In giving the stage to Donna Hylton, who sodomized her victim with a pipe before helping to murder him, the left proved beyond a doubt they care that "our children are listening" only until the campaign is over. From the eco-nuts assortment came the segregationist with the Marine haircut who demanded that the Trump supporter move to the back of the plane after declaring she had the right to vomit on him.
In the madness of decompensation, the left are repressing freedom of speech and association through censorship and mob violence, "unfriending" actual and virtual relationships, ruining family get-togethers, and generally going nutters against anybody deemed to be one of the new political untouchables.
It has become a cliché to liken liberalism to a mental illness. Here is an explanation: the mental fragility of the left wing, which has allowed this rage decompensation, has to do with the counter-directional psychodynamics of the belief forms of political opinion versus moral conviction.
In 1919, G.K. Chesterton succinctly summarized the current left-wing lurch into lunacy: "In real life, people who are most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all."
The opinion versus conviction dichotomy is the core psychological contradistinction between the American left and right. The fundamental paradigm of the left tends to be humanist and scientific-materialist with a tendency to disavow what is termed "organized" religion. Whether or not there is a belief in God, and regardless of what personal experiences an individual may feel as "spiritual," for the left wing, beliefs are derived from anthropogenic information and knowledge about the phenomenal world. Anthropogenic knowledge cannot provide the underpinnings of an absolute and unchanging moral code, therefore the left wing tends to have no such code to follow.
Anthropogenic knowledge is limited to the realm of the intellect. Intellectual knowledge wavers and rationalizes because it invariably is filtered by the egos of the knowers. Therefore, when intellectual knowledge is applied to the problems of life, it necessarily culminates in ego-driven opinion.
Regardless of their claims of morality and spirituality, in truth, ego-driven opinion is the highest realm of significance in the beliefs of the left wing. The fact that the left is restricted to ego-driven opinion causes the fallacious self-image, unrealistic life expectations, and distorted view of reality that have caused the current rage decompensation.
The worldview of the contemporary American right wing still tends to be based on the tenets of theistic faith, and specifically the Judeo-Christian belief system. That paradigm is one of faith in and personal reliance on God Who has provided revelatory scripture. It is higher than anthropogenic knowledge. It can be informed by human knowledge, but only faith can use God-given, unchanging, universal standards with which to evaluate the phenomenal world. And only such faith can in turn allow the modification of egoism provided by the belief form of absolute spiritual and moral conviction. Such conviction is less prone to wavering and rationalizing. It prevents a grandiose self-image and is less prone to rage decompensation.
Opinions have been likened to the terminus of the gastro-intestinal tract – there is a general complacency toward one's own accompanied by a reluctance to inhale another's. This is because opinions – especially political opinions – are the spear-tipped progeny of assertive egoism designed to do battle with differing opinions. Political opinions are based in an identification with particular economic or social interests in competition with other interests. For that reason, political opinion is invariably mentally structured as us versus them. Furthermore, to resolve the cognitive dissonance and maintain the us-versus-them cohesion, political opinion engenders a sense of intellectual and ethical superiority. Because opinions are protestations of the ego, they fight back when challenged. And because politics are a religion substitute for the left wing, that fight has become vicious.
The victory contained in the word conviction is the conquest of one's own ego when it has discovered truth greater than self. Convictions need no defense and can incorporate any challenger into the transcendent, universal truth that supplies the basis of the convictions.
Opinion and conviction are psychodynamically opposite. Opinion tends to be psychologically destabilizing because it is associated with defensiveness, pride, and assumed superiority, all of which intensify judgment and separativism. Conviction is the inner voice of faith, a profound, self-transcending experience of Truth worthy of dedication and sacrifice. Calling someone opinionated is negative; calling someone a person of conviction is to honor him.
This "cover" of the hymn of the left reveals why leftists cannot form reconciled convictions. Imagine that you disrespect the Bible. You have no example of human perfection to emulate. All of your beliefs are tuition provided by imperfect humans like yourself. Imagine that you disrespect the religion of your own spiritual heritage. No pastor, priest, or rabbi – just Tuesdays with Morgan Freeman, Cheetos, and spiritual tourism. No one can form a lasting conviction while channel-surfing. Imagine that you believe there is nothing worth fighting or dying for – the clearest symptom of living without conviction. Imagine that you believe there's no heaven. Eat, drug, and be merry, because the black void awaits us all. Only sky above and dirt below. Imagine that the answers to the whence and whither of your existence are found only in dumbed down science and suicidal German philosophers.
Imagine that you believe there is no spiritually based moral certainty. It's easy if you try. The commandment against murdering the innocent given by God to Moses has been discarded. Imagine, as in Islam, that there is no sanctified marriage. Without God's law, sex relations are cheap biological functions, and the so-called unwanted, untethered from universal worth, are disposable. Ironically, for left-wingers, that opinion is the farthest from – and most often mistaken for – a conviction.
The best illustration of the difference between left-wing opinion and right-wing conviction is in the different actualization of the belief that "racism is evil." Because that is a political opinion for the left, certain forms of racism are much more evil than others. In fact, anti-white racism does not exist at all, as the last Democrat president just said. A black teenager beating an innocent white person to the brink of death while shouting, "F--- whitey" cannot be racism. But when that belief is based on spiritual conviction, all racism is equally wrong. The decline from conviction to opinion is why race-centered politics has been mainly destructive to black people since the 1960s. So too with feminism.
Without unity in God's love, spiritual and moral conviction becomes impossible. Brotherhood declines, and political identity communities inflict externality in social relations. All rights are alienable because they are granted by man and man's law. Politics replaces religion as the basis of ethics; political correctness becomes the standard of social acceptability. The cacophony of opinion grows. The vanishing of spiritual and moral conviction, and its replacement with the zealotry of political opinion, installs a momentum of competition and strife, which eventually decompensates into widespread rage.
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