On November 29, 2022, state Rep. Yousef Rabhi, a Democrat from the people’s republic of Ann Arbor, introduced the appropriately named “Joint Resolution Y,” which would amend Michigan’s 1963 Constitution so as to create a state public utility by the “purchase or [aquirement via] eminent domain of all the electric and natural gas generation, distribution, or transmission facilities owned by any investor-owned utility in this state.”
Now what would be the point of the state taking control of Michigan’s electric and gas generation? According to michigannewssource.com,
This power grab to control Michigan’s utilities aligns well with Rabhi’s stated environmental goals. Rabhi’s personal website says he has “introduced transformative policies to tackle climate change and move our state toward a renewable energy future.”
In other words, the whole point of allowing the Michigan state government to take control of the state’s investor-owned power plants would be to provide climate change activists (i.e., radical leftists) with the necessary political power to impose their insane renewable energy policies on the hapless citizenry of Michigan. Why would such policies necessarily be detrimental to ordinary folk? Because they would involve replacing energy production based on fossil fuels with energy production based on wind turbines and solar panels. Now Michigan is not a particularly windy or sunny state. It receives, on U.S. standards, about an average, or slightly less than average, amount of wind. And it is the seventh cloudiest state in the country. Between the middle of November and the middle of January (when average temperatures are in the thirties, twenties, and teens), it remains cloudy eighty to ninety percent of the time. The attempt to “green” Michigan would inevitably lead to much higher energy rates and possible dangerous and life threatening shortages during the freezing cold winter months.
Europe has already gone down the dark path of “green” and “renewable” energy. As a consequence of such short-sighted policies, many nations in Europe may see a rise in winter-related casualties. As Kristin Tate explains:
Slavish commitment to green politics, coupled with foolish idealism, will cost lives this winter. Britain alone suffers more than 28,000 excess winter deaths a year. About 200,000 such deaths occur in all of Europe each year, with mortality increasing by 1.5 percent for every 1-degree Celsius decrease. A bitterly cold winter and a sharp decline of constant heating could potentially trigger a six-figure increase in excess deaths continent-wide. In particular, areas with a high urban population (less able to provide wood as a backup heating source) or especially high dependence on Russian heating oil — such as France, Britain, or Germany — will be at much higher risk.
I would question whether it is in fact a slavish commitment to green politics and foolish idealism that is the cause of these lethal policies. After all, it’s not like this is the first time politicians espousing a left-leaning type of “liberalism” or “progressivism” have adopted policies that lead to bad (not to say potentially lethal) consequences for the middle class and the poor. Indeed, politicians on the left side of the political spectrum often evince a fatal tendency toward political conduct that makes things worse for normal people. And to add insult to injury, they rarely if ever own up to their own catastrophic errors. Indeed, they’ll often double-down on their most disastrous policies, seeking to inflict them on their fellow citizens with an implacable ardor and vindictiveness.
How are we to explain why the Biden administration, in August of 2021, insisted on vaccine mandates for military personnel? After all, by this time, it was well known that Covid was largely harmless to the young and healthy and that for forcing the nation’s military to get the jab had absolutely no upside but plenty of downsides (i.e., in terms of potential vaccine side-effects). When, in January 2022, insurance companies began publishing data of a non-Covid related increase in all cause mortality in the 18-64 age group during 2021, you would think that, our of caution if nothing else, the Biden administration would have rolled back the vaccine mandates. But of course they did no such thing, opting instead to keep them for another year. How can we explain such callousness towards our nation’s soldiers? Why would they insist on injecting the young people in our military with an experimental drug that did provide little if any protection from a disease that primarily threatens the old and and the inform and which potentially has a huge risk profile?
Federal vaccine mandates still remain in force to this day for any healthcare care professionals working at facilities that receive funding from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This has placed even more pressure on a medical system already suffering from critical staffing shortages. But do left-wing advocates of these mandates care about the destruction they have wrought with their obstinate support for vaccines that have proven over time increasingly ineffective and possibly catastrophically unsafe? No, they don’t care a jot. They keep doubling-down on vaccine mandates, and all the evidence in the world about non-efficacy and the deeply suspicious and alarming rise in all-cause mortality won’t shake them from their inflexible resolve to impose their penchant for destruction and harm on the rest of us.
At a certain point, when individuals adhering to progressive ideologies keep making the same catastrophic mistakes over and over again, suspicions have to enter one’s mind that perhaps there is some level of intentionality involved in the sorry business. Sincere people who by accident, as it were, and with the best of intentions, nonetheless engage in some sort of policy or conduct that causes serious harm to others are normally quick to reverse course as soon as they realize the harm they’re causing. But when people persist in their harmful behavior; when they double-down and vindictively attack those who try to stop them: well in that case it’s hard not to believe that the pernicious behavior has at least some measure of intent behind it. At some level or another many people on the left seem wedded to various policies that lead to catastrophic levels of harm. Why is this so, and what can be done about it?
Experimental psychology has discovered that the unconscious mind plays a much greater role in decision making than was previously thought. Human beings are prompted by unconscious urges to behave in a certain manner or favor a specific political program, and their conscious minds are later asked to put a positive spin on these urges, whether they deserve it or not.
Now suppose we apply this psychological insight to the problem of explaining why so many on the left can’t help instinctively supporting destructive public policy prescriptions that, when enacted, cause so much damage to innocent people. What must we conclude? Doesn’t it become painfully obvious that, whatever these people, these so-called “liberals” and “progressives,” believe on a conscious level—whatever flattering stories they tell themselves about the purity and self-disinterestedness of their ideological and moral principles—that it’s all just smoke and mirrors? For what animates these people in reality? What can be evinced from their actual conduct (as opposed to the stream of puerile rationalizations that come pouring out of their pie-holes)? The typical left-wing politician or administrator, if we judged him by his conduct, rather than by his stated (and clearly self-serving) rationalizations, must be regarded, at least in some measure, as a despicable cad—hateful, mean, narrow-minded and stupid beyond all description. What, for example, could have possibly prompted state governors such as Andrew Cuomo of New York, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, and Gretchin Whitmer of Michigan to require nursing homes to admit COVID-19 patients to their vulnerable populations? In the midst of the deadliest pandemic to strike the world in over a century, the efforts of our leading public officials should’ve been to protect the most vulnerable populations. But that is not what these governors did. For reasons inexplicable to normal human beings they took a very different course. Instead of protecting the most vulnerable, they spent most of their energy destroying the economic lives of the young and healthy—that is, of that segment of the population that was largely immune to Covid-19—while doing nothing to help preserve (and at times actually imperiling) the lives of those most at risk. The entire pandemic, from the lockdowns to the vaccine mandates, constitutes an unmitigated public disaster. The nation’s ruling elite, particular in its more progressive manifestations, seemed intent on willfully adopting a destructive path. All their most cherished nostrums for dealing with the pandemic were either ineffectual or made matters worse. Lockdowns, social distancing, cloth masks, vaccines all failed to stop the spread of the virus. But these measures did not fail when it came to spreading economic hardship, humiliating inconvenience, misery, and death.
And so it is with policies related to global warming and the climate change hysteria. The practical effect of these policies (as opposed to the “intended” effect) is to cause harm to ordinary people by driving up energy prices. Isn’t it possible that the practical effect of these measures is what was intended all along? How else can we explain the sheer dogged stubbornness with which leftists persist in their championing of economically catastrophic “environmentl:” policies? It’s not as if they haven’t been warned of the consequences of their “green” agenda. It’s plain as day that if you deprive ordinary people of the ability to heat their homes in the winter, that is likely to lead to catastrophe and death. But the climate activists on the left could care less about such matters. They pursue their insane agendas in the very teeth of the evidence against them. What could possibly be the source of this pathological desire to hurt other people? Why do these leftists seem so determined on imposing their ruinous policies on innocent bystanders? What is it that causes such manifest hatred? These are difficult question to answer, but with a little ingenuity, maybe we can reverse engineer what might be causing this unconscious animus toward the rest of us.
A plausible starting point is the observation that people drawn to left-wing policies often feel alienated from the type of social orders that prevail in the west. The typical leftist feels out of place in modern societies that place so much stress on impulse control and personal responsibility. What is unique to Western Civilization and separates it from most other civilizations is its ability to balance an individualism or freedom for the brilliant few with a tightly-knit communitarianism for the ordinary many. Throughout history, human societies, in order to persist in a world where both nature and other social groups pose an unending threat to basic survival, had to maintain high levels of social cohesion and obedience to group imperatives merely to survive. Under such conditions, it became impossible for any particularly enterprising individual within the group to assert himself by introducing innovations that threatened the customs and laws holding the society together. Anyone who dared to try anything new, even if it ultimately improved both social utility and the chances of long-term group survival, was ruthlessly put down.
As long as every band of primitive hunter and gatherers that infested the prehistory of our ancestors remained locked under this iron thrall of social uniformity, the evolution from tribal bands to complex social orders remained impossible. Most likely as a consequence of the development of more complex and far reaching social hierarchies, which allowed certain privileged individuals the opportunity to introduce innovations, civilizations began to arise. But even here there were limitations on enterprise and development. The hierarchies that emerged in ancient civilizations and even in the medieval period tended to be martial, although religious and plutocratic elements sometimes existed in them as well. These hierarchies glorified military success over commercial innovation, which limited the development of genius in the sciences, in applied technology, and in business. It would not be until the modern era that institutions would develop that would allow for the flowering of genius in the arts, in science, in technology, and in business innovation. Out of these institutions also emerged a legal system that provided extensive protections for the ownership of property and the accumulation of capital. This essentially liberated society's most brilliant innovators to make full use of their genius, while also rewarding society’s most disciplined and conscientious nurturers of wealth and capital. These two developments unleashed a torrent of creativity and innovation that would thoroughly transform the entire world. In the matter of just a few centuries, the material comforts of human life were raised to unheard of heights for hundreds of millions of people around the globe.
But this progress in material wealth and comfort went hand in hand with a stasis in moral progress. What essentially occurred is that capitalism and technology created an entirely new type of world, one which, however, human beings have not as yet evolved to live in. Now some individuals were so constituted that they managed to adapt and thrive in this new social order. Capitalist societies in their earlier, pre-decadent phases tend to create hierarchies that reward those who are especially high in intelligence and conscientiousness. The two best measurable traits for predicting economic success in a tech-based industrial economy are IQ (which strongly correlates to intelligence) and conscientiousness. Individuals who are low in either of these traits will obviously be at a disadvantage in sempiternal struggle for power and status that exists within all human social orders.
When individuals are innately ill-adapted to their environments, they will of course tend to blame the environment, rather than themselves, for this maladaptation. This in turn will predispose them towards just those political ideologies that seek to impose dramatic changes upon the current system. Now because of the sheer complexity of modern socio-economic systems, attempts to make wholesale changes to them are fraught with peril. This is especially true when we consider the emotional wellsprings out of which emerge the policy prescriptions of most (if not all) ideologies of radical change. The overly sentimental and jaundiced mind of the typical leftist is simply not capable of coming up with a political scheme that would allow society to be changed in ways that would be more accommodating to his innate character flaws. So even if such changes were possible (they’re probably not), leftist agitators would be incapable of formulating and implementing them. This is one of the reasons why the policies of the political left so often end up creating more harm than good. Leftists are seeking to achieve something that is likely impossible with policies that are badly formulated.
Although the left rarely acknowledges its own failures, at some level, unconsciously or otherwise, they must experience some awareness of them. When an individual strives ever so hard to refashion society in such a way as to better accord with his own innate predilections but never succeeds, this can only lead to a chronic and insoluble discontent The typical leftist, try as he might, cannot escape the consequences of his own nature. And since most leftists have allowed themselves to become thoroughly secularized, the only solution they will accept is one that is achieved in this world, not in some other. Unable to find a this-wordly solution to their chronic maladaption, over time they becoming increasingly prey to frustration, despair, resentment, and, ultimately, a vengeful nihlism. Unconscious urges to destroy the prevailing social order will begin to percolate within the depths of their troubled souls. Since they cannot fashion society to their liking, they will begin to fall prey to unconscious urges to see it punished and possibly destroyed. Hence the fatal attraction they feel toward any sort of policies that imperil society and cause harm to those who don’t seem to share their discomfort with the way things are.
Assuming the foregoing analysis is correct, what does it mean for western societies going forward? How is our civilization supposed to survive when tens of millions of our fellow citizens feel an unconscious urge to sabotage and/or destroy it? All attempts, of course, to “reason” with these people will prove totally useless. They are too self-unaware to realize the extent to which they are governed by a penchant for inflicting harm on those better disposed than themselves. With human beings, as social psychologist Jonathon Haidt has point out, the intuitions (i.e., the unconscious motivations) come first, and strategic reasoning (the rationalizations) come second. In other words, human emotion and behavior has its primary source in the unconscious mind, while the conscious mind is chiefly concerned with fabricating flattering stories about these unconscious motivations. And so if the individual does experience unconscious urges to cause harm to the society he lives in, he will rationalize these urges as something other than harmful.
Regardless of how all this plays out in the years to come, one thing cannot be denied: a civilization will always have among its ranks various psychological misfits—the chronically discontented who by some fatal instinct for destruction will seek, unconsciously or otherwise, to inflict ruinous change upon their fellow citizens. It would of course be a very good thing to keep such people out of society’s most important institutions. If the West is to survive its current crisis, one absolute essential remedy would be the removal of these implacable troublemakers from the institutions of our civilization. But make no mistake. If somehow this could be achieved, the very next moment these very same canaille of resentiment would be once again up to their old tricks of trying to burrow their way right back into those very same institutions from which they had been so recently expelled. These people can’t help themselves. They have a mandate from the darker parts of their nature—you could almost say, from the devil himself—to destroy the civilization of the West. Those who want to see this civilization preserved so it can be passed onto future generations must either figure out how to stop these leftists from carrying out their wicked schemes. And if they can’t figure out how to do this in a humane manner, they may be faced with the awful dilemma of being forced to resort to less humane methods to preserve the patrimony of their ancestors.
Greg Nyquist is author of The Psychopathology of the Radical Left and The Faux-Rationality of Ayn Rand.