Imagine you are flying on a 707 passenger airplane and, looking out the window, you notice that the jet engines on the right side of the plane don’t seem to be working. You are so shocked at this discovery that you don’t trust the testimony of your own senses. You ask some of your fellow passengers: “Hey, am I imagining this, but are those engines on the right side of the plane not running?”
“What are you talking about?” answer your fellow passengers. “Of course they’re running. Why would they be shut off?”
Yet, oddly, no one bothers to look out the window to see what you are talking about. The people around you simply take it for granted that what you’re claiming cannot be true. You decide to take up the matter with the flight crew. They greet your concerns with undisguised hostility and contempt. “Go back to your seat,” they tell you. “Whether the engines are working or not is none of your business.”
“I just want to know whether they’re running,” you tell them defensively. “Because they don’t look like they’re on.”
“Well of course they’re not on!” admits the co-pilot, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“But isn’t that dangerous?” you ask.
They roll their eyes and shake their heads. You overhear the co-pilot whisper into the ear of one of the stewardesses, “Conspiracy theorist.” Other terms are tossed around: “Bigot.” “Racist.” “Science denier.”
You return to your seat. You’re accosted by a very distinguished appearing man — a tall fellow dressed in a suit and tie and looking very professorial. He is, however, quite disturbed by something. His face is torn by anguish. Beads of sweat are pouring down his forehead. He addresses you in a conspiratorial whisper.
“The word is you’ve raised the problem with those engines on the right side of the plane with the flight crew,” he observes.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve done,” you reply in a normal tone.
“Not so loud!” he hisses at you. “Trust me. You don’t want to draw attention to yourself.”
“Why ever not?”
“Because you will find that there are powerful forces on this plane arrayed against you. “
“Really?”
“Yes. I’m taking a great risk just talking to you.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
He gestures frantically at the inert engines that can be glimpsed out the window. “What they’ve done by turning those things off...” He morosely shakes his head. “It’s incredibly dangerous. We could flip on our side at any time and plummet straight into the ground. I’m an aeronautical engineer. By turning those engines off they’re putting all our lives at risk.”
“By turning them off? What are you talking about?” you demand to know. “Have you reason to believe that they have turned the engines off on purpose? Why would they do that?”
“They have their reasons,” the man somberly intones.
You feel a surge of panic grip your breast. “If that’s so, you need to talk some sense into them. If you’re the expert and you know that what they’re doing is dangerous, don’t you have an obligation to make a stink about it?”
He grimaces sheepishly. “Oh no, I can’t do that. I’d be ruined.”
“What are you talking about? Ruined by whom? What does that even mean?”
“I could be cancelled,” he tried to explain.
“Cancelled? Why is that such a big deal? If the plane crashes, you’ll be dead!”
He merely shrugs. “That wouldn’t be as bad as being cancelled. If I got cancelled I would not only lose my job, I might not be able to find any other source of employment. Look man, I have a wife and kids and a dog who all depend on me. I have a lot to lose here. But you — you’re obviously not married and I doubt you have any kids, let alone pets. You’re in a much better position than me to take those bastards on.”
“Take who on? Who are you referring to?”
“The flight crew of course. And the rest of the dweebs who have pressured them to turn off those engines.”
He gazes at you with such desperate, pleading eyes that you begin to wonder if he doesn’t have a screw loose. You decide once more to take the matter up with the flight crew. You’re beginning to feel seriously alarmed and are not inclined to put up with any more nonsense.
“Hey you guys!” you address the flight crew, who all turn and look at you with stern, disapproving looks. “I’ve just talked to this guy who says he’s an aeronautical engineer and he says having those engines off on the right side of the plane is a rather risky thing to do.”
They all trade exasperated glances with one another.
“Yeah, we know all about that guy,” one of the co-pilots tells you. “He’s a conspiracy theorist who consorts with people who are alt-right adjacent.”
“Oh no, he’s much worse than that,” puts in the morbidly obese flight attendant. “He’s an insurrectionist and men’s rights activist.”
They all make faces of disgust upon hearing this.
“I’m not sure I understand,” you protest. “What does his personal beliefs have to do with whether those engines should be running or not? I would think that having them turned off would be dangerous — would it not? Isn’t that just common sense?”
“Oh, ‘common sense’! Isn’t that a dog whistle term?” questions the fat flight attendant.
“Oh yes,” they all agree. “That is the doggiest of dog whistle terms!”
The co-pilot looks at you sternly, with a hard glint of censure in his eyes. “Maybe there’s something you need to get straight,” he tells you, his voice throbbing with indignation and reproach. “You’ve got to understand that this belief or expectation you seem to have that both engines should be running — that’s just your white privilege.”
“Excuse me?” You are completely befuddled. “What on earth are you talking about?”
The obese flight attendant suddenly loses it. “You need to pull your head out of your ass!” she scolds you at the top of her voice. “There are people whom you and your kind have been oppressing for centuries who have never enjoyed the opportunity of flying in a plane with two engines running at the same time. And here you are, all high and mighty, complaining that some of the engines have been turned off, as if you have a God-given right to have all engines running whenever your highness deigns to take a flight. Well I got some sobering news for you. The days of your white privilege when you can fly anywhere you like with all engines running are thankfully over. Now if you have any sense you’ll return to your seat and not raise a fuss with the other passengers. We’ll have our eyes on you and if you try to speak out, we’ll have your pathetic white ass so quickly removed from this plane you won’t know what hit you.”
You can hardly believe that this woman should speak to you with such hostility and contempt. You're absolutely livid. Aren’t your demands eminently reasonable? Aren’t you concerned, not just with your own safety, but for the safety and well-being of all the passengers on the plane? Then why are you being told that your desire to have all the engines running can be so casually tossed aside as mere “white privilege’? You have never before been confronted with so glaring a non sequitur. How can it be “white privilege” to wish that all the engines were on? It’s not a matter of race—it’s a matter of life and death. If the plane crashes, the obese flight attendant will die with everyone else. Do these people care whether they survive? Is this really about white privilege, or is it about something else? If so, then what? Why are these people so intent on the destruction of themselves and a plane full of strangers? “I don’t know what’s wrong with you people,” you rail at them. “Don’t you understand that you’re putting us all at risk by having those engines turned off?”
They burst into derisive laughter. “Conspiracy theorist!” “Science denier!” “Insurrectionist!” “Racist!” they shout at you with an almost demonic mockery.
You return to your seat incensed and anxious. You feel like you have fallen into the clutches of crazy people intent on universal destruction. You try to warn the other passengers, but everyone shuns you like a leper. You slink into your seat, feeling that the end is near. The plane hits a batch of turbulence and begins to sway perilously to one side. You brace yourself for the inevitable and wonder why so many of your fellow passengers are willing to go to their deaths without putting up a fight.
Now this improbable little tale contains within it an allegorical representation of a potential truth. Living among us are people who, for reasons that remain inscrutable to good sense, are actively at work sabotaging our society. Take for example the Black Lives Matter riots that took place in 2020. These “protests'' caused an estimated $2 billion in property damage, led to more than thirty deaths, and inflicted injuries on 700 police officers. The response to all this mayhem and destruction by the progressive left has been near complete apathy. In blue cities, it's routine to dismiss hoodlums arrested for offenses related to looting and rioting. Typical in this respect is New York, which has only convicted 19 of the 118 individuals arrested for looting. Most of these convictions were for lesser crimes requiring no jail time.
I’ve heard from several sources that many self-identified “liberals” don't have a problem with BLM looting and rioting — that their attitude is that “we” deserve it for having treated blacks so badly down through the centuries. One wonders how these so-called “liberals” would react if Jews suddenly started rioting, looting, and vandalizing. After all, Jews haven’t been treated all that well either in the last few thousand years. Yet regardless of how this racial or ethic group has fared through history, it’s difficult to understand how rioting and looting can possibly improve their situation going forward. It’s also hard to believe that these pro-BLM “progressives” are incapable of understanding this. Because many of them are obviously smart people, demonstrating a fair amount of competence in their personal lives and in the workplace. Why then the inability to appreciate that rioting and looting does not in fact make things better for blacks in the inner city — that, on the contrary, it’s probably making things much worse. American cities witnessed a 33 percent increase in homicides in 2020. How many of these homicides involved blacks and other “marginalized” peoples? Despite all the virtuous noise made on behalf of the phrase “black lives matter,” does anyone on the left really care about actual black lives (other than the handful who die at the hands of white cops)? The alarming rise in urban homicides suggests otherwise—a rise, moreover, that coincided with the BLM calls for “defunding” the police.
It’s not simply on the issue of race that progressives zealously endorse counterproductive policies. Take the federal debt for instance. The United States government owes more than 28 trillion in accumulated debt (and rising). How has the Biden administration responded to the weight of these massive liabilities? By proposing a budget with a $1.8 trillion deficit! How have progressives reacted to this clear threat to the solvency of the federal government? By either indifference or savage criticism of those concerned about the debt. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spared no words in describing her contempt for what she described as “GOP deficit-hawking.” "We need massive investment in our country or it will fall apart. This is not a joke," she pontificated. But a $28 trillion debt is no joke either. At what point would Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and others of her ilk begin to worry about government insolvency? I’ll venture to guess they’ll never worry about it. This in itself is rather puzzling and demands an explanation. What is behind the left’s apathy to national insolvency? How much of it is due to economic illiteracy and sheer ignorance, and how much of it is due to lack of concern with long-term consequences? And if these people don’t care about the long-term consequences of the policies they support, what does that say about their inner motivations? At what point does recklessness and irresponsibility become so blatant that it can no longer be explained on the basis of mere ignorance and unbridled conceit?
Consider as another example of societal sabotage the lockdowns and shelter-in-place restrictions inflicted on the American public as a response to the Covid-19 menace. The mainstream view is that the lockdowns were necessary to save lives—that in the absence of such measures, millions could have died. The problem with this view is that it’s probably not true. A case could be made that the lockdowns did little to prevent the virus from spreading. A study conducted under the auspices of the Rand Corporation and the University of Southern California
“failed to find that countries or U.S. states that implemented [shelter in place] policies earlier, and in which [shelter-in-place] policies had longer to operate, had lower excess deaths than countries/U.S. states that were slower to implement [shelter in place] policies. [The study] also failed to observe differences in excess death trends before and after the implementation of [shelter in place] policies based on pre-[shelter in place] COVID-19 death rates.
Lockdowns have created serious problems in supply chains that have dire effects on the most vulnerable populations worldwide. According to the American Institute of Economic Research:
For those who care about lives outside of America, UNICEF has estimated that worldwide, 6,000 children are likely to die daily because lockdowns in various parts of the world are causing disruptions in the supply chain and humanitarian services; the number of people suffering acute hunger will probably double to 250 million, for the same reasons.
Already, 10,000 additional children die of malnutrition a month because of lockdowns; 550,000 more per month are suffering from wasting, which is malnutrition so severe it causes significant, lifelong health problems. Malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV are on the rise again, especially in developing countries because of lockdowns; those illnesses cause millions of deaths per year, so their resurgence should concern the liberals who claim to care about human life.
It could be argued, of course, that in the early stages of the pandemic, since the long term effects of lockdowns were unknown, it’s unfair to criticize those who supported them. In the early going, they could not possibly have known better. But even if we cut some slack to those who favored strict lockdowns in the initial weeks of the pandemic, support for such draconian measures should have waned when, in the ensuing weeks, it became clear that the virus had little effect on healthy people and that our efforts to stop the spread of the virus should have been focused on those who were most vulnerable to the contagion, not on the young and the healthy. That is not, of course, what happened in areas of the country governed by “progressives.” Generally speaking, the bluer the state, the more severe the lockdowns. As columnist J.T. Young has pointed out: “Of the top 20 states (and the District of Columbia) with the highest COVID-19 restrictions, all 20 are blue states.” The excessive nature of these restrictions have real world consequences. One such consequence is unemployment. Because the lockdowns caused the permanent shutdown of quite a few small businesses, this led in turn to an increase in joblessness. Just consider how the unemployment statistics shake out between red and blue states. Generally speaking, unemployment is higher in blue states. Again to quote columnist J.T. Young: “There are just six states with unemployment at 8 percent or higher, all are blue…. Of the top 10 states with the lowest unemployment, eight are red. Of the top 20, 16 are red.”
Why do states run by “liberals'' and “progressives” favor more restrictive lockdowns than states run by “conservatives”? It’s not as if the severity of the lockdowns improved mortality statistics. They just led to greater unemployment and triggered what is now being called a mass exodus from blue to red states. A report from North American Moving Services found that residents of New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey and Maryland (all blue states) were fleeing to Arizona, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Idaho (mostly red states). It will take some time to tabulate the extent of these migrations and to understand exactly why they occurred. But if nothing else these mass exoduses strongly suggest that people feel threatened by governance from the left. This itself raises questions. Would large numbers of people go to the immense trouble of moving from blue to red states over trivial matters like a few extra dollars in taxes or a spare regulation or two? This exodus is likely caused by dangerous excesses in progressive governance (such as defunding the police, failure to hold BLM and Antifa responsible for looting and rioting, and tyrannical lockdowns). If you were a passenger on a plane and the flight crew kept turning off the jet engines on the right side of the plane, wouldn’t you want to leave the aircraft as quickly as possible? Of course you would. As soon as the plane landed, you’d get off the damn thing, never to return. That is essentially what is happening in blue states. People, noticing that the extent to which progressive rule is sabotaging the security and economy of the state, are doing everything in their power to move someplace else.
The larger issue is whether this tendency toward societal sabotage on the part of progressives is intentional—in short, whether they’re doing this on purpose—or is it merely the consequence of ignorance and/or hubris? Obviously the motivations behind any political behavior or ideological allegiance are extremely complicated. There may exist many different motives, some of which could be working at cross purposes. All I wish to suggest is the mere possibility that one of the motives behind progressivism (and leftism in general) could be something akin to a death wish. Or perhaps it’s would be more accurate to describe it as a diabolical desire to engage in both suicide and large scale murder. Progressive policies, to the extent that they harm society, don’t necessarily inflict harm only on those who support and/or implement them. No, they harm society as a whole. If it's true that at least some progressives may be motivated by a death wish, this motivational complex encompasses much of society as well. These progressives don’t just want to kill themselves, they want to take as many people with them as possible.
In exploring the possibility that there could exist strains of progressivism that might be animated to at least some degree by a death wish, it must be acknowledged that this is hardly an original thesis. In 1964, James Burnham published The Suicide of the West. In this work Burnham suggested that liberalism (which in this context is largely equivalent to “progressivism”) is the ideology of Western suicide. In advancing this conjecture, Burnham did not mean to suggest that liberals (or progressives) were attempting to kill themselves. On the contrary, Burnham saw progressive liberalism as a rationalization of a decline in civilization that liberals were helpless to prevent. Instead of facing up to their shameful impotence, liberals used their ideology to convince themselves that the decline of the West was a good thing—that it was moral and proper and should therefore be celebrated as “progress.”
Malcolm Muggeridge, in a speech entitled “The Great Liberal Death Wish,” became the first social commentator, as far as I can determine, to suggest that liberals (or progressives) were in fact engaged in the unedifying task of doing away with themselves and the society that nurtured their delusions. Reading through Muggeridge’s speech, however, makes it clear that his supposition of a “liberal death wish” is more a rhetorical device than an empirical observation. Muggeridge merely observes how the general tendency of progressive liberalism is toward what he calls a “suicidal situation.” “The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the opposite,” he suggests. But note that he doesn’t actually claim that the motivation behind all of this is a death wish. On the contrary, the liberal is intent on his own happiness and self-indulgence which, paradoxically, leads to societal dissolution and death.
The conjecture that progressive liberalism is actually motivated by a death wish in the sense that this is what the liberal (or progressive) consciously has in mind by his various political agitations is, of course, grossly implausible—which is perhaps why no sensible critic of progressivism has ever advanced such a thesis. The suicide hypothesis, if it is to retain even a minimal degree of plausibility, must be framed along the following lines. It must be regarded as primarily an unconscious phenomenon—a product of incognizant motivations or instincts propelling the hapless individual toward self-slaughter and societal destruction. In recent decades experimental psychology has discovered that the unconscious mind plays a much larger role in human conduct than was heretofore imagined, even by Freud. This includes making decisions and reacting to external stimuli. The question then arises: if an individual, without consciously realizing or intending it, engages in self-destructive conduct, could we reasonably assume that he is acting on the basis of unconscious motivations? In other words, is this self-destructive behavior a consequence of unrecognized impulses of a suicidal complexion? Or is it little more than an unhappy mixture of chance concurrences, with no rhyme or reason to it whatsoever—just a sort of random thrashing about, with no particular end or object?
Of course, as I have already noted, if progressivism is a suicide cult, it does not seek just the suicide of the invidiual, but wishes many other individuals, and perhaps society as a whole, to perish as well. The analogy that comes to mind as an illustration of this phenomenon is EgyptAir Flight 990, where one of the pilots, Captain Gamil el Batouty, intentionally flew the plane into the Atlantic ocean, killing not only himself, but everyone on board. To the extent that the typical progressive is subject to unconscious suicidal impulses, he is behaving in much the same manner as Captain Gamil el Batouty; which is to say, he’s not merely trying to kill himself, but he’s attempting to slaughter the rest of us along with him. But perhaps the analogy to EgyptAir Flight 990 is not quite exact. If the plane is a metaphor for society, it would be a gross exaggeration to suggest that progressives are trying to destroy our society by crashing it into the ocean. No, their behavior is far more subtle and diabolical than that. Rather than engage in a blatant act of self-destruction, the progressive merely plays around the edges of suicide. He engages in sabotage, gross negligence, and a sort of aggressive carelessness. And let’s face it: if the typical progressive were in fact prey to suicidal impulses, he would likely be ashamed of such inclinations and would be eager to repress and conceal them. So instead of leading to direct suicidal behavior, these impulses manifest themselves in far more subtle, one might even say sneaky, manifestations. Instead of flying the plane into the ocean, progressives merely support measures that, in less transparent ways, could lead to the same outcome. Hence the little story that opens this essay about the airline passenger noticing that the right jet engines on the plane had been shut off. That seems a more apt analogy of what society is facing at the hands of progressive governance. These left-wing elites and activists are not seeking to destroy society—they’re simply engaged in its ruthless sabotage, which they justify under the cover of other goals, often laudatory in intention (if not in result), such as fighting “racism” or “climate change.”
If progressivism is in fact, at least in some respects, a suicide cult, what would this mean in terms of practical ramifications? If we have people among us who suffer from a fatal inclination to agitate on behalf of the destruction of our civilization, what are we supposed to do about it? When faced with the threat of the so-called “woke” left, there exist two common responses. The first is to assume that the whole movement has arisen largely because radicals have taken over the nations’ education system and have propagandized the nation’s youth into the miasma of woke ideology. While this radicalization of public schools and universities is obviously a factor in the woke equation, it is not likely the only, or even the primary determinant of the cultural and social dominance of the “woke” left that we find in so many of our nation’s institutions. Almost everyone in our country has attended grade school, and over a third have college degrees. Yet only five to eight percent of the nation identifies as “progressive” (let alone “woke”). How come so many people passing through these radical leftist seminaries (i.e., the U.S. education system) remain largely untouched by the woke contagion? If some people become “woke” after attending college and others don’t, how do we account for this? Doesn’t thus suggest that there must exist other factors at play? If so, what could these possibly be?
The second common response to the rise of “wokeness” is to belittle it as a passing fad which over time will wear itself out through its own intrinsic incompetence and tendency toward self-destruction. “None of that woke stuff works,” it is argued, as if the primary motive of “progressive” and other hard and far left agitation is precisely to find solutions that “work.” But what if they’re not actually trying to solve problems? What if deep down they want to make things worse? What if all the talk about social justice and equity and “anti-racism” is just so much fustian noise—sound and fury signifying nothing? What if at the very core of their motivational centers, buried deep under layers of repression and rationalization, these progressives are seeking something very different—something sinister and appalling?
Jonathan Haidt, in his bookThe Righteous Mind, demonstrated (via sophisticated psychological experiments) that when it comes to morality, the intuitions come first, and afterwards reasons are sought to rationalize these intuitions. Morality therefore is not the product of conscious deliberate reasoning, but arises from deeper currents in the psyche that find an outlet in the individual's emotional judgments. What if something similar occurs when it comes to political agitation and conduct? What if the behavior comes first, and then reasons are provided afterward, ad hoc as it were, to provide a veneer of rationality, or at least “moral” justification, for what initially was never rational or moral in the first place? Under such a scenario, the individual’s behavior would be a far stronger indicator of what he was aiming at than whatever moralistic or “rational” verbiage came streaming out of his demented piehole. And if a person’s behavior is the best indicator of their real motives, if a man’s conduct betrays the deepest aspirations of his soul (assuming he even has one), what are we to conclude about the individual who strives to sabotage the very social order which nurtures and sustains him? If the flight crew feels impelled to act in ways that puts the plane at greater risk of a crash, what does that say about their deepest motives? If the individual suffers from a persistent instinct toward ruination, isn’t that because there’s something at the core of his being that seeks destruction for himself and others?
We could state this even stronger by putting it in the following terms. Progressivism, as it becomes increasingly “woke,” begins to merge into the radical left. As we move closer to the ideological extreme, the will to destruction and societal suicide becomes harder to ignore. Consider the history of radical left movements over the last two centuries? When they have gained enough power to implement their visions for a “better” world on a grand social scale, what has been the result? The French Revolution brought us the September Massacres and the Terror. The Soviet Union brought us the Ukrainian famine, Stalin’s purges, and the Gulag. Mao’s China bought us the Cultural Revolution and tens of millions of deaths through starvation and tyranny. Pol Pot brought us the Cambodian killing fields. Communism killed upwards of 100 million people in the Twentieth Century. If there is one thing we have learned from this horrible experience in left-wing utopianism is that socialism (that is, real socialism—i.e., the means of production owned by the state) is not compatible with the survival of large populations. Yet it is precisely socialism (along with the concomitant destruction of “capitalism”) that the radical left persists in seeking. Why? Are these people not capable of learning from the experience of history? How can they be so intellectually irresponsible as to believe that they will succeed when everyone before them failed? Wouldn’t a responsible person be eager not to repeat the mistakes of the past, especially when those mistakes led to the deaths of tens of millions of people? But the typical radical leftist has no such concern for the possible disastrous outcomes of what he so eagerly wishes to inflict on his fellow man. Why is this? How naive and stupid can a person be before we start suspecting evil motives at play?
Whatever the ultimate causes of the “woke” progressivism, it should be clear at this point that it is not something that can be reasoned with. You’re not going to prevent the excesses of Critical Race Theory, Political Correctness, Anti-Racism, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa with carefully crafted arguments. These are all primarily emotional phenomena, and as such, can only be treated (assuming they can be treated at all) through some kind of psychological intervention. If more people understood what is potentially at stake; if they realized that in the absence of such an intervention, this sort of “woke” progressivism, left unchecked, could place our society in some measure of peril—then perhaps a greater effort would be made to discover humane methods of treating these malignant forms of ideology. If the worst excesses of the “regressive” left are not held in check by some kind of therapeutic intercession—then, supposing, as is eminently possible, matters reach a crisis point, more draconian solutions may have to be adopted. When the more orderly and traditional forces of human nature reach the breaking point, the temptation to make use of what might be described as the “right-wing medicine” may become too great to resist. Such a curative can be a rather heady dose, apt to have side effects of chilling dimensions. Just examine, if you will, the effects of its ministrations in Spain under Franco and Chile under Pinochet. In both instances the patient was thoroughly cured of the disease which afflicted him, but not without great suffering and the destruction of healthy tissues. Would that we could be spared so dramatic a cure!
Greg Nyquist is author of The Psychopathology of the Radical Left and The Faux-Rationality of Ayn Rand.