Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Mis-Education and Mental Illness

Mis-education may be a larger problem in America today than ignorance. As the government-controlled education establishment continues to indoctrinate people with misinformation and logically incompatible premises we run into an intractable problem: People who believe that they are educated are actually further from moral and physical reality than the uneducated.
  It is all too easy for such mis-educated people to dismiss all disagreement with their views as ignorance and all dissension from their moral perspective as bigotry.
Thus the formally recognized status of their mis-education can actually serve to wall them off from learning anything. It protects their fragile world-view, for a time, from having to compete in the marketplace of ideas. What matter if their positions are logically indefensible? Who needs logic when one has credentials?
  Mis-education is not, in theory, limited to any part of the political spectrum.   But because the government backs the statist left, it manifests in the United States most often from those who consider themselves liberals (but are actually leftists rather than classical liberals.)  Being distant enough from moral and physical reality so that it seriously interferes with functioning in everyday life is a pretty good definition of insanity.  Indeed one veteran psychiatrist has determined that today's 'liberals' are "mentally ill."  Personally I am not comfortable with the idea of labeling disagreement with my political views as a psychiatrist disorder, but the left does it all the time (see "homophobia") so I suppose whats' sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Here is how Dr. Rossiter frames it from the above link..
“Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded,” says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.” “Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave.”
I am not a trained mental health professional, but I can testify that my attempts to engage leftists in rational dialogue reveal some very important truths; namely that they are not interested in rational dialogue.   Reason is treated as an alien enemy, not an indispensable tool for determining truth.     What they want is an echo chamber where their delusions are supported by others who share them.     

Dr. Rossiter focuses on a desire to evade responsibilities as the seminal issue in their neuroses, or psychosis depending on degree of detachment.  He's the doctor, but I would zoom out a bit. Many leftists meet their daily responsibilities quite well, especially those propped up with paychecks from the government and government supported academia. I suspect the larger issue is a desire to put short term emotional satisfaction over truth.   

I will never forget what an old black Pentecostal preacher said to us at a revival I was attending; "Emotions make a good caboose, but a bad engine."  Our minds, renewed by and connected to the Holy Spirit of God, ought to be the Engine. If we do that then our lives will be guided by reason, justice, principle, and truth. The cars of the train should be our actions which follow along where the engine of our mind takes us.

Lastly, the caboose should be the emotions. We will have positive emotions if our minds are right, and our right actions follow our right minds.  People who put emotions first fall into a trap. They want to feel good now regardless of what the righteous mind might think of it and regardless of what the actions will lead to in the long run.  People who put feeling good first often wind up miserable.  People who put right thinking first wind up with the most satisfying emotions as a side-effect.

What I believe is happening here is that leftists want to put emotions over reason. That is the core of their psychosis.  Feeling right matters more than thinking right. When this desire to indulge short-term emotions over logic, reason, and truth leads to painful consequences, rather than re-examine the propriety of their priorities they simply call for the government to "fix it".  I see it all as an attempt to keep living with their emotions first instead of putting reason first.

This mal-adjustment leads them to support unsustainable policy answers in which "the government" somehow has the resources to insure that we are all taken care of regardless of the quality of our personal decisions.   Rush Limbaugh once noted that being a 'liberal' was the most gutless decision a person could make because they can just say "yes" to everyone.  "Yes, you deserve free health care and a college education.  Yes you deserve affordable housing.   Yes you deserve a living wage."    Anyone who is in any pain, you can just say "yes" they can have what they want, even if they have not earned it.

Again, it feels good to be able to tell people "yes", but sane people don't tell other people "yes" just to feel good.   They only tell people "yes" when it is a reasonable request that can be realistically paid for.  Leftists do tell people "yes" in order to feel good about themselves. They then blame the delivery failure not on the impossibility of their promises, but rather "the rich."  Those awful rich who greedily want to keep what they earn rather than surrendering it in order to validate the leftist's emotional desire to feel good by promising what is not theirs.

 In truth, if we looted the rich even more than we do, we would find they don't have enough to satisfy the promises already made. Not that the rich would consent to hang around and be looted. They would of course flee the country rather than have their fortunes confiscated in a hopeless attempt to sate the appetite of insane people. That's why leftist demagogues always wind up turning their guns on the middle class. They are the only group with enough resources to loot but not enough to be able to defend themselves or escape the government looting.

The government has basically bought education in this country. And because they have they spirit of free inquiry has been stamped out. It has been replaced by indoctrination posing as education. No ideas that are a threat to the statist status-quo will be tolerated- and this will even be done in the name of "tolerance!" And of course the ideas they push are ideas that government is good, and that it is right and just. They teach that it is realistic to think the wise rulers in Washington can solve all our ills if only given more power and money. That's what "education" will devolve to every time it is funded by the central government, as far as I can tell without exception. 

I recently chimed in on a FB discussion where the instigator posted a George McGovern quote about how bigotry against women was the only acceptable bigotry left. I mentioned that he said that before bigotry against Christians became so popular. His friends jumped all over me demanding to know where this bigotry was. I showed them. They then said basically the victim in my example had it coming because bigoted Christians should stay out of politics.  I calmly showed conclusive evidence demonstrating this view did not square with the position taken by either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. At that point, they said that I was a white male, and as such had no business highjacking a thread about bigotry against women, and that they would no longer respond.    Ah, the sex and race card. So, who is supposed to be the bigot again?

The above is but one example of something I have begun to experience more and more often.   Leftists claim the mantle of intellect and reason, but they are not interested in having to use either to defend their positions. They don't want logic and reason.  They don't want dialog. Thomas Paine (a real liberal) once said, " 'To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.'"   Most of them have not formally renounced the use of reason yet, but they are getting close to making that break with the last link in their mind.  The are close to casting off the last tow line they might use to begin the long, painful, but ultimately rewarding journey back to moral and physical reality.



3 Comments:

Blogger Mark Moore (Moderator) said...

Our government run education system produces something worse than ignorance- it produces mis-education. And this mis-education only feeds into a growing type of mental illness...

7:28 PM, June 19, 2012  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The right is not immune to bias and mis-education.

3:31 PM, June 20, 2012  
Blogger Mark Moore (Moderator) said...

No, and I am not claiming that it is. But the right does not control education, particularly higher ed. What I object to is the rejection of dialogue and reason. They no longer feel they even need to justify or defend their positions. They are right because the whole of the education machine is indoctrinating their position.

1:36 PM, June 21, 2012  

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