Earlier I wrote in the thread about whether collectivism or religion is the greater evil.
Seeing Biden’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan has led me to wonder something again that I forgot about in that thread: why does the Left seem to get along so well with Islam?
I’ve seen this cooperation before, because of the Left banning books critical of Islam, such as a bestselling book called Mohammed’s Koran, by Peter McLoughlin and Tommy Robinson. (Amazon banned this book and I had to go to a lot of extra trouble to get a copy of it.) Leftist censorship has also targeted the cartoonist Bosch Fawstin on numerous occasions.
The Left and Islam are both Primacy of Consciousness, but different consciousnesses. So why?
It seems interesting to me that some on the Left are saying that the Right is “just like the Taliban” (and that’s true, in the sense that both the Right and the Taliban believe in the primacy of God’s consciousness), but the Leftists are saying it as if to excuse their cooperation with the Taliban – while cooperation with the Right remains inexcusable. Why?
I think I discovered the reason: all people who choose to believe any variant of the primacy of consciousness choose it because they want consciousness to have primacy over existence.
A person who tries to believe that their own consciousness already has primary over existence soon finds that their consciousness is thwarted. What I said before was that they try to change ideas in their own mind, to see if some other ideas cause reality to conform. Maybe some of them do that, but begin to realize after a while that it is fruitless.
But the idea of an existence that doesn’t answer to consciousness at all is still abhorrent to them. So they might prefer to believe that existence answers to some other consciousness than their own – some consciousness which might change its mind, or might be persuaded, or perhaps can be forced, or at least will assume the burden of doing all their thinking for them. That, they think they can deal with. If they can’t be the ruling consciousness, then they can persuade, or force, or ride the coattails of, the ruling consciousness, and get the same results.
So it’s just plain second-handedness, of the Peter Keating variety. Everything in their minds comes down to persuading or forcing some other consciousness, or else, just letting another consciousness (even an imaginary one) do all the work. They won’t dare try to deal with reality on their own.
The problem that the Left and Islam have with the Right (and with America) is the same problem: “worldliness,” i.e., the insistence that one should deal with reality firsthand, that people can actually do that, and that people can properly be expected to do that.
The American Right tolerates a lot more “worldliness” than Islam. This is why the Enlightenment “sense of life,” which is implicitly a primacy of existence perspective, still survives in the Right, whereas in the Left (and in Islam) it is almost completely gone.
It is the fact that the Left and Islam both hate this sense of life, and the reality underlying it, that unites them. They both hate worldliness because they’d rather deal with a consciousness (whether society or Allah) than with reality, and they regard the ruling consciousness as more real than reality itself.
(It should be noted that the Left’s love of Islam is unrequited. The Left approves of Islam’s hatred of “worldliness” but sort of laughs at their religiosity. Islam, on the other hand, though grateful for the help they get from the Left, is just as willing to kill the Left as the Right. So they probably plan to kill the Leftists last.)
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The Right still has some severe problems, and they have been worsening over the decades.
Some Christians allow that it’s okay to be “worldly” up to a point, because reality, they claim, was made by God. However, it’s only up to a point: many of them are anti-conceptual mentalities, who are only willing to accept “worldliness” up to a certain level of abstraction, but no further. They reject whole fields of knowledge like calculus and science because they would rather believe in the book of Genesis than run the risk of obtaining knowledge that contradicts it. I’ve seen that firsthand. The result is that their knowledge of reality can’t exceed the medieval level.
Some Christians claim that reality has been corrupted by sin or Satan or the like, and they often use that excuse to declare war on various aspects of reality that they don’t like.
Both Islam and the Right’s less-worldly Christians hate other religions in proportion to how different those religions are from their own. That’s also a characteristic of the anti-conceptual mentality.
The anti-conceptual mentality is also a form of second-handedness: it’s the belief that thinking should go only so far and no further, because once you reach a certain point, another consciousness is supposed to take over for you. I think this is the product of not having confidence in one’s own consciousness – not having confidence in reason.
I suppose some people who reason incorrectly, and find their incorrect reasoning thwarted by reality, decide to give up on reason altogether. (Some people might also give up on reason because their correct reasoning is rejected by other people, and they aren’t sure of themselves.) They may not give up on reason after their first conflict, but they might do it after a few such conflicts. They learn the wrong lesson from their problems. They decide that thinking is dangerous or a fool’s errand and that they will let “someone else” worry about it, so they embrace the primacy of consciousness.
They’re afraid of thinking for themselves. They’re afraid of getting it wrong. (And they decide that, if they close their eyes, they don’t have to see the problem!)
Propaganda preys on this, of course.
In the physical realm, the Right rejects the “something for nothing” mentality of the Left. They are aware that you have to work in order to eat. However, their mistake is that they still embrace “something for nothing” in the realm of cognition: they need to be taught that you have to do cognitive work to acquire knowledge, in the same way that you have to do physical work to acquire food or goods. Knowledge does not come from God. It has to be built up from reality by a process of reason, which has to be checked for correctness. Objectivism provides a complete picture of how to do that. Christianity not only doesn’t provide such a picture, it rejects the idea that one is necessary.