The High Priests of Performative Goodness
I am wary of performative goodness. A few days ago, I wrote in The American Spectator about a speech UN Secretary-General António Guterres had just delivered. Calling him an idiot didn’t quite satisfy me, even though it is a reasonably accurate description of the man. So today, I would like to move beyond the individual (Guterres) and elevate him to a category; that is, to address everyone like him, those who belong to what I often call the postmodern Left: the faction that brought us “wokeism,” a myriad of pronouns, and cardboard straws to countries that had already discovered the immense progress represented by plastic straws.
The entire ideological structure of the postmodern Left rests on a single moral principle: we are the good guys (kind, benevolent, and big-hearted), while the rest are the bad guys. Their speeches are increasingly unfit for diabetics. They bare their fangs and behave like hyenas only when discussing dissidents (those who hold differing opinions) or whenever they speak of Donald Trump, regardless of what he does or says.
Their goodness reeks just as much as their self-righteousness.
Their goodness reeks just as much as their self-righteousness. One of the things I love most about being Catholic is that, in Christianity, the “good” person is one who denies himself, makes sacrifices, and sometimes even lays down his life for others. Couldn’t the Left do the same? In the postmodern Left, the “good” person sacrifices absolutely nothing (except common sense). They practice charity with your money and mine, imposing peace (a false peace) by abandoning thousands of people who may well need help to the mercy of some authoritarian tyrant, or by encouraging gender transition without taking responsibility for the psychological problems that the victim and their family must face in order to break free from the perpetual unhappiness of living a lie.
They say “no to weapons,” “no to wars,” “no to poverty.” They also say more ambitious things like “no to climate change,” which is like saying “no to the law of gravity.” Their typical solution never solves the problem: their way of fighting poverty is to make the rich poor too, just as their way of fighting academic failure is to make sure every student fails. And the best part, as I’ve noted before: they never take responsibility for the consequences of their stupid ideas. They are like a defective AI developed by AOC: it doesn’t matter what you ask; when something goes wrong, the blame always lies with capitalism or the patriarchy, and “if you want, I can give you a tone that’s a bit more anti-capitalist or a bit more anti-patriarchy.” (RELATED: Why All Leftism Is Now Far Left)
Above all, what really grates on my nerves is that air of the secular saint they adopt, as if they were born in a sacristy (or, in their case, a Masonic lodge), always believing their words are inspired by the Holy Spirit of Marx or a divine breath from Lenin’s mummy. Naturally, they are incapable of admitting a single mistake, except when they happen to be right by accident. In practical terms, they are an adolescent with pretensions of being an intellectual.
It makes no difference whether you read them in The New York Times with the fancy title of full professor hanging on their office wall, or hear them struggling to articulate an opinion on CNN, or watch them drone on with a tedious speech at the U.N. General Assembly, or run into them at a bar holding forth with their own personal “Epistle to the Corinthians.” They combine exaggerated virtue with ridiculous arrogance. And their arrogance is inversely proportional to their reasoning. That is to say, the more idiotic the argument (perhaps because they know it is weak), the more zealously, violently, and irrationally they defend it. (RELATED: The Moral Blackmailing of the American People)
And the issue of irrationality is another matter of interest. For all its many flaws, the classical Left used to position itself as the champion of reason and science, often pitting them against faith, which they scorned, as they always feel compelled to scorn the beliefs of others. The postmodern Left, however (figures like Kamala Harris or Joe Biden), views reason as a hindrance and regards science as downright fascist, simply because mathematical results fail to align with the tenets of equity, diversity, and equality. (RELATED: No Kings, Except for Progressive Ones)
After all, the only argumentative driving force they constantly invoke is emotion, the heart. Yet, whether the issue is abortion or tax hikes on the middle class, they never truly show heart when it is actually needed. Their sensitivity is mere sentimentality, and it is selective. They are moved only by the idealized paradigm that exists in their own heads, never by the actual individual; perhaps this is simply because they do not believe in the individual, and with each passing day, they appear increasingly detached from reality.
They sleep soundly because they spend vast sums telling the world just how immensely virtuous they are. That is precisely the specialty of people like António Guterres. Unfortunately, I can never be like them; I shall remain an insomniac for the rest of my life, for personally, I prefer a good war to a bad peace. And I feel not the slightest need to explain to the world whether I am a good man or the most despicable creature on earth.
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The UN’s Never-Ending Power Grab