The Personal Website of Mark W. Dawson

The Two Liberal Minds Beliefs

Introduction

The book “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness” by Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr. M.D. is about the psychological basis of the Progressives/Leftists mindset, and human nature and human freedom. Although the book was published in 2006, the Liberal Agenda has become more pronounced and easily understood by the words and deeds of today's “Progressives/Leftists”. All should read this book to understand the liberal mindset and its psychological basis, as stated From the Preface:

“This book is about human nature and human freedom, and the relationship between them. Its contents are an outgrowth of my life-long interest in how the mind works. That interest, beginning at about age twelve, eventually led me to careers in clinical and forensic psychiatry and to the particular access these disciplines provide to human psychology. Disorders of personality have been a special focus of this interest. First in clinical practice and then in forensic evaluations, I have had the opportunity to study the nature of personality and the factors which affect its development. The practice of forensic psychiatry has permitted an especially close look at the manner in which all mental illnesses, including personality disorders, interact with society's rules for acceptable conduct. These rules, both civil and criminal, largely define the domains of human freedom and the conditions that ground social order.

Historically, of course, western ideas about freedom and social order have come from fields quite distant from psychiatry: philosophy, ethics, jurisprudence, history, theology, economics, anthropology, sociology, art and literature, among others. But the workings of the human mind as understood by psychiatry and psychology are necessarily relevant to these disciplines and to the social institutions that arise from them. This book is an attempt to connect mechanisms of the mind to certain economic, social and political conditions, those under which freedom and order may flourish. Although I have made strenuous efforts to follow where reason leads, I have not written this book out of intellectual interest alone. My intent has been more "generative" than that, to use one of Erik Erikson's terms. It has, in fact, grown out of a deep concern for the future of ordered liberty. In their efforts "to form a more perfect Union," America's founding fathers intended, as the Preamble tells us, to establish justice, insure peace, provide for the nation's defense, promote its general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty. But the entire twentieth century, and the dawn of the twenty-first, have witnessed modern liberalism's relentless attacks on all of these goals and on all of the principles on which individual liberty and rational social order rest. Although they are strikingly deficient in political substance, these attacks have nevertheless been successful in exploiting the psychological nature of man for socialist purposes. To counter the destructiveness of these attacks requires a clear understanding of the relationship between human psychology and social process. It is my hope that this book makes at least a small contribution to that purpose.”

In this book he defines two types of liberals: ‘The Benign Liberal’ and ‘The Radical Liberal’. Given that this book was published in 2006, I believe that there is a better label for the two types of liberals of today: ‘The Traditional Liberal’ and ‘The Progressives/Leftists’. In Chapter 41 the section, ‘The Benign Liberal Mind’ describes the Traditional Liberal of today, while in Chapter 43 the section ‘Radical Liberal Themes’ describes the Progressives/Leftists’ of today. In Chapter 42 the sections ‘Positive Rights and the Injustice of Suffering’ and ‘The Vagueness of Liberal Principles’ describes the actual vagueness of their social policies which allows for the blurriness between the two types of Liberal Mind Beliefs. This effectively allows for the comingling of these two groups to make it appear that their numbers are larger than they are, and to drown out criticism from The Traditional Liberal of the radicalism of The Progressives/Leftists political goals and policy agendas. These three sections are:

The Benign Liberal Mind and Its Illusions

“Given the record of modern liberalism’s failed “wars” on poverty and drugs, the ineffectiveness and bankruptcy of its collectivized educational, health care, retirement, transportation and housing programs, to name a few, and given the corrupting effects of its social programs on the character of the people, we may ask yet again: why has western society created the idealized parental and administrative state and endowed it with vast managerial, caretaking and regulatory powers over the people? The answer to this question can be found in the statement of the question itself and in its implied goals. An idealized liberal state or its close approximation can, in fact, be created in the real world.

• The idealized parental state can and will act as a benign and loving parent.
• The idealized managerial state can and will manage the people’s lives for their great benefit just as loving parents manage their children’s lives.
• 316 Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr., M.D.
• The idealized caretaking state can and will ensure the health, economic security, and social status of the people.
• The idealized regulatory state can and will control the lives of the people to eliminate economic adversity, social strife and political conflict.
• The idealized liberal state can and will meet all or nearly all of the people’s needs and desires, including their desire to be indulged.

As this book has been at pains to prove, however, the promises in these propositions cannot be realized because of the realities of human nature. Moreover, they should not be realized because they violate the basic human rights essential to ordered liberty. Nevertheless, the naïve liberal citizen chooses to believe in them for many reasons. Here are some of them:

• These promises represent him and his best intentions toward the wellbeing of everyone, and they declare his support for those most in need.
• These promises make him feel that he is doing something good for others, thus allowing him to feel altruistic and generous and avoid feeling guilty.
• These promises assign charitable tasks to government agencies so the citizen himself need not do the actual work of charity or cope with difficult recipients.
• These promises reassure the citizen against his own fears of helplessness, neediness, inferiority and envy.
• These promises reassure the citizen against his own fears of economic adversity, political impotence and social conflict.
• The naïve liberal can maintain his ignorance and denial of the programs’ failures in its primary objectives.
• The naïve liberal can maintain his ignorance and denial of the programs’ unintended destructive effects.
• The naïve liberal can maintain his ignorance and denial of the financial and political exploitation of the programs by government officials.

In contrast to the Radical Liberal Mind to be discussed in later chapters, this well-intentioned but naïve citizen is the Benign Liberal Mind. He feels compassion for those who are poor, needy, diseased, desperate, downtrodden, ignorant, hopeless and helpless. He seeks a power greater than himself and his fellows, and greater than religious and volunteer organizations, to help all of those in dire straights. He has some conservative values but is ambivalent about conservative institutions, especially economic institutions. He suspects that conservatives are fundamentally selfish, and he is unaware that this belief is, in part, a projection of his own unconscious selfishness. He believes to a considerable extent in the idea of individual liberty under the rule of law but is unsure about how much individual responsibility anyone including himself should have to assume. He believes in market-based economies but thinks that they must be closely regulated by government officials, not just by laws protecting property and contract rights. He believes in the principle of self-ownership, in the right to own property, in the right to exchange property by mutual consent, and in the right to self-defense, but he is quite often willing to yield these rights to a collective cause, and he is strikingly unaware of the extent to which they have already been compromised by the liberal agenda. He believes in greatly expanded rights to restitution and is ambivalent about compensation for takings. He believes in a right of access to private facilities in emergencies. In the conduct of most adult interactions, he believes that it is better to be honest than dishonest, better to be courteous than rude, to be self-reliant than dependent, to be mutual than selfish, to be generous than stingy. With this more or less positive but ambivalent support for the ideals and aspirations of liberty, it does not occur to the Benign Liberal Mind that the effects of government welfare programs have already seriously undermined the foundations of his freedom and will eventually destroy it. On the contrary, he believes that the free and orderly society established by America’s founders has already been enhanced, not degraded, by having the unarguable virtue of the welfare state grafted onto it, and that it can be enhanced still further with more of the same. He believes this in ignorance of the manner in which the dynamics of government welfare policy attack the underpinnings of ordered liberty and corrupt the people. Details of that attack have been listed at length in Chapter 35 and elsewhere in this book.”

Radical Liberal Themes

Certain neurotic themes are dominant in the radical liberal mind’s perceptions of the world. All of them portray the citizen as a suffering child who is victimized, helpless and in need of rescue. All are evident in various liberal platforms. They represent the liberal mind’s transference of childhood dynamics into the world of adult relationships. As expressed in his most passionate political pronouncements, the radical liberal mind believes that:

• A very large portion of the population is suffering; they are suffering because they are deprived, neglected, exploited or abused.
• They are suffering because of certain injustices inflicted upon them.
• They are helpless to stop their suffering.
• Bad people, such as capitalists and the rich, cause the victims to suffer by depriving, neglecting, exploiting and abusing them.
• These bad people are villains who must be stopped from preying on their victims.
• The villains are ruthless, powerful, selfish, cruel and mean spirited.
• The bad institutions supported by the villains are economic, social and political in nature; they include free market capitalism, basic property rights, strict moral and ethical accountability, reasonable social decorum, personal and financial responsibility, individual sovereignty, and justice based on merit and desert.
• These bad institutions promote economic enslavement, social discrimination, political disenfranchisement, exploitation of minorities, forced pregnancies, and coercive advertising, among other things.
• The people are innocent victims; they have no important role in causing their suffering.
• Modern liberals are heroes whose mission is to rescue the victims from the villains.
• Modern liberals are compassionate, wise, empathetic and nurturing.
• Modern liberals are devoted to saving the victims from the villains just as nurturing parents protect their children from harm by others.
• Like children, most citizens cannot adequately direct or manage their own lives.
• Most citizens need a powerful liberal government to direct and manage their lives.
• Because the villains and their institutions are ruthless and powerful, the people need a powerful liberal government, The Modern Parental State, to protect them from the villains and the institutions supported by the villains.
• The Modern Parental State is the answer to problems created by the villains.
• The Modern Parental State will rescue the people and protect them from the villains and from other misfortunes.
• The Modern Parental State will nurture the people by providing for all their needs and desires.
• The Modern Parental State will blame and punish the villains for their deprivation, neglect, abuse and exploitation of the victims.
• Much of the suffering of the victims comes from too much freedom in economic markets, which allows the villains to exploit the victims for unjust gain.
• Proper controls instituted by The Modern Parental State to regulate the markets will prevent the villains from economically exploiting the victims.
• The Modern Parental State will cure the deprivation, neglect, exploitation and abuse of the victims by taking the wealth, power and status of the villains away from them and redistributing it to the victims.
• Some of the suffering of the victims comes from too little social freedom and too many restrictions on behavior in social situations.
• The Modern Parental State will lower the standards of social conduct in order to free the victimized citizen from guilt and from adverse legal consequences when he acts criminally, irresponsibly or offensively.
• By remaking the institutions of society, The Modern Parental State will liberate the victims from exploitation and oppression by the villains.
• The libertarian structure of ordered liberty grounded in basic property and contract rights allows the villains to exploit the victims.
• The Modern Parental State will eliminate these individual rights and create a new political architecture for a secure society modeled on the loving nurturing family.

These and related themes of deprivation and neglect, exploitation and abuse, domination and control, blaming and punishing, caring and caretaking, protection and security, rescuing and nurturing—all are the radical liberal mind’s unconscious projections of early childhood dynamics transferred into the political arenas of adult life. These projections define the transference neurosis of the radical liberal mind:

• They are the liberal’s projections of a painful neurotic disorder; they are the legacy of his childhood.
• They represent his desperate longings for attachment, attention, affection, empathy, significance, esteem, adoration, recognition, indulgence, relatedness, guidance, direction, belonging and love.
• They represent his desperate efforts to heal real emotional wounds that he suffered when he was, in fact, significantly deprived, neglected, exploited or abused.
• They are his efforts to defend against his suffering by constructing an idealized world of loving care and exemption from responsibility; he seeks a world that will compensate him for the traumas of his childhood, relieve his neediness, indulge his impulses and heal the enduring wounds to his soul.
• They are distorted perceptions of the real world of economic, social and political processes; the liberal agenda is based on these transference perceptions.

Unfortunately, all of the radical liberal’s efforts based on these perceptions are badly misguided. Because he does not understand the childhood origins of his pain, he projects his neurosis into a contemporary world of imagined villains, victims and heroes. Once he locates himself in this world, he hopes to find in the ministrations of the Modern Parental State what he missed as a child. He may not admit to himself or others that he did, in fact, suffer early wounds. If he does admit this fact, he will not realize that his wounds drive his political views. If he realizes this causal connection, he will not admit it to others.

Positive Rights and the Injustice of Suffering

Direct perceptions and indirect reports of suffering, hardship and need are powerful messages in the liberal agenda’s efforts to create a welfare- driven collectivist society. But an equally powerful force derives from the agenda’s success in portraying most human suffering, not just some of it, as unjust instead of seeing it as an inevitable part of the human experience. In fact, the view that all or nearly all suffering is unjust is the flip side of the liberal mind’s argument for positive rights or entitlements: if human beings have positive rights to food, clothes, houses, jobs, education, medical care, child care, abortion, a clean and safe environment, adequate social status, leisure time or any other good, service or condition, and if those entitlements are deemed enforceable, then persons who don’t have them are being neglected and deprived and are therefore victims of injustice. On this understanding of the human condition, the liberal mind views the minimal libertarian state as profoundly unjust because it zealously protects only the basic rights essential to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in a peaceful and orderly environment, and explicitly refuses to guarantee all of those goods and services which only individuals and groups can provide through their own initiative. In fact, however, it is the liberal agenda’s collectivist state that is profoundly unjust precisely because any attempt to enforce its platform of positive rights immediately violates the negative rights essential to ordered liberty.

 The Vagueness of Liberal Principles

“One of the most striking characteristics of modern liberalism, whether benign or radical, is the actual vagueness of its social policies despite their apparent nobility of purpose. A typical “progressive” liberal platform, for example, will announce its goals to be the eradication of hunger, poverty, ignorance, disease, faulty child care, material inequality and political oppression. The platform will dedicate itself to the provision of adequate jobs, housing, nutrition, education, social harmony and medical care. But in the real world, attempting to reach even one of these goals is a colossal undertaking, whose difficulties the liberal agenda never adequately spells out for review. Consider, for example, the announcement of a program whose intent is to end starvation in a single third world country. Questions of the following type must be answered with verifiable facts and proven or at least plausible strategies if the program is to succeed:

• What is the history of the problem? When and for what reasons did the starvation begin?
• Has the country ever been able to feed itself? How?
• How do weather factors affect the problem?
• What has made the problem better or worse?
• What are the economic, social, political, religious, legal and ethnic factors affecting the problem and any realistic attempts at solving it?
• What are the logistical problems in providing food to the population?
• Who will provide the food? Who will grow it, collect it, preserve it, record its type and amount, ship it?
• Who will ensure that the food is preserved and edible when it arrives for consumption?
• How and by whom and at what cost will it be received and distributed to those in need?
• Who will administer the program? How will corruption and graft be prevented?
• How and by whom will all phases of the program be funded and how much will it cost?
• How will providing food to the target population affect them socially, psychologically, politically?
• What are the attitudes of the people toward the program?
• Will anyone, especially politically positioned persons, object to the program?
• Will anyone attempt to thwart it? Assist with it?
• Who will benefit financially and politically from the program? How much?
• Who will be harmed by the program?
• How long is the program to continue?
• Does the program incorporate a plan to make the population self-sufficient? What is it?
• What are the medical consequences of the starvation to date?
• What are the developmental consequences of the starvation?
• What will be the incentive and disincentive effects of the program?
• Toward what better uses, if any, could the funds, efforts and resources for the program be allocated?
• What exit strategy will terminate the program?

Verifiable facts and proven or plausible strategies to answer most of these questions will not be offered by anyone proposing a program of this type, and any such proposal is therefore meaningless for practical purposes. If the program is only one among many comparable programs to guarantee other positive rights, then the entire platform is even more meaningless since no amount of planning can hope to bring such a grand scheme to life. In that case, the announcement of the platform’s goals serves only rhetorical purposes—feeling good about one’s intentions, for example, or rallying support against a political opponent.

This list of questions illustrates the kinds of essential inquiries that are routinely omitted from any liberal politician’s campaign to impress voters with his good intentions and with reasons why he should be given more power and money. By tacit agreement, the liberal voter will not challenge the liberal politician with these questions, and the politician will not have answers to them if the questions are asked. Both will content themselves with an implicit trade-off: the voter will feel that he is a good humanitarian doing something truly charitable for others in need, the politician will get more power and money, and the liberal agenda will be validated in its noble intentions (but defective substance). Equally important, if any attempt is made to implement the program, it will fail in its primary objectives for practical reasons, suffer from massive cost overruns and losses to fraud, and result in severe unintended consequences. No one will be held accountable for these outcomes, but blame will be placed on irrelevant persons, organizations and events.

The dedicated liberal will argue that these and other objections are merely a cynical cover for persons who are essentially selfish and don’t care if starvation persists. But history records the failed objectives and destructive consequences of nearly all programs of these types. African dictators, for example, have gotten very rich on programs to end their country’s poverty while the people continue to starve and live or die in squalor. In Chicago the effort to enforce a right to adequate housing for the poor has had such disastrous economic and social effects that the projects had to be torn down. Despite history’s negative report card on programs of this type, the true believer in the liberal agenda nevertheless presses ahead with “progressive” programs, ignoring their repeated failures. Meanwhile, the character of all the people, those to whom the state gives and those from whom it takes, is profoundly demeaned. The dignity and sovereignty of the individual are lost in the state’s perverse ministrations to the collective social mass.”

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More information about this book can be viewed at his website The Liberty Mind,. Although the book was published in 2006, the Liberal/Progressive/Leftist Agenda has become more pronounced and easily understood by the words and deeds of today's "Progressives/Leftists" and the Democrat Party. These political goals and policy agendas are antithetical to our American Ideals and should frighten any person who believes in “Freedoms, Liberties, Equalities, and Equal Justice for All”. Consequently, it is the duty and responsibility of freedom-loving Americans to actively oppose Progressives and Leftists and the Democrat Party, for the purposes of retaining our freedoms and liberties. This book inspired me to create articles that are extractions from this book. I would suggest that you read these articles in the following order to obtain the essence of this book:

• The Liberal Mind Overview - This article is an overview of the three sections of this book, which I have titled: I – The Nature of Man, II – The Development to Adulthood, and III – The Adult Liberal.
• The Liberal Mindset – This article is the author's selections from the book that highlight the major topics of the book.
• The Two Liberal Minds Beliefs (this article) - This article defines two types of liberals: ‘The Benign Liberal’ and ‘The Radical Liberal’ and their different viewpoints and perspectives.
• The Liberal Manifesto Major Principles - The section “The Liberal Manifesto: Major Principles” from Chapter 35 examines their political goals and policy agendas of today's Progressives/Leftists and the Democrat Party. I have excerpted this section of the book for your review and consideration.
• The Liberal Integrity and Treatment - The Chapter 48 section, ‘Integrity and Treatment’, has the best explanation of the difference between the Liberal and Conservative mindset that I have ever encountered. I have excerpted four sections of this chapter of the book for your review and consideration, and as a basis for understanding the psychological nature of the political divides that are occurring in America today.
• The Ideal and Reality in Radical Liberalism – The Chapter 47 sections, ‘The Liberal Agenda as an Evil’, and ‘Ideal and Reality in Radical Liberalism’ contradicts the claims of moral superiority and correctness that The Liberal Mind so often self-proclaims.