The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness

[Boon Mee]

Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.,a forensic psychiatrist, explains the madness of liberalism in his new book The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness. Like all other human beings, the modern liberal reveals his true character, including his madness, in what he values and devalues, in what he articulates with passion.

And what the liberal mind is passionate about is a world filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust, anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation and injustice. Those who occupy this world are “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,” “women,” and the “unemployed.” They are poor, weak, sick, wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited and victimized. They bear no responsibility for their problems.

The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to grave agenda of redistrubutive caretaking...

[barbaro]

Every U.S. politician is a liberal.

The GOP and Democratic parties are both Liberal parties.

They belive in the philosophy of Neo-liberalism and practice it.


What do you mean?

[stroller]

This book is the first systematic analysis of the political madness that now threatens to destroy the West’s greatest achievement: the American dream of civilized liberty.

[keda]

Likely to upset some of the staunchly fairminded libs on to this board.

[Begbie]

What has the radical left got to do with liberals ?

Seems to me that psychoanalysis might be more appropriate for neocons. Folks who want to dictate what others can or cannot do, definately have some unresolved issues.

[Mr Earl]

What has the radical left got to do with liberals ?

Seems to me that psychoanalysis might be more appropriate for neocons. Folks who want to dictate what others can or cannot do, definately have some unresolved issues.

That's right those "neocons" are just like "Islamofacists". Maybe worse.
They just haven't started flying airliners into skyscrapers yet.....or wait minute they already have; those weren't Saudi terrorists on 9/11 they were "neocon"! Little Eichmanns all of them... they all deserve to die!

[Begbie]

Bit early for the cough syrup Mr Earl ?

[stroller]

They just haven't started flying airliners into skyscrapers yet.....

Nah, they prefer to drop bombs on women and children from the safe distance of an airoplane. Michael Moore documented it all on film.

[Mr Earl]

[Mr Earl]

Bit early for the cough syrup Mr Earl ?

I was just about to wash down some codeine with the last of the Jamesons.

[Milo2]

The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to grave agenda of redistrubutive caretaking...

Hence the paradox of liberalism as explicated by Isaiah Berlin in his Two Concepts of Liberty.

"Berlin is best known for his essay "Two Concepts of Liberty", which was delivered in 1958 as his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents' possible action. I am more "negatively free" to the extent that fewer opportunities for possible action are foreclosed or interfered with. Positive liberty he associated with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one's destiny. While Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, he believed that, as a matter of history, the positive concept of liberty has proven more susceptible to political abuse. He argued that under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel (all committed to the positive concept of liberty), European political thinkers were frequently tempted to equate liberty with forms of political discipline or constraint. This became politically dangerous when the relevant ideals of positive liberty were, in the course of the 19th century, used to defend ideals of national self-determination, imperatives of democratic self-government, and the Communist notion of humanity collectively asserting rational control over its own destiny. In this way of thinking, Berlin contended, demands for freedom paradoxically become demands for forms of collective control and discipline — those deemed necessary for the "self-mastery" or self-determination of nations, classes, democratic communities, and perhaps of humanity as a whole. There is thus an elective affinity, for Berlin, between positive liberty and political totalitarianism. Conversely, negative liberty represents a safer, more liberal, understanding of freedom on Berlin's account. Its proponents (such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) insisted that constraint and discipline were the antithesis of liberty and so were (and are) less prone to confusing liberty and constraint in the manner of the philosophical harbingers of modern totalitarianism."

Isaiah Berlin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia