SNEAK PEEK: Stick To Being a Hobbit

The dissident right really does have a human-capital problem

For some time now I’ve wanted to write a companion piece to Ted Kaczynski’s account of the average leftist in “Industrial Society and Its Future,” a.k.a. “The Unabomber Manifesto.” It’s one of the most valuable and enduring parts of the Manifesto, providing an acute description of the social and psychological factors that make modern leftists who and what they are, the things that drive their perpetual revolt against all that’s good and nice and sane and human. I’m not a trained psychologist, but then again, neither was Uncle Ted. You don’t need to be to see what’s going on.

I think there are very clear similarities, actually, between left- and right-wingers in their motivations, especially if we’re talking about the less mainstream parts of the right like the so-called “dissident right,” and I think these similarities would reward a detailed examination. Providing one would also piss off certain people, and increasingly I’m in the mood to piss those people off, since they’re making themselves a huge burden for anybody who has the misfortune to be associated with them, by choice or otherwise.

Take what Kaczynski calls “feelings of inferiority,” for example. Kaczynski says one of the two main reasons leftists are the way they are, besides being “oversocialised” (meaning they tend to overidentify with particular social values like equality and anti-racism), is pervasive feelings of inferiority. Leftists feel inferior, for various reasons, including physical ones, and so they lash out at the things that make them feel that way.

It’s not hard to understand.

Here’s a good passage from the Manifesto.

“Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist's real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.”

What Kaczynski is describing is something like the structure of resentment, rooted in weakness, that Nietzsche believed was the cause of the “slave revolt in morality,” an actual historical process that produced Christianity and then much later its afterbirths liberalism, leftism, socialism and communism. The weak masses revolt against the dominant values of the aristocratic minority, which in reality are just an extension and justification of aristocratic life, and in the process of revolting against those values, they turn them on their head.

Everything that’s good becomes bad; everything bad, good.

Right-wingers like to tell themselves, buttressed by Nietzsche and increasingly by age-old arguments about biology and physiognomy, that resentment is the exclusive possession of the leftist. They’re the resentful ones, not us. They’re the ones who feel inferior—because they are. But, really, that just isn’t the case. Right-wingers are driven by resentment as much as leftists; although I think there are some interesting variations in the way that resentment manifests itself and why.

I’ve found myself increasingly referring to a number of different people “on our side,” mostly in private conversations, as “inverted leftists,” because I don’t really think of them as right wing at all. These people, who will remain nameless, strike me as leftists who’ve simply ended up on the right because the left doesn’t want them. For whatever reason, often through personal fault of character—perhaps they’re just so disagreeable that even leftists can’t tolerate them—these people have been made outcasts and so, isolated and embittered, they end up in the only place that really does have endless lebensraum for isolated, embittered, disagreeable people: the right wing and its fringes.

But resentment on the right is more widespread than that, especially when we’re talking about the dissident right. To see this, you only need to have a little bit of success yourself, or pay attention to what happens to those who do.