Dear Friends,
It seems to me, progressives are not interested in communication, they are interested in getting in some licks. Every time I have tried to have a dialogue with a progressive they immediately use every underhanded means of debate and attack they can. Their favorites are changing the subject and baseless personal attack. They use these tactics to avoid actual discourse. No matter how polite I am, if they stay engaged, eventually they become too enraged to continue and claim I have treated them horribly! Which cannot help but make me laugh out loud. Now, I understand why they do this… even if they themselves don’t. It is because they cannot engage in logical and polite dialogue, since they are captured by the idea of progressivism, and are not really in rational control of themselves.
Jung said, people don’t get ideas, ideas get people. That we can become so enamored with an idea, like a woman, that we lose all rationality, becoming an avatar for that idea… to the exclusion of everything else. Those captured by an idea cannot talk of anything but that idea. They only become engaged when talking about it. Since they have become the idea and the idea has become them, any attack on that idea, they will see as a personal attack and will react accordingly. This gives ideas a quality of contagion. Some are more virulent than others and some are even deadly. We saw this when the idea of Nazism swept through Germany until almost every German was sick with it. It was spread by a book and contact. National Socialism falls within the greater epidemiology of progressivism.
Such contagious ideas are contracted in college and university, but since they are a contagion and not personal enlightenment, they do not stand up to discourse. In our universities today rational discourse is eschewed for a return to appeal to authority. Speakers who do not have the correct political opinions are silenced, with horns, shouting and even violence, if that is what it takes. The resulting graduates are fully captured by the idea of socialism. If not national socialism, democratic socialism, international socialism or just progressivism. But since they have never been asked to defend the idea that has so captured them, they cannot, and so have to resort to changing the subject, personal attacks and anger. The tactics that were so effective in school… tactics used to silence independent thinking teenagers.
Progressives firmly believe that rudeness trumps logic. If not consciously they act as if that is the case. Our actions say what we believe… not what we say we believe. By that measure we can see progressives do indeed believe that rudeness is superior in argumentation to logic. On one hand, they are correct, in that we are often more swayed by emotion than logic. We tend to believe what we feel even when we have reason not to believe. So, calling someone rude names is effective at reducing their message, without having to address that message. On the other hand, believing in absurdity that fosters perpetual anger, is a sub optimal path through life. It is a sure way to get regularly pummeled about the head and face by the world… no wonder they are so angry, nihilistic and hateful.
That is why it is so difficult to communicate with a progressive. They are captured by the idea of socialism’s promise, as were the Nazis, Marxists and communists, which makes them hold socialism as personal, part of them, and they feel they are part of socialism. Any questioning of socialism is questioning their personal worth. Having contracted the socialist disease, and never being forced to debate it in any meaningful way, or even hear a diverse viewpoint on the subject, they are wholly unfit to defend it in debate. That is why almost all progressives, when confronted with someone who is not a carrier of progressivism, will become rabid, even frothing at the mouth. They cannot be reasoned with… until the world has beat them about the head and face for awhile, then finally, some will awake.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
