Our mainstream media live in an alternate reality in which positions are changed as readily as clothes. Equality is touted as an ultimate good until discrimination, branded “equity,” feels more right; anti-lockdown protests were dangerous during a pandemic, but BLM protests were necessary; and treatment to change sexual inclination must be illegal, but treatment endorsing change in “sexual identity” is enlightened. And because of this, writes commentator Andrea Widburg, “it’s fun to compare past and present articles that demonstrate the media’s willingness to shift principles to advance their biases.”
Liars give themselves away. When I worked with kids decades ago, a youngster from a very liberal family and whom I was close to remarked, with amazement, that I was the only person he knew who gave him consistent answers. When you’re telling the Truth, you see, your answers don’t change because the Truth doesn’t. But a dishonest person isn’t using as a frame of reference the Truth, but his own often emotion-driven preferences, which can change with the wind. It’s hard to keep track of lies, too.
The latter phenomenon characterizes leftists, says Widburg, and she provides some striking examples from the mainstream media (below).
Image credit: American Thinker.
Image credit: American Thinker.
But then Widburg presents the pièce de résistance, courtesy of NBC News:
Image credit: American Thinker.
Widburg remarks that this is Soviet-style reporting, only, USSR “journalists” faced the gulag for being honest; our “journalists” are voluntarily pushing us toward the gulag. But we have to hand it to NBC: Contradicting your headline with your subheading may be breaking new ground.
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Widburg also asserts that this behavior reflects leftists’ failure to have matured. To support that general thesis, she relates some ideas from Lyle Rossiter, Jr.’s book The Liberal Mind, The Psychological Causes of Political Madness, as summarized by writer Mike Shotwell.
Rossiter “explained how the collectivist-leftist clenched-teeth demands for cradle-to-grave caretaking, desires inbred in all humanity from the earliest child-parent relational stages, translated into an inability to mature into adult behavior; behavior that upholds freedom, autonomy, and personal and fiscal responsibility as the dominant script for societal well-being,” Shotwell tells us.
“He further explained their blindness to reality and how in their zeal to protect humanity from the injustices of the world they implement programs that instead of creating independence and self-sufficiency, foster dependency and instability …year after year and decade after decade with nary a glance backward at the socialist horrors of the 20th-century authoritarian monsters and their demands for societal purification,” the writer continued.
I certainly agree. For years I’ve characterized leftists as “overgrown children,” a status evidenced also by their flightiness, tendency to rationalize away inconvenient reality, propensity for living in the “now,” ignoring of consequences, and generally stunted moral development.
Speaking of which, Widburg states that all children are “narcissists” up to a certain age and, unsurprisingly, that this fault characterizes the mainstream media as well. I’ll add that, in accordance with my own assumptions, scientists claim that all babies are sociopaths. We’re born little barbarians and must be civilized, inculcated with a proper moral compass. Barring this, we can end up big barbarians with skills — sometimes for rendering “news” entertainingly.
In this vein, Widburg writes that as “narcissists get more sophisticated without ever maturing, they create a reality in which the truth is always defined by the needs of the moment. That’s why narcissists pass lie detector tests. If they need to say something, that need means that what they say is the truth.”
Such a phenomenon was comedically portrayed on the sitcom Seinfeld in an episode in which the George Costanza character, an inveterate liar, gives Jerry Seinfeld advice on how to beat a polygraph test. “Jerry, just remember,” said George, “It’s not a lie — if you believe it” (10-second video below).
Actually, George is definitionally correct. A lie is an untruth uttered while knowing it’s untrue; if you believe it, it’s simply an untruth.
As to this, most mainstream-media figures tell lies, but actually believe many other untruths they espouse. So if the saying, “A man who is capable of deceiving only others is not as dangerous as a man capable of deceiving himself” is true, this makes the media even more toxic than you might have thought.
This self-delusion phenomenon does epitomize the people called “leftists.” Just consider what an American defector learned about Marxism while spending decades in North Korea. “In North Korea, when you lie they think you are telling the truth, and when you tell the truth they think you are lying,” said ex-Army Sergeant Charles Jenkins. “You learn real quick to say no when you mean yes, and yes when you mean no.”
The North Koreans are obviously an extreme example. But all this raises interesting questions: How do people get this way? Does the dislocation from reality lead to the embrace of the unreality of leftism? Or does the unreality of leftism lead to wider dislocation from reality? I’m quite sure it’s both, actually. But now I’ll briefly outline Descent into Unreality 101.
Man has a great capacity to rationalize, which, of course, is when you lie to yourself, twist reality for yourself. People do it when reality isn’t what they want it to be. This especially characterizes leftists, whose agenda is wholly contrary to reality, to Truth.
The problem is that when you lie to yourself over and over again, bending reality year after year, you fall further and further out of touch with reality. Not only can rationalization then become entirely habitual, but you may reach a point where you can’t “find” reality even when you want to. Once severe enough, this may be called being crazy.
It’s as when continually feeding bad data into a computer. How will the output be? In fact, people can reach the point of having “corrupted files,” more commonly known as character defects or dysfunction (though I dislike psychobabble terms reflecting the atheistic lexicon).
By the way, this habitual rationalization likely begins in childhood, when parents (often “liberal”) enable it by not holding their kids responsible and forcing them to face reality. “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree,” the saying informs — and in our mainstream media’s case, it’s not the tree of liberty.
