The Frictionless Souls Addicted to the Cause

Fri Mar 11, 2022
Daniel Greenfield

Ukrainian flags are flying on buildings across the country and Russian vodka
is being poured into drains. Concerts are being canceled and books are
flying off shelves over a cause that the vast majority of Americans would
not have cared about and did not even know existed last year.

In a matter of weeks everyone has come around to having a passionate opinion
on the subject.

And when the war in Ukraine has come and gone, some other cause will arrive
to fill that void, and the outrage, blue and yellow flag waving, and all the
rest of it will be gone with the vodka.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was perfectly timed to fill the emptiness left
by the collapse of COVID restrictions. And what the reaction says about us
matters more than what it says about Ukraine.

The desperate hunger for new causes is a spiritual vacuum. The Ukrainians
and
the Russians believe in what they’re fighting for. We believe in the need to
believe in something. The conflict over Ukraine stretches back centuries
while our fervent investment in it goes back a few weeks.

It is quite likely that a few weeks from now we will be just as invested in
something else.

It is no coincidence that the least religious parts of America are the most
invested in this war, much as they’re the most invested in wokeness, in the
COVID culture wars, and all the culture wars that have come before and that
will come after to fill the void in their souls.

People without a purpose to their passions rush from one cause to another in
search of a momentary sense of meaning. Conspiracy theories make the world
meaningful and nurture their sense of outrage because it distracts them from
the aching emptiness within.

Radical politics acts as a substitute religion with its own theology,
momentous destiny and personal commitment, but without any sense of personal
connection or enduring continuity. What is true in politics one week may not
be so the next. Political touchstones shift and the partisan who is at the
heart of the cause may find that a few years later he’s an outside enemy.

The Left’s purity tests and radical transformations force its followers to
run to catch up or be left behind as reactionary bigots still protesting
that we had not always been at war with East Asia or that men have not
always
been considered the best possible women. Insecure social mobs embrace new
causes because they have a deep fear of being left behind the bandwagon.

Politics provides them with external validation and internal purpose. To
politically dissent is both the equivalent of losing their religion and
their place in society. That is why cancel culture is dreaded at a
psychological level, not just because of the loss of employment and
educational opportunities, but because the affected party loses their
society and their soul.

Herd behavior is a rational response to this threat. Virtue signaling
protects their place in the herd. And offers a sense of temporary security
in an extremely insecure sociopolitical order.

The seeming randomness and irrationality of some of the causes, the lack of
personal connection to the mostly white upper class people who embrace them,
are an asset. If a cause may have to be left behind at any time, it’s
easiest if the cause, black people, a country thousands of miles away, mask
culture, strange sexual fetishes, is impersonal.

A frictionless world in which family, sexual partners, friends, homes, and
careers can be abandoned at short notice also requires frictionless causes
that are equally disposable.

Replacing religion with politics has made for more frictionless souls who
never grow. The emotional retardation can be seen everywhere as adults
behave like teenagers and teenagers behave like children. No one ever grows
up, instead they feign maturity through politics.

Advocating for causes makes them seem like they care about something more
than themselves. The right politics bestows membership in a community based
on politics, but behind all the virtue signaling is the fundamental
immaturity of people who only truly care about themselves.

That is the dirty secret of leftist politics whose egocentrism is thinly
masked as altruism.

Leftism is not an act of conscience, but an escape from conscience. Its
causes, legitimate or illegitimate, are manifold, but what they all have in
common is an underlying denial. The only form of liberation that their
politics truly offer is the liberation from moral accountability and
personal growth. The more radical the politics, the more radical of an
escapism it represents.

True religion is an ongoing act of conscience while false religion evades
the internal accountability and externalizes it into political causes. The
external virtue signaling projects a false righteousness to mask the
underlying failure to struggle for internal rightness.

Radicals jump from one unfulfilling cause to another because escape requires
motion. The causes themselves are external and ultimately unfulfilling. No
matter how hard leftists struggle to change the world, they fail to change
what is truly within their power to change: themselves.

The addiction to causes is, like all addictions, initially a rush only to
gradually become unfulfilling, frustrating, and debilitating. The rage is
the suffering of the addict who is increasingly unable to recreate the
seeming purity of their initial political involvements except by upping the
dose and escalating the emotional and physical violence of their
commitments. Radicalization, like higher doses of any substance, don’t
address the anhedonia of the abuser.

Every cause gives way to another cause and then the original cause is often
forgotten, occasionally to be picked up later when convenient. When the
cause has its moment, then it eclipses all others, and for a week, a month
or a year, nothing else deserves to be mentioned.

The cause fills all the airwaves, swallows up all other considerations, and
becomes the single greatest issue in the universe. And then a little time
passes and it’s forgotten and discarded.

The cause was never the true cause. It was only ever an effect.

https://tinyurl.com/3j66mnwz

On 3/12/2022 11:57 AM, Byker wrote:
> The Frictionless Souls Addicted to the Cause
>
> Fri Mar 11, 2022
> Daniel Greenfield

What "obsession" with Ukraine? There isn't any.

"Frontpage Magazine" is a Nazi propaganda page.