The Liberal Bigot (for Borneo)

The term 'liberal bigot' is bandied around on this forum with the the frequency that 'Mug' appears on other forums.  I have to admit I didn't fully understand the term and stumbled across the following whilst looking into it.

Borneo, the piece below will no doubt transport you to 7th heaven and I am sure that you will be regurgitating quotes from it in spats to come.  I would have posted a link, but know that you haven't yet mastered the interweb, hence the reproduction,  Enjoy xxx

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http://libertygb.org.uk/v1/index.php/news-libertygb/5854-the-liberal-bigot

Like all organisms the liberal bigot is an evolved creature, although the character traits which made him – hypocrisy, the wish to create the world in his own image, paternalism, a sense of moral superiority, a desire to gratuitously interfere with the lives of others, false humility, self-indulgent masochism and a pathological refusal to accept evidence which contradicts emotionally based beliefs – are as old as civilised man. Those who know their history will readily recognise the basic personality of the liberal bigot, for it is that of the Puritan.

Very primitive types existed in the ancient world – Plato's Socrates has much of the liberal bigot's smugness and ability to ignore the facts of human nature – but it was not until the eighteenth century that creatures displaying most of the modern liberal bigot's general features emerged in the shape of men such as William Wilberforce and Jeremy Bentham.

But Wilberforce and Bentham still had some moral sense and it is Shelley who perhaps first displays the peculiar humbugging amorality
of the modern liberal bigot with his continual prating about his love for 'mankind', whilst behaving abominably to all and sundry.

The nineteen thirties saw the first indubitably modern liberal bigot – described by Friedrich Hayek after he found one called Harold Laski at the London Schoool of Economics. To be sure Laski did not have certain of the detailed traits associated with the liberal bigot of our time – for example the hatred of academic success in the working class – nor did he possess the instinct to dissemble his paternalism. But he had that quintessential quality of the fully developed liberal bigot, an intellectualised pseudo-morality or, to put it more exactly, ethical rules without moral context.

Since the discovery of Laski, liberal bigots have become increasingly common and they are now a very widely spread pest. They are particularly fond of habitats such as politics, the arts, universities, the media and the social services. They can be found in all Western societies, but nowhere do the creatures have such success as in the Anglo-Saxon world, where they have captured political control of their societies.

The liberal bigot's ideological and psychological starting point is the fantasy, which he maintains in the face of all the evidence, that man is a generally malleable creature who can be changed by social engineering to create a world fit for liberal bigots; although in so thinking the liberal bigot misunderstands his own psychology for he would find such a place supremely uncongenial. No more would he be able to posture in the public eye because there would be no matters occasioning expressions of liberal bigot moral outrage or excuses for paternalistic action. Even more alarmingly, in a realised liberal bigot society, he might be forced to match his behaviour to his words. However, he may rest easy in his bed for such a world is but fit for dreams.
The liberal bigot has but one general principle, but what a principle it is, being so all-embracing that no other is needed. He holds as an article of faith that no discrimination should be made between human beings, regardless of man's natural inclinations and Nature's distinction by sex, sexual inclination, race, colour, culture, class, talent, intelligence, education, personality, physical condition and age – unless, of course, the person judged is female, homosexual, non-Caucasian, poor, stupid, uneducated, old or crippled. Then the liberal bigot may discriminate to his heart's content, although in the weasel-worded manner of Lenin's 'democratic centralism' he calls it 'positive discrimination' and thinks it not in the least 'judgemental'. This he has institutionalised in a totalitarian system called political correctness.

Above all things the liberal bigot delights in what he calls 'racism', which in practice means the white man defending his own interests or extolling his own culture. This the liberal bigot has raised to the status of the great modern blasphemy. Just as once the Holy Office caused men to be burned for denying the literal truth of transubstantiation, so just as surely does the liberal bigot wish to immolate those who distinguish amongst their fellows on the most natural grounds of all, a sense of kinship, of shared culture and experience. So central is this tenet to modern liberal bigotry that the liberal bigot has moved in the past forty years from believing that racial discrimination is bad to asserting that multiracial societies are a positive good.

The fact that such societies always experience considerable friction between their various racial components is not, of course, taken as evidence by the liberal bigot that he is wrong, but as ammunition for promoting more restrictions on the white population and further reason for indulging in positive orgies of European cultural denigration.
At some level the liberal bigot realises that his creed is at odds with reality. So, following in the footsteps of religious intellectuals such as Aquinas and political theorists such as Marx, he creates an elaborate fictional world which is baldly represented as 'natural' or 'right', and reality 'unnatural' and 'wrong', even though intellectually he would deny any objective morality or measure of cultural worth.

Like all those who adopt intellectually indefensible ideologies, the liberal bigot makes disbelief a heresy and punishes it with a gamut of sanctions which range from simple expressions of distaste through exclusion from public life to the passing of laws threatening fines and imprisonment for those who express the 'wrong' opinions.

Morality exercises a peculiar difficulty for the liberal bigot for he is caught between believing in moral relativism and a desire to impose his own standards on the world, for which he cannot, necessarily, have any absolute sanction. This dilemma is partially solved by the development of an amoral personality and by using doublethink to hide the intellectual contradiction.

The liberal bigot decries 'nationalism' but he is also a firm advocate of cultural expression, provided, of course, that the people concerned are within his approved ideological circle of deserving causes. That a sense of cultural worth and identity is practically indistinguishable from nationalism the liberal bigot cannot accept, so he represents the two as opposites. When pressed with disloyalty, he often makes a spurious distinction between patriotism and nationalism and says he is 'proud' of such things as Britain's history of providing sanctuary for refugees, which trait, when translated to the nature and level of modern population movements, is of course of the greatest possible disadvantage to the receiving country. If he is in the media he will crudely mock the idea of national feeling by being absurdly jingoistic in trivial matters as in the statement: "The space shuttle took off today. The plastic wrappers for the food were British." His hysterical laughter at any suggestion that Churchill or Wellington might be worthy of respect changes to a childlike reverence when his thoughts turn to such vicious charlatans as Che Guevara.

The liberal bigot wishes to enjoy the material wealth, physical security and intellectual tolerance of the advanced civilisation in which he lives, whilst decrying all the institutions and habits which have produced this happy state. He publicly laments such things as poverty, but he reacts most strongly to suggestions that his personal wealth should be expended on those causes supposedly dear to his heart – it is to the public purse that the liberal bigot looks, first, second and last. He extols the virtues of 'working class' or 'ethnic' customs and values, but takes good care to avoid contact with unreconstructed members of such groups by living well away from or cocooning himself within a gentrified part of their areas.

In truth, the liberal bigot has little knowledge of the groups whom he purports to champion. Loving humanity in the mass, he finds their individual reality at odds with his ideology and personal inclinations. Even worse, he cannot but suspect that the downtrodden prole or black does not take him seriously, that in some curious way he is patronised by the very people he imagines desperately need his help. Now if there is one thing which enrages the liberal bigot above all others, it is not being taken seriously. While uttering a great deal of cant about how much he is against snobbery, how he is just a common man no different from anyone else in the street, he is mortally offended when he is taken at his word.

The liberal bigot decries privilege but excepts it eagerly when the beneficiary is himself or other liberal bigots. How cleverly he creates jobs and status for those of a like mind. He is always pushing for more, and better paid, social workers, teachers and race relations operatives, whom he constantly refers to as 'professionals'. Indeed, on the question of formal status he can be decidedly touchy. For one who supposedly embraces egalitarianism this is rather strange, but then not so odd when his propensity for hypocrisy is considered, for there is nothing he likes so much as having his cake and eating it.

The liberal bigot is the enemy of social opportunity for all but his likeminded fellows. The happy recipient of social and educational opportunities which permit him to enter the magic circle of liberal bigotry, his voice is always to be heard berating the value of such things for what he calls 'the underprivileged'. To this end he speaks of the worth of 'working class' and 'ethnic' cultures which, of course, cannot be preserved if 'middle class' values are foisted upon their members. And this is scarcely to be wondered at, for the liberal bigot is essentially undemocratic. A politically sophisticated and educated working class capable of effectively challenging liberal bigot ideas is the last thing the liberal bigot wants. Besides, without them who would he have to patronise so superbly?

The self-conscious masochism of the liberal bigot knows no bounds. Like the medieval Christian who cried "I am the humblest of men", he commits the sin of pride in a peculiarly distasteful manner as he seeks approbation under the guise of self-denigration. How diligently he vies with others to prove that his society is the guiltiest of colonial and cultural oppression; how relentlessly he denigrates his own people's cultural and intellectual achievements.

What will be the future of the liberal bigot? Like the nautilus with its ever increasing spiral, the liberal bigot continues to evolve regardless of specific advantage. He acknowledges no sense of belonging or cultural indebtedness, whilst exhibiting a truly unthinking arrogance in his belief that no matter what he does or what cause he supports, his own person will be inviolate, both intellectually and materially.
In fact, the liberal bigot exhibits the classic behaviour of the parasite. He enjoys benefits gained at the expense of the host, in this case Anglo-Saxon society. But parasites can only be successful in the long run if they do not so weaken the host that it is eventually unable to support them.

Consequently, the liberal bigot is unlikely to survive in his present form for very long because he shows no capacity for controlling his voracious appetite for incontinent abuse of his environment.

Robert Henderson blogs at England calling and Living In A Madhouse.