Leave Anger Behind

If you're in the leftist cult, disaffiliate now.

Who fears the left? Strangely, the main answer seems to be: leftists. I talk to a wide range of people in academia about left-wing anger and the fear it sustains. As you’d expect, the people who are most outraged by the climate of fear are non-leftists. But the people who personally experience the most fear are leftists themselves. In my private conversations, some of the most boring milquetoast technocratic leftist scholars have grimly foretold that somehow, someday, a mob of their own ideological persuasion will come for them.

Yes, you can dismiss this as anecdotal. If you do, I doubt that the four Twitter polls I recently ran will please you any better. But take a look anyway.

If you’re a leftist and none of this matches your experience, lucky you. But if you’re a leftist and this hits close to home, you’ve got to ask yourself, “Why consort with ‘friends’ who use anger to keep me living in fear?” You don’t need a precise answer to the question, “When did the left become a cult?” to know that it feels like a cult now. Nor do you don’t need a precise answer to the question, “Why aren’t kooky right-wing people scared of each other?” to know that fear of one’s political “allies” is not universal.

I’m not suggesting that you should abandon your intellectual convictions just because so many people who share them are scary people. What I’m suggesting, rather, is the same thing I’d tell anyone in any cult: Get out. Disaffiliate. Leave. These may be the only people who care about you now, but they aren't the only people in the world. Even if they’ve taught you life-changing lessons about life and the universe, that’s no reason to spend the rest of your life in the shadow of their wrath.

“But I don’t want to join the right?!” you say?

Great. Don’t.

Join nothing.

Just flee your subculture of fear and be yourself.

Once you do, admittedly, you may find that many positions that “made sense” when they were mandatory for group membership no longer seem so compelling. That’s the intellectual experience of most people who disaffiliate from a cult. Common sense starts where emotional blackmail stops.

How will you make new friends? That will no doubt be a journey, but you’re not the first to take it. Try reading these stories of ex-Mormons for inspiration. If you don’t know how to get started, email me. I will be your friend. I mean it. I really do.

P.S. After you disaffiliate, I strongly recommend against instantly anointing yourself a leading scourge of the left. Haven’t you already had enough passion to last a lifetime? Calm down, stop following the news, and take the time to read widely about the Big Questions for a year or two before you speak about them again. Howard Zinn notwithstanding, you can be neutral.