The murder of Charlie Kirk has provided some lamentable insight into our current national politics, particularly on the left.
The left’s response to the murder is remarkable in several respects.
The first is the vitriol, the unhinged glee that some, obviously not all, on the left demonstrated in the response to the tragedy.
At the beginning of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky makes a helpful observation about human nature. The character Father Zossima, the Orthodox elder, remarks:
The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.
…
The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than anyone […] he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.
Many on the left have been lying to themselves, or willingly indulging in lies that are told to them.
These lies concern the moral superiority of abstract ideologies, the base motives and bad character of those who disagree with them, and the wildly inflated sense of the popularity of their views.
They credulously embraced caricatures of what people like Mr. Kirk actually believed and held them so tightly as to be impervious to contrary evidence. They “reveled in their resentment.”
As a result, many on the left felt not only justified, but reassured, that they were not only morally justified, but were in the overwhelming majority, and that no untoward consequences could possibly result from rejoicing in an atrocity. They expected, at worst, approval of the substance and discomfort at the tone.
The worldwide response has instead left them confused and disoriented. Their callousness was not lauded for its edgy “truth.” Instead, many revelers who could be restrained neither by common decency nor common sense, found themselves fired from their jobs, mocked on social media, and the objects of censure and condemnation.
Lies that people tell themselves are the most difficult to dispel. Doing so not only corrects an inaccurate perception but wounds the pride, and can shatter the structure on which people build their self-esteem and sense of worth. It is difficult to admit that one’s sense of superiority was based on an untruth.
As a result, the secondary response in some precincts of the left has been to cast about for further fabrications from their shaken worldview.
They declaim their fear of an inchoate backlash from hateful hooligans. They charge that they are the victims of unjust cancel culture. The demand preemptive restraint, voluntary and otherwise, against their adversaries. Self-reflection seems not to have occurred to them.
The claim that those on the left who lose their jobs or face any kind of uncomfortable consequences for their behavior in the wake of Mr. Kirk’s death betrays a lack of understanding of a free society.
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