Customer Reviews

The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

Dr. Rossiter's very illuminating and insightful book answers questions that many of us have asked about the essentially childlike behavior of liberals - for instance, their temper tantrums, sense of entitlement, intolerance, and grandiosity. While listing any number of liberals' infantile expectations - from a powerful parental government to a guarantee of material security from the state to laws that punish the "haves" for their excesses and compensate the "have-nots" for their pangs of envy to an international caring agenda that understands everyone's hardships and tolerates destructive actions by others, the list goes on - Rossiter concludes that, "these and other goals dear to the modern liberal heart are remarkable for the childhood needs they address and the adult needs they ignore." This is an important resource for those seeking to understand what makes the liberals among us tick. Joan Swirsky, NY-based journalist and author.

For years I have tried to discuss rationally with liberals/socialists. The only result I could get was to doubt my arguments, no matter how solid they were, because reason didn't seem powerful enough to move them. I could see that the liberal agenda was economically unsound and even against the basic facts of human nature. Just when I was giving up any possibility of ever understanding the liberal mind and its irrational assaults on reason and human nature, I came across Dr. Rossiter's book.
For the first time I could confirm a long held impression that liberals have some problem in their way of thinking. The Liberal Mind convincingly states that what appears to be just normal people worried about real social and political problems is in fact a neurosis which manifests itself in trying to manipulate those who just want to live their lives autonomously and cooperatively by attacking their freedom. Dr. Rossiter gives a complete description of signs, symptoms and causes of this neurosis. And a didactical one, for he emphasizes and repeats key concepts all through the book, so that when introducing new concepts the fundamentals are never out of sight.
Anyone who still understands man as an autonomous and cooperative being must read this book. The Liberal Mind is a wonderful guide through the sophisms the liberal neurosis creates in the mind of those affected by it, even if the liberal agenda has already dominated the mentality of almost a whole country.

I'm a 35 year old "recovering" Liberal. In the past 4 years or so I discovered what conservatism actually was through stumbling upon authors such as Sowell and Hayek. It turns out that I have been a conservative my entire life, I just didn't know it, because I didn't know what conservatism actually was, and I didn't recognize the folly of the Progressive ideology that was forced upon me from an early age.

I agree with other reviewers that this book is dry and can be a stuggle to get through. The first 300 pages painstakingly build the foundation for the last few chapters. Basically the author reasons that Liberals, especially the hard Left, are projecting their childhood trauma upon the world of politics. The modern Liberal agenda is not compatible with liberty. Overall he makes a good case.

I would not say that this is required reading or a book that would change the mind of a Liberal. I would say, however, that it is a worthwhile, interesting read and would make a good addition to any conservative collection.

I purchased this book to illuminate the wellspring of a slightly different topic, Why liberals feel socialism is superior to freedom, given the evidence of the last 120 years and the blood spilled by governments against their own people. Rommels book "The Black Book of Communism" details the horrors, but not the "Why". Given the evidence of total failures of Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Castro, the African Communist states, the current clown Hugo Chavez plus the failures of the European states in both production and sheer vitality (their demographic populations will disappear within 50 years given current birth rates) you would think that even the liberal's would be demanding an overhaul of their own philosophy, or even second thoughts. Not so.

Throughout the centuries man has stumbled from one leadership model to another: Roman Emperors, Kings and Fuedalism, Popes, Aristocracy, and Socialism. All are dead ends for those who wished to rule over the individual. Everything from gun control to Gulags have been tried by the socialist state without achivement, yet they use the same methods over and over. To repeat the same action over and over and expect different results is the very definition of madness. This book gives the "Why"

There are several agents responsible for the structure of the modern liberal mind. They include the philosophical, cultural, intellectual (ignorance of economics), psychological, and perhaps even genealogical. Doctor Rossiter makes a superb contribution to our understanding of the psychological in his book.

A side benefit of his book is his analysis of mental development in all its phases from infancy to adulthood. This is a valuable foundation for those of us who are responsible for raising children. It is valuable in itself, and it is of value in judging how-to information.

A section I shall refer to often is entitled The Liberal Manifesto: Major Principles. In it he lays bare the modern liberal belief system. It is an exhaustive, seemingly complete, and dispassionate statement of what modern liberals believe. There is no hyperbole, no attempt to make it worse than it is; it's just a straight, objective, verifiable catalogue of the modern liberal's beliefs. As Ann Coulter observes, liberals don't tell you what they actually think; if they did, they would never get elected.

Doctor Rossiter ties it all together in a series of radical liberal hypothetical confessions. In each case the malady confessed to stems from a different developmental failure than the others. The confessions are the result of successful psychiatric treatment. The patient understands his liberal madness and the developmental failures that caused it. This is another part of the book I shall return to often; it's entertaining and informative.

So with all this good stuff why did I only give the book four stars? When I like a book, even one I have some disagreements with, I go all the way - five stars. I'm easy.

The reason is because the book has some pernicious traps for the unwary reader. I list four below, each starting with a statement of the author's belief as discussed in his book.

1. Altruism is a virtue. Altruism is sacrificing a value for someone else's benefit. It is not a virtue. It is in fact the major pillar on which the modern liberal's agenda rests. The author must be confusing altruism with benevolence. Altruism sacrifices values; benevolence affirms values. Reader beware; you could be sucked into a package deal here.

2. Government should do for people what they cannot do for themselves. How many times have we heard the modern liberal start a defense of his beliefs with this statement? It is nonsense. There is nothing except keeping the peace which the citizenry if left alone cannot do better than the government.

3. Eminent domain laws are necessary and proper. Confiscating property by invoking eminent domain laws is theft. The author argues that the owner whose property is taken should be justly compensated. But the only just compensation is the price the owner puts on his property. In no way is legalized theft necessary in a society not afflicted by madness.

4. Antitrust laws are necessary and proper. The good doctor recommends economic education as part of his cure for modern liberal mischief. As the saying goes, physician heal thyself. The laws and how they are administered have been a nightmare. They are neither necessary nor proper. See "Man, Economy, & State" by Murray N. Rothbard for a proof of the fallacy of monopoly prices.

Lyle Rossiter doesn't argue with Liberalism; he unceremoniously guts Liberalism.
In The Liberal Mind, Lyle discusses in pithy statements the Liberal social immaturity that treats the government as a cradle to grave caretaker. He discusses the psychological roots of Liberalism.

I've highlighted quotes on almost every page, and can say without doubt that this is the best book I've read on the state of modern society since Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.

If you read one book this year, make it this one.

To begin, I agree with the author's premise. The reasoning that liberals use is faulty, and the author goes to great pains to show this using psychological theories. But most of the book gets bogged down in this and is difficult to read. It's a 400 page book, and the lines seem close together so that each page is quite dense. The author takes a rather academic tone. Sample several pages if you're able to by using Amazon's sampler. This is not your usual political book charged with colloquial rhetoric.

Aside from the long stretches of dry reading (which I admittedly glossed over), there are a few parts that were strong. These parts tended toward bullet points. If you have a strong interest in psychology (some Erikson fellow is cited repeatedly) do give this book a look. If you're wanting the book from a political perspective you should evaluate your desire to read a scholarly dissection of modern liberals. Neutral recommendation overall.

Liberalism defies explanation. If you are one, you are blind to the delusion, and if you aren't, the delusion evades a reasonable explanation, because it isn't rooted in reason. Dr. Rossiter combines a lifetime of experience in clinical and forensic psychology with a libertarian understanding of ordered liberty to explain in essentially clinical terms why modern liberals so persistently attack the basis of our free society.

Dr. Rossiter is not a libertarian purist, and criticizes the idealized libertarian view of liberty at several points. He bases his analysis on classical political philosophy generally, and a neofreudian understanding of human nature particularly. Because he believes that humans have a dual nature - competitive & cooperative - he grounds his prescription for a good society in an encouragement of personal and political virtues. A good society requires good individuals (productive, cooperative, etc.) in good families, and the society, along with its political expression in government, must reinforce and encourage good families as the environment in which good individuals may develop and florish.

The theories of Erik Erikson, the noted neofreudian developmental psychologist, play an influential role in this book. Dr. Rossiter believes that modern liberalism is the adult expression of a neurosis rooted in childhood. He uses Erikson's explanation of the development of an infant through childhood, adolescence and adulthood to firmly connect liberalism's extravagant politics to an arrested stage of late infancy and early childhood, where a lack of proper nurturing and needed discipline lead to unrelenting demands for attention, nurturing, and affirmation. These demands, if allowed to prevail, corrupt the functions of government into policies of redistributive coercion which undermine the voluntary cooperation and personal freedom required for living in ordered liberty.

This hasty exegesis obviously does little justice to Rossiter's ideas. He connects human development with the requirements of life in a free society at great length, and explains why modern liberalism is so inimical to freedom. If you haven't thought much about the conditions in which a free society can function, and what are the requirements of living in one, Rossiter will give you a lot to think about. And, if you think that freedom is just an excuse for not caring, then Rossiter's emphasis on cooperation and charity may get you to reconsider. (Why do you think President Obama is so opposed to private charity, e.g. opposed to tax exemptions for it?)

Speaking of Obama, I don't recall his name being mentioned in the book, which isn't surpising, given the likely time frame of its writing and Obama's rapid rise to power. Neither is this a book where anecdote or example play much role, further militating against the avatar of present-day liberalism as a topic. If you know anything of Obama's history, in as much as it can be known, you will have a difficult time reading the devastating final chapters of "The Liberal Mind" without thinking of Obama, and believing against the evidence that Rossiter was thinking of Obama too. Young Obama's serial abandonments, frustrated longings, and alienation follow Rossiter's recipe for forging a liberal personality to an uncanny degree.

Unfortunately, this book is not particularly light reading or for the faint of heart. That isn't because it is too subtle, refined, complicated or abstract for the lay reader. I'll admit that Erikson's freudianist mindset is a little heavy for me, though his conclusions seem sound enough (I'm not a big fan of Freud and his followers, and consider most of them mediocre psychologists, fair philosophers, and pseudo-scientists of the top rank.) Rossiter seems to take the best of Erikson, but the problem is that he repeats and reiterates the basic points too much. The same can be said for his explanation of ordered liberty. Great basic political philosophy, too much reiteration. The book starts well, drags in the middle, largely due to redundancy and reiteration, and finishes very strongly. At 2/3 the length, this would be an easier read without losing anything in detail.

Naturally, Dr. Rossiter can't be said to have comprehensively explained the "liberal mind", human nature and human motivations are too complicated for that. Also, as he admits, liberal leaders and liberal followers have a somewhat different constellation of motivations, at least in emphasis. Rossiter's best achievement is probably explaining so clearly the fundamental opposition between the aims of modern liberalism and the conditions necessary for humans to live in ordered (practical) freedom. While leaving out much that must motivate many liberals (particularly the leaders) his explanation in terms of a failure in the process of human maturity (a transfer neurosis played out as politics) is convincing as far as it goes. The big disappointment is that the diagnosis is not followed by a credible prescription for treatment. Dr. Rossiter calls for education (which the mad left controls, so good luck with that) and standard psychiatric treatment (for which he refers readers to standard texts in psychiatry or clinical psychology.) One cannot help thinking of the Soviet example of psychiatric hospitals as essentially coercive prisons for "political" illnesses. This isn't at all what Rossiter means, but it illustrates the poverty of his prescriptions for healing society of liberal madness.

These criticisms shouldn't discourage a potential reader. You'll go away with a much better understanding of the basis of a free society, and of modern liberalism's threat to human freedom, as well as a very plausible explanation of at least some of the deeper motivations driving liberals.

If you want to learn more of the motivations of liberals, particularly without the freudian tint, start with the Greek tragedies and end with Shakespeare. Liberal vanity and error is really that old, and so are some of the most telling explanations. Tyranny comes calling in the mien of liberty, driven by our lowest passions while preying on our weaknesses. If history does indeed repeat itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, how are we to characterize this latest reprise?

This book compares and contrasts liberals and libertarians. Most books on libertarianism are based on philosphy, ethics, politics, psychology, or economics. This one is different: it's based on psychiatry. As such it is unique and timely.

The book follows Erik Erikson's stages of life, showing how liberals develop differently from libertarians. To give a bit of the flavor of the book, here are the first four bullet points given on p. 400: "In the competent society, the competent individual is able to:

(1) Acknowledge the value of individual lives. [Modern liberalism devalues individual lives by violating individual rights and by treating citizens as fungible elements of economic, social or political classes.]

(2) Honor the sovereignty, agency, autonomy and freedom of human beings. [Modern liberalism curtails individual freedom of choice and action, substitutes regulation and dependency for autonomy and freedom, and overrides personal sovereignty.]

(3) Honor the freedom to consent and not consent that defines social cooperation. [Modern liberalism devalues voluntary cooperation in favor of government coercion and invalidates freely made contractual agreements.]

(4) Recognize the right to be let alone as a foundation right to individual liberty. [By invading every aspect of his life, modern liberalism's endless taxes and regulations violate the right of the citizen to be let alone.]

I do have a few bones to pick, however. The editing could have been better; for instance, the entire Table of Contents should not have been capitalized; but the word "Western" should have been capitalized throughout; on p. 57 the author writes "poles" when he means "polls"; and quotes are often given without specific references. On the other hand, the index is quite good.

One last quibble: the section on treatment is only two pages (pp. 405-406). Dr. Rossiter says "Therapy must also address the liberal's self-pathology, especially his immaturity, self-centeredness and grandiosity; his lack of empathy for and recognition of others; his marked sense of entitlement; and his impaired self-esteem and identity." This is fine, but please, doc, give us more than two pages of treatment after 404 pages of diagnosis.

Length:: 8:48 Mins

Bernard Chapin here and The Liberal Mind is one of the best books I've read this year. Absolutely amazing but you should know it's psychology first and politics second.