The Orcs are at it again

At any given moment, any and every day of the week, all over the Right side of the bandwidth, dozens of conservative bloggers have put up posts that all say pretty much the same thing:

"Liberals are bad people because I can imagine them doing/saying/thinking/acting exactly as I'm doing/saying/thinking/acting right here."

Meanwhile, dozens of their colleagues are putting up posts that all pretty much say:

"Liberals are bad people because I believe, without any evidence, and even in the face of much evidence to the contrary, they do not practice any of the virtues I'm convinced I have, even though there's no evidence that I have ever practiced those virtues, even though there is in fact plenty of evidence that I have definitely never practiced them."

Think Michelle Malkin on racism and now John Derbyshire on courage.

I've called their "thinking" Orc Logic, based on a passage in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings in which a gang of Orcs complain about some "trick" an elf has played on them and then congratulate themselves on having done something even worse to one of their own friends.

Orc Logic is the habit of thinking that whatever you do is right and whatever people you don't like do is wrong, even if they're doing exactly what you're doing.

Tolkien didn't create Orcs to satirize people of a particular political bent.  Everyone is guilty of Orc Logic sometime.  It creeps into the posts and comments on many Liberal blogs from time to time, including this one, although my readers are too kind and polite and I don't get called on it often enough.

But Orc Logic has become the defining rhetorical trope of the Right Wing propaganda machine. You want a quick sample?  Stroll on over to their side of the street and look at their posts on the Virginia Tech massacre.  See how fast and broadly they've assigned blame and, boiled down, all the blame is assigned implicitly to Liberalism---because as we all know it's liberals who don't let college students pray in English class, liberals who don't let drunken frat boys pack heat, liberals who have turned our young men into cowards and girly-men, liberals who have let too many damn immigrants into the country, liberals who won't let us lock up our young women in single-sex dorms guarded, I would have to guess, by large, brawny eunuchs wielding curved swords...

This is the call.  The response is self-congratulation.

We know better.  We believe in God.  We don't date crazy foreigners.  We are manly-men.  If we'd been there this wouldn't have happened.  We'd have stopped him somehow.  We'd have stood up to him.  We'd have caught the bullets in our teeth, slapped the gun out of his hand, knocked him flat with a flick of our finger.  We'd have made a gun of our own magically appear in our hand and our aim would have been true and we'd have shot the sucka dead before he could've fired off his first round.

We know we'd have done all this and survived and been heroes because we've told ourselves so a thousand times.

Orc Logic is seductive.  It is vanity plus sloth.  Self-love and moral and intellectual laziness combined.  Once you let it become your habit of thought you are freed forever from self-examination, self-criticism, self-judgment.  You are freed from having to worry about your own behavior because you know that you are a better person than they are, whoever they are, and that whatever you do is automatically the right thing because you are not them and whatever they do is wrong.

Orc Logic is extremely useful to people whose politics and moral code are devoted exclusively to defending their money and their privileges.  If you know without having to think about it that you are a good person you don't have to listen to any calls to sacrifice and pleas for fair dealing and demands that you do an inconvenient right thing.

Of course this is what has made it useful to leaders and corporate financiers of the Right Wing Movement.

Since at least the New Deal, the Right has motivated itself through a mixture of outraged vanity, self-righteous anger, and fear.

We are good people, how can Roosevelt suggest that the mess this country is in is our fault!  How dare he suggest it!

That's the vanity and the outrage.

The fear is that they will come in the night and take it all away.  But even more terrifying is the thought:  What if they are right?  What if it is our fault to some or any degree?  Shouldn't we then give up some of our money and privileges?  Isn't this one of the things the religion we all pride ourselves on practicing teaches?

The trick has been to stoke the vanity to provoke the outrage and then exploit the first fear while shutting down any thought that might lead to second.

So they tell themselves and their voters over and over again how good they are, how virtuous they are, how favored by God and Nature, how they deserve all their comforts and wealth and privilege---or if they don't actually possess those comforts and that wealth and privilege how they ought to have them because they are so deserving---and then they gasp in horror and point, Look, they are coming to take it all away!

Or:

They have taken it away or keeping you from having it!

Keep them angry enough, keep them vain enough, keep them scared enough, and they won't think, they'll just react.  Don't ever let them think.  This is why you keep changing the subject.  Look over here, look over there, look up, look down, look all around, look everywhere and at everything but yourselves.

Give them enemies to hate that will let them love themselves unquestioningly.

Give them reason after reason to hate those enemies so they never have to ask why.

It's the faggots in the schools teaching our kids, it's the Feminists turning our daughters into lesbians and our boys into girls, it's the atheists tearing down our Christmas trees, it's the dirty hippies undermining the President's glorious war, it's the rappers, it's the immigrants, it's the tree-hugging environmentalist alarmists, it's the Islamofascists, it's the Christian-hating Hollywood Jews, it's them!  It's the Liberals!

We hate them, them and their filthy elvish tricks.

Comments

[Dave]

Lance,

It sounds like you have heard the same things I've been hearing the last two day. I don't know how many times I have listened to someone over the cubicle walls talking about VTech and saying "And now the liberals (or the media as if they are the same)will say ...". The thing is I never hear anyone saying any such thing. Yet that doesn't stop them from getting red faced, vein bulging angry. For something they imagined someone might, but didn't, say. I think Molly Ivins used to call it a waste of perfectly good anger.

[joanr16]

Elvish is everywhere. Proud to say that I am.

There are no easy answers to what happened on Monday, and anyone who tries to say otherwise is a fool and a liar.

Meanwhile, buried way down in the headlines, today's death toll in Iraq:
• At least 166 people killed on Wednesday in series of bombings in Baghdad;
• 119 dead, 116 wounded in Sadriya market in central Baghdad.

[Kevin Wolf]

Not being of the Orc race, I only see this phenomenon from the outside and ask myself (for years now) just what makes this work. You've at least helped explain it. Now can you help make it go away?

[billy pilgrim]

Well done.

Fitting right into this is the explanantion for the antagonism towards the idea of energy conservation and alternative energies. By themselves, good ideas in any case; but since Al Gore supports it, it must be a Liberal Idea and hence, A Bad Thing.

[Campaspe]

Once, years ago, I was on a subway platform when there came the sound of gunfire, or so we thought. This platform full of people hit the floor, me with them. I have never seen anything like it, before or since, not in real life.

Well, it wasn't a gun, it was some sort of firecrackers. I can still remember two men flying over the turnstiles after the kids who had lit them, yelling, "You think that's funny? I'LL SHOW YOU BLEEPING FUNNY, YOU BLEEPS!!" They were big, big guys, so big I almost hope they didn't catch the teens because I am sure it wasn't pretty. But they were angry, because they had been crouched down with the rest of us.

And I am supposed to believe that all of these weedy little men on these tiresome, chest-thumping blogs would have done any different? That they would have heard a gun and run TOWARD it?

I have seen some sickening displays of macho-by-proxy, but the past couple of days really takes the biscuit.

[BOSSY]

Bossy loves this concept of Orc Logic as applied to those right of Right.

[desertwind]

Have these Orc-bots led such sheltered lives? Or are they just bullshitting?

Accidents. Assaults. Insults. Broken hearts. Disappointment. Sickness. Death of my loved ones. Fear of my own shadow.

And then, afterwards, laughter because I survived and knew I was damned lucky.

Some of the stupid things I did -- and thought! -- and I survived.

This is normal, right?

I've no idea what I would've done at Virginia Tech.

Neither do the Orcs. Anything they say to the contrary is bullshit. They know it's bullshit and, oh brother, that knowledge is stokin' the fear.

[Jerry]

My favourite example of Orc logic is from Sinclair Lewis' "Babbitt"
"A good labor union is of value because it keeps out radical unions, which would destroy property. No one ought to be forced to belong to a union, however. All labor agitators who try to force men to join a union should be hanged. In fact, just between ourselves, there oughtn't to be any unions allowed at all; and as it's the best way of fighting the unions, every business man ought to belong to an employers'-association and to the Chamber of Commerce. In union there is strength. So any selfish hog who doesn't join the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced to."

Kinda like the way NRA logic works isn't it?

[Lemastre]

Orc logic is deployed most vigorously in the wrangle over global warming. The thought that human actions have anything to do with the condition of the planet's air and water is so repugnant that the orcs feel forced to reject any suggestion that cleaning things up a little bit in their city or state might actually be good for their immediate health and that of their kids, regardless of its effect on the planet as a whole. Not enough scientific evidence, they say. I assume that fear of being inconvenienced by altering their lifestyles is what inspires their resistance to change.

[Christopher Davis]

Lemastre: it's more direct than that. "Global warming is unproven and controversial, so we don't need to do anything about it; however, if there's even a 1% chance of a terrorist attack, we have to take drastic action that will curtail liberty to prevent it."